So far so good. The Greeks- not even that Demetrius, defeated by Kalinga's Karevail in Magadha, and whom Modi was recently mocked for mentioning- were not aggressors towards India. They enriched it immeasurably.
Even if Ind, which Wine conquered without Violence, had been unreceptive; Nonnus's Dionysicaca- or its echoes in Camoen's Lusiadas- reminds us that amphorae shipped to Amaravathi via Arikamedu, and for that reason returned unsold, yet earned their vendor a profit- so much richer and more robust had the vintage grown during that round trip.
Wine.
Not piss.
Soma, of course, was in such short supply that there was a market for my Vedic ancestor's urine.
But no export market.
Credentialised Academia was not yet Globalised.
Ever since it became so, we have exported plenty of Professors who take the piss out of their subject.
Spivak, Sen, the two Guhas, the list is endless.
By contrast, Greece can boast only a solitary Varoufakis.
A hyphenated Greek, true.
But then our biggest clowns are wholly ex-pat and hyphenated in all but name.
Still, India can't rest on its laurels.
Take the case of Stathis Gorgouris- a Literature Prof. at Columbia.
He is openly challenging Spivak's title to be the most illiterate pretend Lefty on Earth!
You don't believe me?
Take a gander at his article in Open Democracy published today.
Syriza’s extraordinary problem – which would not be faced by any other political party in government – was to alter internal institutional frameworks under conditions of external institutional assault.
So, Stathis is saying, if some other party desiring to alter the internal institutional framework had been elected- Golden Dawn for example- the Troika would not have gone in for 'external institutional assault.' Okay. Maybe the Troika are secret Nazis. Fine. But Greece also has a Communist Party, a Green Party, a Classical Liberal Party and so on, all of whom would want to change the 'internal institutional framework'. Why does Stathis think they would not have faced any problem from the Troika? There is only one possible answer. Other parties might think they want to alter the internal framework, they might even try to alter it, but- because their Political Theory is not correct- it would be a case of impossible attempt. Thus no collision with the Troika would occur.-
Although the history of the Left has produced an extraordinary theoretical legacy, which continues to be the nucleus of almost all radical thinking, it has nonetheless left a trail of extraordinary failures in practice.
A theoretical legacy which continually prompts extraordinary practical failures is either shite ab ovo or has been implemented exclusively by shite people. Either way, 'the nucleus of radical thinking' needs to either stop being shite or so exclusively adversely selective of its exponents.
Fuck me, this Stathis dude might be on to something! I'm not saying he could redeem our own corrupt Kafila caravan of tenured shitheads- they kissed Satan's rectal ring long ago- but maybe he can put our young people on the right path.
I understand the dialectical relation between theory and practice, of course, but we have to admit that in real historical terms this dialectic is terribly uneven, to the degree in fact that it may render questionable a great many of these theoretical achievements, which, if we are going to be rigorously leftist about it, cannot really stand entirely on their own.
I understand the dialectical relation between theory and practice, of course, but we have to admit that in real historical terms this dialectic is terribly uneven, to the degree in fact that it may render questionable a great many of these theoretical achievements, which, if we are going to be rigorously leftist about it, cannot really stand entirely on their own.
Cool! Spivak and Sen never spoke like this coz there was a Left Front Govt. in their home State. Thus, they had to 'extend and pretend' that their indebtedness to RAND's Arrow or that sociopath of Ann Randian proportions, Paul de Man, served some occult 'subversive' purpose.
To this general account, I now add a series of realizations that have arisen from the experience of a government of the left in Greece since Syriza was elected, a complex, circuitous, contradictory, and internally conflictual trajectory that is still unfolding in full force.
To this general account, I now add a series of realizations that have arisen from the experience of a government of the left in Greece since Syriza was elected, a complex, circuitous, contradictory, and internally conflictual trajectory that is still unfolding in full force.
Anyone who thinks that Syriza as a left phenomenon has ended, been coopted or defeated, etc., is thinking too much too fast. Too much complexity is being swept carelessly under the rug. For this reason, despite everyone’s intense attention to the recent traumatic developments, it’s worth conducting an assessment of the full trajectory of Syriza in government.
Radicalising democracy
As a prelude to mapping the details, let me confess that the overall course of events has made me aware of the weakness of theoretical predeterminations, and especially of the dangerous tendency, common in left thought, of grasping at schematic theoretical straws in the face of the perplexing circuitry of politics in action – all in some fashion remnants of the history of the left, no matter how dressed up with new terminologies and allegedly new significations.
The field of historical action in the last few months has exceeded the theoretical armory that is presumed to be somehow its strongest signifying capacity, so that in all its turns, sometimes even counter-intended manifestations, historical action needs to be considered in itself, from its own standpoint, as it is happening and in the terms that it sets as it is happening, rather than encountered from the safety of our preexisting theories.
Okay, Stathis has gone overboard with the satire here. Indeed, it was this passage which led me to blow the whistle on this naked Greek incursion into territory upon which Spivak has raised the Triranga- viz. writing meaningless, lefty sounding, shite.
