Fanon and de Beauvoir: Opposing Discrimination Essay example -- Psycho

Fanon and de Beauvoir Opposing DiscriminationAll modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the Gnostic trace of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the created world. Contemporary primitive tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any(prenominal) excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradu eachy (like mercury poisoning) till eventu eachy it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to spirit. This idea characterizes what we call civilization.-Hakim Bey, Information War, c-theory a022Struggles against injustice in the 20th century tend to take a drearily similar form. First the advocate recognizes that not all people are equal, next demands that just about irrelevant differences are ignored, and finally tries to make all people people again. This method has become so popular it has been applied all the way down the ladder of inferiority, to declare politically-irrelevant unequal treatment on every possible basis. The effort is, in a sense, a drive to move from the created world outside the body to a cheery world of comparability in the mind. This hostility to the body and exoneration of a universal publication, unfortunately, is also precisely the basic cause of the discrimination one must condemn in step one of struggles for equality. The subject is a problem for many reasons, but the explicit proclamation of the inferiority of some to others relies purely on an ability to assert what a person is or should be, and what not. If some are treated as less than human, it may well be because of the category of human itself.... ...attempt to initiate some oppressed groups into the class of oppressors. What may well be needed instead of trading places in the system of constructed identities centered around one ideal subject is a rethinking of the sub ject itself, a problematization of the role of self that Fanon and de Beauvoir are so anxious to expand just enough to allow in their chosen group. The similitude to Moses is apt, the Gnostic impulse here can be seen in both thinkers as they rescue their people from the servitude in one land, take them through a long initiation process to the promised land, which is disappointing, and then allow them free reign as stable subjects to wage war against their own enemies and dominate the Canaanites as they had been dominated. thither is a perverse specter of the golden rule being obeyed discriminate against others as you were once discriminated against.