critical theory with slavoj zizek: 2016

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/777075071911358464 http://slavoj--zizek.tumblr.com/post/153018419017/what-if-one-prays-not-to-regain-belief-but-to-get

The recognition that we are all each in our own way weird lunatics, provides the hope for a tolerable co-existence of different ways of life

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/777074106042843136 http://slavoj--zizek.tumblr.com/post/153011416956/the-recognition-that-we-are-all-each-in-our-own

In the “normal” cynical functioning of ideology…the true logic is: “Kneel down and you will thereby MAKE SOMEONE ELSE BELIEVE

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/777074416207458304 http://slavoj--zizek.tumblr.com/post/153004334809/in-the-normal-cynical-functioning-of

Wednesday, 9 November 2016

The point isn’t to recognise ourselves in strangers, but to recognise a stranger in ourselves, the innermost dimension of European modernity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/777073902627483648 http://slavoj--zizek.tumblr.com/post/152975561410/the-point-isnt-to-recognise-ourselves-in

it all of a sudden strikes us how stupidly meaningless and arbitrary our customs and rituals are

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/777073415454883840 http://slavoj--zizek.tumblr.com/post/152968176318/it-all-of-a-sudden-strikes-us-how-stupidly

To believe “directly,” without mediation of a ritual, is a burden. Through ritual one has a chance of transferring this burdon onto an Other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/777072982783102976 http://slavoj--zizek.tumblr.com/post/152960460125/to-believe-directly-without-mediation-of-a

Tuesday, 8 November 2016

it is love itself, the fact of being loved, that ultimately makes the beloved beautiful.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/777072055674101760 http://slavoj--zizek.tumblr.com/post/152922119673/it-is-love-itself-the-fact-of-being-loved-that

An encounter of the Other’s desire…can be an experience of utter alienation: I’m obsessed with inaccessible Desire which plays games with me

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/777071867790258176 http://slavoj--zizek.tumblr.com/post/152915072677/an-encounter-of-the-others-desirecan-be-an

a fundamentalist loses his sensitivity for the enigma of the Other’s desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/777070942078046208 http://ift.tt/2eSvmop

Monday, 7 November 2016

Kneel down and you will believe!” has to be understood as: "Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/776793117827686401 http://ift.tt/2fVzw3d

What is your most unappealing habit? The ridiculously excessive tics of my hands while I talk.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/773526773015379968 http://ift.tt/2fxlG4n

What do you most dislike about your appearance? That it makes me appear the way I really am.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/773526722197192705 http://ift.tt/2fwHgWH

Sunday, 6 November 2016

there are not only right and wrong solutions to problems, there are also right and wrong problems.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/773204360708907008 http://ift.tt/2fsFaZW

even if I live side by side with others, the normal state is to ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others; I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external “mechanical” rules, without sharing their “inner world” – and, perhaps, the lesson to be learned is that, sometimes, a dose of alienation is indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2fvumXt

There is thus a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the all-Muslim outcry against godless Denmark was immediately followed by the hightened violence between Sunnis and Shiites, the two Muslim factions, in Iraq. Is not the lesson of all totalitarianisms that the fight against the external enemy sooner or later always turns into an inner split and the fight against the inner enemy?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2f7pydF

Saturday, 5 November 2016

The only political force which does not reduce them to second-class citizens, but allows them the space to deploy their religious identity, are the “godless” atheist liberals, while those who are closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies. The paradox is that (not those who first published the caricatures, but) those who, out of solidarity with the freedom of expression, reprinted the Muhammad caricatures, are their only true allies.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2fH00pU

the fact that there is no sexual relationship in no way implies that “there is no sexual difference in the unconscious,” that the unconscious is beyond or beneath sexual difference, a fluid domain of partial drives that defy sexuation. … The unconscious is thoroughly and only about sexual difference in the sense of an antagonism that is impossible to symbolize and that haunts the symbolic order. The impossibility of sexual relationship does not mean that sexual relationship is simply absent from the unconscious. … The very impossibility of sexual relationship is the traumatic point of failure which structures the entire symbolic space, or, as Lacan put it…, “we take language as that which functions as a supplement for the absence of the only part of the real that cannot manage to be formed in being, namely, the sexual relationship.” … There is objet a because there is no sexual relationship. …Sexual difference is the point of failure of logos, of the Symbolic, but this failure absolutely does not mean that there is a domain of sexuality prior to (or outside of) sexual difference and its deadlock. Sexual difference/antagonism is not just the point at which logos/reason fails; it is nothing but the effect of this failure.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2fnsT6o

masculine and feminine positions are the two inconsistent ways to cope with—or, rather, to assume—the trauma of the impossibility of sexual relationship

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2fsn2LX

Friday, 4 November 2016

Not only sexuality but human subjectivity as such is thoroughly “sexed” precisely in the sense of the trauma of sexual difference. …Yes, every solution to the failure of sexual relationship is unsatisfactory and in this sense incomplete, but this does not mean that sexual difference is a secondary imposed frame

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2fl16ni

Nancy Fraser has shown how the predominant form of feminism in the US was basically co-opted by neoliberal politics.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/769079482783264770 http://ift.tt/2eI5Zpi

The link between the struggle for sexual liberation and what was traditionally designated a “class struggle” in all its diverse dimensions (not just the workers’ struggle but…the plight of immigrants and refugees, etc.) is…ignored by my opponents.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2eHzEPw

Thursday, 3 November 2016

Although critics like to emphasize how they reject normativity (“the imposed heterosexual norm,” etc.), their stance itself is one of ruthless normativity, denouncing every minimal deviation from the PC dogma as “transphobia,” or “Fascism,” or whatever. Such a tweet culture, combining official tolerance and openness with extreme intolerance towards actually different views, simply renders critical thinking impossible. It is a true mirror image of the blind populist rage à la Donald Trump, and it is simultaneously one of the reasons why the Left is so often inefficient in confronting rightwing populism, especially in today’s Europe. If one just mentions that this populism draws a good part of its energy from the popular discontent of the exploited, one is immediately accused of “class essentialism”…

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2ejCUzw

His or her “positive” characteristics are glow in some void and are a “positivisation” of the void itself – of objet a, that x.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/767876592613920769 http://ift.tt/2fhaISB

Proper “love” entails a feeling that one would still love a person if he or she lost all his or her positive features.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/767514171063820288 http://ift.tt/2flP9wx

Wednesday, 2 November 2016

The only true answer to “Why do u love me?” is: I do not know, there is something in u, some x, that gives a miraculous lustre to ur virtues

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/767150516992348160 http://ift.tt/2fcPO78

Answering “Why do you love me?” with a well-defined list is a..negation of love. ..The other is “objectivised” & denied existence as subject

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/766788156163256320 http://ift.tt/2ffHH7y

The Other’s jouissance is by definition experienced as a threat to our identity, as something to be rejected, destroyed even.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/766683693649915904 http://ift.tt/2e2PW9b

Tuesday, 1 November 2016

I have to trick myself, telling myself, “No, I’m not yet writing. I’m just putting down ideas.“ At a certain point I just have to edit it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/766411948841984000 http://ift.tt/2ffpnKe

The (anti-Semitic figure of the) “Jew” as the threat to the organic order of a society, as the element which brings into it from the outside corruption and decay, is a fetish whose function is to mask the fact that antagonism does not come from the outside but is immanent to every class society. Anti-Semitism “reifies” (embodies in a particular group of people) the inherent social antagonism: it treats “Jews” as the Thing which, from outside, intrudes into the social body and disturbs its balance. What happens in the passage from the position of class struggle to Fascist anti-Semitism is not just the replacement of one figure of the enemy (bourgeoisie, the ruling class) with another (Jews); the logic of the struggle is totally different. In class struggle, the classes themselves are caught in the antagonism inherent to social structure, while the Jew is a foreign intruder who causes social antagonism, so that all we need in order to restore social harmony, according to Fascist anti-Semitism, is to annihilate Jews.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK ON THE RACIST CONSTRUCTION OF WHAT OTHERS ARE LIKE http://ift.tt/2eYJzAJ

Antagonism (or, as Lacan put it, the fact that “there is no sexual relationship”) is at work in the very core of normative heterosexuality, and it is what the violent imposition of gender norms endeavors to contain and obfuscate.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2farSz9

Monday, 31 October 2016

My starting point is the anxiety transgender people themselves experience when they confront a forced choice where they don’t recognize themselves in any of its exclusive terms (“man,” “woman”). And then I generalize this anxiety as a feature of every sexual identification. It is not transgender people who disrupt the heterosexual gender binaries; these binaries are always-already disrupted by the antagonistic nature of sexual difference itself. This is the basic distinction on which I repeatedly insist and which is ignored by my critics: in the human-symbolic universe, sexual difference/antagonism is not he same as the difference of gender roles. Transgender people are not traumatic for heterosexuals because they pose a threat to the established binary of gender roles but because they bring out the antagonistic tension which is constitutive of sexuality. Şalcı Bacı is not a threat to sexual difference; rather, she is this difference as irreducible to the opposition gender identities. In short, transgender people are not simply marginals who disturb the hegemonic heterosexual gender norm; their message is universal, it concerns us all, they bring out the anxiety that underlies every sexual identification, its constructed/unstable character. This, of course, does not entail a cheap generalization which would cut the edge of the suffering of transgender people (“we all have anxieties and suffer in some way”); it is in transgender people that anxiety and antagonism, which otherwise remain mostly latent, break open. So, in the same way in which, for Marx, if one wants to understand the “normal” functioning of capitalism, one should take as a starting point economic crises, if one wants to analyze “normal” heterosexuality, one should begin with the anxieties that explode in transgender people.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2e75J1Y

what he loves is the vision of HIMSELF displaying his love for her.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/766047308509245440 http://ift.tt/2fokTWK

the more radical attempts to liberate sexuality get, the more they turn into attempts to enact a liberation from sexuality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/766018101724995584 http://ift.tt/2eUBRHX

Sunday, 30 October 2016

The greatest hypocrites are those who advocate open borders: secretly, they know very well this will never happen, for it would trigger an instant populist revolt in Europe. They play the Beautiful Soul, which feels superior to the corrupted world while secretly participating in it: they need this corrupted world as the only terrain where they can exert their moral superiority. The reason why these appeals to our empathy towards the poor refugees flowing into Europe are not enough was formulated a century ago by Oscar Wilde in the opening lines of The Soul of Man Under Socialism. There, he pointed out that ‘it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought’. ..“Their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim.” …The more we treat refugees as objects of humanitarian help, and allow the situation which compelled them to leave their countries to prevail, the more they come to Europe, until tensions reach boiling point, not only in the refugees’ countries of origin but here as well.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK CITING OSCAR WILDE http://ift.tt/2eKoJHN

Jacqueline Rose pointed out how Pistorius’s killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp has to be read against both the complex background of white men’s fear of black violence and the terrible reality of widespread violence against women: ‘Every four minutes in South Africa a woman or a girl – often a teenager, sometimes a child – is reported raped and every eight hours a woman is killed by her partner. The phenomenon has a name in South Africa: “intimate femicide”, or, as the journalist and crime writer Margie Orford calls the repeated killing of women across the country, “serial femicide”.’ This violence against women should in no way be dismissed as marginal.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK CITING JACQUELINE ROSE http://ift.tt/2eXOgxD

the ‘total war’ against ISIS should not be taken seriously – the big warriors don’t really mean it. We are definitely in the midst of the clash of civilizations (the Christian West versus radicalized Islam), but in fact there are clashes within each civilization: in the Christian space, it is the US and Western Europe against Russia; in the Muslim space it is Sunnis against Shias. The monstrosity of ISIS serves as a fetish covering all these struggles, in which every side pretends to fight ISIS in order to hit its true enemy

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2eRO53Y

Saturday, 29 October 2016

Saudi Arabia, the US’s key ally, welcomes ISIS’s war on Shia Islam, and even Israel is suspiciously half-hearted in its condemnation of ISIS out of opportunistic calculation (ISIS is fighting the pro-Iranian Shia forces, which Israel considers its main enemy).

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2e9Du5Y

had Turkey placed the same kind of absolute blockade on ISIS territories as they have done on Kurdish-held parts of Syria, and shown the same sort of ‘benign neglect’ towards the PKK and YPG that they have been offering to Islamic State, Islamic State would long since have collapsed, and the Paris attacks would probably not have happened.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2fi5dUP

I draw a…distinction between sexual difference (as the antagonism constitutive of human sexuality) & the binary (or plurality) of genders

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/765654743813349376 http://ift.tt/2fr5mET

Friday, 28 October 2016

Identification as “man” or “woman” is always a secondary reaction to the “castrative” anxiety of what I am.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/765288320419192832 http://ift.tt/2eYKFwU

to pass from alienation to reconciliation, one does not have to change reality, but the way we perceive it and relate to it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/765230360011612160 http://ift.tt/2eQcvxI

an “alienated” society can reproduce itself (in its actuality) only through its illusory/false self-appearance or self-perception – the moment it appears to itself the way it actually is, this actuality disintegrates. In a homologous way, psychoanalysis deals with entities which exist only insofar as they are not adequately self-conscious or “for themselves”

http://ift.tt/2eE3442

Thursday, 27 October 2016

Pathological Narcissus is..convinced everybody else does the same: hiding behind a conformist appearance & that one must know how to lie low

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/764964970727702528 http://ift.tt/2eSxOMR

It is those who evoke holocaust that effectively manipulate it, instrumentalizing it for today’s political uses. The very need to evoke holocaust in defense of the Israeli acts secretly implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute trump-card of holocaust can redeem them.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2eKEjAw

The obvious over-reaction to caricatures, rising up to murderous violence and expanding to the whole of Europe or of the West, indicates how the protests are “not really” about caricatures, but about humiliations and frustrations with Western imperialist attitude. Journalists in the last weeks compete with each other enumerating these “real reasons”: Israeli occupation for Palestinians, dissatisfaction with the pro-American Musharaf regime in Pakistan, anti-Americanism in Iran, etc.etc. However, the problem with this excuse is: does the same not for anti-Semitism itself? It is not “really” about Jews, but a displaced protest about capitalist exploitation. So this excuse only makes it worse for the Muslims: why don’t they address the TRUE cause? And, last but not least, what about the brutal and vulgar anti-Semitic and anti-Christian caricatures that abound in the press and school-books in Muslim countries? Where is here the respect for other people and their religion, that they demand from the West? Some Muslim groups replied to the Danish caricatures with their own offensive of caricatures. A Muslim group in Europe distributed on the net drawings of Anna Frank in bed with Hitler. Hamshahri, Iran’s largest selling newspaper, has announced it is holding a contest on cartoons of the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The plan is to turn the tables on the assertion that newspapers can print offensive material in the name of freedom of expression: “The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let’s see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons.” This exercise is clearly self-defeating: if they really believe that the Danish caricatures of Mohammad were a sacrilegious crime that deserves the harshest punishment, will the holocaust cartoons not repeat the crime? The fact that they are doing it with the excuse “Let us see how tolerant YOU are!” in no way changes this fact. In short, this reaction is a proof that what really matters to the enraged Muslims is a struggle for recognition and respect, a sense of humiliation and hurt pride, NOT religion.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2fjU19c

