Follow-up to incredulity, that shouldn't be surprising,  sure, as none of this is new, sadly, but still, yesterday:

Leaving aside BHL's close familiarity with the routines of maids at very expensive hotels...

Let's be clear again.  You're actually - openly - saying that you think that the rich and powerful should not be taken "for a subject of justice like any other"?  That they deserve, so to speak, special treatment?

This entire event, or at least the backing-and-forthing now, reverberates strangely through a pairing of anonymity and infamy, and it knots them closer, even as it marks the impossible material distance between the two people figured as such. As her lawyer says, "she had no idea who he was, quite honestly, in the world, until the next day," and she remains anonymous and "alone in the world", with "no agenda."  For what seems unthinkable to BHL and the defenders is the prospect that someone might not, god forbid, know who DHK is.  She is held out in a quadruply-closed position:

unnamed/ unknown,

not knowing the name or the weight of the one who attacked her,

called a liar (the name given who speaks against what she knows to be the truth),

and unknowing of the letter of the law ("Shapiro described his role as trying to help her sort out her life and to explain the legal proceedings to her."). 

On the other hand, a name, and a weight, that all are supposed to know, that is therefore supposed to be lifted out from the hoi polloi, that is supposed to be another subject of justice, another subject altogether, circulating in its orbit, in accordance with different laws of gravity and consequence.  That is to say, that belongs to a different class of subjects.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just love it whenever this fool gets pied in the face (when was the last time?). I remember watching Zizek "debate" him at the NYPL and being stunned at how well they got along. I wanted to pie them both.

OSSRD said...

You've done a great service with this commentary. As for Anonymous' comment on Zizek, at least he has some content in his theories - as self serving as those might be. BHL needs to be pied yet again, just for that silly comment on DSK.

I'm wondering if all filthy demagogues will soon be named with three letters only?

Gloup gloup!

ECW said...

Thanks, although as someone who is pretty much goes by three letters only, I hope "filthy demagogues" can also mean "in the good way." That is, like a rabble-rouser (for we are all rabble, when we are at our best) rather than a hack and a charlatan.