maintaining that the only legitimate politics are the ones that willfully mortify the passions is the most slavish shit ever, and you inordinately see it from bootlickers already comfortably placed within hegemony.
the reflexive revulsion towards violence/coercion is related, but i have a harder time excavating why exactly its so distasteful to me. i saw a comment thread on reddit yesterday between a paint by the numbers technocratic liberal and a vaguely marxist leftie; they went through the usual bullet points before the centrist signed off with a respectably purplish illustration of the “terrors of marxist regimes” meted out on its subjects. the rhetorical bluster’s just enough to get you to sympathize until you notice that the subjects in question were...gusanos fleeing to florida. now, i’m gonna remain agnostic about how effectively distributed the violence was (idk shit about cuba) but denying that lining up landlords/slaveowners against a wall could ever be justified in principle strikes me as not just ignoble but also historically illiterate.
there’s a line in the intro to a student edition of hobbes i have that’s something to the effect of: the only people who find hobbes’ defense of absolute, arbitrary sovereignty compelling are the ones who’ve lived through war. and that’s probably right. but equally, the centrality to fanon of violence -not just its liberatory potential in boring consequentialist terms, but the therapy it performs on the dispossessed and indigent- shouldn’t be intelligible to someone until they’ve been caged in ostensible peacetime.
