In unserer Auswahl frei zugänglicher Netzartikel in diesem Monat: querdenkende Intellektuelle.

Subversion ist seit vielen Jahrzehnten ein Lieblingsziel der Pop-Linken. Slavoj Žižek bringt den Anspruch nun auf einen neuen Tiefstand. Über Rammstein weiß er in einem Interview mit »New Statesman« zu berichten: »›They’re very hard – I think they’re extremely progressive. It’s totally wrong to read them as almost a proto-fascist band. My god, they explicitly supported Die Linke, the leftists there, and so on. I like their extremely subversive from within, undermining of all this – you know?‹« (»New Statesman«)

Von ihm selbst wohl nicht verstanden, war einst auch Disco-Produzent Giorgio Moroder in subversivem Auftrag unterwegs zu Bob Dylan. Im Gegensatz zu Žižeks Rammstein scheiterte er aber, wie einem Gespräch im »Guardian« zu entnehmen ist:

»It was actually Sylvester Stallone who asked me to ask him to sing a song for a Rambo movie. So I composed a song. I wanted him to write the lyrics, of course. I went to see him in Malibu, where he had a beautiful house. He listened to it about four times. I’m not sure if he didn’t like the music that much, or if he wasn’t interested because of the nature of the movie, which was totally anti-Russian, anti-communist. I think he didn’t feel like being involved with a movie such as Rambo. It was nice to meet him, and it could have worked, but it didn’t work out.« (»The Guardian«)

Erfolgreicher agierte einst Paul de Man. Der »Chronicle of Higher Education« verabsäumt nicht, neue Details (aus einem angekündigten Buch von Evelyn Barish) über das frühere Leben des späteren Theoretikers mit seinen dekonstruktivischen Thesen – »De Man’s stance, the stance that made him famous, was that facts were unreliable, language was slippery« – denunziatorisch in Verbindung zu setzen: »Perhaps the single biggest revelation of the book, which Liveright/W.W. Norton will publish this spring, is that de Man was indeed a convicted criminal. In 1951 a judge in Belgium sentenced de Man in absentia (he had fled to the United States by then) to six years in prison for theft and fraud related to Hermès, the publication house he created and ran. De Man had looted the funds of the company to cover his own lavish expenses. In one case, Barish writes, de Man engaged in a ›deliberate swindle‹ of a family friend, fooling him into making a loan that was never repaid. All told, more than a million Belgian francs disappeared – and, before he could face creditors and courts, so did de Man.« (»The Chronicle of Higher Education«)

Wenigstens im Verlagsgeschäft funktioniert die rhetorische Subversion, möchte die »Höhere Erziehung« suggerieren, um vor ihr zu warnen. Vor solcher Haltung sei Rammstein vor.