The violence of public Gooning/Andrew Tate//Israel-Palestine/Obscene Supplements/Žižek/Lacan/Fetish

[00:00:02]Hello and good morning everybody. It's me Julian and welcome to another introduction to philosophy and theory live stream video. Welcome also to the patrons and Discordians who are joining us live. Uh really appreciate you guys and I just want to give you an advanced warning that I think today is going to be pretty unhinged. like I just I'm in a good mood and I feel like I just want to like go in swinging and there's a lot that I want to talk about. I want to give you a working definition of the concept of the obscene supplement which I think can be actually super helpful to like diagram different cultural phenomena. So, like I'm going to try to make a connection between Andrew Tate and Israel Palestine and how power functions according to the logic of the obscene supplement. But I want to begin with once again talking about gooning because I've decided that every road leads to gooning. And this is not just a bit like I actually every time I decide not to talk about it, I find myself back thinking about gooting. And I've increasingly started to think of gooting as some kind of like c cultural touchstone like some key that unlocks every other ideological phenomena of our current morbid impass. Like the book that I'm working on, I actually am very tempted in like a nod to Jek to call it the Gooners's Guide to Ideology, which I think is like I mean, first of all, the alliteration is beautiful, but I feel like it's too close to the pervert's guide to ideology, but I do think that Gooning functions according to like a certain logic that to my mind seems indicative of where we are as a society, as a culture. Um, but anyway, there's going to be a lot of topics along the way. So, that's basically what I'm going to try to cover. I'm going to try to cover Andrew Tate Gooning Israel Palestine uh and the obscene supplement and other topics along the way. Um but before I begin, I want to say that um I was on an airplane the other day.

[00:02:05]I'm back in LA as you can see. I was on an airplane and there was something very interesting that really caught my attention, which is that when we got on the plane, there was an announcement that said, "Please be aware that if you want to film on this airplane, you have to seek the other passengers consent."

[00:02:25]And I thought that was such an interesting like ideological phenomenon that at this point whenever you're in a public space you're aware of the fact that you could be filmed not just by security cameras which we sort of sort of tacitly accepted at this point that we live in a constantly monitored society but that we also are constantly subject not just to the gaze of the other but the content creation of the other. That that in the same way that we see the world as essentially performative we also anticipate that we could be filmed by someone for their enjoyment. that we become part and parcel to their performative fantasy and that in a sense there was a certain impetence to this announcement saying we know that you're going to be filmed but if you're going to be filmed someone should at least seek your consent. It's like the the logic of political correctness that that ultimately there has to be a guarantor that you have willingly consented to be part of somebody else's fantasy as it were. And of course nobody's ever going to ask for consent. people just pull out their phones anyway, start taking selfies and pictures and what have you. It's kind of like this predicament that we're all in at this point that we're always living not just aware of the fact that we're being filmed and recorded, but that at any point in time we could become a an NPC as it were in somebody else's libidal fantasy, the staging of their own enjoyment for the gaze of the big other to which we somehow become beholden ourselves. And to my mind here again, we have a certain logic of gooning that takes place, which is we're all trapped in this space, but we're all experiencing different fantasmatic frameworks. It's one of the the symptoms, if you will, the breakdown of the the master signifier. There's no center that guarantors ideological frame through which we experience and access our reality. Instead, we live in this fractured existence in which everybody has their own way of mediating their own existence. That's the well-known idea of the the the main character syndrome as it were. But the reason that I that I brought this up is I want to make a bit of a surprising link maybe between this phenomenon of being stuck together on an airplane knowing that like we might be part of somebody else's fantasy to another experience that I had with Galene the other day.

[00:04:32]Gentle and I went to see Tristan and his old Vagner's opera which to my mind is the ultimate Goonar's opera. If you're unfamiliar with Tristan and his old it's basically like this prolonged masturbatory 5hour performance in which Tristan and his old want to essentially achieve a kind of orgasm together and the music swells and they're constantly undermined.

[00:05:00]There's something very like it's actually hilarious if you're aware of it. It's so beautiful being in an audience of people who have never seen Tristan and his old before because like they get so enraptured by the music and multiple times throughout the performance these secondary characters appear on stage and at the exact moment of perceived climax they kind of interrupt the proceedings and and it was actually I was watching the audience a little bit and it was quite beautiful.

[00:05:25]There was like there there was a young Asian couple next to me and the man was very very invested in in the music and and you could see it written on his face, right? He was just like fully with it, mouth open, just like having this very intense visceral experience and then and I think this is true for most of the crowd and then I think it's what act two or something and act two I mean it happens multiple times in which the father basically comes on the the other suitor comes onto the scene. King Mark.

