For a couple of hundred years we have been telling ourselves that we can dig the midnight black remains of other life forms out of the bowels of the earth, burn them in massive quantities, and that the airborne particles and gases released into the atmosphere–because we can can’t see them–will have no effect whatsoever….
…At every state our actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are unleashing–a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt us.
Is it any wonder that a society which denies the Dead is destroying the earth?
Excrement and Exclusion
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, there’s the concept of the Excremental Remainder — the thing which fails to fully integrate into the total. Yes, I’m gonna be talking about feces here, but bear with me a little.
When you eat something, your body digests what it can, and uses what has been broken down to build, repair, and otherwise ‘create’ itself. Those calories, nutrients, minerals, and all other ‘usable’ parts are taken into the totality of the body to become part of the body.
Something is always left, parts that cannot be used or transformed into the whole. I need not get into a description of what’s left over, as you’ve certainly seen it yourself. That left-over mass, that undigested remainder, is the necessary excrement of your survival, your existence.
The Excemental Remainder is sometimes also called “the bone,” after the dialectical philosophy of Hegel (‘”the spirit is a bone.”) That ‘bone’ is what is left over when all the consumable meat is stripped off. It is the thing left over, the excrement, and yet it is also the very thing which kept all the flesh there in the first place, the unusable but necessary structure or foundation. It is also the thing we exclude. We don’t eat the bone; we don’t digest the feces or re-consume it. It is both the thing that is left over and the thing we choose to rid ourselves of. And, in both cases, we do an interesting thing with it — we bury it.
We bury the bones of what we’ve eaten and we bury our feces; although the fate of both is obscured through modern waste management. We exclude both from our lives. The Excremental Remainder is the necessary and buried secret of human existence. There is unlikely any place in your home where you store or display corn husks, onion skins, turkey carcasses, the intact bones of your great-grandmother, or your poop; rather these go outside, away, either into a compost pile, a trash can, a cemetery or a sewer.
The Excremental Remainder is what we look away from, what we do not examine. It is not just physical waste. There are social, relational ‘s*%ts’ as well — aspects upon which society is predicated on which we do not want to look. Likewise, we cannot ‘include’ these remainders in our conception of society without threatening the very foundations of our society.
What Capitalism S*%ts Out
Consider carbon pollution, the necessary by-product of our high-consumerist lifestyles. The phone or computer by which you are reading my words, and I am writing them; the servers which create the connections we call “the internet;” and the electricity which powers all of these connections dumps significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. To look directly at the excrement of our technology would ruin the ‘magic’ and might challenge our behavior, just as a clogged toilet or a waste-collection strike forces us to confront what’s left over from our activities.
There are other Excremental Remainders of society and of a Western Capitalist society in particular.The homeless are the excrement of an economy based upon private property. They are both created by and excluded from Capitalist exchange, left to ‘rot’ on the streets of cities as a necessary s&#ting-out of our consumption. They must be excluded if housing is not considered a universal right; they must be homeless if housing is something that can be bought and sold rather than just had.
In this way, a shelter counselor is akin to a waste-management worker or a mortician. A homeless shelter is like a landfill or a cemetery; except in one particular way: the ‘waste,’ which is managed, is still alive.The homeless person is the excess carbon in the atmosphere that doesn’t need to be there; the cardboard or plastic bottle buried in the landfill rather than recycled or re-used or, more importantly, something that didn’t need to be created in the first place.
The position of the homeless person, who is shunted to the outside of society, is illusory just as the magical disappearance of our excrement into a water-filled porcelain basin is chicanery. The feces goes somewhere; we just don’t see where. All the trash we produce, all the carbon we spew into the air, doesn’t go away. It goes back to the very foundation of our existence.
In other words, the excrement of our lives actually feeds back and becomes the center of our existence, the very foundation upon which we live. The homeless person lives at the very core of the city, invisible except to those of us who notice. Similarly, the CO2 of industrial production doesn’t disintegrate into the atmosphere, it becomes part of the atmosphere itself. The Excremental Remainder is actually the Excremental Center — the founding horror of our modern lifestyle.
