I definitely wish some of the greatest times in our lives could go on forever and somehow, I believe they do. When I sit here and think about my time in San Francisco, it gives me goose bumps.
I’m thankful we can always share that special feeling of when Travis Ishikawa hit a walk-off homer to send us to the World Series, and from my experience I’ve never had a more chaotic, blissful, euphoric, ecstatic moment on a baseball field. The world through my eyes was SHAKING and I can honestly say we (the Giants) were backed by fans believing in us even more than usual.
That was the year we lost the division to the Dodgers and were facing a Wild Card game on the road. I remember wanting to build momentum for a dreadful looking path in the playoffs, one in which we weren’t expected to win a single series. I asked you, the fans, if you were ready for a parade and you so willingly obliged with a “YES! YES! YES! Let’s gooooo….” It gets me fired up just thinking about how crazy I was to say such things, how awesome you were to buy into it, and how the magic “COINCIDENTALLY” happened. ? We brought back a third title in five years. [High five!]
When I sit here and think about my time in San Francisco, it gives me goose bumps.I have grown so much over the six and a half years I was a part of this franchise. One thing I know is that if I didn’t feel comfortable being myself and wasn’t in such an accepting environment I don’t think I would have had the guts to give such an outlandish speech. Thank you for that.
As Giants we had a bit of a superpower, a secret weapon, so to speak. It was the unity, support, and acceptance which you guys fueled us all with every day. For example, one day my scooter got stolen, something that tends to happen when you leave it unlocked while you’re eating dinner. Not only did social media blow up with pictures from fans telling me they were looking for my scooter, but restaurants also started offering rewards, such as free noodles for a year and free dinners at the best steakhouses. It made such a ruckus that it became a ticker on ESPN … Hunter Pence’s Scooter Stolen … and about three days later on the ticker … Hunter Pence’s Scooter Returned!! LOL. I felt so smothered in support, love, and care that I couldn’t help but smile and hope to repay the favor in some small way. This is just one of the countless behind-the-scenes stories of fan interactions I had throughout my time as a Giant.
Jed Jacobsohn/The Players’ Tribune
Let me share with you two more of them. One day in 2014, during a month in which we had one of the worst records in baseball, I was riding home on my scooter after a loss and feeling kinda down. When I was stopped at a stoplight, a man looked over at me and said, “Hey, you’re Hunter Pence.” I nodded and said, “Yes, I am.” He replied, “I want you to know we believe in you guys. You are going to pull out of this mess and be just fine.” He said it so confidently that it really lifted my spirits. I thanked him and told him that meant a lot. As I rode away I thought to myself, This guy believes in us now in the toughest time. I promise that I’ll be damned if I don’t find a way to believe too!!
Moments like that don’t happen often. It’s a little reminder to everyone of the power of what they say to people. Encouragement is capable of shifting the balance in someone’s day, month, year or lifetime. He impacted me that day in a major way, something I hope to instill more of throughout my lifetime.
My second memorable moment with fans came when I experienced the ULTIMATE WELCOME to becoming a Giant. Sometime in my first three weeks with the Giants after being traded from the Phillies, I was just kinda settling in, and our team that second half was on an absolute roll, opening a big lead in the division over the Dodgers. I went out to dinner one night. As they called my name and they started leading me and my family to our table, one person recognized me and immediately belted out, “LET’S Go GI-ants!” He then stood up and did it a second time, joined by the rest of his table. Shortly thereafter, most everyone in the restaurant stood up and applauded. I was extremely touched and overwhelmingly humbled by this enthusiasm! I took a few pictures with people, waved, and said, “Thank you so much. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.” I’ll never forget the way that made me feel and how special it was to be a part of. Thank you to that man for that great moment. Thank you for welcoming me to the Giants family.
Now, if I had to pick my favorite moment on the field as a Giant it would be a tie between the Ishikawa homer and a moment in 2012. I vividly remember facing elimination in St. Louis in Game 5, when Zito pitched an absolute gem that brought us home to our horses Vogey and Cainer. On the flight back to San Francisco, the team was feeling the confidence build, and boy, did those guys deliver. I don’t remember the exact inning and I don’t remember the exact score, all I know is it was late in Game 6 against the Cardinals and Vogelsong was on the mound. The sun was setting. The sky was a mix of purple, blue, orange, red, and yellow, a color combo like I had never seen before. Vogey was in that zone that he gets into where you can literally feel his intensity. You could feel he knew exactly where every pitch was going, and you could feel he knew exactly where he wanted to throw it. The entire stadium was chanting, “VOGEY! VOGEY! VOGEY! VOGEY!” and he didn’t even flinch. It was as if he couldn’t even hear it, he was so dialed in. I looked behind me and the fans in right field were shaking the fence so hard I’m pretty sure they broke it and easily could have charged the field in the middle of the game.
It was a moment that I’ll never forget. I took a mental note of being in complete AWE. These memories are a small sample of the beautiful journey we shared for about seven years. I can’t express to you how THANKFUL I am, how much JOY I got playing here, and how FORTUNATE I feel to have been a Giant for so long. I wish there never had to be a “so long,” but I’m grateful for all the time we had. I hope you felt a tiny bit of the joy I experienced out there. I love you all and always will.
why do we have the political opinions we have? Why do we embrace one outlook toward the world and not another? How and why do our stances change? The answers to questions such as these are of course complex. Most people aren’t reading policy memos to inform every decision. Differences of opinion are shaped by contrasting life experiences: where you live; how you were raised; whether you’re rich or poor, young or old. Emotion comes into the picture, and emotion has a biological basis, at least in part. All of this and more combines into a stew without a fixed recipe, even if many of the ingredients are known.
On rare occasions, we learn of a new one—a key factor that seems to have been overlooked. To a surprising degree, a recent strand of experimental psychology suggests, our political beliefs may have something to do with a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical disgust.
In the mid-2000s, a political scientist approached the neuroscientist Read Montague with a radical proposal. He and his colleagues had evidence, he said, that political orientation might be partly inherited, and might be revealed by our physiological reactivity to threats. To test their theory, they wanted Montague, who heads the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech, to scan the brains of subjects as they looked at a variety of images—including ones displaying potential contaminants such as mutilated animals, filthy toilets, and faces covered with sores—to see whether neural responses showed any correlation with political ideology. Was he interested?
Montague initially laughed at the idea—for one thing, MRI research requires considerable time and resources—but the team returned with studies to argue their case, and eventually he signed on. When the data began rolling in, any skepticism about the project quickly dissolved. The subjects, 83 in total, were first shown a randomized mixture of neutral and emotionally evocative pictures—this second category contained both positive and negative images—while undergoing brain scans. Then they filled out a questionnaire seeking their views on hot-button political and social issues, in order to classify their general outlook on a spectrum from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. As Montague mapped the neuroimaging data against ideology, he recalls, “my jaw dropped.” The brains of liberals and conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures: Both groups reacted, but different brain networks were stimulated. Just by looking at the subjects’ neural responses, in fact, Montague could predict with more than 95 percent accuracy whether they were liberal or conservative.
The subjects in the trial were also shown violent imagery (men pointing revolvers directly at the camera, battle scenes, car wrecks) and pleasant pictures (smiling babies, beautiful sunsets, cute bunnies). But it was only the reaction to repulsive things that correlated with ideology. “I was completely flabbergasted by the predictability of the results,” Montague says.
His collaborators—John Hibbing and Kevin Smith at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and John Alford at Rice University, in Houston—were just as surprised, though less by the broad conclusion than by the specificity of the findings and the startling degree of predictability. Their own earlier research had already yielded a suggestive finding, indicating that conservatives tend to have more pronounced bodily responses than liberals when shown stomach-churning imagery. However, the investigators had expected that brain reactions to violent imagery would also be predictive of ideology. Compared with liberals, they’d previously found, conservatives generally pay more attention—and react more strongly—to a broad array of threats. For example, they have a more pronounced startle response to loud noises, and they gaze longer at photos of people displaying angry expressions. And yet even in this research, Hibbing says, “we almost always get clearer results with stimuli that are disgusting than with those that suggest a threat from humans, animals, or violent events. We have an ongoing discussion in our lab about whether this is because disgust is simply a more powerful and more politically relevant emotion or because it is an emotion that is easier to evoke with still images in a lab setting.”
Findings so dramatic, especially in the social sciences, should be viewed with caution until replicated. The axiom that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof clearly applies here. That said, Hibbing, Montague, and their colleagues are scarcely alone in linking disgust and ideology.
Using a far cruder tool for measuring sensitivity to disgust—basically a standardized questionnaire that asks subjects how they would feel about, say, touching a toilet seat in a public restroom or seeing maggots crawling on a piece of meat—numerous studies have found that high levels of sensitivity to disgust tend to go hand in hand with a “conservative ethos.” That ethos is defined by characteristics such as traditionalism, religiosity, support for authority and hierarchy, sexual conservatism, and distrust of outsiders. According to a 2013 meta-analysis of 24 studies—pretty much all the scientific literature on the topic at that time—the association between a conservative ethos and sensitivity to disgust is modest: Disgust sensitivity explains 4 to 13 percent of the variation in a population’s ideology. That may sound unimpressive, but it is in fact noteworthy, says David Pizarro, a psychology professor at Cornell who specializes in disgust. “These are robust, reliable findings. No matter where we look, we see this relationship”—a rarity in the fuzzy field of psychology. The trend stands out even more, he adds, when you consider all the other things that potentially impinge on “why you might have a particular political view.”
II. The Behavioral Immune System
broadly speaking, studies of possible connections between ideology and susceptibility to disgust fall into two categories. The first involves measuring subjects’ sensitivity to disgust as well as their social or political ideologies and then calculating the correlation between the two. The second category explores whether exposure to disgusting subject matter can actually influence people’s views in the moment. But whatever the type of study, the same general finding keeps turning up. “We are at the point where there is very solid evidence for the association,” says Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University, in Denmark. His own research finds that “disgust influences our political views as much as or even more than long-recognized factors such as education and income bracket.”So many scientists have thrown themselves into this line of research in recent years that it has become an accepted discipline, sometimes jokingly given the aptly unappetizing name “disgustology.” Their conclusions raise a lot of questions, chief among them: Why in the world would your reaction to mutilated animals, vomit, and other unwelcome things somehow be associated with your views on transgender rights, immigration, or anything else stirring debate in the news?Jeff BrownResearchers have theories rather than answers. At a deep, symbolic level, some speculate, disgust may be bound up with ideas about “them” versus “us,” about whom we instinctively trust and don’t trust. In short, this research may help illuminate one factor—among many—that underlies why those on the left and the right can so vehemently disagree.
There is nothing inherently political about disgust. It evolved not to guide us at the ballot box but rather, it is widely theorized, to protect us from infection. As we move about in the world, a sizable volume of research shows, our minds are constantly searching our surroundings for contaminants—moldy leftovers, garbage spilling out of trash cans, a leaky sewage pipe—and when the brain detects them, it triggers sudden feelings of revulsion. Confronted, we withdraw from the threat. The mechanism is part of what’s known as the “behavioral immune system,” and it is as vital for survival as the fight-or-flight response. Our pathogen-tracking system does its job largely beneath our conscious awareness—and pays close attention to those walking germ bags we call human beings.
This dynamic was highlighted in a pioneering series of experiments launched in the early 2000s by the psychologist Mark Schaller, of the University of British Columbia. Like a smoke detector, Schaller discovered, our germ radar operates on a better-safe-than-sorry principle. It is error-prone in flagging danger—it produces a lot of false positives. Any physical oddity displayed by the people around us—contagious or not—can set off an alarm. Just as a pink eye, a hacking cough, or an open wound may activate our behavioral immune system, so too can a birthmark, obesity, deformity, disability, or even liver spots. Furthermore, having germs on our mind can affect how we feel about people we perceive to be of a different race or ethnicity from ourselves.
In one notable experiment, Schaller showed subjects pictures of people coughing, cartoonish-looking germs sprouting from sponges, and other images designed to raise disease concerns. A control group was shown pictures highlighting threats unrelated to germs—for instance, an automobile accident. Both groups were then given a questionnaire that asked them to assess the level of resources the Canadian government should provide to entice people from various parts of the world to settle in Canada. Compared with the control group, the subjects who had seen pictures related to germs wanted to allocate a greater share of a hypothetical government advertising budget to attract people from Poland and Taiwan—familiar immigrant groups in Vancouver, where the study was conducted—rather than people from less familiar countries, such as Nigeria, Mongolia, and Brazil. Familiarity does make a difference. Schaller, whose landmark studies are credited with sparking the initial interest in the relationship between disgust sensitivity and prejudice, says: “If I grow up in an environment where everybody looks pretty much the same, then someone from China, for example, might trigger my behavioral immune system. But if I grow up in New York City, then a person who comes from China is not going to trigger this response.”
If pathogen cues of this kind can indeed intensify prejudice, the explanation could be biological adaptation. Some scientists—notably the psychologist Corey Fincher, at the University of Warwick, in England, and the biologist Randy Thornhill, at the University of New Mexico—theorize that foreigners, at least in the past, would have been more likely to expose local populations to pathogens against which they had no acquired defenses. Other scientists think germ fears piggyback on negative stereotypes about foreigners common throughout history—the notion that they’re dirty, eat bizarre foods, and have looser sexual mores.
Whatever the explanation, an online study launched by Petersen and Lene Aarøe, also at Aarhus University, and Kevin Arceneaux of Temple University suggests that a dread of contagion is not just a personal matter. It can have an impact on society. The investigators began by evaluating the disgust sensitivity of nationally representative samples of 2,000 Danes and 1,300 Americans. The participants were then asked to fill out a questionnaire that assessed their views about foreigners settling in their respective countries. As the researchers reported in 2017, opposition to immigration in both the Danish and American samples increased in direct proportion to a participant’s sensitivity to disgust—an association that held up even after taking into account education level, socioeconomic status, religious background, and numerous other factors.