[00:05:52]Yeah. King Mark comes onto the scene and you can sense the visceral sort of dissatisfaction and disgruntlement of the audience because their collective gooning as it were has been disrupted by this figure who kind of barges into the opera and starts singing in his own way in in a way that that that fundamentally bars you from your enjoyment. And what Vagner does so well is that like he builds this successive repetition, this sort of process of like getting to the to the climax and then being withheld from it. And then in the final moments of the opera, the famous Leebus tour, which you can find on YouTube, it's almost like a kind of ASMR experience.

[00:06:31]It's it's it's it's absolutely incredible when you listen to the music and you've undergone that experience of slowly building up to it. is like an enormous rush like the the climax of Liebus to it's like similar to if you're listening to like I don't know dubstep or something and there's a really really visceral drop you know how like you you see like audiences at like Lost Lands or something and they're just screaming because like the the drop is so good that's very similar to what happens in in Vagner's uh Tristan and his old is like the drop at the end is so incredibly visceral that you experience this like surge of emotion this like blood pressure change and and and sort of historically when Vagner premiered the opera infamously like lots and lots of people were just literally fainting like they'd never experienced something like before and and it is orgasmic. It is a little death. It's a momentary uh sort of disappearing into the music. And there's something very obscene like I actually I actually do think that like if I were dictator I would I was joking about this with Jennine like I would ban Vagner's Tristan and his old like there's something too obscene about the way in which people all gathered together in a room to have this like collective gooning experience and the release that they experience at the end.

[00:07:42]And you know that it's like an orgy of sorts because after after the rush after this moment at this climactic moment of the leasto there's always a kind of like embarrassed almost like discomfort is like you wake up from this rush and you realize that you're in this room surrounded by like a thousand other people who have just collectively experienced the same thing. And unlike let's say in a music concert like you know a EDM concert where afterwards you feel this sort of collective rush of like euphoric we've gone through this together in in Tristan and his old there's always that like kind of like it's almost like everybody lost themselves for a minute. Everybody's kind of like adjusting their clothes and their fine outfits etc. And then to my mind the clapping after a good Tissson is always a little bit too exuberant.

[00:08:27]there's a certain like embarrassment almost at the fact that everyone has just collectively had this musical rush in which they've forgotten themselves for a minute and and by means of clapping and reassuring ourselves that we've seen an important production that everyone's worked on there's a sort of like you know symbolic consensus that is achieved again the reason that I bring this up is that there is something that takes place within Tristan and assold a kind of if you will orgasmic excess that to my mind is constitutive to the way in which we experience pleasure. It's that momentary loss of self that occurs, but there's nevertheless something dangerous about it. There's something kind of disruptive about it. And I think that if we understand the way in which pleasure works on that level, I think we can understand a lot about the relationship dialectically between love and hate, between pleasure and violence. And that's one of the things that I want to talk about here. Now this is a long way perhaps too long and I apologize of getting to the point which is to say that I wanted to talk about gooning and specifically in a previous lecture I've talked about the ideology of gooning in relationship to the death drive and the obje the relationship of gooning to edging the idea that edging implies the sort of like deferral of pleasure so as to increase the climax which is actually if you will closer to Vnus Tristan and his old versus the idea of gooning as a kind of deferred uh sort of neverending infinite a barrier towards pleasure as such which itself increased the pleasure the kind of like deadlock that is implicit within the open-ended pleasure of gooning as such and how it functions as a symptom if you will of our contemporary ideological impass which follows the logic the the capitalist logic of the imperative to enjoy yourself but it remains difficult to do so without remaining nevertheless depressed and so the short circuit the deadlock of gooding comes to represent a kind of ideological if you will symptom of our contemporary ide uh contemporary impass. But I want to add to this a secondary notion that I've been thinking about, which is to say, I came across this deeply disturbing, deeply vulgar story about people who goon in public and who use it as a way of staging sexual assault towards women. Like they'll walk up to a woman in a grocery store and they'll they'll take out their penis and they'll ejaculate and and crucially, they'll film it. often they'll film it to then post to gooning communities online to gain a kind of validation from their peers. This is a phenomenon that is known as as sharking or tagging. Uh, of course, it's it's deeply vulgar, problematic. It's it's a form of sexual assault that is meant to degrade women and to make them feel harassed and and and violated as a way of increasing the enjoyment. However, I think there's a lot of interesting things to be said about this. So if you'll bear with me, I want to briefly talk about this phenomenon of sharking as as sort of if you will inverse of the ideological symptom of Gooning. Now first of all I want to say that when I was a kid, no confession coming up here, don't worry, but when I was a kid in the Netherlands going to high school, there was a similar phenomenon. I can't really remember what it was called. I think it was called something like faffing or funneling or there was some kind of word that would that the Dutch used for it.

[00:11:42]But the basic phenomenon was that kids who would go on holiday, this like peak, you know, uh, peak humanist liberal 2000s ideology is like you take your children on these grand tours that the teachers take the children on a grand tour to like Rome and Athens and to sort of like the the heights of civilization.

[00:12:00]And of course, wonderful educational experience, but this was like key to our upbringing was the idea that we would undergo these trips. In fact, there was this wonderful thing where you would have to decide as a student whether you wanted to go to Rome or if you wanted to go to Athens and it became this whole lifestyle decision as it were if you were someone who trended towards the you know the Greeks or the Romans etc. Anyway, long story short this is something that would happen across like European schools. You'll see this in the summer still like stu European students and high school students being sort of dragged across these cultural sites. And some of the young uh male students had decided that as a gag they were going to whip out their penis and they were going to take their penis and they were going to essentially like throw it against or like swipe it against important cultural monuments and they would film themselves and put it on the internet. This is like very early internet preyoutube. I don't even know how it got distributed and it became such a big first of all like obscene vulgar but also like weirdly amazing like I think it takes away it's it's related to the idea of gooning as a form of sexual assault but but I'll get to that in a moment but it approaches it in a way that I think is actually much more carnivalesque which to say it takes the dis inherent discomfort if you will that many especially young men experience app propo the penis and and turns it into kind of like a phallic performance uh that stages of rebellion against the cultural iconography of the humanistic project of educating young bourgeoa subjects who go out into the worlds to experience the heights of civilization. Now, of course, these young men didn't have the sophisticated idea about it, but I do think it's never less symptomatic as a form of like rebellion that is associated with the the fear of the fallus in as much as it becomes a sight of rebellion against the the presumed ideology of of being raised as as as a citizen subject within the European humanistic project. But that aside, this became such like a form of cultural outrage. Of course, first of all, it became an international diplomatic incident because these other like for example like the Italian ambassador would summon the Dutch ambassador saying your youth have defiled our monuments etc. How could you? like it became a diplomatic crisis to the point where schools in the Netherlands would actually start having to tell teachers to disincentivize their students and to to monitor the students that at any point that they were standing around these these these museums and monuments that they weren't suddenly going to deface them by by taking out their wieners essentially.

[00:14:29]Now, the reason I bring this up is that I think that ultimately this is very similar, although in some way you could say more harmless to the phenomenon of sharking, which is of course much more violent since it seeks to degrade women for the pleasure of men, which can then be performatively posted online for other men. But it functions according to a similar kind of logic which is to say it's very important to note that the the if you will the public gooner as I'll call him who participates in an act of gooning in public so as to which is of course perverted in the sense that he becomes the embodiment of the pleasure of the other men who are watching him. I think it's actually very important to see the gooner as the ultimate pervert in this sense. He is not enjoying simply for himself. he is enjoying on behalf of pleasure as such the the furl of pleasure but moreover he's also performing for the gays of other men and so this process by which a a woman is put in a situation of being sexually assaulted on behalf of the gays of other men who can experience a kind of libidinal satisfaction through this excessive act is therefore not even about the pleasure as such nor even I would venture about the sexual degradation instead it's about the performative aspect of doing something which is considered so outside the norm that it actually in a sense neutralizes the dangerous substance of the sexual encounter by means of a performatively excessive transgression. An example of this can be found in the discourse surrounding such public gooning, which is to say that the people who do it and who upload it to the internet, like an infamous user I read about is called the Goonar god. They're referred to in in sort of praising terms by their followers as being low inhib or in the same way that like an incel is an incelibate invol sorry an involuntary celibate a low inhib is someone who has low inhibition. In other words that they prove that they can do this thing in public therefore like in a sense acting upon their their intrusive thoughts living out the fantasy that other people could only dream of. They staged the ultimate transgressive act, if you will, which to take the realm of fantasy, a fantasy which is often predicated upon the exploitation of women for the for the satisfaction of men. And they take it too far as it were. They take it out into reality. But of course, in a similar way to like pornography that the kind of pornography that is about like uh public sex as it were, it's never about the sexual act as such. Instead, it's about the gaze. It's about the possibility of being caught. Moreover, the public gooner catches himself in the act of sodingo in his depravity imposed for the pleasure of his viewers, thereby enhancing his own pleasure, knowing that not only has he engaged in a transgressive sex sex act, he has also done so in a way in which he can provide pleasure to others and other people follow him. It's a it's a performative spiral as a war that I think is actually quite interesting. It's interesting in the sense that it exemplifies the Lanian theory of the fetish. One of the most interesting things that LL says about the fetish is that the fetish actually functions as a kind of barrier from the object of desire which to say what the man fears the most in this case the male subject is the object of desire. He thinks he wants it but actually he fears it. The most basic dimension of this is that the man wants the woman as it were but he really fears the woman. The woman can undermine his onlogical security.