Breathing is easiest when you don’t think about it. Feces is unnoticed once it’s flushed. Capitalist existence appears seamless and harmless until we are confronted with what we treat like s&#t. The riots and protests in Ferguson, for example, are just one of the many examples of what happens when people refuse to be flushed down the polite and pristine toilets of Capitalist exclusion. Likewise our warming planet, the dying species and the drowning cities are the build-up of the excrement we defecate by living modern and ‘free’ lifestyles.
There are ways we find to manage our excrement such as recourse to free-market platitudes and Calvinist ethics (“the homeless just haven’t earned a better life,” or “humans are greedy by nature”), delusional messianic hopes (“Capitalist technology can fix the problems that Capitalist technology caused,” or “It won’t happen here”), or the most popular solution of all — denial.
This last solution is the easiest precisely because it is a foundational aspect of Western Capitalism. Denial, distraction and oblivion are significant products of high Capitalist society, endlessly varied according to preference. There are thousands of video games, television channels and films, hundreds of sports competitions, an array of new products and vacation getaways, and the omnipresent availability of any sort of noise you’d like. Each distraction itself becomes a carrier for advertisements and injunctions towards engaging in the very behavior which creates the problem we hope to deny.
Denial, Distraction and Violent Enjoyment
There’s also an inherent violence to this last option, what Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek point to as jouissance. Jouissance is supreme, excess enjoyment; enjoyment at the expense of all else; pleasure and joy that give no thought to anyone harmed in the process of amusement. Jouissance encompasses both the sadistic pleasure of the child who shoots small animals ‘for fun,’ and the sated and oblivious pleasure of a good meal at a restaurant cooked and served by underpaid and miserable workers. Jouissance is the very engine of denial, the machinery of Capitalist consumption.
That violent and oblivious enjoyment can be seen best in the wars that Western societies fight to secure their oil addictions. It should have been no surprise that a U.S. President would have chosen to hide the shipments of coffins containing dead soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade; nor should we really think it odd that so many deaths in the last few years have been through remote-controlled drones. As oil becomes more scarce, the inherent violence required to get more of it might be too unbearable, like the excess feces after eating an entire pizza or the creation of more homeless to make way for an Olympic Village or new stadiums.
That is, the consequences of our excess, the violent enjoyment, our jouissance, must be obscured and hidden in order for us to enjoy it. Images of mutilated children in Iraq, stories of the conditions of workers in iPhone factories, tales of flooding cities all ruin the enjoyment of our addictions and jolt us back to the very reality of the human activity behind the experience in the same way as a human hair found in a restaurant meal or a bone found in a chicken sandwich.
Homelessness is also a condition of violence, as is global warming, deforestation, pollution, and war. You cannot have private property without exclusion, any more than you can have industrialized production without global warming. And that ‘excess’ or that waste product is one of violence. Cutting down a forest to make room for a highway is a violent act. The ripping off of a mountaintop or the bombing a country to get at their resources is an assault. What is left behind, the ‘bone’ or ‘excrement,’ doesn’t go away anymore than the victim of a rape disappears after the act.
But like the silencing of a rape victim, the censoring of war images, or the flushing of a toilet, there are ways in which we specifically try to ignore the necessary consequences of our actions or the Excremental Remainder of human activity. Seeing the mounds of trash we create destroys the illusion of consumption-without-consequence. Seeing the victims of our wars weakens support for military expansion. Making a connection between global warming and the car we drive to work would force us to confront the very violence of an activity we consider foundational to a ‘good life.’