The team expanded the part of the study that focused on the U.S. It got state-by-state breakdowns of the prevalence of infections, and also analyzed statistics compiled by Google Trends, which tracks internet searches related to contagious illnesses in an effort to spot early signs of outbreaks. Crunching the numbers (the results are as yet unpublished), the researchers found that resistance to immigration is greatest in states with the highest incidence of infectious disease and where worry about this, as reflected by internet activity, has also been high.
More recent investigations by Petersen and Aarøe suggest that those with high disgust sensitivity tend to be leery of any stranger, not just foreigners. They view casual social acquaintances with a certain amount of suspicion—a robust finding replicated across three studies with a total of 4,400 participants. The implication is clear: Disgust and distrust are somehow linked. And maybe, again, the link is defensive in origin: If you shrink your social circle, you’ll reduce your exposure to potential carriers of disease.
III. The Smell Test
interest in disgust sensitivity extends beyond its potential role in fostering xenophobia and prejudice. As the social psychologists Simone Schnall, at the University of Cambridge, and Jonathan Haidt, at NYU, have shown, disgust sensitivity may also help shape beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil. In one experiment, Schnall, Haidt, and other collaborators sat subjects at either a clean desk or one with sticky stains on it as they filled out a form that asked them to judge the offensiveness of various acts, such as lying on a résumé, not returning a wallet found on the street, and resorting to cannibalism in the aftermath of a plane crash. One subgroup of participants seated at the filthy desk—those with high “private body consciousness,” meaning they were particularly sensitive to their own visceral reactions—judged the transgressions more severely than those seated at the pristine desk.
Foul odors can be just as effective as a sticky desk. Another experiment involved two groups of subjects with similar political ideologies. One group was exposed to a vomitlike scent as the subjects filled out an inventory of their social values; the other group filled out the inventory in an odorless setting. Those in the first group expressed more opposition to gay rights, pornography, and premarital sex than those in the second group. The putrid scent even inspired “significantly more agreement with biblical truth.” Variations on these studies using fart spray, foul tastes, and other creative disgust elicitors reveal a consistent pattern: When we experience disgust, we tend to make harsher moral judgments.
Algernon: You can hardly have forgotten that some one very closely connected with you was very nearly carried off this week in Paris by a severe chill.
Jack: Yes, but you said yourself that a severe chill was not hereditary.
Algernon: It usen’t to be, I know—but I daresay it is now. Science is always making wonderful improvements in things.
–from “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde
The Pain Body and Transmutation of The Pain Body: Eckhart Tolle
Transcription of a Video
Summary:
Pain is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain you create now is always some form of non-acceptance or resistance. On the level of thought, the resistance within you is some form of judgement. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment. And this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind.
As long as you are unable to access the power of the now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past and becomes lodged in your body and mind.
Breaking ID With the Pain Body:
The pain body does not want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is. The moment you observe the pain body, feel its energy within you, and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come in. I call it presence.
This means that the pain body cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you and it can no longer replenish itself through you. When you thought you knew someone, and then you are confronted with an alien nasty creature for the first time – this is their pain body. It is more important however to observe it in yourself than in someone else.
The pain body wants to survive just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it unconsciously gets you to identify with it. It will feed on any experience that resonates with anything that creates pain in any form – basically any negative emotions, illness, violence…. So the pain body when takes you over, it will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. In other words, it manifests painful situations.
Once the pain body has taken you over, you want more pain, and you become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. You are not conscious of this of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and feelings are designed to keep the pain going for yourself and others.
The pain body may seem like a dangerous monster that you cannot bare to look at, but I assure you it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence. When you become the watcher and continue to dis-identify, the pain body will continue to operate for a while and will try to trick you into identifying with it again. Stay present, stay conscious, be the ever alert guardian of your inner space.
The truth is that the only power there is, is contained in this moment. It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now – nobody else is – and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the now.
Next week – Understanding and Relinquishing the Pain Body
During this class, Jordan Peterson describes how overprotective parenting led to the creation of Buddhism.
Peterson compares the Buddhist origin myth with the story of Eden.
Both tales deal with the onset of consciousness and mortality and therefore are universal in appeal.
Jordan Peterson begins at the outset of the origin myth. Siddhārtha Gautama’s father was a local oligarch in the region of modern-day Nepal. It was prophesied that his child would either become a great political king or spiritual leader. The chieftain would never have a mendicant for a son, and thus built a walled garden to enclose his offspring. This way the young Gautama would only experience the pleasures of life: health, youth, and beauty.
