The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
"(beat)"


Zygmunt Bauman has a nice sense of theatrical timing.

Bauman:

I, who came from emptiness and solitude . . . At the beginning of the war, our family had been sent to the extreme north of the Soviet Union, where we had no one to talk to. That is to say, no one Polish. We were alone. Everywhere we were alone.

Take some croissants, they'll get cold . . .

Interviewer:

Thanks, yes.

Bauman:

Try to imagine, that you are 18 years old . . .

Above = from interview that we found here.

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Later in the same interview, ZB points out:

But humiliation is very imaginative. It can take dozens of different forms.

This for some reason recalled for us Hullot-Kentor's prescient words:

But humiliation is a complex emotion. At its limits it can be a disintegrative psychological catastrophe. But it can also be a tremendously mobilizing impulse . . . .

Humiliation, rage, and guilt: these are the hidden realities that the perennial spawn of any nation's distress, the inevitable Limbaughs and Coulters, manipulate with instinctual expertise. A psychoanalytically informed social criticism needs to comprehend this in plausible expectation of what may come next after the November elections.

Taken from an interview published almost three years ago, here, all, together with its follow-up here, thoroughgoingly mind-bending.

[foregoing = a post TiR sat on for 2 months, too bored w/ ourselves to hit 'publish.' yawn.]

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM