Have I Been Understood?

 Food for thought, a little piece from The Barbarians:
 

     Dionysus, this old new divinity, come to reclaim his rights as the patron of bare life, ecstatic joy set against the despair and unhappiness of Protestant sophistries...
      This abhorrent doctrine of cold, frosted forests and rocky sea coasts, rainy cities and money-making tried to implant itself in the lands of the Mediterranean. But unbeknownst to all, the rebellious Dionysia kept growing, now taking the city by revelry, now by flame. The masks of the theatre stayed on as more and more forgot themselves, this strange remembering of the essential...
        Release the dark passions, says Bakunin, and this dark fury destroys all the old beliefs and monuments. This would be inexplicable were it not the midnight of childbirth...
       Many the thyrsus bearers, few the Bacchants. Yet revolutions are these bacchanals where none are not drunk, Dionysian festivals of world-history. The millenial peasants demanded the sacrament of wine to be shared for all, and the time is soon coming when the consciousness of Liberty demands this once more.
      The official end of the Christian era and its divinized State...We want no more rationed units of pale happiness, this utilitarian world of small pleasure and empty rejoicing- no, the loss of these petty concerns: unaccounted delight, the old celebration deprived of its spurious veiling,
a final epochal revolution to reveal
the true mystery of bread and wine! 

“Have I been understood? -
Dionysus versus the crucified”
 Friedrich Nietzsche.

 

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The Dispossessing Of The People.

      This quote is taken from the introduction to the chapter of The Barbarian called "Crisis".

       The concept ‘crisis’ has indeed become a motto of modern politics, and for a long time it has been part of normality in any segment of social life. The very word expresses two semantic roots: the medical one, referring to the course of an illness, and the theological one of the Last Judgement. Both meanings, however, have undergone a transformation today, taking away their relation to time. ‘Crisis’ in ancient medicine meant a judgement, when the doctor noted at the decisive moment whether the sick person would survive or die. The present understanding of crisis, on the other hand, refers to an enduring state. So this uncertainty is extended into the future, indefinitely. It is exactly the same with the theological sense; the Last Judgement was inseparable from the end of time…Today crisis has become an instrument of rule. It serves to legitimize political and economic decisions that in fact dispossess citizens and deprive them of any possibility of decision…We must start by restoring the original meaning of the word ‘crisis’, as a moment of judgement and choice.

-Agamben

Read the full chapter HERE:

      Today we are certainly seeing the dispossessing of the citizens under the banner of "crisis", and it is not just on a national scale, but an international, global scale. The present "crisis" has seen the largest dispossessing of general public ever. What meager to acceptable standard of living you once had, has been shredded. In spite of rapid increase in production efficiency, across the planet the ordinary people are poorer now than they were ten years or so ago, all due to the "crisis". In actual fact, those who saw it as a "crisis", and caused that "crisis" are all doing fine, they are not being dispossessed, they are doing the dispossessing. 

 Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk