fuckyeahŽižek

lawgiverz: The awaited second part to the debate between Alex...

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:47:08 -0400

The awaited second part to the debate between Alex Callinicos, John Holloway and Slavoj Zizek on the Idea of Communism.
Download Living in the End Tmes by Slavoj Zizek (pdf ebook)
“The Idea of Communism” at Marxism 2010 (2/2) (by Kosho Yoshiyama)

historyofnow: Slovoj Zizek at Marxism 2009

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:46:52 -0400

historyofnow:

Slovoj Zizek at Marxism 2009

thethinkingsloth: Slavoj Zizek on Fear They Neighbour!

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:45:46 -0400

thethinkingsloth:

Slavoj Zizek on Fear They Neighbour!

separatist-blog: the most important gif of our time

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:44:50 -0400

separatist-blog:

the most important gif of our time

the university is a factory, lets treat it as one

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:43:59 -0400

the university is a factory, lets treat it as one:

mxmlsm:

“The first point to come up was a critical reflection on the lack of political engagement of ‘radical’ academics—Marxist or otherwise—and how there seems to be no translation from critical thinking in the scholastic debating chamber to actual support for struggles taking place even within their own workplaces, including for the cleaners who sweep their departmental corridors. More generally, this separation of University based critical theory from actual movements was considered not to reflect well on the left’s cherished role for the University as a bastion against capitalism, insofar as the separation of the economy of theory from the economy of struggle actually works in the interests of capital, not against it. For instance, during the occupation of the SOAS directorate over union-busting deportations of migrant cleaners, very few of the overwhelmingly lefty SOAS staff came outside to show any solidarity during the rallies. Renowned Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, strolled past the rally with apparently little interest.”

HA!

minervanpollo: Minervan Pöllö 4/2009: fallos

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:22:26 -0400

minervanpollo:

Minervan Pöllö 4/2009: fallos

renumerations: *

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:21:28 -0400

renumerations: *:

Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one…

triciawang: Subversive Politics of Dirty Testicles? A Joke...

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:08:00 -0400

triciawang:

Subversive Politics of Dirty Testicles? A Joke about Dissidents AND a great speech From Slavoj Zizek

I love Slavoj Zizek. I wish that I could have a drink with him. Sip some whiskey and look at the stars. And I love him more for the joke he makes in his amazing speech, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid!

Watch the youtube video and here’s the text:

“In the good old days of Really-Existing Socialism, a joke was popular among dissidents, used to illustrate the futility of their protests. In the 15th century Russia occupied by Mongols, a farmer and his wife walk along a dusty country road; a Mongol warrior on a horse stops at their side and tells the farmer that he will now rape his wife; he then adds: “But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you should hold my testicles while I’m raping your wife, so that they will not get dirty!” After the Mongol finishes his job and rides away, the farmer starts to laugh and jump with joy; the surprised wife asks him: “how can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped in your presence?” The farmer answers: “But I got him! His balls are full of dust!” This sad joke tells of the predicament of dissidents: they thought they are dealing serious blows to the party nomenklatura, but all they were doing was getting a little bit of dust on the nomenklatura’s testicles, while the nomenklatura went on raping the people… Is today’s critical Left not in a similar position? Our task is to discover how to make a step further – our thesis 11 should be: in our societies, critical Leftists have hitherto only dirtied with dust the balls of those in power, the point is to cut them off”

ANd here are some of my favorite quotes from the speech:

“When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a “discursive” ideological competition …Consequently, to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terms, the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose as narrative which will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system AS SUCH, but on its secondary accidental deviation (too lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions, etc.)”

“Rarely was the function of ideology described in clearer terms – to defend the existing system against any serious critique, legitimizing it as a direct expression of human nature:

“An essential task of democratic governments and opinion makers when confronting economic cycles and political pressure is to secure and protect the system that has served humanity so well, and not to change it for the worse on the pretext of its imperfection. / Still, this lesson is doubtless one of the hardest to translate into language that public opinion will accept. The best of all possible economic systems is indeed imperfect . Whatever the truths uncovered by economic science, the free market is finally only the reflection of human nature, itself hardly perfectible.”