[00:17:44]The woman can emasculate him. In other words, the woman can castrate him. the mere existence of woman. Therefore, a priori symbolically castrates the man.

[00:17:53]It's a double bind that he's caught in.

[00:17:55]And the only way to overcome this this this this uh repression of his own anxiety and anger towards the woman as an onlogical threat as a woman, as the figure of symbolic castration, is to make her subject to his violence. In other words, to dehumanize her, to take away her agency, to quote unquote neutralize her. Therefore, the fetish act, the fetishistic act of sneaking up on a woman and and defiling her is a way of actually neutralizing the perceived threat of woman. It's very important to note, therefore, that this very act of sexual transgression, therefore, is an act of fundamental impetence. It's it's it's an act that stages the man's own hysterical inability to be subject in the world as a way of seemingly overcoming it. In this sense, I actually do think it relates back to the young men who would defile the public monuments by putting their penis on it, which is to say, they wanted to resist integration into the symbolic uh symbolic identification with the world.

[00:18:51]In other words, being a citizen subject who learns the humanistically appropriate knowledge about the importance of cultural artifacts.

[00:18:58]However, this resistance here is playful. It's carnivalesque in a certain way. It undermines the perceived cultural uh hegemony. Whereas the the the act of gooning and public gooning specifically in this form of sexual assault is actually a way of trying to sort of violently degrade women so as to try to sort of assuage the man's own onlogical insecurities.

[00:19:20]I'm going very fast here but there's a part a couple of elements that I want that I want to take apart and that we can put together in this lecture um uh in in the coming hour but those are like the basic elements of it that I think are quite important. Now, one more thing I'd like to say about public gooning or or or sharking in this sense, uh tagging is that to my mind, it is actually quite similar to the logic of school shootings. There's a there's a wonderful scene in um the uh latest film uh a recent film called the drama with Robert Patterson and Zenaia in it. Uh I don't know if you saw that one part of it and and and I don't mean to spoil too much of the movie but I inherently will which is that Robert Patton so if you don't want it to be spoiled don't listen now.

[00:20:02]Robert Patson and Z and they are this perfect couple you know both highly educated urban uh liberals who work like in the arts and publishing etc. and uh and they're going to be married and uh at a certain point they're in a they're in an environment where they're encouraged to share something about themselves that they've never shared before. Uh and Zenaia shares what she thinks is just like a funny story, which is that when she was young, she thought about uh committing a school shooting. In other words, she even went so far as to acquire or or or steal her father's rifle and to practice and record herself like a video of of her essentially saying goodbye to the world and and declaring that she wanted to murder her classmates. Now, I'll get to this in a moment because of the fact that this disturbs Robert Patson and makes her see see her in a different light. But but the more important thing here, the the key scene that I thought was actually very well written is that Robert Patson says, "Why?" He's trying to like wrap his mind around this. He says, "Why would you want to be a school shooter?

[00:21:05]Like what could be so wrong with you that you would want to murder your classmates?" And her her her answer is very honest, I think, and very important. Her answer is that there was something about the aesthetics of school shootings that appealed to her. I think that's actually very very important is that she she found herself very angry and disaffected and and that without any kind of frame through which or language through which to articulate her resistance or herantim and that the iconography if you will of the young disaffected quote unquote romantic school shooter was very appealing to her and that a key part of fantasizing about uh staging a school shooting was photographing herself with the rifle in camo and and having the sort of libidal satisfaction of being able to resist uh the the the the ideology of of sort of like consensual participation within the school system that had been forced upon her. I think it's actually I'm not trying to say that we should in any way rationalize school shootings as like you know a cry for help etc. I find that a little bit too cliche, but I think what's very important here is the aesthetics of school shooting was therefore something that she had already consumed online that she was already peripherilally aware of and that in so doing she parttook in what she what you might call an imaginary con community which to say the school shooting that she was preparing in her mind which of course she didn't actually act out uh act upon wasn't just stayed for the gays of the big other but in a very real sense also for the imaginary community of others who would not only posthumously see her, after all, she anticipated her own death as a kind of, if you will, pseudo-revolutionary fighter without a cause, but also that when she recorded these videos of herself announcing her act, which was to be postumously discovered if the act were to be carried out, she also created a dialogue with herself, a way of insinuating herself. It's in a sense the ultimate performative act to imagine oneself as a school shooter. And there's another amazing scene in the film in which um Zenaia, I think it's Zenaia or Robert Patson's friend says, "What if the world is full of people who thought of themselves as potential school shooters, but they never actually carried out the thought? What if they never actually acted upon their impulse to kill their schoolmates?" And there's this sort of paranoid shot of like ordinary well-adjusted bourgeoa individuals going to their jobs who and their very innocuous existence is now suddenly cast through a paranoid lens as as a kind of suspicion that that perhaps each and every one of us who is well adjusted or seemingly well adjusted to the world at some level carried a kind of murderous thought or instinct that we wanted to break out. This is explored through and I think very appropriately the the lens of love and specifically what you might call the violent aspect hidden within true romantic love. So what do I mean by that? Well, first of all, when you really love someone, there's always a certain junqua. There's a certain ineffable X. There's something that is in them more than is in them.

