Living in the End Times
Segunda-feira, 7 Junho, 2010Duas notas portuguesas de Zizek em ‹‹Living in the End Times››, afinal a passagem por Portugal tinha de gerar algumas linhas.
Comparando o fim de Tito, na Jugoslávia de 1980:
‹‹A less cataclysmic example occurred in Portugal, in the last years of the dictator Salazar who ruled the country for decades. He was senile, unable to sustain a meaningful conversation, but the council of minister nonetheless regularly met with him, going through the motions of government debates and decisions, making Salazar think that he was still running the state; after Salazar left, the ministers got down to business and took the real decisions. The reason for this ritual was that the entire ruling clique around Salazar feared the moment which might – as it effectively did – open up a period of uncertainty and the search for political alternatives.››.
A outra nota:
‹‹The fate of the Portuguese language in Angola is exemplary of the paradoxes of decolonization. Prior to decolonization, a large majority of people in Angola spoke their own tribal languages, with only the narrow elite educated by the colonizers speaking Portuguese. It was thus only after decolonization that the language of the colonizer fully penetrated the entire social body and emerged as predominant language of the newly independent nation-state. Does this paradox not lie at the core of all independent postcolonial states: their independence signifies not a return to a pre-colonial condition, but the adoption of that very form of the nation-state brought by the colonizers?››.