Any newspaper around the world (even in China) would seem to offer us a convenient answer, an answer that is, in my opinion, way too convenient: the association between the Beijing government and the violence in Tibet and the War in Darfur. In this sense, what is going on in Tibet and Darfur have been technically treated by both the Euro-American and the Chinese presses as international eyesores, incidents that the discourse on the Olympics ever since the opening ceremony has been trying to erase momentarily; but if they are consciously erased by the media discourse, they are then by definition not “missing” from the big picture. Rather, they are merely hidden from our sight. What is truly absent from the Olympics is perhaps not Tibet and Dafur, but something even more disturbing than what appears to be a tension between harmony and disharmony, a trope that the Anglo-American press has constructed upon the theme of he (harmony) showcased by director Zhang Yimou’s opening extravaganza, i.e. something that is more deeply rooted in humanity.
Perhaps we should begin by asking: What is present in the international discourse on the Olympics in “mainstream” media? Since the morning of 8th August 2008 (Beijing Standard Time), the “mainstream” media have been cautious against any “misbehaviour,” i.e. as long as nobody mentions anything about politics, the “world” can enjoy a relatively “peaceful” tournament. The NBC has been trying to maintain a seemingly “objective,” or even close to euphoric position towards the games. Its reporters hailed the opening ceremony as a memorable artistic achievement that surpassed political boundaries. Major events are often portrayed as “fair plays” between the United States, a “World Power” in sports, versus China as a “Rising Power,” a “friendly competition” between two “nations” that the sports pundits consider as a “League on Their Own.” Team USA is allegedly supported by a “generous Chinese audience,” who welcome the American sports stars the way they would be received at home, a civil diplomatic success comparable to the Ping Pong Diplomacy. In a way, this claim seems to be further substantiated by an obsession about poster-boy Kobe Bryant among the young Chinese fans of the NBA, and about the token all-American male Michael Phelps, whose lust-inspiring semi-nude body has graced the front page of the official Olympics website more often than the Chinese national gold medallists. The New York Times and the BBC have reduced their journalistic distance to a level of “critical forgiveness.” For example, while the New York Times criticises the superficiality of youth and harmony that have impressed the visitors to Beijing, its writers are quick to point out that America had once created a similar euphoria at Salt Lake City. The BBC almost expresses gratefulness that the knifing to death of the relatives of an American coach at the Gulou (Drum Tower) has been “comfortably” overshadowed by the brutal murder of a young Chinese couple in Newcastle, so that “China” and the “West” have now evened their scores in the area of self-perceived victimisation. In addition, the violence at Xinjiang has been downplayed as isolated incidents by the world media, events that are still considered as relatively unrelated to the Uyghur independent movement.
With President Bush and Prime Minister Putin being seen on television discussing what most people presume to be issues related to the Russo-Georgian conflict, the Olympics and their mediated image have thus far made a visual statement that President Hu Jintao has been trying to pound into the heads of the journalistic community: “Violence happens everywhere, why should we focus on China? Political violence is, after all, a ‘fair game.’”
Perhaps the question we should ask is: Why must violence be everywhere, and is “China” such a “modern” participant (as “modernity” is another trope repeated over and over again in both the media reporting of the games, and the commercial sponsors that support them), both aggressively and passively, in relation to what the international community imagines as the “world outside China?“ Has China's role in ”world“ politics been so much different or ”behind“ the ”rest of the world?“
One of the most poignant performances in the opening ceremony, for billions of spectators of Chinese descent, is the representation of the maritime expeditions of Zheng He (1371-1433) to South Asia, India and, possibly, Africa. In one register, Zheng He’s sea voyages represent to the “world” not only the colonial ambition of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), they offer a glimpse of what could have been an alternative nomos, an order of land appropriation that could have competed with that established by Spain and Portugal under papal authority, or an omnipresence on the free sea that could have challenged the maritime domination of Great Britain. For many Chinese viewers, regardless of their political positions, this part of the performance in the Bird Nest created a prosthetic memory that the Amity Line (or at least one of them) once oriented towards the Ming captial (Nanjing, 1368-1421; Beijing, 1421-1644).