Father purposefully kept son from disease and death, hoping that by showing the future Buddha joy and mirth he would never feel the need to wander around sampling spiritual disciplines, meditating, chanting, and the like. Peterson finds this predictable:
“It’s also in some sense what a good father would do. What do you do with your young children? Well, you don’t expose them to death and decay at every step of the way. You build a protected world for them, like a walled enclosure, and you only keep what’s healthy and life-giving inside of it.”
You wouldn’t bring a three-year-old to a funeral or show a four-year-old The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Peterson continues. Because the Buddha has been raised in good health, however, he seeks what’s beyond the protective confines of that which has blessed him with health. He becomes, like all humans, curious.
Peterson compares this moment with a realization from Doestoevsky’s Notes From the Underground: give people utopia and the first thing they want to do is smash it to pieces “just so something interesting and perverse can happen.” Peterson continues,
“We’re creatures that are designed to encounter the unknown. We want to keep moving beyond what we have, even if what we have is what we want. And maybe that’s partly because we’re oriented towards the future.”
Jordan Peterson during his lecture at UofT. Photo credit: Rene Johnston / Toronto Star via Getty Images
Buddha might have felt confined by a few walls; today, Earth itself seems too restrictive. Jeff Bezos calls us, in honor of Isaac Asimov, “planetary chauvinists,” while Elon Musk declares we must become a “multi-planetary species.” Most likely, a mature Buddha would recommend they both curb their interplanetary enthusiasm and take better care of the planet that birthed us. Still, a young Gautama felt stuffy in his pleasure dome.
Peterson compares what happens next to modern-day China’s Olympics preparation, spray painting grass green and evicting locals to offer an appearance of sterility. Gautama Sr. attempted to make the outside world as safe as his son’s walled garden. He tells the sick and ugly to take a walk. Peterson calls it the snake in the garden theory:
“No matter how much care you take to make things perfect, some of what you’re excluding is going to come back in.”
A chosen route was strewn with flowers; beautiful women lined the road for young Gautama’s chaperoned chariot. But then, as always, the gods intervened. Though Peterson doesn’t mention it, they create an alternate — or in this case, real — route for the Buddha to travel that only the prince and his driver see. And what he saw was old age, disease, and death. That is, he learned about time.
Gautama returns home distressed, though awakened to the nature of reality — in this case, nature. He has finally felt the pain of sentience. Peterson mentions that he’s comforted in the safety of his walled garden, again protected by caretakers who use hugging as an analgesic. Pain reduced, Gautama eventually fixes for his vice. Forget these golden robes, he thinks, I must understand pain and suffering. Peterson notes the parallel with the biblical garden, the onset of consciousness after the tempting fruit is bitten.
In Peterson’s retelling, the Buddha needed six months before venturing out again. In other versions, he sees all the world’s ailments in a single night. Either way, Gautama could never really return to the walled garden. As with all epics, he had set out on his quest; there was no turning back. His father would have a mendicant for a son, one who would, in a strange twist, become a sort of political leader, though that’s rarely discussed.
Interestingly, Peterson never mentions the fact that Buddha himself becomes a deadbeat dad, leaving his family shortly after the birth of his son, Rāhula, who he named for being a “fetter.” Buddha felt his son chained him to a life he no longer wanted to live. Just as his father created his neurosis, we have to wonder what became of Rāhula’s psychological trauma.
‘So many people now don’t know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure, but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure’ [“There is no sexual relationship.”]
Alain Badiou: ‘for love to last, one has to reinvent oneself.’ Photograph: Eric Fougère/VIP Images/Corbis
Love, says France’s greatest living philosopher, “is not a contract between two narcissists. It’s more than that. It’s a construction that compels the participants to go beyond narcissism. In order that love lasts one has to reinvent oneself.”
Alain Badiou, venerable Maoist, 75-year-old soixante-huitard, vituperative excoriator of Sarkozy and Hollande and such a controversial figure in France that when he was profiled in Marianne magazine they used the headline “Badiou: is the star of philosophy a bastard?”, smiles at me sweetly across the living room of his Paris flat. “Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it’s not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!”
In his new book, Badiou writes about his love life. “I have only once in my life given up on a love. It was my first love, and then gradually I became so aware this step had been a mistake I tried to recover that initial love, late, very late – the death of the loved one was approaching – but with a unique intensity and feeling of necessity.” That abandonment and attempt at recovery marked all the philosopher’s subsequent love affairs. “There have been dramas and heart-wrenching and doubts, but I have never again abandoned a love. And I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.”
I think about the distinction Badiou describes in In Praise of Love. “While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist[ic] manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock,” writes Badiou, “love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life that is consequently disrupted and re-fashioned.”
