Earlier quoted context omitted.
where capitalised (B)ig other is a more spiritial (God) thing? I don't read French so that's a nuance I miss. Thanks. Edit: sorry tired and getting mixed up with Heidegger's being/Being
The small 'other' is just the other people in life, as regular people. The capitalised Big Other is the organized, concrete and symbolic forces created/imposed by all other people into the individual: law, culture, social obligations, morality, language. It's the organised imposition/force of others, also called as "the symbolic order".
Orwell’s Escape
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Re: Orwell’s Escape
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Animal Farm is as well; what is a farm but a piece of geography containing multiple living beings but organised for the ultimate benefit of only a few of them? Remember: very few dystopias are as much about the other, as they are about the society in which they were written. Animal Farm is the book-length exploration of what in 1984 gets a single sentence: " Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable cha…
I thought power was the point and cruelty what the way of exerting power - at least that's roughly my memory of O'Brien's explanation. That's why I think it aligns so well with any bureaucracy, because they're all self-organizing towards gaining and exerpting more power for it's own sake. (The big difference of course being the conscious awareness of this the party has, whereas in real life it's mostly just emergent…
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#43[flagged]
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
A tangent but Lacan just distinguished Autre and autre (Other and other), but more recent philosophers in English (especially Zizek) popularized the more pronounceable distinction between the big and the little other. To be fair though, “l’objet petit a” does occur in Lacan, though, so he wasn’t above the “big”/“little” terminology himself
Lacan is a massive charlatan, and him being taken seriously at all in any context indicts the entire idea of HN being a high quality discussion forum.
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really not subtle. Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. Orwell fought on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the betrayal by the Soviet Union soured him on the prospect of its interpretation of communism. This doesn't even require reading his biography, he explicitly wrote about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia . Where it falls apart is when people…
> Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. I'm sure this is accurate and I've heard it before. In practice though, at least 1984 feels like a non-partisan criticism of power hungry bureaucracy run amok. I think that's why it's timeless, it criticizes political systems in practice more than making any argument for a particular ideology. There's would be lots of disagreement on the sol…
There was a lot of active debate when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia on whether to support them or not because they were creating the first "communist project" at that scale. The disagreement was largely ideological and the criticism was eventually proven correct when the Soviet Union sided against the anarchists in Spain (as well as when they went after "Makhno's army" in Ukraine, as well as early on when they disbanded syndicalist groups and worker cooperatives, as well as later on when they went through rounds of ideological purges and so on). The most well-known discourse around this seems to be from German communists, where it was cut short by the killing of the Spartacus group.
When you say 1984 criticizes "political systems in practice" that is exactly right: the criticism of the Soviet Union wasn't that their stated goals were bad, in fact most of the left agreed on the ultimate goals. The criticism was that, like the pigs in the animal farm, by merely picking up the weapons of the oppressors they recreated the same oppressive power structures (i.e. systems). Anarchists on the other hand wanted to disband the power structures and replace it with one built from the ground up.
When you say "all systems of government" however, it's clear that you're likely unaware of anarchist theory: the problem is not government, the problem is the state. And it doesn't matter whether that state is a conservative or reactionary oligarchy, a liberal or Soviet bureaucracy, or an "anarchocapitalist" corporate board of capital owners: they all share the same structural problem of moving power from the subjects to the state and then using it against the subjects to legitimize the state's authority through violence.
In other words the point of Animal Farm isn't that oppression is inevitable but that switching out who's in charge won't make an oppressive system any less oppressive, it will just recreate the same oppression eventually.