In another register, the featuring of Zheng He as the “Columbus of the 'Orient'” is symptomatic of a much deeper tension in the way Chinese historians imagine this alternative nomos. Zheng He is, after all, a eunuch enslaved by the Ming emperor, and possibly, a Muslim whose maritime conquest might be more appropriately understood as part of the process of “global Islamic expansion” (in the Eurocentric sense of “global history”) than an “indigenous Chinese” imperial and cultural triumph. Can the people of China locate a historical figure better than a “Muslim eunuch” to represent a juridical alternative?
In order to understand what underlies Zheng He as a figure of historical mythology, we should first examine his wound of castration. Zheng He was castrated as a result of the Ming’s re-conquest of Yunan in 1381, a region that remained loyal to the Mongolian empire, whose representative monarch in Beijing (known during the Mongolian era as Dadu) was overthrown by the Ming in 1368. Castration, together with genocide and mutilation of female genitalia, had been considered as punishments (xing), necessary forms of violence that were implemented by a new ruler in order to “rectify” (zheng) the disorder that the conquered people had once caused to the nomos of the “world.” Meanwhile, the xing themselves would be formalised as the law (fa) that would stand for the authority of the new power. In the “Lü xing” (Punishments According to the Marquis of Lü) chapter of the Shang shu (Book of Documents, 1000 BCE and 200 CE), the legendary sage king Yao (c. 3rd century BCE, if he existed) conquered the descendents of the “disorderly” legendary minister Chi You, the Miao people. According to the chapter, while Yao accused the Miao of using unnecessary violence (namely, genocide and genital mutilation) against their enemies, Yao himself implemented the same punishments upon the Miao for their violation of what Yao perceived as the world order. The castration wound of Zheng He therefore bore the trace of a punishment that was considered by the Ming emperor as a necessary violence that would eventually become the foundation of his law and the new world order, within which Zheng He’s “manhood” (in this case, his political life and humanity) could be restored for the purpose of instantiating this new order.
The ”Zheng He“ (or officially known as the ”Maritime Silkroad“) number in the opening ceremony was therefore a spectacle for both what the “world” perceives as the “Rising Power” (China), and the “World Power” (America; in the stadium, instantiated by President Bush) as a contract between the two countries. It acknowledges precisely that violence is not only everywhere, it is a necessary state of exception that constitutes a new order that the “world” hopes to see between the US and China. Furthermore, this state of exception is, as it has always been, imagined as a process of excepting the “Islamic world” as a piece from the Real, a constitutive element of both the ”Euro-American“ version, and the “Chinese” version of the nomos made concrete and tangible by its exclusion from the law, and its imaginary restoration under the new constitutive order. This new constitutive order was perfectly sanctioned by Bush’s applause for the Iraqi national team, an applause that was initiated by the “Chinese” audience. However, while the “Chinese” audience applauded the Iraqi team as an “underdog,” Bush applauded them as their new Caeser. In other words, it does not matter whether the Islamic “nation” is sympathised as an underdog or hailed as a new subject, a new harmony can only be peacefully achieved (he), in the imagination of the newly combined Sino-American effort, as long as Islam’s political participation in the new order can be carefully managed by the new law.