Wednesday, 26 October 2016

The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that THEY THEMSELVES secretly consider themselves inferior (like, obviously, Hitler himself felt towards Jews) – which is why our condescending Politically Correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2eSArhx

The best are no longer able to fully engage themselves, while “the worst” engage in (racist, religious, sexist) fanaticism. Are, however, the terrorist fundamentalists, be it Christian or Muslim, truly fundamentalists? There is a feature that clearly distinguishes all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. Since they really believe they found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dLGkL6

The attitude of “understanding-each-other” has to be supplemented by the attitude of “getting-out-of-each-other’s-way,” by maintaining an appropriate distance, by a new “code of discretion.” European civilization finds it easier to tolerate different ways of life precise on account of what its critics usually denounce as its weakness and failure, namely the “alienation” of social life.” Alienation means (also) that distance is included into the very social texture: even if I live side by side with others, the normal state is to ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others; I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external “mechanical” rules, without sharing their “inner world” – and, perhaps, the lesson to be learned is that, sometimes, a dose of alienation is indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life. Sometimes, alienation is not a problem but a solution: globalization will turn explosive not if we remain isolated of each other, but, on the opposite, if we get too close to each other.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2eGOEO9

Tuesday, 25 October 2016

“Love thy neighbor!” means, at its most radical, precisely the impossible=real love for this de-subjectivized subject, for this monstrous dark blot cut with a slit/gaze… This is why, in the psychoanalytic treatment, the patient is not sitting face to face to the analyst: they both stare at a third point, since it is only this suspension of the face which opens up the space for the proper dimension of the Neighbor.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2fdEhVA

Why does the encounter with a face covered by burka trigger such anxiety? Is it then, that a face covered by burka is no longer the Levinasian face, the Otherness from which the unconditional ethical call emanates? But what if the case is the opposite one? From a Freudian perspective, face is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing: face is what makes the Neighbor le semblable, a fellow-man with whom we can identify and empathize. (Not to mention the fact that today, many faces are surgically changed and thus deprived of the last vestiges of natural authenticity.) This then, is why a covered face causes such anxiety: because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension. The very covering-up of the face obliterates a protective shield, so that the Other-Thing stares at us directly (recall that burka has a narrow slip for the eyes: we don’t see the eyes, but we know there is a gaze there).

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2ePxZbt

The communist struggle for universal emancipation means a struggle which cuts into each particular identity, dividing it from within. When there is racism, when there is domination over women, it is always an integral part of a particular “way of life,” a barbarian integral underside of a particular culture. In the “developed” Western world, Communist struggle means a brutal and principled struggle against all ideological formations which, even if they present themselves as “progressive,” serve as an obstacle to universal emancipation (liberal feminism, etc.). It means not only attacking our own racist and religious fundamentalisms, but also demonstrating how they arouse out of the inconsistencies of the predominant liberalism. And in Muslim countries, Communist strategy should in no way be to endorse their traditional “way of life” which includes honor killings, etc.; it should not only collaborate with the forces in these countries which fight traditional patriarchy, but it should also make a crucial step forward and demonstrate how, far from serving as a point of resistance against global capitalism, such traditional ideology is a direct tool of imperialist neocolonialism.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2e7HQIo

Monday, 24 October 2016

the multiculturalist..defence of the multiplicity of ways of life..covers up the antagonisms within each of these particular ways of life, justifying acts of brutality, sexism and racism as expressions of a particular culture that we have no right to judge by foreign Western values. … the immediate export of Western feminism and individual human rights can serve as a tool of ideological and economic neo-colonialism. (We all remember how some American feminists supported the US intervention in Iraq as a way to liberate women there, while the result is exactly the opposite). … One should nonetheless absolutely reject to draw from this the conclusion that Western Leftists should make here a “strategic compromise,” silently tolerating “customs” of humiliating women and gays on behalf of the “greater” anti-imperialist struggle.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2ezorU8

I see the anxiety apropos sexual identities as a universal feature of human sexuality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/764927181000671232 http://ift.tt/2eyU1RY

I see transgender people as a group whose message is radically universal: …it tells the truth about all of us as sexual beings

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/764927093746573312 http://ift.tt/2eymbMW

Sunday, 23 October 2016

I fully support the struggle of transgender people against their legal segregation

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/764926451246305280 http://ift.tt/2eIJa5V

Identification as “man” or “woman” is..a..reaction to the..anxiety of what I am. …A heterosexual norm..tries to avoid this anxiety

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/764926201764966404 http://ift.tt/2dzPlM2

I fully support the struggle of transgender people against their legal segregation … I see them not as a marginal group, which should be “tolerated” but as a group whose message is radically universal: it concerns us all; it tells the truth about all of us as sexual beings. … I see the anxiety apropos sexual identities as a universal feature of human sexuality … I draw a strict distinction between sexual difference (as the antagonism constitutive of human sexuality) and the binary (or plurality) of genders

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2edqwna

Saturday, 22 October 2016

Identification as “man” or “woman” is..a..reaction to the..anxiety of what I am. …The more radical attempts to liberate sexuality get, the more they approximate their self-overcoming and turn into attempts to enact a liberation from sexuality

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2eFl4rn

by means of the call of the Other, the individual constitutes himself as “always-already”-subject

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/764922302094073856 http://ift.tt/2ebh0AV

Semblance is an appearance which conceals a void, a nothingness - that is to say, in Hegelese, the fact that there is nothing to conceal.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/764855431055470592 http://ift.tt/2dYpLwy

Friday, 21 October 2016

Habermasians, deconstructionists, cognitive scientists, New Age obscurantists…are all united in their rejection of the Cartesian subject.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/764128180517081089 http://ift.tt/2euHXPI

the identification that Thatcher’s discourse gave you was not that you would actually become rich, but, rather, the discourse gave you the opportunity to identify yourself as the one who might get rich next

http://ift.tt/2eu9Ibk

Authentic belief does not concern facts, but gives expression to an unconditional ethical commitment. For both liberal cynics and religious fundamentalists, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept them as such, while skeptical cynics mock them. No wonder religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest results of sciences. For them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge. …It is the humanists who stand for belief, while fundamentalists stand for knowledge. This is what we can learn from Lacan with regard to the ongoing rise of religious fundamentalism: its true danger does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2ePqt3W

Thursday, 20 October 2016

Both liberal-sceptical cynics and fundamentalists share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe, in the proper sense of the term. What is unthinkable for them is the groundless decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision which cannot be grounded in the chain of reasons, in positive knowledge.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2drMwwt

A man can only pretend to be a woman; only a woman can pretend to be a man who pretends to be a woman, as only a woman can pretend to be what she is (a woman). To account for this specifically feminine status of pretending, Lacan refers to a woman who wears a concealed fake penis in order to evoke that she is phallus… …The man’s first reaction upon seeing the contours of the fake penis is: “Put this ridiculous fake off and show me what you’ve got beneath!” The man thereby misses how the fake penis is the real thing: the “phallus” that the woman is, is the shadow generated by the fake penis, i.e., the spectre of the non-existent ‘real’ phallus beneath the cover of the fake one. In this precise sense, the feminine masquerade has the structure of mimicry, since, for Lacan, in mimicry, I do not imitate the image I want to fit into, but those features of the image which seem to indicate that there is some hidden reality behind.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dSreV7

The fate of most married couples? You make love to your lawful partner while “cheating in your mind,” fantasizing that you are doing it with another partner. The actual sex-relationship has to be sustained by this fantasmatic supplement.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2eomPK2