When we do acknowledge the violence, we create hierarchies to excuse some actions while vilifying others. We consider the razing of a forest for a highway or suburb less violent than the eco-activist who torches a bulldozer. Developers are awarded tax breaks and profit from their violence, while the ‘ecoterrorist’ goes to jail. The homeless squatter in a foreclosed house is beaten and jailed while the real estate agent is given a commission for selling that home. The plight of the victims of our daily violence are ignored when they try to speak of their villages flooded or their children bombed. At the same time, we throw parades for our military and line up for days to buy the next big i-thing.
We celebrate and reward the violence at the very foundation of our civilization and then dole out more violence in pursuit of maintaining our cherished, modern, ‘way of life.’ And to do this, we ignore the Dead.
Photo by Rich Simpson (http://strihc.wordpress.com/) Used by permission.
Paganism and the Return of The Dead
Consider how, after Hurricane Katrina, a common lament of the poorest New Orleans black communities was about the water-logged, bloated, decomposing corpses left unattended for weeks. No image made clearer to me the connection between Capitalist exclusion and ignoring the Dead. How much must we ignore the Dead in order to maintain our skewed and oppressive violent enjoyment of inequality?
Cut down a forest to build a shopping center and you do not just have an absence of forest, you also have a dead forest. Bomb a village in the Middle-East and you do not only have an absence of a village and its inhabitants; you also have a dead village and dead people. The mountain doesn’t go away when we strip it for coal, nor does the gasoline we combust to drive our vehicles.The bones of the raped mountain litter the earth, just as the carbon from our consumption litters the sky.
The Dead don’t go away. They are always with us, even when we refuse to notice.
When Capitalism sweeps through a formerly non-Capitalist people, one of the first things to get destroyed is the ancestral traditions and reverences of those people. Witch persecutions in Africa, Asia, and South America mirror the same persecutions in Europe that required us to divorce from an understanding that included the Dead in life-activities. It does so because Capitalism must sever people from a recognition of the Dead, must obscure and displace the excremental effects of its exploitation. For peoples who remember the destroyed forest, the wound of Capitalism is ever-present. Its ghost still haunting the place it once stood. The rape remains even though the rest of us have forgotten just as the dead child remains in the bombed village, out of sight but never fully flushed away.
Western, particularly American, Capitalism denies the Dead in order to erase our memories, and we play willingly along with this Forgetting — this exclusion.
But the Dead persist, no matter how hard we try to ignore them. Consider our fascination with ghost stories, or more precisely, the peculiar Anglo-American fascination with zombies. These are depictions of shambling men and women, shuffling through the streets in torn clothes, reeking of death, moaning incoherently without substance to feed upon the ‘living.’ Zombie films remarkably depict our fear of the “living dead,’ the homeless, the immigrant, the prisoner, the refugee — that is, the very people we exclude from our society in order to enjoy it, those who continue to live despite being ‘dead to us.’
Few people like to look at their own feces, or even talk about it. In fact, we consider it perverse to do so, just as we consider those who speak of the dead as ‘morbid.’ Similarly, any calls to change or abolish the Capitalist system, which is warming the planet and ruining lives, are considered ‘extremist.’ The few brave souls willing to actually do something about this matter are called ‘radicals’ or ‘terrorists.’
The return to a way of thinking which doesn’t ignore the Dead might be the only chance we have to build societies which create less excrement. The various Paganisms which acknowledge the dead can return to our denialist society precisely what it refuses to notice.
The destroyed forests remain as Dead forests, and we must insist they be remembered. Only by doing this may we learn not to destroy them.
The burned oil and coal are the compressed remains of our earliest ancestors, and we must acknowledge them as Presences melting our ice-caps and flooding our cities. Only in this way might we finally admit the consequences of our consumption.
The poor, the homeless, the downtrodden all live on as ‘walking dead,’ and we must again see them as the excluded foundation of our very societies. Until we do so, we will meet their rage and horror with malevolent, brutal fear.
And the Dead themselves, the gathered ancestors of all our peoples, stand before us, just on the edge of our sight. If we learn to acknowledge them, to see them, to accept what they have to teach and listen to what they have to say, we may finally learn what it is like to truly live.