In this light, we can re-examine what the “mainstream” media hail as “modern China’s re-entry into the World” and the so-called “gracefully apolitical Olympics.” The underlying assumption of these praises is that the Olympics are expected to have the therapeutic power to restore the potency of “modern China” after a century of “imperialist abuse” (a trope that the Athens games have materialised by designing a cauldron that erected like a giant penis for “modern Greece,” a fertile soil for a discussion on “modern Europe,” and its “apolitical” demonstration against its “bastard child” Turkey). However, if “China” truly submits “itself” to therapy (like what ”it“ has been doing in the past fifty years), what we should see in the Bird Nest ought to be a restaging of the ”suffering“ of “modern China” (as understood by historians for over a century) from the Opium War until the Japanese invasion, and the traumatic experiences of the Cultural Revolution (once being hailed and hated precisely because of its “radical modernity,” an effort to build a “modern China” by reworking all the “national traumas” through a Maoist discourse). BBC’s comment that “modern China” was missing in the open ceremony is therefore a blatant parapraxis (a Freudian slip that both “China” and the “world” acknowledge as a missing element that is necessary to maintain their ontological consistency), for officially, half of the ceremony was supposed to have showcased “modern China,” though it is a different version of “modern China.”
What is this “new” kind of “modern China” then? What Zhang Yimou has skilfully avoided is precisely the “modern China” as an over-traumatised subject, a notion of “modernity” that has defined “China” as we have known of it according to the canonical historical discourse, the very “traumatic past” that forms the basis of all the celebrations on the street of Beijing. The underlying assumption of “apolitical Olympics” is none other than the new political order that the “world” is eager to imagine, i.e. “China” is only “allowed by the 'world'” to become “modern” as long as it stops going through therapy. This is a principle in Hollywood cinema: the opening ceremony, which is produced and directed as a “live” cinematic extravaganza à la mode Hollywoodienne, offers imaginary resolutions for a “nation’s” traumatised subjectivity as long as the traumatic scenes remain untouched and unmentioned (a reading of Hollywood cinema first proposed by Thomas Elsaesser). What “China and the World” can ultimately accept as “China’s” ticket into the “world stage” is precisely a conscious erasure of what has always constituted “China’s modernity.” In this sense, “China” can join “America” to “lead the world” precisely by a common amnesia—as long as “China” only remembers its history in the form of ancient and medieval glory, and as long as “America” remembers only the inalienability of its freedom and democracy its Constitutive moment aimed to preserve, “modernity” can remain as an empty signifier that the new world order can purloin (in Lacanese, to put aside for future rhetorical use), and nobody would be shocked (in the sense proposed by our friend Walter Benjamin) by modernity’s impotence, traumatic memories, and ontological inconsistency.
After all, what was the purpose of the Olympics in Ancient Greece? One of the many highlights of the ancient games was drama. An award would be given for those who could successfully help the spectators, who were temporarily released from being bound to their poleis, achieve catharsis, i.e. a release from being bound by the human praxis, or an es-tasis outside the purposiveness of humanity and animality, political life and biological life. What is missing in the Beijing Olympics, and in fact, the modern Olympics in general, is rooted in the re-interpretation of such release as a form of “peace” that is achieved by the bracketing of wars, and the effective global management of life, a re-interpretation quite parallel to another highlight in the opening ceremony: the transformation of Confucius's and the Legalist ideas of a suspension of the need of wars (meta-violence), to the management and bracketing of wars by means of a mega-War that constituted what we now imagine as the “Chinese Empire.” As long as we continue to imagine that “man is a wolf to man” (homo homini lupus), political violence would continue to be a “fair game” found everywhere, and the Olympics would always be, regardless of the host and its relationship with the “world,” a bracketed war conducted in the name of peace.
Why specifically Tibet and Darfur? Because these are Western-manufactured issues with China particularly. V Fan is clearly not interested in such “issues” with other countries, and he has forgotten that the Olympics is for sports, not politics. V Fan raises these items because—and there is no other explanation for it—V Fan is a China hater, no more, and no less.
What an overwhelming comment. If you read carefully, I don't think that the essay is arguing for or against China. The issue at stake in our global discourse on the Olympics is deeper than “China” versus the “West.” Both the criticism from the Anglo-American press, and the reaction of many people of Chinese descent, say something more profound about our humanity, and how we (as humans) conceive ourselves as a political community.