Wednesday, 19 October 2016

During rough but consensual sex he accidentally caused her death, the defence argued (but then again, how could she give consent when her blood-alcohol level was, as shown in the trial, extremely high?). Barton admitted to his actions, but he said he didn’t mean them. Furthermore, a laptop found with Barton’s belongings was not admitted as evidence, although it had a search history of pornography depicting torture. This case doesn’t just run counter to our basic ethical intuitions (a man brutally murders a woman during sexual activity but he walks free because ‘he didn’t mean it’?). The most disturbing aspect is that, acceding to the demands of the defence, the judge allowed Gladue’s preserved pelvis to be admitted as evidence: brought into court, the lower part of her torso was displayed for the jurors (incidentally, this is the first time a portion of a body has been presented at a trial in Canada). Why would photographs of the wound not be enough? Does such a display not rely on the long tradition of treating indigenous peoples’ bodies as specimens? Could we even imagine the opposite case, an upper-class white woman’s torso displayed when the accused is a black or indigenous man?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dBj9Xb

It is in so far as the subject makes himself the object of another will that the sado-masochistic drive…constitutes itself. …The sadist himself occupies the place of the object, but without knowing it, to the benefit of another, for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK, on the sadist who more or less consciously imagines an Other who would sanctify his sadism http://ift.tt/2dr9GhD

Himmler, the chief of SS, adopted the heroic attitude of ‘Somebody has to do the dirty job, so let’s do it!’: it is easy to do a noble thing for one’s country, up to sacrificing one’s life for it – it is much more difficult to commit a crime for one’s country. In her Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt provided a precise description of this twist the Nazi executioners accomplished in order to be able to endure the horrible acts they performed. Most of them were not simply evil, they were well aware that they are doing things which bring humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament was that, “instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” [2] In this way, they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation: the temptation to be resisted was the very temptation to succumb to the elementary pity and sympathy in the presence of human suffering, and their “ethical” effort was directed towards the task of resisting this temptation not to murder, torture and humiliate. My violation of spontaneous ethical instincts of pity and compassion is turned into the proof of my ethical grandeur: to do my duty, I am ready to assume the heavy burden of inflicting pain on others. The same perverse logic operates in today’s religious fundamentalism.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2euu6IJ

Tuesday, 18 October 2016

This is the perverse attitude of adopting the position of the pure instrument of the big Other’s Will: it is not my responsibility, it is not me who is effectively doing it, I am merely an instrument of the higher Historical Necessity. The obscene jouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated for what I am doing: I am able to inflict pain on others with the full awareness that I am not responsible for it, that I merely fulfil the Other’s Will. The sadist pervert answers the question “How can the subject be guilty when he merely realizes an objective, externally imposed, necessity?” by subjectively assuming this objective necessity, by finding enjoyment in what is imposed on him.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dMOaVD

Today’s achievements of brain sciences thus seem to fulfill the prospect envisaged by Freud of sciences supplanting psychoanalysis: once the biological mechanisms of pain, pleasure, trauma, repression, etc., will be known, psychoanalysis will no longer be needed, since, instead of intervening at the level of interpretation, one will be able to directly regulate the biological processes that generate pathological psychic phenomena. … if psychoanalysis is to survive and retain its key status, one has to find a place for it within the brain sciences themselves, from their inherent blanks and impossibilities. – However, within cognitive sciences themselves, things are no less confused when one tries to account for the emergence of consciousness — whither consciousness? The surprising thing is how “everything goes,” all possible answers coexist, from dismissing the question as mean

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2efBZTo

Our first reaction here is, of course, that this absolute jouissance is a myth, that it never effectively existed, that its status is purely differential, i.e., that it exists only as a negative point of reference with regard to which every effectively experienced jouissance falls short … Our experience of jouissance…as finite…immediately gives birth to the notion of a full, achieved, unlimited jouissance whose existence is necessarily presupposed by the subject who imputes it to another subject, his/her “subject supposed to enjoy.”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2ehVr1e

Monday, 17 October 2016

The post-68’ drive to jouissance — to reaching the extreme of forms of sexual pleasures that would dissolve all social links and allow me to find a climax in the solipsism of absolute jouissance … Is it not all too easy to denounce jouissance offered on the market as “false,” as providing only the empty package-promise with no substance? Is the hole, the void, in the very heart of our pleasures not the structure of every jouissance? … is it, rather, not that the…commodified provocations to enjoy…push us towards, precisely, an autistic-masturbatory, “asocial,” jouissance whose supreme case is the addiction to drugs? … The drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory “sequence” of 1968 exhausted its potentials. … the only option left was a kind of direct, brutal, passage à l’acte … the only option left was a…push-towards-the-Real…: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism…; and finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). … the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real…sustains a stricto sensu “worldless” ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful “cognitive mapping.”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK, ON JOUISSANCE (another name for enjoyment) http://ift.tt/2ehwab6

Man is woman with phallus: the phallus is an imposture, a lure which covers up a preceding unbearable Void.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/763764548033798145 http://ift.tt/2dJJnEh

The Real is that which gets lost, that which the subject has to renounce, in order to become immersed into its life-world.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/763400917005766656 http://ift.tt/2dmWri3

Sunday, 16 October 2016

The Talented Mr. Ripley tells the story of Tom Ripley, a broke ambitious young New Yorker, who is approached by the rich magnate Herbert Greenleaf, in his mistaken belief that Tom has been at Princeton with his son Dickie. Dickie is off idling in Italy, and Greenleaf pays Tom to go to Italy and bring his son back and to his sense, to take the rightful place in the family business. However, once in Europe, Tom gets more and more fascinated not only by Dickie himself, but also by the polished, easy-going, socially acceptable upper-class life that Dickie inhabits. All the talk about Tom’s homosexuality is here misplaced: Dickie is for Tom not the object of his desire, but the ideal desiring subject, the transferential subject “supposed to know /how to desire/.”

http://ift.tt/2effHnN

In Jaroslav Hasek’s legendary comical novel The Good Soldier Schwejk, the adventures of an ordinary Czech soldier who undermines the ruling order by simply following orders too literally, Schwejk finds himself at the frontline trenches in Galicia, where the Austrian army is confronting the Russians. When Austrian soldiers start to shoot, the desperate Schwejk runs into the no-man’s-land in front of their trenches, waving desperately his hands and shouting: “Don’t shoot! There are men on the other side!”

http://ift.tt/2eGJYLj

Man wants to be loved for what he truly is; which is why the archetypal male scenario of the trial of woman’s love is that of the prince from a fairy tale who first approaches his beloved under the guise of a poor servant, in order to insure that the woman will fall in love with him for himself, not for his princely title.

http://ift.tt/2dW4Ugg

Saturday, 15 October 2016

soldiers often fantasize about killing the enemy soldier in a face to face confrontation, looking him into the eyes before stabbing him. The singular experience of humanity occurs when the mystique of such a face to face encounter is rendered meaningless. The same sublime moment of solidarity took place in the battle for Stalingrad, when, on New Year’s Eve of December 31 1942, Russian actors and musicians visited the besieged city to entertain the troops; the violinist Mikhail Goldstein went to the trenches to perform a one-man concert for the soldiers

http://ift.tt/2edwNlV

The ethical struggle to sustain the meaninglessness of the catastrophe is the topic of Atom Egoyan’s masterpiece The Sweet Hereafter, arguably THE film about the impact of a trauma on a community. Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer, arrives in the wintry hamlet of San Dent to sign up the parents of children who died when their school bus plunged into an ice-covered lake. His motto is “there are no accidents”: there are no gaps in the causal link of responsibility, there always HAS to be someone who is guilty. (As we soon learn, he is not doing this on account of his professional avarice. Stephens’ obsession with the complete causal link is rather his desperate strategy to cope with the private trauma, which is sorting out responsibility for his own daughter Zoe, a junkie who despises him, although she repeatedly calls him demanding money: he insists that everything must have a cause in order to counteract the inexplicable gap which separates him from Zoe

http://ift.tt/2dSx3DL

not only are people not “good,” since they let themselves be manipulated with obscene pleasure; there are also no “old myths” which we need to study if we are really to understand the complex situation, just the PRESENT outburst of racist nationalism which, according to its needs, opportunistically resuscitates old myths. To paraphrase the old Clintonian motto: no, it’s not the old myths and ethnic hatreds, it’s the POLITICAL POWER STRUGGLE, stupid!

