I distinguish liberal and non-liberal forms of human social orders. The non-liberal form I can also typify as ‘sacrificial’. I have based this little theory on the work of René Girard.

The two types of order are distinguished, in my view, in the following way:

The sacrificial order allows, and most of the time essentially needs, the issuing from the authorities a positive proscription concerning violence. Example: kill the infidel. Slaughter a bull every full moon. Cut the tongue of a liar.

The liberal order is based around the idea that the authorities can never issue a positive proscription concerning violence. To do so, would be against the ‘rules’ of liberality.

Does this mean that no violence exists in the liberal order? Of course not! The order protects itself with police, army ,… But what makes it different is that in the rules of the liberal order never can this order legitimize or utilize any positive proscription concerning violence. All violence is essentially reactive, protective against violence initialized by a criminal.

Any ideology or religion that still holds that there are positive proscriptions regarding violence, cannot be integrated into the liberal order. It would be a total contradiction and an undermining of the liberal order.

Is coercion into a formal acknowledgement of a convention synonymous with the recognition of the validity of this convention? I believe it isn't. The whole world can tell me I live in Belgium, but perhaps I don't really believe this is the case, perhaps I only play along because I fear the coercive force of the law were I to really challenge the convention.

Funniness and the sense of uncanniness often derive from an unexpected juxtaposition of the natural and the spiritual. For example, one introduces genitalia (nature) in a context wherein the convention reigns that genitalia are not shown (spiritual/discontinuity). This will usually be funny. Unless it becomes too 'intrusive'.

On the other hand, when one introduces unexpectedly, the suggestion of spiritual intention into something that is usually believed to be merely natural/mechanical/unspiritual, one can also achieve a humorous or uncanny effect. Uncanny: for example HAL in 'Space Odyssey'.

Perhaps the common element is the disruption of the categories of life and death that is implicated in these unexpected juxtapositions.

According to Freud, the pleasure in laughter derives from the avoidance of energy expenditure. In the case of uncanniness, perhaps the unpleasure we feel in that case, derives from an unexpected all too elevated demand of energy expenditure: something which is usually repressed (which we pay for with energy expenditure) is made irrepressible (for example our tendency to think animistically, which comes natural to us as children, but which we had to inhibit in order to count as 'adults', is provoked by the semblance of intentionality in mechanical objects), creating intrapsychically the need to expend even more energy, beyond our capability.

Unspiritual music can not become uncanny when one digitalizes it, because it is merely mechanics mechanized further.
Spiritual music, Bach, Beethoven, can be 'uncannified' through digitalization, since here there is a juxtaposition of spirit and mechanics. Cf the music of Wendy Carlos.

Was, from a historical perspective, puritanism the consequence of the Gutenberg revolution? The untrained immediate access to the word of god leads to a fanatical, literal-minded conscience, untrained in a more dialectical, mediated approach to the word of God?

Is today's islamist ressurgence likewise correlated to the digital revolution?

Harmony oriented architecture respects humans qua humans: it acknowledges transcendence and leaves the suggestion of horizon intact. A harmony oriented building acknowledges that it is an element of certain surroundings, of an environment, with which it has to compromise and which it must respect. It acknowledges that it is 'borrowing' space, by allowing for example ornamental carvings, in which space is here and there made empty again.
A perverted architecture robs us of the suggestion of any horizon, and therefore it robs us of our humanity. It imposes vulgarity, calculation, a simplistic, protohuman, utilitarian conception of geometry. 'Perverted' always mean something that is cut off from any true relation to the other.
To be 'human' means to be able to negotiate with the other.

Honor killing: in order to escape eternally returning vendetta's, these communities have learned to shift the aggression from the rapist to the victim. Because once the victim is dead, the gods are nourished. No need for disintegrative, chaotic violence over many generations. More economic. The great importance attached to the sexual purity of women in these cultures, is a correlate of their method of defending themselves against disruptive, chaotic violence.

The difficulty for me is, that in postarchaic societies the rape victim still feels the need to punish himself, even without any cultural incentive to think of oneself as 'soiled'... This, to me, suggests, that there is something deeper going on than simply a cultural scapegoating mechanism...

Perhaps the brusque collapse of a traditional hierarchical order is one of the causal factors leading to moral masochism. The individual, without the traditional order, is left without guidance on which model to take for himself. He then takes whatever model appears to him to be the most worthy of his admiration. He will overvalue this model and feel completely unable to rival it. Which contains the nucleus of masochism: the constant assurance of submission to the rival, the constant reassurance that one has renounced the objects which 'belong' to the rival.

i speak of the brusque collapse of a traditional order, and that is something sociohistorical, but perhaps something similar happens at a microlevel: consider the neurotic individual to be someone who suffers from a 'collapse' of a clear order, a clear model to adhere to.

Kubrick has something anally-retentive about him. Everything is orderly, shiny, clean, sterile,... very appolinian. Into which he then introduces traumatic intrusive elements.

Mike Leigh is expulsive, dostojevkian, chaotic, the dialogues are not 'clean', they are open, animalistic, rough and undefined like the sound of waves, ... Here there is no sudden traumatic representant of the continuous in the midst of a harmonic, appolinian, anal order, everything is continuous already.

As a child i "felt" the presence of gods in open fields, in nature. The whole pagan thing . It is probably a projection of one's own will to expand, to fly, to symbiote with the animal, etc.

Many women are indifferent to the ideological system they live under. The ideological is for them but one of the modi of appearance, in this way they are relativist. Islam can become acceptable for them, because it is to them no more than but yet another modus of appearance of which they can with great dedication learn all the intricacies and all the details. The vanity of women will then be the trojan horse that reintroduces their subordination to patriarchy.