The essay does not “specifically” focus on Tibet and Darfur. On the contrary, I argue that these two issues are rather inappropriately centrestaged in our popular debate, because something deeper in humanity (both “China” and the “West”) is at stake. If you read further into the essay, there are more world issues at hand that I have discussed. In fact, the essay does not discuss Tibet and Darfur at all.
Yes, Olympics is about “humanity” and not about “politics”; but until we (both “China” and the “rest of the world,” a dichotomy that we should eventually dissolve) find a way to suspend the need of violence (I'm not specifically talking about Tibet and Darfur here, but all kinds of political violence that are taking place at every corner in the world, in Georgia, in Iraq, in Indonesia, caused by all countries in the world), the Olympics (no matter whether it is staged in Athens, Atlanta, Moscow, Los Angeles, Beijing, or London--and remember Munich?) will remain political, something that the ancient game was trying to avoid (see my last paragraph in the article).
If you are so focused and sensitive about any mentioning of Tibet and Darfur, let me ask you a question: Would you agree that it would be nice if both the Tibetans and the Chinese could suspend the “need” of violence? (For example, if we take the official position of Beijing for a minute: Wouldn't it be nice if the Tibetans wouldn't need to use violence against the ethnic Chinese?) Wouldn't it be nice if we would no longer need the mental violence that both the Euro-American and the Chinese presses have inflicted upon all of us as humans? The reason why we have this need today is certainly NOT as simple as the Chinese government attempting to “settle down” violence, an action that, as President Hu has said, would be done in every single country; rather, it is the “human” need to resort to violence, a problem that is, as you argue, not specific to “China,” but to the world community at large. In other words, why must we need violence, no matter where it takes place?
For anyone who loves China, including myself, if people of Chinese descent (again, including myself) cannot tolerate constructive crticism, and are simply capable of labeling those who would like to critique in order to see “China” improve as “China-haters,” then how far are we as humans from the days of the Roman Empire, and from the traumatic exeperience of the Cultural Revolution? How far are we, if we allow to use the term as people from and related to China, from a “nation” that persecuted such patriotic critics like Su Shi, Confucius, or Mencius himself (Mencius was persecuted because he advocated peace)? How far is “our” phobia against criticism from that manifested by the Bush administration after 9/11? Is the “West” that far from “China”; is “China” that far from the “West?”
Calling me, or anybody, a “China hater” is precisely an act against the Olympic spirit, because in your eyes, I am not human, but only an animal life bound to a political label (this is exactly what is called “man is a wolf to man,” again, please see the last paragraph of the essay). If there is one thing we can learn from this Olympics, what this Olympic should show the “world” that the Olympic ideal that “man is man to man” is a possibility. This effort shouldn't start or end with the Olympics, but is inherent in the way we act in little gestures like this. My friend, if this is not what Beijing wants us to see, what is?
The comment by “Bert Fong” looks like something generated by the search engine operating on the key words “Tibet, Darfur, Olympics” because it totally misses the content of the article and sounds like one of those pseudo-patriotic slogans. “China-hater” sounds pretty much like very familiar “foes of the people” in Stalinist Russia or “Bolshevik threat” in the Nazi Germany.
But exactly this 'mass-produced' response makes me ask: Isn't it exactly the manifestation of the allegedly missing“modern China” in the Olympics ? Isn't it “modern” both in Maoist terms of “modernization” and Cultural Revolution with its utter intolerance to any form of intellectual reflection and modern-modern in terms of the new global computer generated censorship ? It seems to be all here, all in place.
Many thanks for this interesting and informative Olympic review! I learned a lot from the Zheng He part, a real backstory for me, though the general symbolism of its spectacle was obvious. It's true that this Olympics is quite symptomatic of the power shift or the old powers' struggles for keeping the balance, since Olympics has been a certificate that the West issues to a non-Western country for meeting the global (Western) standard. Shameful or not, only three Asian countries have been 'recognized' as loyal followers to this world system only every two decades, but now China seems to 'order' the rest of the world to recognize and even admire it; a master-slave reversal. It's no surprise the West is pickier than before.