[00:24:07]And this this ineffable quality is filled in of course through belief not just knowledge. After all here we have the dialectical tension between knowledge and belief. If you know your partner to be perfect for you to be exactly right for you then it is strictly speaking no longer love. Love functions on a level of trust on belief.

[00:24:29]I believe in love on behalf of love itself. Two people who come together not because they know that it will be a happy ending but because they trust in each other that they believe in the idea that they were quote unquote meant to be. It's also why for example for Hegel love is a metaphor for the if you will dialectics of spirits the process by which a contingency retroactively is cast as necessity which for Hegel is how the functioning of all sort of universal history functions. And likewise when you meet someone, a complete stranger, a random person, i.e. a contingent accidental encounter, but it nevertheless comes to feel to you as if it were meant to be, i.e. faded or necessary. This is the quote unquote truth process by which two people come to be. Now, without wanting to like wax lyrical about, you know, the poetics of love, what's important here is that this ineffable X, this, if you will, like uncolonized substance of the thing that is in the other more than themselves, is also something that can be very terrifying, very unnerving. It's also like the central premise of like horror horror movies, like the thing, for example, is that there's something inside of you that cannot fully be given form. Love in this sense is violent not just in that it disrupts your reality, but specifically because it revolves around the thing that is in the person more than is in themselves. They may not even have access to it. It's something that you see in them that they may not even be able to see. But this means that when you're first dating, it's it's also very easy to be undermined in your love when the way in which this belief is filled in suddenly is assured as it were or undermined by a very specific knowledge. You can see this when people are first dating, right? When people first date, there's this idea that like they they like each other, but they're looking for red flags or certain things that if they know about their partner makes them see them in a completely different light. And the crucial thing is that there are certain quote unquote acceptable things which if you know about them actually makes you love them thus the more. Like some secret that they tell you about themselves that now you feel like you're more intimate because they've shown you a side of them that they would reveal that they would keep hidden from others. But vice versa, there's the fear, the nagging awareness that if they tell you something that cannot be reconciled within your given horizon of tolerance, then suddenly you've actually jeopardized your love for each other. And so it's a it's a delicate dance if you will about how much you reveal to the other person and and what what what sort of gradual way here. Therefore, Robert Patterson's knowledge of her desire to be a school shooter cannot be reconciled with his belief in her as a fundamentally good person and their relationship begins to unravel. Not only does he suddenly see her in a different light, everything that she does which seem cute and inoquist now suddenly seems as like a suspicious harbinger of some kind of future violent act. But moreover, he has to reconcile himself with the ineffable ex within her, within the thing that is more in her than herself. And it's important to note that this is also how like xenophobic violence functions. For example, every time or or even to go back to the ideology of like gooning in public, the gooner who sexually degrades a stranger, a woman in the supermarket by ejaculating upon her does so because he is intimidated by something in her more than her by something that she represents that can undermine his onlogical security i.e. his belief in himself and his masculinity which is constitutive to the way in which he inhabits the world. Therefore, this violent act against the woman, because it's important to note that it's a sexual act that is not about the if you will about pleasure, but it's strictly speaking about violent degradation, dehumanization of the woman, not just woman in her perceived particular reality, but precisely the universal category of woman as such. Therefore, serves to in a sense obfiscate the man's own uh the threat that is posed towards him, a threat which could undermine his own fantismatic framing. And now I'm starting to get to my main point, which is that violence always functions in a very curious way. The most quote unquote violent acts are always those directed against that which can undermine a fantismatic frame that supports the power of our access to reality. Now, that's very abstract. So, I'm going to give you an example of this.

