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[chieur]

so i just can't stop saturating myself with politics. i wish i knew how. i think i need at least one day in which i'm not at least somewhat plugged into the blogs.

Comments

[emblemparade]

Are hope and fear mutually exclusive? Are they even neatly discerned categories? You seem to imply, and I agree, that they aren't.

Maybe you can do yourself some good by separating the specific hope that Obama wins from the specific hope that politics, as a process, becomes something more enriching. It would perhaps be less overwhelming than collapsing the entire future into one narrative (similarly to how nostalgia transforms the past). Leave the concept of "the world" as a single thing only for certain grammatical abstractions.

[chieur]

no, fear and hope aren't mutually exclusive. if you listen to freud, they're identical. i'd hold that they're affective positions with respect to the fact that any communication, action, projection, might fail. that they cannot be rigorously distinguished does not, however, mean that they are indistinguishable; and to assimilate one to the other too quickly is dangerous. to claim their unity because of a failure of analysis or of language is to confuse the realm of the discursive with the affective. (again, not rigorously distinguishable, but the same rule applies. thanks, wittgenstein!) i'd like to hold them apart, even if i'd fail if called upon to be rigorous in their distinction. you know what i mean; i don't mean that trivially

[emblemparade]

Michelle Obama is pretty much an "everyman" to me, a job she accomplishes especially well due to her fine-tuned sense of social sympathy. Lots of people accomplish this well these days, because globalization really does make us share fate. I think your phrase "dangerous abstraction" hits it well, though: sympathy is fine, but to what end? (And I guess we can both take this further and say that affect has in general been abstracted from life. We can shed a tear for Darfur, and can also shed a tear for Wall-E. The equivalence is a slap in the face for anyone looking to change "world

[chieur]

To be frank, I think at some point I promised myself that I wouldn't get into political discussions/arguments with you, in part because of the vast difference between, let's put it this way, our levels of affective investment in a particular (American electoral) form of the political. Plus, for some reason, I seem to get gaudy and strident in my rhetoric (well, more than usual) in response to you. I feel all ugly American in my intense (and often intensely ambivalent) attachment to democracy, freedom, &c and blathering &c. From this side of things, it often sounds like you're just telling us silly deluded humans that we ought to know better. Fool me once, fool me twice, you know the drill