I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet. The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...
Friday, March 28, 2014
Then There's This
Then there's this. There is a very simple point to be made here. Of course poetry is involved in nationalism, and nationalism is involved in nationalist violence. This is breathtakingly obvious.
I've always had a sense of humor about Zizek, but somehow I can't just laugh this off. Obviously it's wrong to say that poets "started to sow the seeds of aggressive nationalism" in the 1970s. This will not be true of any country, anywhere, or in any decade. The "seeds of nationalism" (even "aggressive" nationalism, whatever that is) were sown ages ago. It's all in the reaping. To suggest that if only a few "sincere poets" had kept quiet there would have been nothing there to blossom! What absolute nonsense.
It's pretty bad because it is at once obvious and wrong. In other words, it uses an over obvious fact and then draws mistaken conclusions from it. We all know poetry can be used for anything, and that the idea of poetry as etherially non-violent is dumb (well, some people might not know that). But not much else follows from that.
3 comments:
I've always had a sense of humor about Zizek, but somehow I can't just laugh this off. Obviously it's wrong to say that poets "started to sow the seeds of aggressive nationalism" in the 1970s. This will not be true of any country, anywhere, or in any decade. The "seeds of nationalism" (even "aggressive" nationalism, whatever that is) were sown ages ago. It's all in the reaping. To suggest that if only a few "sincere poets" had kept quiet there would have been nothing there to blossom! What absolute nonsense.
It's pretty bad because it is at once obvious and wrong. In other words, it uses an over obvious fact and then draws mistaken conclusions from it. We all know poetry can be used for anything, and that the idea of poetry as etherially non-violent is dumb (well, some people might not know that). But not much else follows from that.
"Stockhausen Serves Imperialism"....
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