[Thanks to Rich Simpson for use of his photography: (http://strihc.wordpress.com/)]
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A well thought and rational argument Food for thought.
So…Hail, Sterculinus?
Well-written and desperately needed.
Yes, guilt for existing is a psychos of the left. The coyotes who entertained our Samhain ritual with the death of their dinner suffered from no such guilt, and neither do self respecting pagans. .
The word you mean is “psychosis.” And yes, seeing the consequences of our actions is certainly considered a psychosis in modern Capitalism.
You’ve also made a habit of defending child molestors, so I would hate to see what you think “self-respecting pagans” DO do.
I appreciate the fact that Rhyd brings a well-needed criticism of the modern Western civilization (I.E: Ultra-Liberal capitalism) which, at heart is deeply opposed too everything Paganism stands for. However, I found the bit about capitalism destroying the cult of the dead somewhat odd: If the destruction of human habitat and ecosystem most likely accelerates the death of traditional religious traditions, it’s the church that, there, as everywhere else, takes care of actual religious eradication.
Monotheism currently acts in tandem with Capitalism, and I’ve argued elsewhere (in my presentation on Radical Relationality) that Capitalism was birthed from Monotheism once Catholicism was weakened by Calvinism. So, you’re right to a point, but we should remember that the logics of Atheist Materialism also eradicate those traditions as well. The Child has become the Father here.
You have a good point here, but what about Monotheism before capitalism? I’m sorry I did not read your previous paper, maybe you talked bout it then.
Monotheism before Capitalism is a fascinating problem. On the one hand, it destroyed ancestral traditions everywhere it went. On the other, it preserved enough of the original forms (look particularly at the oldest churches in Germany, or the long survivals of pre-Christian venerations in Bretagne and parts of the British isles) that it functioned, mostly, as an Imperial power, rather than a Universalizing power.
Likewise, Catholicism kept one more thing around–the fear and respect for the Forest, which is what Luther used as a point of an attack against the Church (the fact that priests wouldn’t disabuse peasants of the idea that the forests were full of spirits).
Don’t get me wrong. It was horrible. However, it was an incomplete destruction. Capitalism (with its universalizing logic–we’re all products/producers/consumers, and every one thing is equivalent to any other) is finishing the job quite nicely. The reason any Pagan or Heathen should be particularly pissed off at Capital–and particularly private property–is because it was that final logic which caused displacement of peoples off ancestral lands. The Catholics just killed or subjugated; the Capitalists subjugated, enclosed, displaced and severed, leaving rootless peoples to find a way to survive in factories cities because they could no longer return to the land of their ancestors.
Being European raised in a (somewhat) Catholic country, I definitely understand how catholicism, for all its Evil deeds, did help channeling some Pagan concepts into modern times. I would even go as far as saying that, among all monotheisms, catholicism is probably the one I dislike the less (they also do have nice architecture).
I also agree that capitalism did, as you say it subjugated, enclosed, displaced and severed, leaving rootless peoples to find a way to survive in factories and cities and on other people’s ancestral land because they could no longer return to the land of their ancestors, but on the other hand, communism did that too so I still don’t get completely how capitalism is entirely singled out in that respect.
“Really-existing” Communism, to my mind, is State Capitalism. It kept the same logics of displacement and ‘improvement’ and private property (and divorced it from personal property even more so!). It’s one of those places where someone tries to reform a system but keeps the core machinery intact, and we get something as bad as what we started out with.
Happy to know that you seem to share my diastase of Stately communism.
I kind of fell off at the “personal property” bit. I have things. These things are mine.
It is a territorial thing.
Humans, whilst social creatures, are also subject to an instinctual imperative to defend territory – that which is theirs.
Before people start the “but we are all one family/society” bull, consider Dunbar’s Number – the theorised maximum for the maintaining of stable social relationships. In humans, this number is commonly proposed to be 150. More than that and you struggle to maintain group cohesion as individuals. People outside your immediate social group are “other”, and “other” is competition for ever depleting resources.