[00:28:51]In fact, I'm going to give you an example that Jijik uses that I think is quite effective. So, Jik says, imagine uh you have uh like a gold rush and you have a merchant who sells prospectors equipment for the gold rush. And of course, the way in which the system works is that he sells them access to his tools in a way that makes them indebted to him. In other words, he says, "I want you to find gold, and once you found gold, you can pay me back for the tools." knowing perfectly well that the majority of them will never find any gold. Therefore, remain essentially like uh uh like wage slaves, debt slaves to him, beholden to him. Now, this system can continue to function according to the sort of ideological duplicity of saying I want you to succeed and yet nevertheless secretly I don't want you to succeed. It's the Lanian logic of the difference between the goal and the aim which is to say my my stated goal is that you find gold and succeed and I want to be the person who helps you. I am your benefactor.

[00:29:49]But the underlying aim is of course that you will never succeed in finding gold.

[00:29:54]Therefore becoming beholden to me and you become my slave. Now violence occurs or breaks out only in two situations.

[00:30:03]One if one of the prospectors becomes too successful. If he suddenly starts making too much money to the point at which he could exempt himself from the system i.e is buy himself free. the merchant will likely encourage another prospector to uh carry out a violent act against them saying, "I'll write off half of your debt if you burn down this man's house," for example. The second instance in which we can have an explosion of violence is when uh someone tries to escape, when they try to leave the system, when they try to say, "I can't pay back my debt, and so I'm going to run away."

[00:30:35]These are the two instances in which we therefore have the necessity for violence, an explosive violence which guarantees the continued existence of this, if you will, low-level violent system of exploitation. The status quo, as it were, in which the merchant can appear to be the benefactor of the gold diggers whilst nevertheless exploiting them, has to be maintained, and violence occurs only when there is an act which can undermine the fandismatic frame through which he appears as the benefactor, not as the exploer. Now, something similar happens within all of our social reality when it comes to power. There's there's another good example which is to say or or actually sorry I'm going a little bit too fast.

[00:31:15]I'm going to try to take it step by step. These ideas do all kind of come back together because remember I'm trying to give you a definition of the obscene supplement which perhaps I should have given you in the beginning but we'll get there in the end and hopefully it'll feel good. This is the dialectical promise if you will of these lectures is that if you undergo them, if you are willing to undergo them, then what I tried to promise you is at the end the idea will emerge in your mind.

[00:31:35]The connections will be made and then suddenly you will see a lot of other connections that you can start making yourself. Okay. So the basic point here is that violence is often directed against those who undermine the fantismatic frame through which a perceived status quo is maintained.

[00:31:53]Now, it's actually quite important, therefore, to understand that the best way to maintain the status quo is precisely by means of an obscene supplement. An obscene supplement which appears to be resisting it and yet nevertheless tacidly supports the continued functioning of the status quo as such. An example that Jig uses once again is uh a situation in which we have the captain of a ship who faces mutiny.

[00:32:20]The crew rises up against him. Now, what was the deciding factor in the crew rising up? Was it that they were treated poorly? Was it that there was inequality? No. On the contrary, the reason they rose up against the captain was precisely because he tried to impose a system of orderly equality, essentially eliminating the, if you will, tacit, unspoken structure of abuse that existed within the hierarchy of the shipmates.

[00:32:51]In fact, the specific example is that these shipmates carried out a certain hazing ritual for the younger members called walking the line in which younger members were submitted to all forms of brutality, including being thrown into the water and dragged along the dragged dragged along the ship so as to be entered into the symbolic identity of the sailors. When you matured, you were able to inflict the abuse on the next generation. And the captain being a quote unquote enlightened good captain eliminated this practice by saying that it was dehumanizing that it was dangerous etc. What's really important therefore is that this carnivalesque excess this obscene supplement this practice of hazing which appeared to be in if you will in in in juxiposition to the orderly functioning of the ship was in fact entirely constitutive to it. This acting out, this this obscene supplement not only was tacitly tolerated, but there was an awareness that as long as the sailors got to act like monsters to each other, they would nevertheless follow the captain's lead. The only thing that therefore could really undermine the captain's status quo, his power, the thing that would trigger a mutiny, was precisely to eliminate the excess, the violent excess, the obscene supplement which appeared in resistance to the status quo and yet nevertheless tacidly supported it. Now, I'm going to make an enormous leap here, but this is, I think, exactly how we should approach the US relationship towards Israel.

[00:34:29]Israel's atrocity, atrocities against Palestinians, the ongoing genocide, the expansion of this violent uh uh system of retribution towards Lebanon, the you know the torture, the the the the sex the the the sexual assaults, the rape, the sort of all of these things have the the the killing of civilians and health workers and journalists with absolute impunity.