http://ift.tt/2e7des0

Friday, 14 October 2016

A man stupidly believes that, beyond his symbolic title, there is deep in himself some substantial content, some hidden treasure which makes him worthy of love, whereas a woman knows that there is nothing beneath the mask-her strategy is precisely to preserve this ‘nothing’ of her freedom, out of reach of man’s possessive love

http://ift.tt/2dR0t6d

two clichés are to be avoided apropos of the hysterical nature of feminine subjectivity: -on the one hand, the dismissive treatment of the (feminine) hysterical subject as a confused babbler unable to confront reality, and therefore taking refuge in impotent theatrical gestures (an example from the domain of political discourse: from Lenin onwards, Bolsheviks regularly stigmatized their liberal political opponents as hysterics who “do not know what they effectively want”); -on the other hand, the false elevation of hysteria to a protest, through woman’s body language, against male domination: by means of hysterical symptoms, the (feminine) subject signals her refusal to act as the empty screen or medium for the male monologue. Hysteria has to be comprehended in the complexity of its strategy as a radically ambiguous protest against Master’s interpolation which simultaneously bears witness to the fact that the hysterical subject needs a Master, that she cannot do without a Master, so that there is no simple and direct way out. For that reason, one should also avoid the historicist pitfall of rejecting the notion of hysteria as belonging to a bygone era, i.e., the notion that today borderline disturbances, not hysteria, are the predominant form of “discontent” in our civilization: borderline is the contemporary form of hysteria, i.e., of the subject’s refusal to accept the predominant mode of interpolation whose agent is no longer the traditional Master but the expert-knowledge of the discourse of Science. In short, the shift from the classic form of hysteria to borderline disturbances is strictly correlative with the shift from the traditional Master to the form of Power legitimized by Knowledge. A more than sufficient reason for maintaining the notion of hysteria is that the status of the subject as such is ultimately hysterical. That is to say, when Lacan asserts that the most succinct definition of the subject is ‘that which is not an object’, the apparent banality of this claim should not deceive us: the subject-in the precise psychoanalytic sense of the subject of desire-only exists insofar as the question remains open of how much of an object she is for the Other, i.e., I am a subject insofar as the radical perplexity persists as to the Other’s desire, as to what the Other sees (and finds worthy of desire) in me. In other words, when Lacan claims that there is no desire without an object-cause, this does not amount to the banality according to which every desire is attached to its objective correlative: the 'lost object’ which sets in motion my desire is ultimately the subject herself, and the lack in question concerns her uncertainty as to her status for the Other’s desire

http://ift.tt/2dQBtMi

There is something cold in perfect beauty, one admires it but one falls in love with IMPERFECT beauty, on account of this very imperfection.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/763033446222475265 http://ift.tt/2dpJxmS

‘the cold, austere precision of Kafka’s great texts, their strange “realism”, makes his universe all the more uncanny’, Zizek writes.

via http://twitter.com/AndreVantino (via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2dPEpsT

Thursday, 13 October 2016

I don’t know who or what I am since my innermost core of jouissance eludes me. I then identify myself with others who are caught in the same deadlock, and we ground our collective identity not directly in some Master-Signifier but, more fundamentally, in our shared rejection of the Other’s jouissance. The status of Other’s jouissance is thus deeply ambiguous: It is a threat to my identity, but at the same time my reference to it founds my identity—in short, my identity emerges as a defensive reaction to what threatens it

SLAVOJ ZIZEK ON RACISM http://ift.tt/2e9np2M

The proletariat stands for the dimension of universality, for its emancipation is only possible in/through the universal emancipation.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/762736566632640512 http://ift.tt/2dWPQy8

This is my fear, as if I am nothing who pretends to be somebody, hyperactive to fascinate people so they don’t notice there is nothing.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/762673542219563008 http://ift.tt/2ewmwjD

Wednesday, 12 October 2016

I love the other…on account of the very troubling excess of life in him/her.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/762665068953735168 http://ift.tt/2etu46R

I was…admonished for Political Incorrectness: one should not associate someone’s ethnic identity with a physical feature or a name, because all this just bolsters racial cliches and prejudices. To my ensuing query about how, then, one should identify ethnic belonging, I got a clear and radical answer: in no way, by means of no particular feature, because every such identification is potentially oppressive in constraining a person to his or her particular identity… is this not a perfect contemporary example of what Kierkegaard had in mind? One should love one’s neighbors (African-Americans, in this case) only insofar as they are implicitly deprived of all their particular characteristics - in short, insofar as they are treated as already dead.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dKmiVb

“Is it not the Narcissist for who everything others do, how they look at me, is potentially a threat?” -SLAVOJZIZEK https://t.co/WQggV0OiEB

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/762299288420573184 http://ift.tt/2e9OX42

Tuesday, 11 October 2016

The illusion of “trade-unionism” is that the workers struggle can be depoliticized, reduced to a purely economic negotiation for conditions.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/762031097173639172 http://ift.tt/2e4fxzz

“pathological Narcissus” gives the unsettling impression that “there is nothing behind the mask”, that we are speaking to a puppet, that the mask really is just a mask, and that what is hiding behind it is something completely different and dialectically not mediated by the mask.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2e53Ses

once upon a time we pretended to believe, while, in our intimacy, we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/761985729526370304 http://ift.tt/2dTdk68

Monday, 10 October 2016

we publicly tend to profess our skeptical/hedonist/relaxed attitude, while intimately we remain haunted by beliefs and severe prohibitions.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/761985541936144384 http://ift.tt/2dF1NZR

The pathological narcissus can never really “enter the other”, “feel” with him, experience him in terms of “personality depth” or subjectivity abyss. All people in his surroundings fall into one of the following three categories: (1) The ideal other, those from whom he expects narcissistic recognition and who, in the pathological narcissus’s subjective economy, function as an extension of his own “big Ego” (as a rule, these are powerful, influential and famous individuals); (2) “enemies” or “conspirators” who represent a threat to his narcissistic affirmation; (3) the rest, the “crowd”, “puppets”, suckers who exist only to be used and abandoned

(via zizek-on-love) http://ift.tt/2e9dWIs

Does Phillips contradict himself here? Is making people »see what it is they do feel« not bringing about a kind of self-knowledge? (An elementary case of »seeing« would be to discern the ambiguous hatred beneath which the analyst suspects there is hidden love (or vice versa).) The answer is that knowledge gained in analysis is a knowledge to be forgotten, discarded: once I »see what it is that I feel,« I don’t go on dwelling in it, I just leave it behind – why? Not because of some decisionist mystique (“to be creative, one should overcome Hamlet-like procrastinations, too much self-analyzing, and just do it!”) but because the true task of analysis is to open up a void in the midst of our subjectivity: when we discard the knowledge gained in analysis, we open ourselves to this void

http://ift.tt/2dPfmnP

Sunday, 9 October 2016

When a racist says, ‘sorry, it is not an ideology, I just cannot stand black people’, the answer must be, ‘my God, your feelings are wrong’. …Don’t trust any of these immediate feelings or identifications. …If you look deep into yourself, at the core of your personality, you will not find some deeper spiritual truth. Instead, you find the fundamental lie – the fantasies…that define you. The goal of psychoanalysis is not simply to overcome these things but to disturb and restructure them.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dQ8wAt