But mainstream media (at least here in Quebec) openly admitted that their treatment of China had been too negative until the openning ceremony, which they frankly appreciated in all superlatives. They also easily pointed out that the show totally omitted Mao's legacy, replacing Communism with Confucianism, if not through such intellectual analyses as yours. So it seemed to me that this Chinese show was too explicit to be parapractical, by exposing what it wanted to hide too excessively — apart from the fact that Zhang Yimou himself suffered from the Cultural Revolution.
But then, I wonder if it's possible for China to represent its modern traumas in Olympics. Your question--the title of this article--is natural because the ceremony took the form of a historical slideshow, but no other Olympics was obsessed with showing a nation's entire history. Even this spectacle was based on boasting the four Chinese inventions that already settled in people's commonsense or at least as something like UN-registered world treasures, rather than the historical real. Who would want to show one's traumas to celebrate an event the whole world watches? and more technically, how? It's not a Hollywood war movie, and as you know, even such a moive hardly escapes the trap of representation. If you had been Zhang Yimou, how could you have touched on the Opium war, the Japanese invasion, the Cultural Revolution, etc, from critical as well as entertaining viewpoints that should be different from bringing the issues like Tibet or Darfur, on the eve of the worldwide realtime sports show? Those traces of modernity must be addressed when thinking about China and the world — your ultimate theme, but I don't think Seoul Olympics should have mentioned Japanese colonization, the Korean War, its division, the long dictatorship, and the civil massacre that occured even in the same decade. Korean films have been enough for revisiting those traumas.
So, despite my full understanding of your position, I think the starting point is to accept that modernity, the ticket to the global standard in Olympics, means above all technology and infrastructure that, as you said, a half of the ceremony showed, and that maintains and boosts the world-shared fantasy of 'peace' at least within this world system (which, of course, I personally don't like very much, either). It's not difficult to see through the convolution of the 'political' actual conflicts (war) and the 'ethical' fake harmony (peace), but what if there were no such simulation of a war-less world (even though spoarts are also a war)? You compare the modern Olympics with its Greek origin, as if there were such a pure origin in which everybody could enter a collective ecstasy of aesthetical and philosophical liberation, but I dare guess that it was needed within that world system which must also have been full of violence in its own. I mean, paradigms change, and yet if violence and nomos are the two wheels of human history as you suggest, there'd be no utopia without them. Like any other sublime obejcts of ideology, Olympics works as a world symptom, and we need to enjoy it — and actually I know we enjoy it together in this serious way.^^
I'm not sure if you and I are struggling with the same point.
Well, I don't think that my point is to ask Zhang Yimou to stage the historical traumas in the opening ceremony. On the contrary, I agree with you that it is IMPOSSIBLE for any country to do that. You are absolutely correct. No country in the world would want to stage its traumas in such events. However, why we (all countries; all humans) have to avoid our traumas (of all countries), in all forms of mass events is precisely an interesting question. It is the impossibility that is interesting for discussion. The point is not to make it possible and create our world a distopia; rather, how can we release ourselves from the necessity of traumas, and the necessity to define them as such?
I probably wouldn't agree with you that what Zizek means by “enjoying our symptom” is literally to be “entertained” by it; rather, when he talks about the ultimate form of enjoyment in the form of Versagugn (frsutration), he is thinking about a “release” from the Law, a release from the need, the origin, and definition of traumas and their symptoms, a “radical” freedom that is not bound by the Law of the Father.
I don't argue that violence and nomos are the “origins” of human history; rather, I QUESTION why we always need to see violence and nomos as “fictive origins” or human history.