In other words love is, in many respects, the opposite of sex. Love, for Badiou, is what follows a deranging chance eruption in one’s life. He puts it philosophically: “The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.” Love’s work consists in conquering that fright. Badiou cites Mallarmé, who saw poetry as “chance defeated word by word”. A loving relationship is similar. “In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure,” writes Badiou.
But this encomium to creative fidelity surely shows Badiou to be a man out of his time. “In Paris now half of couples don’t stay together more than five years,” he says. “I think it’s sad because I don’t think many of these people know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure – but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure.”
Indeed. Jacques Lacan argued that sexual relationships don’t exist. (Badiou will shortly publish a book of conversations between Lacan and his biographer, Elisabeth Roudinesco.) What is real is narcissistic, Lacan suggested, what binds imaginary. “To an extent, I agree with him. If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it’s narcissistic. You don’t connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them.”
But wasn’t the rampant hedonism unleashed during Paris’s May 1968 événements, in which Badiou participated, all about libidinal liberation from social constraint? How can he, of all people, hymn bourgeois notions such as commitment and conjugal felicity? “Well, I absolutely agree that sex needs to be freed from morality. I’m not going to speak against the freedom to experiment sexually like some old arse” – “un vieux connard” – “but when you liberate sexuality, you don’t solve the problems of love. That’s why I propose a new philosophy of love, wherein you can’t avoid problems or working to solve them.”
But, he argues, avoiding love’s problems is just what we do in our risk-averse, commitment-phobic society. Badiou was struck by publicity slogans for French online dating site Méetic such as “Get perfect love without suffering” or “Be in love without falling in love”. “For me these posters destroy the poetry of existence. They try to suppress the adventure of love. Their idea is you calculate who has the same tastes, the same fantasies, the same holidays, wants the same number of children. Méetic try to go back to organised marriages – not by parents but by the lovers themselves.” Aren’t they meeting a demand? “Sure. Everybody wants a contract that guarantees them against risk. Love isn’t like that. You can’t buy a lover. Sex, yes, but not a lover.”
For Badiou, love is becoming a consumer product like everything else. The French anti-globalisation campaigner José Bové once wrote a book entitled Le Monde n’est pas une Marchandise (The World Isn’t a Commodity). Badiou’s book is, in a sense, its sequel and could have been entitled L’Amour n’est pas une Marchandise non plus (Love Isn’t a Commodity Either).
Surely that makes him an old romantic? “I think that romanticism is a reaction against classicism. Romanticism exalted love against classical arranged marriages – hence l’amour fou, antisocial love. In that sense I’m neither romantic nor classic. My approach is that love is both an encounter and a construction. You have to resolve the problems in love – live together or not, to have a child or not, what one does in the evening.”
This new book on love is an application of Badiou’s singular philosophy of the subject and his outré conception of truth set out in incredibly forbidding books steeped in mathematics and deploying Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, such as Theory of the Subject, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. These books have led him to be hailed as a great philosopher. “A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us,” Slavoj Žižek has written.
Badiou’s philosophy of the subject is an extrapolation of Sartre’s existentialist slogan “Existence precedes essence” and incorporates a communist hypothesis that Althusser might have liked. It’s also a rebuke to postwar and often postmodern French philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Foucault with whom he argued and all of whom he has outlived. What is a subject for Badiou? “Simone de Beauvoir wrote that you are not born a woman, you become one. I would say you are not a subject or human being, you become one. You become a subject to the extent to which you can respond to events. For me personally, I responded to the events of ’68, I accepted my romantic destiny, became interested in mathematics – all these chance events made me what I am.”
How does truth come into all this? “You discover truth in your response to the event. Truth is a construction after the event. The example of love is the clearest. It starts with an encounter that’s not calculable but afterwards you realise what it was. The same with science: you discover something unexpected – mountains on the moon, say – and afterwards there is mathematical work to give it sense. That is a process of truth because in that subjective experience there is a certain universal value. It is a truth procedure because it leads from subjective experience and chance to universal value.”
Badiou’s very odd, post-existentialist, heretically Marxist and defiantly anti-parliamentary conception of politics has a similar trajectory. “Real politics is that which gives enthusiasm,” he says. “Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective; with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism.”
He defines his “real politics” in opposition to what he calls “parliamentary cretinism”. His politics starts with subjective experience, involves a truth procedure and ends, fingers crossed, in a communist society. Why? “It’s necessary to invent a politics that is not identical with power. Real politics is to engage to resolve problems within a collective with enthusiasm. It’s not simply to delegate problems to the professionals. Love is like politics in that it’s not a professional affair. There are no professionals in love, and none in real politics.”