I understand how exasperating this is – indeed as exasperating as it has been to experience this phenomenon of the left in government. My hunch is – because it’s too early to tell – that this exasperation with experience and this theoretical incapacity arise directly out of the radical democratic process that makes the Syriza phenomenon different (perhaps even unique) in the history of the Left. It is, in other words, the very precarious, disorderly, an-archic, unpredictable, groundless, perilous, open-ended and resistant-to-closure ‘nature’ of democracy that has radicalized this already uneven dialectical relation between theory and practice in favor of the second.
I understand how exasperating this is – indeed as exasperating as it has been to experience this phenomenon of the left in government. My hunch is – because it’s too early to tell – that this exasperation with experience and this theoretical incapacity arise directly out of the radical democratic process that makes the Syriza phenomenon different (perhaps even unique) in the history of the Left. It is, in other words, the very precarious, disorderly, an-archic, unpredictable, groundless, perilous, open-ended and resistant-to-closure ‘nature’ of democracy that has radicalized this already uneven dialectical relation between theory and practice in favor of the second.
Wow! Stathis is saying Syriza is shit. Maybe it wouldn't have been shit if it had come to power by the bullet, not the ballot. Perhaps, if Tsipras could put to death any of his colleagues who fucked up or failed to toe the line, things would have been better.
Okay, this sounds like standard Stalinist shite. But our Literature Professor adds a twist- he calls attention to the word an-archic (without a leader). The reference is to Athens in 404 B.C- the year of the Thirty Tyrants- with the Troika taking the place of the victorious Spartans.
Thus the meaning is 'not only is Syriza shit, it is Thirty Tyrants type shit. The Troika are fucking over even the embryo of Greek Democracy and replacing it by Globalised Oligarchy pure and simple. Tsipras, or if not him, whichever of his fellow 'Thirty Tyrants' has the biggest balls, is the new Critias- not a meretricious traitor at all, but a literary useful idiot. Plato can now have his Republic & Socrates a belated martyrdom. The damage has been done. Lefty shite is now sillography simply. Varoufakis, the new Demosthenes, rises up to utter his Phillipic but then grins strangely, shoves his hands down the back of his pants and fetching out fistfuls of his own faeces, claims it to be Chocolate Cake and starts eating it. But then, like Marie Antoinette, this peacock is a hyphenated Austrian- a 'Hayekian-Marxist'- so it is just as well that he not just tells the people he has impoverished to eat cake but also demonstrates from whence that confectionery can costlessly be procured.
Left governmentality
My wager here is to investigate a terrain that we can name left governmentality which has emerged as a problematic challenge with the worldwide, even if politically and culturally heterogeneous, phenomenon of the assembly movements since the Arab Spring, to which Syriza’s rise owes a great deal.
Why does Stathis say 'wager'? Is this a, not Pascalian special pleading, but sound Pyrrhonist 'epoche' or bracketing like our own Bhagvad Gita?
If so, this posh Greek-American Professor is an Ariadne, not a Daedelus, and thus a fitting spouse for Ahimsa's Saqi.
He may be only hyphenated Greek, and teach at Columbia, but-recalling how far Euginides exceeds Rushdie- a stupid Indian like me needs to sit up and take notice.
I started this post in a militant mood. I thought, here is a Prof. with a Greek name trespassing on Ind's indalmoi of imbecility. But, fuck it, turns out even American-Greek Profs. at Columbia can't write utterly worthless shite because they know there are stupid Indians-okay, maybe there's just one really stupid Indian, namely me- who read stuff written by smart people coz they don't want to be a traitor to their own suffering people all their fucking lives.
This guy, though camouflaging himself in Spivakese- the phrase 'Left Governmentality' could be as foolish as 'strategic essentialism'- nevertheless himself points to a way of excising the idiocy of Agamben if not the vocabulary of crisis.
A couple of years ago- Stathis wrote as follows (bear in mind, he was writing for shitheads)
If it is indeed the case that, per Schmitt’s dictum, “the sovereign is he who decides on the exception” then we need to rethink sovereignty. Mere thinking about whether sovereignty is or is not a matter of exception is inadequate. Surely, we are forced to rethink sovereignty in a world where global economic agents, fully deterritorialized and beyond the boundaries of traditionally understood sovereignty, make direct political decisions that determine real territories, the terrains where actual people dwell. The essential sign of the sovereign in societies since the advent of capitalism is not the State (and therefore monarchy and law) but the national economy. The erosion of national economy as prerequisite of national independence is now the case everywhere in the world, no exceptions – another impetus to let go of the discussion of sovereignty as an extension of the monarchical law tradition of imperial Christendom.
In a society fighting against capitalist values – I am not being utopian – sovereignty needs to be located in unexceptional collective political action. Unexceptional because it can only take place every day – not once in so many years at a ballot box ritual – and it must take place by unexceptional people, people who are not in the business of politics.