To be honest, yes, the Olympics ceremony is entertaining, it is highly enjoyable, and as a piece of art, its form and beauty are marvelous. It is also fully moving and absolutely inspiring. I don't think that anyone should stop enjoying the show, just like no one should be denied a good Hollywood film (or a Hitchcock film for that matter), but enjoying a symptom and enjoying the show are two different matters, and they are not mutually exclusive either.
Utopia is technically not a “happy dream” that we can all be entertained; rather, a Ur-topia is fictive origianl topia. The topological question here is how we can release Utopia from its fictivity and allow it be realised not as a means to an end (a dream), but an end in itself, an actual topos our world can share.
Thanks for your long reply that's beyond my expectation. Briefly, I find your first question to be fundamental, but who could deny Olympics is primarily driven by pleasure principle and not death drive? It's not the stage for acting out or working through repetitive traumas. Sometimes practical thinking may help save us from philosophical stalemates.-;
Needless to say 'enjoying the symptom' is far from simply being entertained, and my last sentence suggested that our discussion itself would be our own way of enjoyment. My basic assumption for this enjoyment is, however, that the war/peace dualism immanent in Olympics is not a hypocritical disguise of negative power games to demask, debunk, or deconstruct, so much as a normal, permanent structure of the world system in which violent human beings still need a periodical fantasy of 'we are the world.' This also fits, as you bring, Zizek's idea of ideology. Rather than being wholly deceived, people (know that they should) project their belief in 'one harmonious world' into this world-tour of multiculturalism, because this fantasy constitutes the ontological consistency of the world. However critical we may be, this need for fantasy-ideology is inevitable, so I accept it as the starting point.
Then, how is your (Zizekian) utopian topology possible? Agreeing with your conclusion, I think it could be called 'atopique' more precisely — Olympics actualizes its utopian project every four years (otherwise we don't need it), but at the same time it always fails in what it shoud be (though we don't really know what it is). As you said, it's a floating signifier, an empty form into which to project all dreams, but a self-evacuating form that repeats all debates on war/peace, West/non-West, modernity/globalization. I said that violence and nomos are not two 'origins' but two 'wheels' of human history, and with no interest in any origin or goal, I just believe these two wheels are not only perpetual but unavoidable as long as humans make history. Olympics is a cog of these wheels; the only way to make it 'atopian' is to find where it fails. Actually, again, we're doing so, despite our subtle differences.
1. We do have the same starting point, but I never regard the Olympics as a “hypocritical disguise of negative power games.” Let us use a very basic topos here. We can't argue that Hollywood films are “hypocritical disguise[s] of male misogyny.” That was the theoretical impasse many people blame Laura Mulvey for creating in the 1970s. A Hollywood film can be symptomatic of larger social, sexual, political, and gender issues; nonetheless, it does not mean that it is “anti-female” in disguise, nor do we now feel comfortable to call it an ideological apparatus. I certainly have never argued that spectators are “deceived” by the games or the cermony, just like we cannot assume that any Hollywood spectator is passively deceived. Furthermore, I never condemned anyone for projecting fantasies (I'm not sure if “ideology,” a word you used, is the right word here) onto a film or a public event. My job here is not to censor the audience, but to open up a space for discussion. There is a huge difference between seeing BACK TO THE FUTURE as beng symptomatic of America's social insecurity during the Reagan era, than seeing the film as an ideological apparatus that disguises Reagan's “ideological plot” and dupes the cinematic specators. In the first reading, we need to first admit that BACK TO THE FUTURE is a pleasurable and even positive thing for maintaining the spectators' ontological consitency and cultural memory, though a critical space can be open regarding what social problems of which the film is symptomatic, or what social memories might be activating the need to make and watch this film.
2. Let us speak “Zizekian” for a moment. Can anything operate on merely pleasure principle or merely death drive? Juridical violence (e.g. revolution, war, rebellion, martial law, state of emergency) as a state of exception is both constructive and destructive. In the “Lü xing” chapter, for example, Yao's violence is supposed to be both a destructive force that brought an end to the Miao people (what you may call the death drive), and a constructive force that establishes the law (what you may call pleasure). From a Zizekian standpoint, the Real is neither pleasure nor the death drive; rather, both “forces” (sorry, not very formal here) maintain their consistency through it.