We want to belong and we define our belonging through what we do. I have a sense of belonging but it is an incredibly material force. The strength of this belonging is precisely the result of a global market economy, because a global market economy disintegrates the traditional bonds which would have once provided a sense of belonging. You need to satisfy this need for belonging – then you need other ways of belonging, which are not really a return to tradition. The true danger comes with the reasoning that only a lesbian single mother can understand what it means to be a lesbian single mother, or that only a gay man can understand what it means to be gay. I think such a view, such an undermining of universality, is catastrophic. I see no emancipatory potential in relying on, or referring to, your own particular identity as beyond criticism, as an unquestionable identity.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dM4IOZ

What Rammstein does: by pushing the listeners into direct identification with the sinthomes used by the Nazis, by-passing their articulation into the Nazi ideology, they render palpable a gap where ideology imposes the illusion of seamless organic unity. To make a long story short, Rammstein liberates these sinthomes from their Nazi-articulation: they are offered to be enjoyed in their pre-ideological status of “knots” of libidinal investment. So when, while watching a Rammstein video clip depicting a blonde girl in a cage, dark uniforms evoking Nordic warriors, etc., some Leftist liberals fear that the uneducated public will miss the irony (if there is any) and directly identify with the proto-Fascist sensibility displayed here, one should counter it with the good old motto: the only thing we have to fear here is fear itself. Rammstein undermines totalitarian ideology not by the ironic distance towards the rituals it imitates, but by directly confronting us with its obscene materiality and thereby suspending its efficiency. So don’t be afraid, enjoy Rammstein!

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dXhj01

Saturday, 8 October 2016

Take, for example, the protagonist (who also happens to be the director) of the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir. The director took part in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, only to, years later, make a documentary about his posttraumatic state journey, the end of which includes a scene where he is redeemed by his shrink, who, in so many words, tells him, “You are good person. It’s true you made a mistake, but don’t ever forget: you are not a killer.”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK ON THE FALSENESS OF WALTZ WITH BASHIR http://ift.tt/2dEUd0m

It is precisely in these times that a film like Aloni’s Forgiveness is so needed. We have to remember that a film shouldn’t intend to answer questions; it should advocate the formulation and reformulation of the questions themselves. Forgiveness is not an avant‐garde postmodern film playing with multiple narratives; it is a film that, on the one hand, thinks with emotions and, on the other hand, functions as a simple moral story, the story of a young, perplexed, but essentially honest Jewish boy who eventually learns, and becomes able to say, “I’m a killer.” This simple recognition saves him from an ethical catastrophe and acts as an ultimate moment of reconciliation; it opens the possibility of seeking redemption through accountability. And redemption through accountability is the very opposite of that which results from granting forgiveness to oneself as the perpetrator.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2dCDQ43

Western civilisation was moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment. Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another: “A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ - say the Last Men, and they blink.”

http://ift.tt/2edYQR0

Friday, 7 October 2016

The Jew as the enemy allows the anti-Semitic subject to avoid the choice between working class and capital: by blaming the Jew whose plotting foments class warfare, he can advocate the vision of a harmonious society in which work and capital collaborate.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d0ZkF8

Each culture lacks “appropriate signifiers” for itself, for its own representation, which is why fantasies are needed to fill in this gap. And it is here that things get really interesting: these fantasies as a rule concern other cultures.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dGaKka

The ultimate cause of refugees is today’s global capitalism itself and its geopolitical games, and if we do not transform it radically, immigrants from Greece and other European countries will soon join African refugees. When I was young, such an organized attempt to regulate commons was called Communism. Maybe we should reinvent it. Maybe, this is, in the long term, our only solution. Is all this a utopia? Maybe, but if we don’t do it, then we are really lost, and we deserve to be.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d94hPv

Thursday, 6 October 2016

Refugees should be reassured of their safety, but it should also be made clear to them that they have to accept the area of living allocated to them by European authorities, plus they have to respect the laws and social norms of European states: No tolerance of religious, sexist or ethnic violence on any side, no right to impose onto others one’s own way of life or religion, respect of every individual’s freedom to abandon his/her communal customs, etc. If a woman chooses to cover her face, her choice should be respected, but if she chooses not to cover it, her freedom to do so has to be guaranteed. Yes, such a set of rules privileges the Western European way of life, but it is a price for European hospitality. These rules should be clearly stated and enforced, by repressive measures (against foreign fundamentalists as well as against our own anti-immigrant racists) if necessary.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dWhGZQ

One of the great Left taboos will have to be broken here: the notion that the protection of one’s specific way of life is in itself a proto-Fascist or racist category. If we don’t abandon this notion, we open up the way for the anti-immigrant wave which thrives all around Europe.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dwd6pM

The hard lesson for the refugees is that “there is no Norway,” even in Norway. They will have to learn to censor their dreams: Instead of chasing them in reality, they should focus on changing reality.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d6tQRm

Wednesday, 5 October 2016

The moralistic complaints—“Europe lost empathy, it is indifferent towards the suffering of others,” etc.—are merely the obverse of the anti-immigrant brutality. Both stances share the presupposition, which is in no way self-evident, that a defense of one’s own way of life excludes ethical universalism. One should thus avoid getting caught into the liberal game of “how much tolerance can we afford.” Should we tolerate if they prevent their children going to state schools, if they arrange marriages of their children, if they brutalize gays among their ranks? At this level, of course, we are never tolerant enough, or we are always already too tolerant, neglecting the rights of women, etc. The only way to break out of this deadlock is to move beyond mere tolerance or respect of others to a common struggle.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d4tvON

The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall–but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, with grass and trees. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as it should be –empty, virginal, waiting to be settled?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cUkDIq

Our readiness to assume guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, then it all depends on us.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dfhsfb

Tuesday, 4 October 2016

Sarajevo which had by far the largest Jewish community in ex-Yugoslavia, and, on the top of it, was the most cosmopolitan Yugoslav city, the thriving center of cinema and rock music - why? Precisely because it was the Muslim dominated city, where the Jewish and Christian presence was tolerated, in contrast to the Christian-dominated large cities from which Jews and Muslims were purged long ago.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dd45fJ

Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can publicly say. His greatest achievement to date is that he has, in his refined and non-provocative way, introduced into the public speech topics that were once unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with “enemies”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dpCYmS

What happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to vote for racist and sexist laws? I am not afraid to conclude: Emancipatory politics should not be bound a priori by formal-democratic procedures of legitimization.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dqh00N

‘Instead of being bothered of what I am for the others, I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being’’ Zizek writes on analysis

via http://twitter.com/AndreVantino (via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2dsxNyZ

Often one believes even if only indirectly through seeing how others believe, in this case ‘all that matters is that’ one believes ‘it to be true that most of the people around them believe’. And ‘for a particular ideology to survive, it is not essential that people actively support or believe in it’, Zizek writes.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2cPN139

Monday, 3 October 2016

Those who advocate radical opening of the borders: Are they aware that, since our democracies are nation-state democracies, their demand equals suspension of—in effect imposing a gigantic change in a country’s status quo without democratic consultation of its population?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cYSXW3

When Angela Merkel made her famous public appeal inviting hundreds of thousands into Germany, which was her democratic legitimization? What gave her the right to bring such a radical change to German life without democratic consultation? My point here, of course, is not to support anti-immigrant populists, but to clearly point out the limits of democratic legitimization.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dqAH7C