- See more at: http://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/the-question-is-society-defended-against-whom-or-what-in-the-name-of-what/#sthash.CqXNVRSR.dpuf
Schmitt was schitt. Karl Lueger, as Mayor of Vienna, decided the 'exception'- a Yid was a Yid unless he himself liked the guy, in which case he was a Goy. That's why Lueger wasn't Sovereign. Hitler, on the other hand...fuck it, I'm not drunk enough for a reductio ad Hitlerum yet. Anyway, the Courts did in fact protect one or two Jews from Himmler.
Sovereignty is a concept which can only arise in a repeated game. Otherwise it is Fortuna simply- the transient shadow of Empery cast by the Weltgeist's Vulture.
Stathis is saying that that 'Left Governmentality' can exist as an Aumann signaller in a repeated game correlated equilibrium.
He may not be aware of the maths that proves market forces militate for sillier Schelling segregation and more tortuous 'Local Public Good' Tiebout model diversity than would be the case under contested- i.e. mimetic desire type- hegemony.
Still, Literature, which is what he teaches, has shown him the way. This guy's C.V might sound as shite as one of our own, but the fucker is Greek. What he is saying can help us. Bastard! We gotta fatwa his ass!
What?
I'm being hasty?
Stathis is too a posh pretend-Lefty talking ultracrepidarian Credentialist gobshite?
Evidence?
Here it is.
This strict isonomy (substitutability) of political actors ensures that the “self” in autonomy is unable to ever come to full self-sufficiency, full archē, for the limits of the self are the otherness of the other, who is utterly substitutable in a process of itinerant othering which makes the key element of autonomy to be self-alteration. This is best understood in theatrical terms where I is an other (Rimbaud) achieves meaning in a constitutive way: where the “I” inheres an otherness that makes the identitary utterance of being (“I am”) not quite adequate. Rimbaud’s famous phrase J’est un autre disarticulates the Cartesian cogito (Je suis) but also the Kantian anthropological prerogative that identifies the human being as the animal who can say “I”, for in this case “I” cannot be enacted but by the third person verb form, so that “to be” becomes demonstrably the verb of being an other - See more at: http://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/the-question-is-society-defended-against-whom-or-what-in-the-name-of-what/#sthash.CqXNVRSR.dpuf
Okay. I admit, the above sounds bad- indeed, rotten enough to be tenure-seeking Babu.
But, Stathis has once again instrumentalized oxymoron to preach a sermon from Samuelson.
If isonomy obtains, so does ergodicity.
Politics is empty.
Alterity is Genidentity- deadlocked Concurrency a la Djikstra's starving philosophers.
This is the mystics' Yoga Vasisth cashing out as the metic Vyadh.
Stathis, unlike Yuddhishtra whom God vouchsafed an education in Statistical Decision Theory as well as the 'Song of the Billionaire Butcher', has had a purely American, wholly Credentialist, 'literary' (i.e. shite) education. Nevertheless, he hasn't forgotten how to be Greek. Look at the following-
In democracy, one may say that the “I” is already an other because the utterance I am is already caught in the sharing of archē (metechein tēs archēs is Aristotle’s exact phrase), mediated by lot, by being allotted (nemein) equally the responsibility of political action. This would be an answer to those who think that substitutability is the weapon of consumer capitalist homogenization. For in that case substitutability takes place entirely in the language of numbers, while in democracy the equivalence is predicated on the recognition of every one’s heterogeneous otherness. Unlike how liberalism promotes and underlies the confusion of equality with social homogenization, I am talking here of political equivalence in a social sphere of ineradicable differentiation and contention. This is an equivalence that cannot be mathematized, since its operating system is not logic (of numbers) but lot (nomos). - See more at: http://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/the-question-is-society-defended-against-whom-or-what-in-the-name-of-what/#sthash.CqXNVRSR.dpuf
Christ says 'ye are as Gods', meaning when it falls to your lot to serve on a Jury, or hold some other Public Office, you must judge not according to your own preferences and prejudices but in a manner that might be apophatic- no question of 'Public Justification' here giving scope for hired sophists (the Paraclete itself began its career as an Athenian ambulance chasing attorney)- but must be Hannan Consistent, i.e. minimise regret according to the Muth rational Mulitplicate Weight Update Algorithm, Evolution itself uses. This militates for not homogeneity but Nature's infinite variety which Custom can not stale.
Yuddhishtra's Vishada was cured by this knowledge; Arjuna, being an agent, not a principal, had his Depression dispelled by Krishna's Theophany, but Pyrrho actually talked to some naked Indian dudes rather than just getting gay with them and...what? Could Athenian Democracy really have been repaired? Dunno. But its recurrent Alcibiades adventurists would more quickly have despaired.
Christ.
A Greek word.
Triumvirate or Troika, nothing imposed on Greece isn't transubstantiated.
Popular Sovereignty, the Rule of Law, Xenophilia
Greece will make a Holy Trinity of the challenges it faces.
Even this worthless Hindu will benefit.
Fuck are you waiting for?!
Fatwa Stathis immediately!
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