On Love of The Neighbor- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part

YOU CROWD around your neighbor, and have fine words for it. But I say to you: your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves.
You flee to your neighbor from yourselves, and would rather make a virtue of it: but I fathom your "unselfishness."
The you is older than the I; the you has been consecrated, but not yet the I: so man presses near to his neighbor.
Do I advise you to love of the neighbor? Rather do I advise you to flight from the neighbor and to love of the farthest!
Higher than love of your neighbor is love of the farthest and future ones; higher still than love to men, is love to things and phantoms.
The phantom that runs on before you, my brother, is fairer than you; why do you not give to it your flesh and your bones? But you are afraid, and run to your neighbor.
You cannot endure yourselves and do not love yourselves sufficiently: so you seek to mislead your neighbor into love, to gild yourselves with his error.
If only you could not endure any kinds of neighbors; then you would have to create your friend and his overflowing heart out of yourselves.
You call in a witness when you want to speak well of yourselves; and when you have misled him to think well of you, you also think well of yourselves.
Not only does he lie, who speaks when he knows better, but more so, he who speaks when he knows nothing. And thus you speak of yourselves, and lie to your neighbor with yourselves.
Thus says the fool: "Association with men spoils the character, especially when one has none."
The one goes to his neighbor because he seeks himself, and the other because he would rather lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.
It is the farthest ones who pay for your love to the near ones; and even when there are five of you together, there is always a sixth who must die.
I do not love your festivals either: I found too many actors there, and even the spectators often behaved like actors.
Not the neighbor do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of the earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman.
I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But one must know how to be a sponge, if one would be loved by over-flowing hearts.
I teach you the friend in whom the world stands complete, a capsule of the good,- the creating friend, who always has a complete world to give away.
And as the world unrolled itself for him, so rolls it together again for him in rings, as the becoming of good through evil, as the becoming of purpose out of chance.
Let the future and the farthest be the motive of your today; in your friend you shall love the overman as your motive.
My brothers, I advise you not to love of the neighbor- I advise you to love of the farthest!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Hello! Hello! As school has winded down and the first few weeks of summer have now settled themselves....we can all get back to the bloggy-bloggy goodness! Recently, Ive been reading a bit of Nietzsche. Some would call him the father of the geneaology and I would go as far to say that he had some major major influence on our old pal Michel Foucault. So I figured, if Im down with Foucault it would be a good idea to take a look at who he was down with. Right yo! But more to the point, this exerpt above struck me so as an allusion to what we would now call the problem of "self/other" dichotomy. We love our neighbors in the way that allows us to construct the other in opposition to ourselves. So as our neighbors become the self, we enlist those in closest proximity to ourselves whether that be locational, idealogical, etc. We do so sometimes at the expense of a difficult and sometimes contradictary and complex coalition. on a more global scale its the difference between what we call Western feminist neo-imperialism and a transnational feminist politics.

We enlist ourselves under a binary system that fails to address the problems with how and why we construct a 'common identity'. So instead of a coalitional (is that a word?) identity politics, we have the bastardization/demonization/pathologization of the "other" that can parade under the guise of the arrogant self-righteousness of what I see as modern day missionary sensibilities of those who call themselve allies to feminist causes or it can parade under liberal humanist notions of authority and agency backed by science and reason.

So we use our neighbors and the love of our neighbors as a replacement for the love of the the farthest and the future. Even further along, he goes into the idea that higher than the love of the farthest and the future is the love of phatoms and things. In my version that line was translated as...."I esteem the love of things and ghosts." Might this read as a what we can call a post-structuralist account of our histories...much like a genealogy? A love of those ghosts which still present themselves and have a hand in the construction of the languages and discourses which constitute our identities.

And so he goes on to preach the teaching of the friend, love of the friend with the overflowing heart. To be a sponge to such overflow...to learn, to be open to learning, to be open to the furtherst. Now Nietzsche was definitely not a feminist, but he exhibits a degree of honesty throughout what Ive read thus far. He is not afraid to take the polemic stance, and to deconstruct what we take blindly as morality or common sense. And maybe thats where Foucault and others have picked up (non-linearly of course). Maybe the friend with the overflowing heart and the sponge is symbolic of what a transnational politics can look like. Sponges....yea for real yo....sponges-you can get all kinds of nice symbolism of them.

