The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape

Excerpt from Zizek,  The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape -- In These Times.

Rather, the real solution is to tear down the true wall, not the police one, but the social-economic one: To change society so that people will no longer desperately try to escape their own world.

This brings us back to rumours and “reports” about “subjects supposed to loot and rape:” New Orleans is one of those cities within the United States most heavily marked by the internal wall that separates the affluent from ghettoized blacks. And it is about those on the other side of the wall that we fantasize: More and more, they live in another world, in a blank zone that offers itself as a screen for the projection of our fears, anxieties and secret desires. The “subject supposed to loot and rape” is on the other side of the Wall—this is the subject about whom Bennett can afford to make his slips of the tongue and confess in a censored mode his murderous dreams. More than anything else, the rumors and fake reports from the aftermath of Katrina bear witness to the deep class division of American society.

via Adam Kotsko.

Comments

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I've read that NO is actually one of the most racially integrated cities in the US. Whenever I meet foreigners who want to talk about the US, they talk about all the racial problems in the US. I'm sure there are racial problems, but I've never witnessed that with coworkers, or neighbors, or at the grocery store. I'm afraid Zizek doesn't really know the US very well. If you want racial problems, go live as a black man in Germany or Slovenia.

[pebird]

I find Z's articles in ITT pretty good - he has to tone down the theory, but still concepts have to leak through which throughly baffle some readers.

[Adam Kotsko]

bjr3, Are you fucking serious?

[pebird]

Adam - either bjr3 is a black man who lives in Germany or Slovenia, and thereby knows Europeans racism from first hand experience, or is just throwing shit out to see if it sticks.

I guess the latter.

[Jodi]

PEBird--I share your guess. I find it highly unlikely that a black man living in the US would defend American egalitarianism.