Three evil dwarfs run for the Purple. We that people always betrayed by our mis-leaders are asked to participate in faux elections, under a faux government, under faux laws determined by faux judges. Good luck on that kids. Trump hails himself as a Savior Godling, Biden is simply a collective thing, RFK Jr. a hungry man lusting to be the next Biden! Each “Token” is weighted by naked need in the Godlesstime of that Rough Beast from 2019 and March 11, 2020 when it’s Nativity was shown to the world as naked force. The creed of the hour, to this hour, is OBEY and BELIEVE the State is the Mediator twixt death and life. Or else. The human comedy.
https://enoughisenough14.org/2021/01/15/marginal-notes-on-the-epidemic-as-politics/
What does the scenario that world politics sets before us look like in the twilight of the Agamben’s interventions? Spectacular domination by mass media, iatrocracy of doctor-priests, sovereign policing controlling the streets: this is the image of a world in which the means — conceived as respective exclusive monopolies: monopoly of language, monopoly of health, monopoly of violence — now assert themselves as ends unto themselves. In fact, the spectacle is nothing but a stage of capitalism in which our linguistic nature, which has now attained its extreme alienation, advances menacingly towards us, radically inverted. The same is true of our conception of health care and policing, where our specifically human capacities for healing and violence, long since alienated, now loom over us as dangers. Thus, our muteness encounters language through the words of the media, our illness meets health through the health meted out by doctors, and our powerlessness encounters violence through the violence of uniformed men. Our singularity everywhere encounters its own natural capacities in forms that are alienated, separated, and hypostatized: in the media, medical institutions, and the police.
Ethics, politics and comedy
It is necessary to reflect on the singular circumstance that the two maxims that have attempted to define with greater acuteness the ethical and political status of humanity in modernity come from comedy. Homo homini lupus – the cornerstone of Western politics – is in Plautus ( Asinaria , v.495, where he jokingly warns against those who do not know who the other man is) and homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto , perhaps the happiest formulation of the foundation of all ethics, we read in Terence ( Heautontim. , v.77). No less surprising is that the definition of the principle of law "to give to each his own" ( suum cuique tribuere ) was perceived by the ancients as the most appropriate definition of what is in question in the comedy: a gloss on Terence states it without reservation : comic par excellence is to assign unicuique personae quod propriom est . If you assign to each man the character that defines him, he becomes ridiculous. Or, more generally, any attempt to define what is human necessarily ends in comedy. This is what the caricature shows, in which the gesture of grasping the humanity of each individual at all costs turns, according to all evidence, into a mockery, and is truly laughable.
Plato must have had something like this in mind when he modeled the characters in his dialogues on the decidedly comical mimes of Sophro and Epicharmus. "Know thyself" is the antithetical principle to all tragic arrogance and can only give rise to a game and a joke, even if these can be and are perfectly serious. The human, in fact, is not a substance whose boundaries can be traced once and for all - it is, rather, an always ongoing process, in which man does not cease to be inhuman and animal and, at the same time, to become human and speaking. For this reason, while tragedy brings to expression what is not human and, at the point in which the hero suddenly and bitterly becomes aware of his inhumanity, ends in mutism, the person , that is, the comic mask, entrusts the smile as the only possible enunciation of what is no longer and yet is still human. And against the West's incessant, hateful attempt to assign the definition of ethics and politics to tragedy, it is necessary to remember every time that man's habitation on earth is a comedy - not divine perhaps, but which nevertheless betrays laughed his secret, subdued solidarity with the idea of happiness. https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-etica-politica-e-commedia
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