It is striking that the very logics we use to justify the current system arose simultaneous with the current system and all favor those who have a Calvinist faith in their divine right to be greedy.
Don’t you think it’s a bit suspicious that we repeat the arguments of the powerful?
I didn’t realize that ancient Heathens were part of the current system. Innangard and utengard, ours-and-not-ours, is inextricable from their worldview.
See my above note on Private property above.
I’m not repeating the arguments of the powerful. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I am a Tribalist. I believe in devolution, in small, largely independent communities. Which is a radically different concept to the Capitalist dream of globalisation.
If you are a Tribalist, why do you support and condone private property laws? They did not exist in tribal society.
Tell that to the pre-Christian Germanic tribes.
I would stand with Léoht here. While I indeed do believe that the current materialistic/capitalist culture is poison, I still think that completely abolishing private property is as unnatural and nefarious as ultra-liberal capitalism.
In addition, I also think that Tribalism might be the way to go in order to create sustainable communities in the future, and if you look at the way (mostly Soviet) Communism/Collectivism has done to traditional societies (Nenets/Sámi/Komi) where a quasi-Tribalist social structure was the norm, you’ll see that it did very little good.
So, yes, as long as we don’t own so much crap, I see nothing wrong to keeping possessions and (some) means of production.
See my above note on private property above. http://wildhunt.org/2014/11/column-the-violent-and-the-dead.html#comment-1672253272
You don’t seem to understand what I mean by private property laws. There’s a difference between claiming a territory and defending it and “private property” as exists and is enforced in the modern day under Capitalism.
Yeah, Rhyd explained the distinction. I get it now, I hadn’t encountered the distinction before.
I haven’t seen the term Dunbar’s Number before but I have run into this human-troop-of-150 (actually 100-120) as a projection of the troop size vs neocortical fraction of other primates. The idea was, this is the point at which we form intermediary institutions like courts and cops, when our numbers exceed this limit, below which we can get by on face-to-face. I’ve also seen theories about growth of churches, a point at which institutional changes are common.
What you describe is exactly the concept of Dunbar’s Number.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
I have never heard about this study before, but it’s really interesting, it kinda like show that in too high numbers, human have to start giving away their immediate freedom.
I’m assuming that you don’t realize that private property as it exists in the modern age is a relatively new phenomenon. Yes, humans are territorial creatures, but historically that was limited to the territory that they actually inhabit. The plight of the homeless has nothing to do with territorial instincts, and everything to do with the way that private property laws operate under modern-day Capitalism.
If you need some historical perspective on this subject, I recommend starting with the Charter of the Forest, which dates back to the time of the Magna Carta.
Try going back earlier than Magna Carta.
The archeo-Heathen practice of grave goods demonstrates private ownership, as do mentions in the sagas. One example would be Gísla saga Súrssonar, where one of Gisli’s uncles is killed because he borrowed the sword, Greyblade, from a slave and was then reluctant to return it.
I can second Léoht here: In the Sagas, there is a very clear delimitation of who owns what, both in term of land and movable goods and wealth (fé). Almost all the Sagas, are, by the way, resolving about the acquisition and loss of such items. In some rare cases, (as in Egils Saga Skala-Grímssonar ch. I) we have examples of economic partnership but those are more in the lines of foster-brotherhood (fóstbræðrafélag ) established between two freemen than anything else.
I agree with you both on the subject of personal ownership, especially given the references. I thought on a question while I was reading that kept coming up :
Who owns the landvaettir? If landvaettir could indeed be owned, why bother making offerings to Them, seeking to please Them, etc.? I think that, while the points here on the lore are made well, that it only speaks to relationships between people and not to their duties to the land and landvaettir. The larger point, that if we belong to the land any ownership claim we have is temporary at best, is being lost. The effects of poor ownership poison and kill not only life, but the means by which life continues, i.e. acidity in the ocean killing immature shellfish, fracking poisoning freshwater.