Badiou hasn’t voted since 1968, a habit he didn’t break in France’s recent presidential election. But he says he is writing a book about politics, a sequel to his 2007 succès de scandale De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (The Meaning of Sarkozy), in which he notoriously called the last French president “rat man” for playing on public concerns about crime and immigration. Earlier this month he wrote a marvellously vituperative column for Le Monde that has been trending across the francophone world. Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, he maintained, weren’t the only politicians responsible for “the rise of rampant fascism” in France. He argued that there was a Socialist party tradition of colluding with right-wing racism – from Mitterrand through Jospin and, no doubt, into Hollande’s first term. Ingeniously, Badiou suggested that mainstream politicians were disappointed in the French people for having a racist sensibility for which they, the “parliamentary cretins” (aided by some fellow intellectuals whom Badiou excoriated), were actually responsible for creating. “It is this stubborn encouragement of the state that shapes the ugly racialist opinion and reaction, and not vice versa … In order to improve democracy, then, it’s necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.” The article nicely conveys his sense that democracy as currently practised in France is a charade inimical to true rule of the people.
Badiou’s far-left politics were burnished in the late 60s. In 1969, he joined the Maoist Union des Communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml), enthused by Mao’s Cultural Revolution that had begun three years earlier. Just as he has been faithful to all but one of his lovers, he has remained true to Maoism. Marianne magazine called him a “fossil of the 60s and 70s”, but Badiou is unrepentant. He still holds that the Cultural Revolution was inspirational, as deranging and fertile for him as falling in love – despite the deaths, rapes, tortures, mass displacements and infringements of human rights with which it has been associated.
When I ask him why, Badiou explains that the success of Lenin’s disciplined Bolshevik party in the 1917 October Revolution spawned a series of other workers’ revolutions, notably in China in 1949. “One soon saw that this instrument that was capable of achieving victory was not very capable of knowing what to do with its victory.” Maoist bureaucracy was corrupt and self-serving, party activists were bourgeois and anti-socialist, and the communist revolution under threat. “So the Cultural Revolution was important because it was the last attempt within that history to modify that in a revolutionary manner. That’s to say they made an attack on the communist state itself to revolutionise communism. It was a failure but many interesting events are failures.” He cites the Paris Commune and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s failed German revolution among such interesting failures.
In his 2010 book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou wrote about the importance of failure for like-minded communists (many of whom gathered with him and Žižek at Birkbeck College, London in 2009 for a conference called On the Idea of Communism). “Any failure,” he writes, “is a lesson which, ultimately, can be incorporated into the positive universality of the construction of a truth.” Which means that Badiou at least has not lost faith in communism. “The old Marxist idea of creating an international society is truly the order of the day now,” he says. “Today things are much more international than they have ever been – commodities and people are much more international than before.” So the time is more ripe than ever for international workers’ revolution? “I wouldn’t say that. Certainly at the world level there can be more hope than hitherto. We’re climbing a very big ladder.”
Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1937. His mother was a professor of philosophy, his father a maths professor and socialist mayor of Toulouse from 1944-58. His philosophical training began in 1950s Paris. He quickly became a Sartrean, devoted to the paradoxical philosophy that, he says, involved “a complicated synthesis between a very determinist Marxist theory of history and an anti-determinist philosophy of conscience”.
In a new book of essays entitled The Adventure of French Philosophy, Badiou argues that between the appearance of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1943 and the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? in 1991, French philosophy enjoyed a golden age akin to classical Greece or Enlightenment Germany. Badiou’s great fortune was to be part of that adventure. Like wine and cheese, French philosophy should, he says, be considered part of France’s glory. “I tell our ambassadors you have with us philosophers the greatest export product.”
He speaks fondly of his times at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Deniswhich, founded in the late 60s, fast became a bastion of countercultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with his fellow professors Deleuze and Lyotard, even though he considered them traitors to the communist cause. “These men were my rivals and my neighbours, people whom I admired and differed profoundly from.”
But why, if he’s right, did France have this postwar adventure, this dizzying explosion of intellectual life? “I think because of the political catastrophe in France – Pétain and the disaster of collaboration. That resulted in a philosophy that had a duty to respond to those disgraces, to propose a different way. What’s more, there is a French model of being a philosopher which isn’t enclosed in the academy as in England – a philosopher who is an intellectual interested in all the things in their age. Such were Diderot, Rousseau and above all Pascal.”
He credits Sartre with revivifying that French model of what a philosopher could be. “All my eminent colleagues were profs because they had to live, but that wasn’t their vocation – they wanted to be politically engaged public intellectuals and often artists, like Sartre. Me, too.” Badiou, like a mini-Sartre, is not just a publicly engaged philosopher, but a dramatist and novelist. Unlike Sartre, he has appeared in a Jean-Luc Godard film – as a philosopher lecturer on a luxury cruise ship in 2010’s Film Socialisme. His says his overwhelming ambition has been to change the relationship between workers and intellectuals. “For me what was especially important from May 1968 to 1980 was that we created new political forms of organisations linking intellectuals and workers. Those links helped me reinvent myself as a human subject. One could say that attempt failed, but I keep dazzling memories of that time.” Badiou’s eyes gleam as if he’s recalling an old love affair he can never forget, still less disown. Perhaps politics and love are not, if you’re a French Maoist, so very different.