The crazy idea that only a radical catastrophe (preferably an ecological one) can awaken masses and thus give a new impetus to radical emancipation. The latest version of this idea relates to the refugees: only an influx of a really large number of refugees (and their disappointment since, obviously, Europe will not be able to satisfy their expectations) can revitalize the European radical Left. I find this line of thought obscene: notwithstanding the fact that such a development would for sure give an immense boost to anti-immigrant brutality, the truly crazy aspect of this idea is the project to fill in the gap of the missing radical proletarians by importing them from abroad, so that we will get the revolution by means of an imported revolutionary agent.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d9joWy

Sunday, 2 October 2016

What if Europe should accept the paradox that its democratic openness is based on exclusion. In other words, there is “no freedom for the enemies of freedom”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dITOg0

Palestinians do not need the patronizing help of Western liberals, and they need even less the silence about “honor killing” as part of the Western Left’s “respect” for Palestinian way of life. The imposition of Western values as universal human rights and the respect for different cultures, independent of the horrors sometimes apart of these cultures, are two sides of the same ideological mystification. In order to really undermine homeland xenophobia against foreign threats, one should reject its very presupposition, namely that every ethnic group has its own proper “Nativia.”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d6SPBk

Black liberation should be the work of the blacks themselves, not something bestowed on them as a gift by the good white liberals.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dnmSXd

Saturday, 1 October 2016

The “radical” leftist critique of Bernie Sanders: What bothers his critics is precisely his close contact with small farmers and other working people in Vermont, who usually give their electoral support to Republican conservatives. Sanders is ready to listen to their worries and cares, not dismiss them as racist white trash. Where does the threat come from? Listening to ordinary people’s worries, of course, in no way implies that one should accept the basic premise of their stance—the idea that threats to their way of life comes from outside, from foreigners, from “the other.” The task is rather to teach them to recognize their own responsibility for their future. To explain this point, let’s take an example from another part of the world.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dAn5tI

We should approach the Rotherham events in exactly the same way since we are dealing with the “political unconscious” of Pakistani Muslim youth. The kind of violence at work is not chaotic violence but ritualized violence with precise ideological contours. A youth group, which experiences itself as marginalized and subordinated, took revenge at low-class girls of the predominant group. It is fully legitimate to raise the question of whether there are features in their religion and culture which open up the space for brutality against women without blaming Islam as such (which is in itself no more misogynistic than Christianity). In many Islamic countries and communities one can observe consonance between violence against women, the subordination of women and their exclusion from public life.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dl8y10

It is fully legitimate to raise the question of whether there are features in their religion and culture which open up the space for brutality against women without blaming Islam as such (which is in itself no more misogynistic than Christianity). In many Islamic countries and communities one can observe consonance between violence against women, the subordination of women and their exclusion from public life.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dtEYbZ

Friday, 30 September 2016

What we must do is move beyond the cliché of refugees as proletarians with “nothing to lose but their chains” invading bourgeois Europe: There are class divisions in Europe as well as in the Middle East, and the key question is how these different class dynamics interact.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2drAEtw

Many of the refugees want to have a cake and eat it: They basically expect the best of the Western welfare-state while retaining their specific way of life, though in some of its key features their way of life is incompatible with the ideological foundations of the Western welfare-state. Germany likes to emphasize the need to integrate the refugees culturally and socially. However—and here is another taboo to be broken—how many of the refugees really want to be integrated? What if the obstacle to integration is not simply Western racism?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dxJ93v

The ISIS terrorists…are the Islamo-Fascist counterpart of the European anti-immigrant racists.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dxmkBJ

Thursday, 29 September 2016

The greatness of the Jacobins was to keep the screen empty, to resist filling it in with ideological projections.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dhV0UI

it’s too easy to play this moralistic game - state power is corrupted, so let’s withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power

http://ift.tt/2dq9ks7

I hate the position of “beautiful soul”, which is: “"I remain outside, in a safe place; I don’t want to dirty my hands.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dpviLL

Wednesday, 28 September 2016

Back to the…veil in Islam: what if the true scandal this veil endeavors to obfuscate is not the feminine body hidden by it, but the INEXISTENCE of the feminine? What if…the…function of the veil is …to sustain the illusion that there IS something, the substantial Thing, behind the veil? …The “undecidability” of truth, for a succession of veils beneath which there is no ultimate hidden core,“ is a threat in Islam, writes Zizek.

http://ift.tt/2dAUWys

We have to move the underground, and sometimes this is much more important than changing the explicit rules. This is what Udi tries to do; he is moving the underground, changing those unwritten obscene rules, like one of his protagonists, the muselmann, who calls himself a “mole.” And this is exactly what Hegel called the work of the mole: this underground work, which is the magic of revolutions. As Hegel put it, all the glitter of the display of power can stay there, but they’re not even aware of how the mole works via the underground. And then, at a certain point, you just have to touch them and say, “hey, look down, you are there,” and all collapses.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dAAE8j

Films dealing with war…often forge an image of the soldier not as a righteous superhero, but rather as a sensitive individual who acquiesces to his own moral weaknesses. In a dialectic way, because he reveals his moral failure, the soldier then receives moral sympathy from the audience. Not only is a liberal audience ready to forgive him for his war crimes, but the fact that these crimes make him so human is the very impetus for us to embrace him as an errant child. Take, for example, the protagonist (who also happens to be the director) of the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir. The director took part in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, only to, years later, make a documentary about his posttraumatic state journey, the end of which includes a scene where he is redeemed by his shrink, who, in so many words, tells him, “You are good person. It’s true you made a mistake, but don’t ever forget: you are not a killer.”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d7nggk

Tuesday, 27 September 2016

I am especially suspicious of this immediate readiness to feel guilty, to be responsible: we Europeans screwed it up, everything is the fault of our neocolonialism. This is not what I mean by probing into the background. This response to the migrant crisis is a problem because it puts refugees in the totally passive position of victims. It’s as if we turned the old racist slogan of white man’s burden into white man’s guilt, as if we are the only active ones. This is, I think, our basic racist view. And when the refugees become too active, they are dismissed as terrorists.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dqAkg5

Fascism emerged as an attempt to master capitalism’s excesses, to build a kind of capitalism without capitalism.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d1Jdd8

The ‘real’ universality of today’s globalization through the global market involves its own fiction (or even ideal) of multiculturalist tolerance, respect and protection of human rights, democracy and so forth; it involves its own pseudo-Hegelian 'concrete universality’ of a world order whose universal features of the world market, human rights and democracy allow each specific 'lifestyle’ to flourish in its particularity. So a tension inevitably emerges between this postmodern, post-Nation-State, 'concrete universality’ and the earlier 'concrete universality’ of the Nation-State. Hegel was the first to elaborate the properly modern paradox of individualization through secondary identification.21 At the beginning, the subject is immersed in the particular life-form into which he was born (family, local community); the only way for him to tear himself away from his primordial 'organic’ community, to cut his links with it and to assert himself as an 'autonomous individual’, is to shift his fundamental allegiance, to recognize the substance of his being in another, secondary…community that is universal and, simultaneously, 'artificial’, no longer 'spontaneous’ but 'mediated’, sustained by the activity of independent free subjects - nation versus local community; a profession in the modern sense (a job in a large anonymous company) versus the 'personalized’ relationship between an apprentice and his Masterartisan; the academic community of knowledge versus the traditional wisdom passed from generation to generation. In this shift from primary to secondary identification, primary identifications undergo a kind of transubstantiation: they start to function as the form of appearance of the universal secondary identification - say, precisely by being a good member of my family, I thereby contribute to the proper functioning of my Nation-State. The universal secondary identification remains 'abstract’ in so far as it is directly opposed to the particular forms of primary identification, that is, in so far as it compels the subject to renounce his primary identifications; it becomes 'concrete’ when it reintegrates primary identifications, transforming them into the modes of appearance of the secondary identification.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dpI3uP