3. Atopia versus Ur-topia: we need a philogist. Nevertheless, the term “utopia” was not used by me, it was yours. I personally haven't found a good use of it yet.
4. Once again, I repeat that I did not see violence and nomos as two “origins.” “Nomos,” according to Carl Schmitt, is a process of origination. In this sense, I agree with you wholeheartedly (and it was my point in the essay, and in my first response to you, at the first place), that we can never find a temporal (or “historical”) point and marks it deliberately as an origin (to do that is the mythologise and narrativise); rather, in a Heideggerian sense, the process of “origination” is always now, and it goes on now and now and now in a chronometric sense (or similarly, the différance is not an “origin” or “goal” in a temporal manner, but an ontico-ontological schism). The interesting point you made is: these “two wheels are not only perpetual but unavoidable as long as humans make history.” Nonetheless, if “perpetuity” “ceases,” we are, by definition in Post-History, a state in which we will be no longer bound by the law. In this light, we are both arguing for the same thing, and yes, with subtle differences.
There seem slight misunderstandings for my implications, but that's understandable; sometimes it's not easy to deliver my face and tone online. “a hypocritical disguise..” was, sorry, an exaggeration of your point, so we wouldn't have to bring film studies here that might deviate the discussion. But frankly, you sounded a bit like a demystifier, an enlightener, not in the negative sense — I was really enlightened by your Zheng He story. I just wanted to take your conclusion (“a bracketed war conducted in the name of peace”) as a starting point to, rather than 'de-bracket' this war, regard it as constitutive of our 'reality as fantansy' (one peaceful, colorful world) — Zizek's notion of ideology, I think.
Likewise, I mentioned pleasure principle and death drive not in terms of psychoanalysis (in which, yes, they are as convoluted as oppositional), but like a slight joke using academic jargons as practical tropes. I have no better answer to your philosophical question (why can't the ceremony show traumas?) than the common assumption that it's for global fun and not for national cure — at least on its suface.
But again, these minor differences are not that important, nor is another confusion (I didn't say you'd seen nomos/violence as two 'origins'; it's you that read my 'wheels' as 'origins', and I just corrected it). As you suggest, we are on the same track in light of our discourse effect that aims at finding where the Olympics fails, or in your term, wehre it can re-originate itself. Then, since you bring a lot of theories, let me rephrase them briefly via Lacan's ethics. I haven't read Schmitt, but nomos and violence sound relevant to the masculine order that has governed human history in terms of the Whole and its exception; the Whole always (re)integrates its outside to create the closed One, totality. Far from being an exception, femininity is within this order, while however making it not totally closed. It's immanent it the system, but immanently opens its infinity. Though I don't buy this sexuation, I understand this femininity not as a utopian post-historical ethics, but rather as something like the atopian movement that always works within, and deviates from, the permanent and unavoidable law of the father. If 'origination' or 'differance' is the dynamics of this law, it also accompanies the very thwarting atopian potential. What I mean is that Post-History you mention is not in the future, but has always already been History; or say, that's the only way Post-History can exist — this also fits your (also, Zizek's) remark on utopia (“not as a means to an end (a dream), but an end in itself, an actual topos our world can share.”) I'd just add this actual topos actualizes itself as a-topique. Then, my conclusion? We can't escape the law or whatever, but it doesn't mean that we are enclosed in it. We can't help accepting it as our ontological ground (forever, really), but at the same time always opening and sliding from within into its crack, fracture, black hole, saying this is not our place/topos. And once again, I believe this is why we are on the same track.
“Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But [we] sit at [our] window when evening falls and dream it to [our]selves.”
;-)
Here's something else missing from the Beijing Olympics: old ladies holding up cardboard protest signs. http://www.nytimes.com/2008...
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