[00:34:54]This is the obscene supplement to the western hegemonic status quo. Which is why in the same way that the captain of the ship could look at the carnivalistic excess of the hazing rituals and and nevertheless enjoy his power. Likewise, the western hegemonic democratic regimes sort of cast a disapproving eye upon Israel whilst nevertheless encouraging it and supporting it because they know that it is an obscene supplement to their own ideological hegemony. And the crucial example of this is actually not in the excesses, but precisely where Israel does apologize, where it does say phaua my bad. I don't know if you remember this, but it was like a month and a half ago, month and a half ago when Israeli some Israeli soldiers were filmed desecrating a I think it was like Jesus on the cross, like some Christian iconography and and and very quickly the Israeli government sort of issued an apology and and reprimanded the soldiers that they' done this this violent act, which of course is blatantly hypocritical if you think about what is actually occurring on the ground that they would apologize for this one innocuous symbolic act. but sort of refuse to to take any action when it comes to like the actual war crimes taking place. But it's so incredibly telling, right? Because the Israelis knew perfectly well that they are the obscene supplement to the Judeo-Christian hijgemony of their western uh democratic benefactors and that the one thing they can't do therefore is to actually infringe upon that unspoken solidarity that that Christian element that Judeo-Christian element in which Arab and Muslim subjects are seen as less than human as essentially just you know uh as as waste. as as as fodder as it were. I think it's incredibly important to note that this is also true for Democrats in the United States because here's the thing about the obscene supplement. It's not that the Democratic establishment really wants to support Israeli atrocities. Instead, they've made their own status quo, their own hegemonic power, so beholden to this obscene supplement that to criticize it would be to give leverage to their quote unquote progressive opponents within the party.

[00:37:17]And so, the Democratic establishment ends up defending these atrocities because what they're really defending is themselves. They're defending their own power. And this is the crucial thing to understand is that the violence, the absolutely unspeakable amount of violence that is quote unquote tolerated and tacidly encouraged exists so as to bolster and uphold the the the the remnants of ideological support or status quo or hegemonic power within the contemporary democratic and republican elites. It's almost as if to give up on Israel would be to give up on themselves. And this compromise, this double bind is the breaking point if you will of all power. The extent to which power makes itself uh dependent on its obscene supplement is the moment of inversion in which power becomes null and void. This actually means paradoxically that if you want to remain in power, you always have to play this delicate game in which the you know the obscene supplement is is there and it exists as an excess which can be condemned but it can never appear that you are beholden to it. I think it's actually why it was so important that people framed the Iran war, for example, as Trump being Netanyahu's puppet because the understanding was always that Israel could act out its violent, excessive, or giastic, if you will, uh fantasies. Once again, the logic of public gooning, to my mind, applies to the logic of Israeli war crimes. This excessive supplement to the status quo as a way of dehumanizing a sub, you get the point. This, to my mind, this narrative by which Trump became the puppet of Israel was actually quite important because it briefly undermined Trump's own power, which is why he had to put quote unquote Israel back in its place, as it were. This constant tustling between the the obscene agent of power, the obscene master, and the obscene supplement, I think, is actually really important. Which finally brings me to Andrew Tate, which is probably where I should have begun in the first place. Now, recently, you may have seen in the news, Andrew Tate and his brother were arrested and and there was all this online discourse about how absolutely ridiculous they looked. Like, the clothing that they wore was just so theatrical and bizarre and and just like patently patently insane that a lot of people were like, "Look at these guys.

[00:39:41]How could they claim to be, you know, icons of masculinity teaching young men when they seem to be these theatrical excesses?" But of course, that's precisely the point, which is to say Andrew Tate and his whole circle is an obscene supplement to the contemporary powers that be. The whole point is that he's not supposed to appear as a as a reasonable actor, but as a form of excess, which can be tacidly disapproved of and quote unquote kept in check while nevertheless bolstering the existing, if you will, logic of our contemporary regime, the Trumpian regime. This is also why there's a certain solidarity, if you want to use that word, that exists between figures like Andrew Tate and let's say Clavicular and Israel or even the uh Argentinian national team because the whole point is that they all function according to the logic of the obscene supplement. They are all theatrical violent excesses, if you will, that appear to undermine the status quo but actually tacitly encourage and support it. I think that's enormously important to understand is that this affinity between all of these theatrical actors like uh uh MLE in in Argentina or or or Andrew Tate or Clavvicular being sent to Israel or Messi kissing the wall in Jerusalem.

[00:41:06]This entire umbrella is not an overt conspiracy of likeminded power brokers, but they all function according to the logic of the obscene supplement. the obscene supplement which functions as a morbid excessive symptom which tacidly supports the existing status quo and the hegemonic position of power. And it's also very important to note that therefore the logic of the public gooner the man who goes out into the world to to uh either desecrate a monument or to dehumanize a woman or to kill and rape a Palestinian or to deface and and violate a protester's human rights. This all functions according to the same violent fetishistic logic that governs the obscene supplement, which is that it must uphold its own ontological identity, which is inherently insecure because it is predicated upon the staged resistance to that which it tacitly supports so as to continue this orgy of violence. And that to my mind is what ties all these together. It's the fetishistic process of violent reactionary sentiment, the carnivalistic orgy like the hazing ritual upon the ship that is meant to uphold the existing status quo. And this is something that Trump does perfectly.