Such ideological legitimization also perfectly exemplifies Badiou’s precise precise formula of the basic paradox of enemy propaganda: it fights something of which it is itself not aware, something for which it is structurally blind – not the actual counterforces (political opponents), but the possibility (the utopian revolutionary-emancipatory potential) which is immanent to the situation:“The goal of all enemy propaganda is not to annihilate an existing force (this function is generally left to police forces), but rather to annihilate an unnoticed possibility of the situation. This possibility is also unnoticed by those who conduct this propaganda, since its features are to be simultaneously immanent to the situation and not to appear in it. »6 This is why enemy propaganda against radical emancipatory politics is by definition cynical – not in the simple sense of not believing its own words, but at a much more basic level: it is cynical precisely and even more insofar as it does believe its own words, since its message is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad one, so that any radical change can only make it worse .”

“Again, it is thus not enough to remain faithful to the Communist Idea – one has to locate in historical reality antagonisms which make this Idea a practical urgency. The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction?

There are four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophy, the inappropriateness of private property for the so-called “intellectual property,” the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics, and, last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. There is a qualitative difference between the last feature, the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included, and the other three, which designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri call “commons,” the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act which should also be resisted with violent means, if necessary: the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of “cognitive” capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc. (if Bill Gates were to be allowed monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have literally owned the software texture of our basic network of communication); the commons of external nature threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity) .”

The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those Excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, on the inclusion of all minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, etc. – the obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy is here: patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost is the proletarian position, the position of universality embodied in the Excluded.

“The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are in danger of losing ALL: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subject deprived of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment. This triple threat to our entire being make us all in a way all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity,” as Marx put it in Grundrisse. The figure of the “part of no-part,” confronts us with the truth of our own position, and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure – in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a HOMO SACER, and the only way to prevent actually becoming one is to act preventively.”

THANKS BARRY!

muchjunk: Slavoj Zizek :: Against Charity (@ RSA Great Hall),...

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:02:30 -0400

muchjunk:

Slavoj Zizek :: Against Charity (@ RSA Great Hall), on neoliberal capitalist society’s flawed priorities

tomknows: Philosopher Slavoj Zizek discusses the problems of...

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:56:59 -0400

tomknows:

Philosopher Slavoj Zizek discusses the problems of ‘Conscious Capitalism’, things like Fairtrade which try and use consumer choice in a market world economy to aid developing nations, and how they maintain an essentially unfair system.

metabolean: MP3 lectures: Zizek, Badiou, Kristeva, New School,...

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:54:33 -0400

metabolean:

MP3 lectures: Zizek, Badiou, Kristeva, New School, http://www.discoursenotebook.com/blog/

Slavoz Zizek Predicts the World Cup Final

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:49:57 -0400

Slavoz Zizek Predicts the World Cup Final:

(via prats)

Welcome to the Slavoj Zizek Show

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:46:40 -0400

Welcome to the Slavoj Zizek Show:

kwartz:

In the midst of a crisis of capitalism, the Western underground is rediscovering communism. Its star is the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who mixes Marxism with pop culture and psychoanalysis. His appearances offer stand-up comedy for a radical leftist avant-garde.

nice interview, but im a bit tired of him being referred to as the most anything of anything just for those who aren’t aware of him, and should be.

"Zizek’s roughly 600-square-foot apartment looks as though Tito were still in power. It consists of..."

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:42:38 -0400

“Zizek’s roughly 600-square-foot apartment looks as though Tito were still in power. It consists of three rooms and is carelessly furnished. A poster from a Mark Rothko exhibition hangs on the wall above the sofa in Soviet-era colors; otherwise, the furnishings consist of a rack of DVDs, bookshelves, mountains of “Star Wars” Legos and his laundry, which he keeps in his kitchen cabinets. He serves iced tea in Disney cups.”

- http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,705164-2,00.html (via thelukaskaiser)

capitan: Una vez mas en palabras de Slavoj Zizek. happy about...

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:41:19 -0400

capitan:

Una vez mas en palabras de Slavoj Zizek.

happy about this, didnt know it existed when i woke up.

dirigisme: So, in today’s leftist politics, we seem in effect...

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:09:12 -0400

dirigisme:

So, in today’s leftist politics, we seem in effect to be reduced to the choice between the “solid” orthodox attitude of proudly out of principle, sticking to the old (Communist or Social Democratic) tune, although we know its time has passed, and the New Labour “radical centre” attitude of going the “full Monty” in stripping, the last vestiges of proper leftist discourse

Theorist/philosopher Slavoj Zizek in ‘The Ticklish Subject’ (quote pulled from Jose Klein’s thought provoking, if flawed, book review over at Salon)

Zizek not only has good (and important) ideas, but the way he expresses them is nearly as important. He does not run for the cover of dense, overcomplex footnotes and build theory upon layers and layers of incoherent monologue; while he may sometimes be difficult to understand, ultimately his message (both in terms of its content and expression) is the most powerful of any philosopher for decades.