Word. I may be wrong, a high probability. But, I was reading this passage today and I thought it was rather lovely and I wanted to share...

ps- the exerpt i included isnt exactly the same as the translated version ive got, but its fairely close.

Mary Jane... what the fuck are you doing?

O MJ... so beautiful with your thong hanging out and your breasts popping out of your shirt while you work hard to wash spiderman's clothes.... how rediculous is this? AWEFUL!!!! i tell you... and this is a real figurine? HA! Comments.... you can also check out the LJ that girl posted this on and others comments...

http://devildoll.livejournal.com/750924.html

My Family

I always tell stories about my niece and how she is being raised and how I always feel like I have to go home and "fix" all the things she has learned about gender in 4 years. Well, after seeing this picture, my work is going to be infinitely harder than I had imagined.

a tale of my sorrows...

so yesterday i lost my wallet. i am rather distraught over it, but it wasnt my fault. it the fault of american gender roles in fashion! i was wearing womens pants. i do not carry a purse (though itd be funny if i did). but anyway, womens pant pockets are nowhere as deep as mens! in fact, i would go as far as to say they are lackluster in depth!! the bane of my existence! these pants are very soft, in fact the softest. but those darn pockets have led me down a path of lost wallets, lost keys, and lost dignity. such distress! such sorrow!

why cant we have unisex pants. well we do, but why don't i own them? well i do i think, but why wasnt i wearing them at the time of the forementioned incident....life's questions still yet to be answered.

so im bumming bout the wallet, but not too much...i just hope i can find the lil thing before i need any of its contents for anything specific. holler.

and in other news,

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3162120
a courthouse ruling denies sex obtained by fraud as rape...what do you think?

a lil mothers day trivia: you are connected to all the women in your family through your mitochondrial DNA ( or aleast from what i can recall from previous biology classes, but i might have just made that up)

good evening friends.

yo! i know everyone is busy doing all kinds of great feminist research/analyze/critiques this time of the year, so why not post your papers, projects, etc. if you get a chance. you know you want to.

for those of you who missed the daily show segment on this university's previous mascot:
http://www.muscoop.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=3aabe115ed8dcbf4e4ee01e071cf8375&action=tpmod;blog=view;cont=38;uid=5

I want to read this summer and i therefore i submit a request for some good feminist recommendations (essays/articles/books). holler.

hope all fares well on the report cards......please remember that your self worth as a person IS completely dependent on your relative successes or failures in terms of an oversimplified 6-letter value system of personal growth and knowledge.

Hi!

Hey everyone...kind of strange question, but who started this blog? It seems to be on the same account as our blog for International Impact? I was just wondering if someone in here is affiliated somehow with I-i and maybe our accounts got intertwined?
~Miriam :-)

Lessons from GWS

It just struck me just now, out of nowhere, how very arrogant it is to assume god is male. It's not something I've thought about in probably 5 or more years, since I decided early on in Catholic high school to simply use gender neutral pronouns anywhere it was necessary. But it's amazing to me how much deeper my understanding is now of something I understood superficially way back then. It's a happy feeling about a frustrating topic

came about this today. it made me feel a bit downtrodden, but then i realized that there are a number of people committed to their own noble endeavors and for this i am very very thankful. they deserve more credit. holler.

Higher Education Conformity
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com. Posted May 2, 2007. (via Alternet.org)

Can you be fired for doing a great job, year after year, and in fact becoming nationally known for your insight and performance? Yes, as in the case of Marilee Jones, who was the dean of admissions at MIT until her dismissal last week, when it was discovered that she had lied about her academic credentials 28 years ago. She had claimed three degrees, although she had none. If she had done a miserable job as dean, MIT might have been more forgiving, but her very success has to be threatening to an institution of higher learning: What good are educational credentials anyway?

Jones is hardly the only academic fraud. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimates that 10-30 percent of resumes include distortions if not outright lies. In the last couple of weeks, for example, "Dr. Denis Waitley Ph.D." -- as he is redundantly listed in the bestselling self-help book The Secret, where he appears as a spiritual teacher -- has confessed to not having his claimed master's degree, and the multi-level vitamin marketing firm he worked for admits that it can't confirm the Ph.D. either.

All right, lying is a grievous sin, as everyone outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue knows. And we wouldn't want a lot of fake MIT engineering graduates designing our bridges. But there are ways in which the higher education industry is becoming a racket: Buy our product or be condemned to life of penury, and our product can easily cost well over $100,000.