[00:42:25]Trump is actually a very skilled manipulator when it comes to tacitly supporting and and and and and allowing these obscenities to take place whilst whenever they appear to infringe upon his own authority putting down putting his thumb down and essentially making sure that they can't uh out out vulgarize him in a certain way. It's also important to note why therefore whilst the quote unquote Trumpian phenomenon is different from the liberal status quo of the hegemonic position of consensus, the sort of like postfukuyamian thirdwave liberalism. It's nevertheless on a on a on a level of ideological logic a continuation thereof. It's not fully antithetical to it. It requires these symptomatic excesses so as to in sense present itself as the more reasonable option as such. Hence why Trump loves to surround himself with goons who are obscene supplements to his own obscene reign. RFK Jr. is an obscene supplement. Hegs is an obscene supplement. These are all wildly theatrical figures who know how to stoke the culture wars in in a way that emphasizes violent retribution that emphasizes a perceived sense of onlogical security usually predicated upon ultra masculinity and and nationalistic reactionary violence and misogyny. But they nevertheless remain discardable. They're they're they're easily discarded when they no longer serve the purpose of being the violent supplement to the existing status quo.

[00:43:58]And meanwhile, and I cannot stress this enough, in the meantime, Trump and his family can continue to enrich themselves grifting without with with complete impunity because that's what this project really serves. It's the the sort of narcissistic process of personal enrichment of of a power-hungry dictator essentially who creates this enormous obscene supplement distraction by which to simply further empower and and and and embellish and and and sort of reward himself and his family. I think it's very important to note therefore that there's a kind of cynical fundamentalism implicit to the idea of the obscene supplement. Not only is it violent, is it a form of desecrating the others so as to create a false ontological security, it's the killing, if you will, of the thing in them more than themselves. I think once again, you can see this very very clearly, the the killing of Palestinians and for example, even like videos of like Argentinians trying to call the police on people showing Palestinian flags in New York yesterday. It's the desire to eliminate that which is in the Palestinians more than in the Palestinians. And the paradox of course and this is the paradox of the real is that the more you inflict uh violence upon the Palestinian body uh populace the more the the idea this ineffable ex the Palestinian thing grows the more that women are subjected to sexual harassment and violence the more the spectre of the woman grows and this logic of course is the same logic as the Nazi anti anti-semitic logic which to say the more Jews were eradicated in real life, the more the spectre of the Jew, the conspiratorial spectral Jew grew. In other words, not only is it is it a futile violent act, which is to say, Israel cannot achieve its stated goals by means of what it's doing in Palestine. Moreover, it's actually the whole point to actually create this pervasive spectre, this, if you will, Palestinian identity that can never fully be eradicated precisely.

[00:46:10]Therefore, so as to uphold it, so as to bolster and support the Israeli obscene identity of extreme apartheid nationalistic uh Zionistic intent. Now, of course, it should go without saying, but I'm going to repeat it anyway, that none of this has anything to do with a quote unquote enlightened Jewish religious participation.

[00:46:34]This is a nationalistic political, if you will, ideological excess that exists in tandem with the continued hegemonic status quo within the West. Hence why the west continues to quote unquote tacitly support it whilst nevertheless condemning it. My whole point here in this lecture has been to try to connect the dots between what I see as a prevailing symptom of our contemporary ideology which is the logic of gooning.

[00:47:04]How the logic of gooning relates to a certain violence that is inflicted upon the other for their perceived the thing that they have in themselves more than themselves. In this case, public gooning, which I think is actually different from gooning as such because public gooning implies the sexual dehumanization of women so as to create a violent performative act stage for the gays of others. In other words, an obscene supplement that actually encourages the community of all the people who aren't participating in it in as much as I think one can see the same logic the the process by which violence exists so as to uphold the fantismatic frame through a perceived excess towards it. we can see within the contemporary hegemonic structure of Israel, Palestine, and the contemporary West.

[00:47:46]That's a lot, but that's about as much as I'm going to talk about today. I realize this is why I said this was going to be an unhinged lecture. I am further developing these ideas in my lectures and in my ebooks. If you'd like to go deeper, you can check out my Patreon. Until then, I will see you next week. And for the Discordians, those listening through Discord, I am going to host a Q&A right after this session. See you next week.