Badiou chuckles bitterly. “France always exists through its exceptions. There are temporary exceptions that aren’t representative of an overwhelmingly reactionary country but are what make it less disgusting than it would be without them. I mean exceptions like 1789, 1848, 1871, the resistance, French philosophy after the war. They are the underside to the reactionary tradition of Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Pétain, Sarkozy.” And you’re one of those exceptions? “Why not? Certainly philosophy from Sartre to Deleuze and me has made France better than it would otherwise have been.”
Ben Gilberti
Published on Feb 11, 2019
Exploring the COURAGE that it takes TO BE CURIOUS about what is going on around us in the world today! It is amazing but true that being disillusioned is a necessary step in building the courage to let go of our comfort zone. Presented by Heather Williams, H.W.,M
Culture what is it? Some say it is something that the rich rescued from the back alleys of the gutter – like music, art, and sex and then took it and commercialized it and made it part of whatever passes as contemporary. Culture produce out of the bowls of appetites modes of living and loving to satisfy the hungry desires, and cravings of a restless idle Class, and whose influences that remains to this modern day.
I say that might be one version, but look a little closer, come along with me as we thrust back in time to a life beyond your imagination. To Life’s mission, call it Divine intention, call it Evolution.
See what people did to desperately escape the future of what one was born into. Here is your chance to venture beyond the familiar and discover “Is it possible for the world to really be like the secret visions that have plagued you since childhood?” Visions many would believe to be heresy.
Are you the mysterious stranger who turns up unconscious after the lightning storm of what the future could hold. I can assure you this class will be like no other you have attended. Designed to reveal faces of fear: awaken intuition: and instill a growing desire for the unusual, to know the implacable hunter within you that has intrigued you like no other.
Cultural History #1- On-line 12 weeks, one-and-a-half-hour weekly seminar – $150 – seminar dates – March 13 through May 29, 2019. Registration is in progress now. Sign up by going to:
siteofcontact.net – select the Learning Circles tab at the top of the page – hit sale – then purchase and then finish the process.
You will receive notice of the Zoom Classroom entrance 1 week prior to start date.
So, what do you have to lose, perhaps the restlessness of an idle Class?
You’ll realize too late that there’s more to life than eating instant mashed potatoes and drinking root beer while the kiddie pool you’re lying in slowly fills up with your excrement.
Pisces | Feb. 19 to March 20
There are some things that money can’t buy. For instance, with your record, you’re forbidden from getting close enough to purchase Girl Scout cookies.
Aries | March 21 to April 19
Mars and Venus will both appear in your sign this week, as will Zach Galifianakis, who is apparently in everything these days.
Taurus | April 20 to May 20
While it is true that all-knowing God sees every sparrow that falls, He finds it a lot more amusing to watch you tumble down the stairs a couple times per week.
Gemini | May 21 to June 20
They say that knowing is half the battle, but they never talk about how the other half is tactical deployment and careful use of grenades.
Cancer | June 21 to July 22
You’ll be pleased to find that science has long since achieved your dream of creating a smaller, cuddlier, domesticated version of the tiger.
Leo | July 23 to Aug. 22
Your self-destructive behavior is beginning to get out of control, which is mostly notable due to how long you were able to control your behavior while destroying yourself.
Virgo | Aug. 23 to Sept. 22
Scientists will announce the discovery of sunspots spelling out your name this week just to see if they can get you to stare at the sun all day.
Libra | Sept. 23 to Oct. 22
The natives will shrink in terror when you demonstrate your lighter, as even they know that smoking is horrible for you.
Scorpio | Oct. 23 to Nov. 21
Losing weight will improve your performance in all areas of life, but bolting on new shock absorbers is painful and counterproductive.
Sagittarius | Nov. 22 to Dec. 21
You’ll learn too late that while it may be easy and even justifiable to ridicule the French, they take their full-contact judo very seriously.
Capricorn | Dec. 22 to Jan. 19
It turns out that it’s neither the size of the wave nor the motion of the ocean that really matters, but the length and girth of your penis.
Rogan argues with Russel about gender and race
Joe Rogan University – Fan Channel
Published on Apr 28, 2017
Joe Rogan Experience
Episode #952
Joe Rogan and Thaddeus Russell get in a heated debate on the social construct of genders. Whether a man is born a male or not. What do you guys think.
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