When I think of my early childhood, i feel as if all those memories are covered in a blissful feeling. The 'Stimmung' of those memories is pure bliss. The only moment when I feel this kind of Stimmung in my adult life is in dreams or on mind altering drugs.

Also, in phantasy, when i hope something, when i am in love with someone. Or when i think back of childhood, or listen to music associated with those times.

I think it is not an illusion to think that once upon a time i really was completely plunged in that blissfull Stimmung.

I do not regret that today things are different, it is necessary that things are different. It is toxic and immature to demand from the world that it poses no more exigencies than what caretakers would demand of a young infant.

Besides, as we have seen, it is still possible to return to bliss: in sleep the cathexes and inhibitions which have been necessarily and which are the reason for the ceasing of the bliss, are withdrawn, to some degree, and we can once more enjoy narcissistic fullness.

We can only feel the grave terror that the infant feels, in nightmares, panic attacks, objectless anxiety, 'bad trips', and the likes.

Bliss and anxiety are the two modi that come with being an infant yet unhindered by necessary inhibitions, adherence to the 'symbolic order', and need to live up to ideals (instead of the illusory selfsufficiency of infancy) that reality demands of us.

For Georges Bataille 'continuity' means that which is not limited:

- the individual may be discontinuous, but life itself, including death, is continuous

- the individual may not be omniscient, but God is

- the symbolic universe (language, conventions, ...) consists of the introduction of discontinuity in the continuity which is reality...

I think 'cursing', like 'goddammit', 'shit', 'fuck' always refers to the continuous. One curses to relief oneself of the constant pressure to adhere to the conventions of discontinuity (which is synonymous to the adherence to certain culturally exacted inhibitions), and for that one uses terms that one associates with the continuous: these terms refer to excrement (all adherence to convention in some way has its prototype in the mastery of the sphincster), God, the souvereign pure expenditure of energy that is coitus,...

Often we do not choose to find some object ridiculous. I think this is because we know that any possible object (=person) can become an example for us. With this example, an ideal (inner object) is correlated, an ideal which can be used by the inner daemon. To neutralize this power others have over us, we look immediately for what can discredit them as 'examples', as models: and this is the background of the impulse to ridiculization.

It is considerend impudent, when one speaks of humour, not to exhibit at the same time a humorous attitude. It is like humour is some kind of god to which one has to pay tribute, to which one has to sacrifice.

One has to pay tribute to this god also, when one speaks of those phenomena that are repressed in everyday conversation: sex, excretion, actual inequality (class, physical ability, ...), perhaps religion, vestigial remainders of etiquette that could be interpreted as undemocratic servility or sexism etc...

In the era of irony one has to assure the others that one doesn't take things seriously. That one pays tribute to the god of humour. Like a muslim who feels obliged to say 'peace be with him' when he speaks of his prophet, so that no doubt may exist to his inner commitment to his belief system, so the ironic westener feels obliged to joke when he speaks of certain things. Or one can also imagine the need to say "bless you" when someone sneezes, which is perhaps a 'proof' that one is committed to wishing no harm to the other.

Corpsing on stage implies that the magical defense against the inner daemon  (acting in this case) is thought to have stopped working. The subject had used the audience as 'accomplices' to his transgressions, as 'witnesses' who could testify to the oral self sufficience of the comedian. The comedian had reversed the relation of passive child and oral mother.

But now the witnesses are felt to be absent and unwilling and the daemon cannot be convinced.

The subject panics and wishes he would 'dissappear'. In biological terms, the subject feels threatened by a predator (the inner daemon) and wants to play dead .

The comedians I like most are those that can play with the precarious equilibrium between oral 'omnipotence' and vulnerability, who can toe that line and keep their balance. This for me, is the 'art' in comedy: revealing vulnerability and revealing the supple mastery of that vulnerability at the same time. Without the revelation of vulnerability that is being mastered, comedy would be boring and too safe. There would be no art to it.

A stoic wouldn't be a very good comedian. he has found a different way to harness himself against his fellow men, those 'witnesses' of his incompetence.

I would just like to say, it is possible to get ‘cured’ from perverse object choice (paraphilia, homosexuality, etc).

What this perverse subject suffers from is an attachment to a ‘bad object’ (he has in Klein’s sense not worked through the depressive position, and has regressed to a ‘schizoid’ approach to objects). Because he fears the unpredictable, painful rejection by the good object he chooses the reliable pain of the ‘bad object’.

This could be linked to the Oedipus complex. The perverse subject does not believe he can compete with his oedipal rival, and instead ‘holds fast’ to the reliable negative Oedipus. Heterosexual masochism is always the libidinal investment into a phantasmatic object which combines the bad mother and the castrating father. This is why the protagonist of Tanizaki’s “Diary of an Old Man” feels attracted to transvestites.

Populist media in Flanders, assume a need for authority and for an image of the world filtered through clearly defined, standardized, simplistic sentiments, in their readership. The Unmündigkeit of these citizens is fed by providing for them a pseudo-discourse covering up the possibility of a more mature, more challenging information provision. The pseudo-discourse, the simplistic image, closes off the possibility to further reflection.
Humour can be a revolutionary tool, but usually it is used to close off the possibility of further reflection, which would be accompanied by an initial anxiety. Humor removes the 'ground' but immediately offers something to hang on to, and the ground returns immediately. Real reflection removes the ground with no assurance that one will find one's feet on the ground once again. In this way humour also 'closes off' the possibility to further reflection. Everything has to stay cosy, or comfortably cynical, detached, non-consequential, manageable, sentimental, crude.