Krenkelsesfellesskap

There is nothing like public outrage to bring a neurotic population together. It provides, for a short moment during its outburst, not only an easy access-point to the moral high ground, as the casual observer might be lead to believe. It also creates a sense of community, of belonging, however ephemeral. Moreover, the warm feeling we get when we are offended together has attracted an offense industry staffed by smug journalists who specialise in providing the population with stories of people using the wrong word or otherwise stepping over a moral boundary, easily shareable through social media. In size and intensity, the resulting hurricanes of self-satisfied rage at the person “called out” usually dwarfs the initial offense as everyone's bad conscience is projected upon the culprit.

Real Fascism is Boring, Part 2

Post-Irony and the Rise of the Security State

Once again it's that day when we are all supposed to wipe that jaded grin off our faces and feel the grasp of our innermost sincerity in the face of a memory of that day when everything went wrong. A coveted treasure-trove for propagandists of all shades, the terrorist attack of a few years ago has been framed as an assault on such various lofty apparitions as the nation, the liberal-democratic form of government, the workers' movement and suchlike. With no shortage of pompous, self-important contestants to the post-22/7 cake, the general agreement seems to be that of a general agreement as such, its dire emphasis rivalled only by its vagueness, its content secondary to its very existence.

I do not doubt the sincerity of the public demonstrations of (os-)love that have followed. But herein lies their true danger. When politicized, love becomes false and perverted. As we have known since Robespierre, nothing lends legitimacy to totalitarian means as easily as a rhetoric of love, dissolving the distance between subjects, between private and public, zoe and bios. Without a minimum of public alienation, no space for rational political discourse is possible, and we are left with Lippestad's doctrine of totalberedskap or Total Preparedness – a principle not only impossible to achieve, but which also has no place in a democratic society.

initiation;

We do not really want what we think that we want. There is always something extra, something for which the desired object is a symbol, its undead more-than-itself quality. The worst thing that can happen to a desire is that it becomes Real, that its inner emptiness is uncovered. The Real is its nightmare-state.