Reginald Shepherd

I'm truly saddened both by his prolonged suffering and truncated life. Reginald truly inspired me towards a melding of criticism and poetry. His perspective and spirit will be missed in the poetry community.

Zizek on Children of Men

Slavoj Zizek Commentary on Children of Men @ Yahoo! Video

The delineation of huminity as seperate from human, unpossessed by the state in principle or universal interest, appears as a Cy Twombley towards the end of the film. A skrawled line to nowhere. Nihlism fails to describe the outcome as aggression or "justified" defense overwhelms compasion. The acts of humanity carried out consist of restraint, protection, willingness to experience and suffering. The anamorphosis of human action and humanity described by Zizek here indicates his early thought in comprising "Paralax View".

Western Hemesphere Polytheist

Christianity, in the colloquial America, exists apart from history. Transplanted without a body from European historicism, no relics of past events exist as reminders of its development. The sunbelt God is an organ without a body. No Worms cathedral where a golden tablet ironically displays the 95 thesis Luther posted on a common bulletin - not driven with a nail and hammer onto a cathedral door as the American classroom myth insists. There's no contrast between a Gothic perspective of Christ and the Romantic perspective of Christ, which I argue is the vision of Christ brought to America. This not only coincides with the historical point at which the national identity of America was wrought, but also the underlying ideologies prevelant in the industrial revolution and the "second" enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The American God is a seperate God.



In Levinas' terms, a pre-ontological God. This inexperience of history and religion allows for nievite and violence, such as the reaction to the Church of Later Day Saints expresses. Yet, its only in America, that a large group of people have allowed for the return of a prophet in modernity. Perhaps the emergence of media coincides with the opening of this prophecy, this belief of the pre-ontological reified on screen, allowing us to glimpse the happenings of heaven without first braving death and the dismemberment of our egotistic consciousness that serves as our opacity to knowledge. A legal footnote protects America from outright theocracy, yet this knowledge arrives from a seperate culture, from a seperate populace. This is a rare event outside of Hegel where the law precedes public knowledge. This statement also assumes that within the process of colonization, the colonizer disconnects from the umbilical culture of inheritence.