Note during the settlement of Iceland that the Gods were asked for Their guidance and the landvaettir were considered, i.e. taking the frightening carvings off the front of the boat and settling in places where They were welcoming, and welcomed after settling. These attitudes of reverence and deference to the landvaettir continue to today.
Kveldulf Gundarsson describes such a thing in Elves, Wights, and Trolls, recounted briefly in the Wikipedia article below.
I believe personal property ownership cannot continue as capitalism has put forth. If we are to go to personal property ownership as our Ancestors had it, reverence and deference to the landvaettir and the needs of the land should be paramount. Our partnership with the Them should be paramount.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landvættir
Not sure quite how this could fit in here, but I thought it could be interesting to mention it: The Finnish word for a land spirit (or any kind of nature spirit) or house spirit, haltija, also has meanings like owner, occupier, possessor, occupant (of a position), master, etc. Those meanings are legal terms for human owners etc in modern Finnish as I understand it. As Wiktionary puts it: (law) possessor (one who has control over, but not necessarily legal ownership of, an item of fixed or movable property).
As far as I am concerned, I have never encountered the concept of ownership in relation to the landvættir
Again, we have to realize that, for all they’re worth, the Sagas generally do a piss-poor job at giving information about the pre-christian religion of Scandinavian people.
In my research, it appears that landvættir are basically “just there” and that people who lived in a certain area did simply either acknowledge them or ignored them.
It is also quite hard to have a precise notion about the status of the landvættir considering that, as you probably know, early on, there were quite a lot of supernatural creatures, álfar, dísir, áss … and then these creatures evolved in the modern Scandinavian psyché into things such as nisser.
So sorry I can’t give youa perfect answer, but I’d still advice you to have a look at Barðar Saga Snæfelsás an enlightning Saga about the protective spirit in Iceland.
P.S: In some strains of Sámi religion, the Noáidi (Shaman) would sometimes “sell” or favor the transfer or local spirits to the new owner of a land before he could move in.
Not looking for a perfect answer. I do share your irritation on the lack of ore-Christian source material.
I look to what little the sources do talk about, coupled with my experience and I think that the landvaettir had more impact than might be seen beyond ‘they were there’, especially when looking at surviving folklore, i.e. the tomte, and current and past attitudes to wards landvaettir I noted above.
Thank you for the recommendation. ^_^
No one owns the Ƿihta. They hold territory, just as other species do.
Þihta? Is it the Æglisc equivalent of the landvættir? If so, in which sources can we hear about them? I’m curious.
Ƿihta, not Þihta. (Ƿ is the letter “wynn”, Þ is the letter “thorn”.)
And broadly speaking, yes, Ƿihta is cognate with Vættir. The contemporary sources are slim, as for much of Ænglisc belief, but there are mentions of various types of Ƿihta in extant writings, such as in the Ƿið Færstice charm, from Lacnunga:
…gif hit ƿære esa gescot, oððe hit ƿære ylfa gescot / oððe hit ƿære hægtessan gescot nu ic ƿille ðin helpan…
trans.:
…if it were the gods’ shot, or it were the elves’ shot / or if it were the witches’ shot, I will now help you…
(Translation by Stephen Pollington.)
Curiously, we see the terms “ylfa” and “Ƿæne” used as glosses for each other, in Ænglisc writings.
Okay, it looked a bit the same so I h-thought it was the same sound. How do you write this “Ƿ” then, if you only have letters of the roman alphabet?
I’ve also heard some things about those “Elf-shots” before. happy that I can now put a name on those.
You still misunderstand the difference between personal property and private property as Rhyd is talking about.
A word on private property–
There is a very real difference between what was considered “my land” and “their land” before Capitalism, and that shift can be seen in the Enlightenment-era writers. Read Adam Smith’s justification of colonial occupation of First Nations’s lands and you’ll start to see precisely what has shifted in our perception of what it means to “own” land.