Zizek’s contrarian role in society and in academic discplines is important, certainly, and he openly admits that his role is not to create some universal base of rigid quasi-theological Marxist discourse. That being said, to argue (as some of his critics do) that his flexibility and pragmatism in terms of the ideas that emerge from his experience is not coherent - and is not ideological - is fundamentally fucked. Everything is ideological - trying to argue that one is not ideological, whether for positive or negative reasons, is a petty attempt to escape

Aside from revering his ideology and methodology at building some form of praxis out of it, I identify with Zizek for two personal reasons too: firstly, I have the same ‘problem’ as him, in that people often struggle to understand us (him because of his speech impediment, me because of my speed of speech & both of us because we get over-excited and don’t enunciate properly when talking about subjects that we care about); secondly, Zizek and I are both accused of being difficult to tell as to whether we are being serious or not. People often believe that, when engaging in some farcial defence of the economic benefits of Italian fascism or how North Korea is consciously moving away from Juche, it’s own haphazard and soundly bastardised form of Soviet Marxism-Leninism, toward an absurdist ideology, we are being serious.

Returning to the first of our two ‘identifications’, I feel like making a bit of a digression: popular responses (journalism, reviews, etc) about Zizek more often than not comment on how he speaks and behaves more so than many other philosophers. Sure, this is because he is a bit cooler and different to most other academics, but I also think this is part of the wider cultural acceptance in the West for people to criticise the way others speak, people who talk fast and those who have speech impediments. It’s a cultural blindspot amidst all the liberal talk of accepting people’s differences. Saying to someone, without humour, in anywhere part of the Western world “my God, why does your sight have to be so bad?” if they wear glasses or “Man, do you really have to be in that wheel chair?” if they are in a wheel-chair, is highly culturally offensive. But complaining about someone talking fast or stuttering in what would be an offensive way for many other traits is quite acceptable. It never ceases to amaze (and infuriate) me how people I don’t know find it culturally appropriate to complain about how fast I speak, as if it’s something I’ve never been told before or am not consciously aware of despite being an adult.

Anyway, I digress. Back to Jose Klein,

Zizek’s playfulness makes him nearly impossible to pin down. Even after parsing through jargon that frankly leaves me cold, I still can never be sure just how sincere he’s being at any given moment. Nonetheless, I think it’s all part of Zizek’s point. Irony, here, becomes crucial to his political argument. For just as irony transforms the literal into something radically different, our imagination contains the power to sneak new narratives into the political universe of global capitalism. Moreover, if what he seeks to illustrate is a new type of agency inhering in human selfhood, one that is ticklish rather than rigidly heroic, then shouldn’t he tickle us into understanding, too?

Humour, irony and making it difficult for discern sincerity are very important rhetorical devices if you want to confront issues and challenge people’s ideology. Using hyper-relevant cultural metaphors and similies like Zizek does (owing to his incredibly wide knowledge of film largely) makes what otherwise are boring and self-referential philosophical wanks into tangible, believable statements that are accessible and agreeable for people. I struggle to understand most philosophers, and frankly have never really bothered trying with a lot of them: philosphy, theory, whatever, relies on so many layers of cultural assumptions, edifices built upon edifices, that you need to be part of this grand homogenising tradition (‘literate’ if you will) and accept a seemingly endless array of existing meta-narratives, that I frankly think most philosophy has divorced itself not only from concretely analysing the world and its inhabitants but outlived much of its use and relevance to modern society.

we need more followers, so recommend us nxt tuesday, because i forgot about it yesterday. thanks...

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:07:00 -0400

we need more followers, so recommend us nxt tuesday, because i forgot about it yesterday.

thanks guys!

Photo

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:06:04 -0400

GHOST OR BALLOON: Zizek's Praxis Antinomies

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:03:57 -0400

GHOST OR BALLOON: Zizek's Praxis Antinomies:

Another thing that bugs me about Zizek- his inability to decide on even the broadest strokes of the essential “What Is To Be Done?”
…
Which appears in his proposal to restructure our conception of time along a Dupuys-style line— which weirdly contemporizes causality (in my opinon, at least)…

hegemonik: ‘Things cannot go on the way they are’ Philosopher...

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:14:50 -0400

hegemonik:

‘Things cannot go on the way they are’

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that unless we think about a radical new beginning, the likes of Berlusconi are the political future.

“Of course there is light at the end of the tunnel. Because there is another train approaching there!”