About

Humans according to French hard-boiled commy philosopher Alain Badiou are crafty, cruel and obstinate animals who inhabit many wor(l)ds. So I feel pretty confy with being a Basque ethnic rhino. If I am not wrong in my interpretation, for me to believe I am a bit of a wild beast would not be such a crazy idea, at least according to Argentinean scholar Roque Farrán. This is what he writes in his paper “The concept of citizen in post-Marxist theory. The return of the political and the issue of madness”:

In one of his first writings (“On psychic causality”), Lacan defines very simply what he understands as madness. Instead of referring to complex clinical structures such as neurosis, psychosis or perversion, madness defines the subjective position in which the subject believes to be one, that is to say, the subject fully identifies with his “I”.

With Jaques Lacan in mind, therefore, this leads me to saying that I am not a madman because I believe to be a Basque ethnic rhino (remember how madmen used to be represented as believing to be big historical figures such as Napoleon). Either or, big or small, a madman would not be someone who believes to be somebody or something else but rather him who believes to be himself. Much really like all these self-consciously self-proclaimed Spanish democrats (or for that matter French etc) who both believe and imagine themselves to be true and authentic democrats!

Given the circumstances, I must admit I could also be mad should I really think I am a Basque rhino independently of the social and cultural-linguistic relationships which have placed me in that silly ethnic position. As Lacan would continue, a madman is not only someone who adheres blindly to his imaginary identification, but also someone who establishes a kind of phantasmatic relation with the Other. And oh boy! No spectral apparition here. Let me be neat and clear on this one: do I really want Spanish and French civic citizens to stop believing they are the real democratic thing? Nay! Do I want them to become sane by shattering the mirror in which I appear as their necessary condition of possibility? Nay! Do I want to show them the very precariousness of the place they now occupy? Nay!I am not such a bad person. I understand their crazy concerns. I know they are insane… but what I want is all of them mad people to keep believing they are themselves what they imagine to be: civic, democrats, cosmopolitan, open-minded… So here I am: ethnic fundamentalist, petty-nationalist, and with a worldview so narrowly brutish that I find enormous satisfaction in teaching my kids how to pull off the legs of any disgusting spider around.

In other words, then: do not tell me I don’t enjoy my symptom! because whoever else ventures into these pages will soon realise also that the only madness I acknowledge, in & for myself, is irremediably intertwined with the readings I make of Slavoj Zizek, that Slovene Troskyst, according to the good old legendary Tony Negri of our revolutionary youth. Particularly, I would add, of his theories on the universal and the singular, not to mention his methodological approach to the powerfully electrifying notion of short-circuit, which I will use extensively. According to Zizek:

A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network – faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors of critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a ‘minor’ author, text, or conceptual apparatus […] disavowed by the hegemonic ideology?

So, as a polemical edge is kind of served on a plate here, I also sense that some humans could be willing to enter the debate. There is nevertheless a sine qua nom condition that I put to those who are obviously entitled to their own opinion and may even want to venture giving it:

any comment which is not signed up with an animal nickname will be considered to be as futile as a goat’s midnight cough, i.e.: didn’t hear.