Personal property has always existed (the sword my father gave me, the land my ancestors lived on), but Private property is radically different. The “land my ancestors lived on” was not something which could then be sold to overseas investors. Land could be assigned and exchanged for compensation within people groups as part of societal function (gifts of land from kings and chiefs to warriors or widows or adopted peoples), but it could not be closed off and turned into something no longer belonging to the people group. That closure (or, specifically, Enclosure) didn’t happen until Capitalism.
I’ve got a lot of respect for Tribalism, and I’m an Anarchist, but I’ve been noticing very often that Tribalism has not yet fully interrogated the current system. In some places (and I’m not saying you), it looks merely like Libertarianism, including some of its most racist strains.
So basically the difference between Private and Personal property lies in its scope and in the remoteness of those acquiring it? I agree that we would never have seen the Amazonian forest sold to foreign investors in a Pagan context but on the other hand there has always been loss and acquisition of property, sometimes in a very large scale due to invasions, conquests and migrations. How does this issue fit into your discussion on Private/Personal property?
Good question. Land became a “commodity.” Before the Enclosure movement, land was never subject to the “market,” was never a “Thing” to be bought and sold like cattle or grain. There’s a really good book that describes the actual process by Ellen Meiksins Wood called The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View. Mostly, land became divorced from Social relations (tribal, religious, political), was stripped down to an abstract resource, and then could belong to anyone anywhere if you had the money. You no longer needed vast armies to take land–now all you have to do is go to a real estate agent, and the indigenous peoples already there must leave not because you’ve conquered them, but because the law now says you bought the title. If they fight back, they’re slaughtered (just as in conquest and invasion), but fighting back is an act of violence while “buying” land is seen as a legally-justified, almost divinely-sanctioned, “right.”
That is, our societal logic changed during the birth of Capitalism, and it’s that logic we need to undo if we’re ever going to get our ancestral traditions back.
And one more thing–you no longer need to live on land to own it. That was a huge change. Only the Church and Feudal Lords could do that (which was bad enough)–now, anyone anywhere can claim land without ever interacting with the land itself.
you no longer need to live on land to own it
Very true…
A depressing notion that carries to the heart of modern society – notice how recent economic problems manifest through “property confidence”.
I see your distinction between personal and private. It is, in essence, the difference between relationship and ownership.
The converting of possession to commodity is part of what I see as the “civilising process”.
It is all about separation.
Absolutely. The moment we divorce ourselves from the land (and nature) that we’re part of is the moment we both become mere products to be bought, sold, and subjugated.
Good points but you lost me in a couple of places. Particularly the persistent use of rape as a metaphor. The day I’ll be okay with men casually doing that is the day that rape culture ceases to be such an omnipresent force.
As someone who has experienced rape, I assure you that the metaphor is apt..
This was a difficult article to read. It is painful to confront the “hidden” in day-to-day existence. It is difficult to know what to do, not do, support, oppose, feel, think when taking in a bigger picture of the culture in which I was raised. I will certainly give this thought. Thank you for a timely look at what “The Dead” can encompass.
Wondering if you have taken in any homeless people?
Yup.
Multiple times. Sometimes to the chagrin of my then-partner and housemates. Often with their co-operation.
Also, I am a social worker for an agency which runs the largest homeless shelter in Seattle, as well as a significant housing program for them afterwards.
I’ve said this before but the Dead are under the malls, the car dealerships, the airports…But as you say they persist and will persist. We should see their potential to upset this system and we can help them.
But Lacan has a very different interpretation of jouissance than a lot of philosophers and critics for whom it’s a liberatory thing, such as Roland Barthes and the feminists Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Jouissance (the enjoyment of orgasm) breaks through the limiting boundaries of the subject, overflowing overdetermined ‘reality’ and identities and leading to new possibilities.