The pundits keep chanting that we need a more highly skilled workforce, by which they mean more college graduates, although the connection between college and skills is not always crystal clear. Jones, for example, was performing a complex job requiring considerable judgment, experience and sensitivity without the benefit of any college degree. And how about all those business majors -- business being the most popular undergraduate major in America? It seems to me that a two-year course in math and writing skills should be more than sufficient to prepare someone for a career in banking, marketing, or management. Most of what you need to know you're going to learn on the job anyway.

But in the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket. A resume without a college degree is never going to get past the computer programs that screen applications. Why? Certainly it's not because most corporate employers possess a deep affinity for the life of the mind. In fact in his book Executive Blues G. J. Meyers warned of the "academic stench" that can sink a career: That master's degree in English? Better not mention it.

My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one's ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end -- whether in library carrels or office cubicles -- does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned -- although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.

Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-"team-player." You will do anything. You will grovel.

College can be the most amazingly enlightening experience of a lifetime. I loved almost every minute of it, from St. Augustine to organic chemistry, from Chaucer to electricity and magnetism. But we need a distinguished blue ribbon commission to investigate its role as a toll booth on the road to employment, and the obvious person to head up this commission is Marilee Jones.
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This article makes me so sad as the throng of business majors plod past me at the library. Is it true? Has college become a four year preparation for the bureacracy of a capitalist self-serving society. Please tell me that some of us really enjoy learning. I do not view the cultivation of intellect to be an exercise in my "ability to obey and conform". Why do we look for the end-product? What about the inquiries, the adventure of it all, the pure joy in the ability to access information and wield ourselves about it. Or on the other side, what about the access to other kinds of information that don't get valued by this society. If the university is not a space for the pursuit of knowledge, but an assembly line of docile employees, what are we left with? A generation that capitulates to administrations, boardrooms, and corner offices?

Why not herald those who pursue a different path? Exalt your GWS majors! Find solace in those who are just resolute enough to see that they can not pursue a life that speaks in terms of utilitarian benefits and losses, those of us who find no solace in using an education solely as a means to a strategic employment end, but who seek virtue and promise in the notion that education can provoke those potentials within ourselves to make change, and to transform ruminations into realities.

"Polygamous Lesbians Flee Sharia"

From the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6599437.stm?lsf):

Polygamous lesbians flee Sharia

A Nigerian lesbian who "married" four women last weekend in Kano State has gone into hiding from the Islamic police, with her partners.
Under Sharia law, adopted in the state seven years ago, homosexuality and same-sex marriages are outlawed and considered very serious offences.
The theatre where the elaborate wedding celebration was held on Sunday has been demolished by Kano city's authorities.
Lesbianism is also illegal under Nigeria's national penal code.
Nigeria's parliament is considering tightening its laws on homosexuality.

Stoning

Kano's Hisbah board, which uses volunteers to enforce Islamic law, told the BBC that the women's marriage was "unacceptable".
The BBC's Bala Ibrahim in Kano says Aunty Maiduguri and her four "wives" are thought to have gone into hiding the day after they married.
All five women, who are believed to be film actresses in the local home-video industry, were born Muslims, otherwise they would not be covered by Sharia law.

Hisbah volunteers enforce Islamic law in Kano State
Islam says a man can take up to four wives if he is able to support them.
"As defenders of the Sharia laws, we shall not allow this unhealthy development to take root in the state," the Hisbah's deputy commander Ustaz Abubakar Rabo told Nigeria's This Day newspaper.
Mr Rabo told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme that if the women were found guilty of lesbianism they faced one of two punishments.
For a married woman the offence would be considered adultery for which the punishment is death by stoning. A single woman would be caned.

Large turnout

Our correspondent says the theatre where the colourful wedding ceremony was held was flattened earlier this week.
Several reasons were given for the demolition, including the discovery that it was built on wrongly allocated land.
Eyewitnesses say there was a large turnout for the marriage and guests were given leaflets as a souvenir showing Aunty Maiduguri surrounded by her "brides".
A Kano police spokesman told the BBC that his officers were not actively looking for the women, but would arrest them if need be.
The Hisbah group, which is run separately from the police, receives state government support.
Two years ago, a Sharia court sentenced a man to six months in prison and fined him $38 for living as a woman for seven years in Kano.
Eleven other states in mostly Muslim northern Nigeria have adopted Sharia law.