Monday, 26 September 2016

Today’s neofascism is more and more ‘postmodern’, civilized, playful, involving ironic self-distance, and yet for all that no less fascist.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cxy3tQ

‘postmodern’ racism is the symptom of multiculturalist late-capitalism, bringing to light the inherent contradiction of the liberal-democratic ideological project. Liberal 'tolerance’ condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance - like the multitude of 'ethnic cuisines’ in a contemporary megalopolis; however, any 'real’ Other is instantly denounced for its 'fundamentalism’, because the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance: the 'real Other’ is by definition 'patriarchal’, 'violent’, never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs. One is tempted to reactualize here the old Marcusean notion of 'repressive tolerance’, reconceiving of it as the tolerance of the Other in its aseptic, benign form, which forecloses the dimension of the Real of the Other’s jouissance.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2duCt6I

A retreat from active engagement in civil society to passive and apolitical consumerism…characterize contemporary capitalism.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2du8hbT

Sunday, 25 September 2016

Antigone…goes to the limit,…‘doesn’t give way on her desire’ and becomes, in this persistence in the 'death drive’,…exempted from the circle of everyday feelings and considerations, passions and fears.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dkJR42

black liberation should be the work of black people themselves, not something bestowed on them as a gift by the good white liberals, and only if they fully accept this fact can they do something to help the blacks. And herein resides Nafar’s point as well: Palestinians do not need the patronizing help of Western liberals; even less do they need the silence about “honor killing” as part of the Western leftist’s “respect” for Palestinian ways of life

http://ift.tt/2diuyNc

Capitalism - the more it is rotting, the more it thrives.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/759015017295470592 http://ift.tt/2d1IJ6h

To have an intense and fulfilling…relationship is not…to look into each other’s eyes, forgetting about the world around them, but, while holding hands, to look together outside, at…the Cause for which both are fighting

http://ift.tt/2d1sZ2T

Saturday, 24 September 2016

The only way…out of the constraints of ‘alienated’ commodification is to invent a new collectivity.

http://ift.tt/2dqhstK

easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system.

http://ift.tt/2cRwoSB

“The people offered the top reward…did worst of all: higher incentives led to worse performance,”…Daniel Pink … suggests that … incentives might be useful in getting people to accomplish boring routine work; but with more intellectually demanding tasks,…success…depends on being nimble and innovative, so there is more and more need for people to find intrinsic value in their work. Pink identifies…elements underlying…intrinsic motivation:…the ability to choose…how tasks are completed;…becoming adept at an activity; and…the desire to improve the world

http://ift.tt/2df62MY

Wendy Brown reads moralizing politics “as a symptom of a broken historical narrative to which we have not yet forged alternatives”

Zizek citing Wendy Brown http://ift.tt/2csPFac

Friday, 23 September 2016

If you want to explain what today is going on with Marx’s theory of exploitation, what goes on today with poverty and so on, you can no longer account for it in the Marxist terms of exploitation. Because the Marxist term of exploitation, it’s a very precise term based on his labour theory of value.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cYrgLI

Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail..the developed countries ‘help’ the undeveloped with aid, credit and so on, and thereby avoid..their complicity in..the miserable situation

(Zizek, ‘Violence’, p19) http://ift.tt/2dqssdC

As Highsmith herself put it in an interview: “Ripley could be called psychotic, but I would not call him insane because his actions are rational. /…/ I consider him a rather civilized person who kills when he absolutely has to.” Ripley is thus not any kind of the “American psycho”: his criminal acts are not frenetic passages a l'acte, outbursts of violence in which he releases the energy hindered by the frustrations of the yuppie daily life. His crimes are calculated with simple pragmatic reasoning: he does what is necessary to attain his goal, the wealthy quiet life in the exclusive suburbs of Paris. What is so disturbing about him, of course, is that he somehow seems to lack the elementary ethical sense: in the daily life, he is mostly friendly and considerate (although with a touch of coldness), and when he commits a murder, he does it with regret, quickly, as painlessly as possible, in the same way one performs an unpleasant but necessary task. He is the ultimate psychotic, the best exemplification of what Lacan had in mind when he claimed that normality is the special form of psychosis - of not being traumatically caught in the symbolic cobweb

http://ift.tt/2cXS7I7

Dalai-Lama is much more appropriate for our postmodern permissive times: he presents us with a vague feel-good spiritualism without any SPECIFIC obligations: anyone, even the most decadent Hollywood star, can follow him

http://ift.tt/2d6lvhg

Thursday, 22 September 2016

“The true enigma of Ripley is why he persists in this shuddering coldness,” https://t.co/cR6J8GmJfU

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740022080092176384 http://ift.tt/2d8lQ46

“The true enigma of Ripley is why he persists in this shuddering coldness,” https://t.co/cR6J8GmJfU

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740022080092176384 http://ift.tt/2d8lQ46

“coldness characterizes a certain radical lesbian stance,” https://t.co/vBYoFkKZdB

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740021880531357696 http://ift.tt/2cVvZ0Y

there was a BBC show on..the most hated politician. Tony Blair came first. One week later he won the elections. #Trump #overidentification

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739503977042223104 http://ift.tt/2deqM8l

“I can be stupid but I’m still at the top”. There is something appealing in this, I think. [#zizek on voters identifying with vices] #trump

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739502735813451776 http://ift.tt/2dcH3pM

Wednesday, 21 September 2016

“growing disenchantment of our ac- tual social world accounts for the fascination exerted by cyber- space:” https://t.co/98hwHOPxvk

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738078154875666433 http://ift.tt/2d14epD

To enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738070116127154177 http://ift.tt/2cn7Qho

Tuesday, 20 September 2016

Our fixation on electronic games & stories is in part an enactment of a denial of death. They offer the chance to erase memory, to startover

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737399743337369600 http://ift.tt/2d0mRIP

Christianity involves the distinction between external rules and inner belief (so the question is always: do you REALLY, in the innermost of your heart, believe, or are you just following the dead letter of the law?), while in Judaism, the “external” rules and practices DIRECTLY ARE the religious belief in its material existence

http://ift.tt/2cRQl9z

this ‘making oneself seen’ that characterizes the circularity, the constitutive loop, of the drive, is in no way to be confused with the narcissistic ‘looking at oneself through the other’, that is, through the eyes of the big Other, from the point of the Ego-Ideal in the Other, in the form in which I appear to myself worthy of love: what is lost when I Took at myself through the other’ is the radical heterogeneity of the object qua gaze to whom I expose myself in ‘making oneself seen’.

http://ift.tt/2cWTfO7

Monday, 19 September 2016

‘pure life’ beyond death, this longing that reaches beyond the circuit of generation and corruption, is it not the product of symbolization, so that symbolization itself engenders the surplus that escapes it? … the Symbolic itself opens up the wound it professes to heal. … the libido, qua pure life instinc [is] immortal life,…irrepressible life

http://ift.tt/2cZQUDh

the passion of Tristan and Isolde expresses the longing for the ‘eternal peace’ of death. … The trap to be avoided here, however, is that of conceiving this pure life drive as a substantial entity subsisting prior to its being captured in the Symbolic network … it is the very mediation of the Symbolic order that transforms the organic ‘instinct’ into an unquenchable longing that can find solace only in death.

http://ift.tt/2d3rH6K

The ‘death drive’ means that life itself rebels against the ego: the true representative of death is Ego itself, as the petrified imago that interrupts the flow of life.

http://ift.tt/2d6wSr5

What re-emerges in the ‘death drive’ is ultimately life itself and the fact that the ego perceives this return as a death threat precisely confirms its perverted ‘repressive’ character.

http://ift.tt/2cptOnk

Sunday, 18 September 2016

Interpret the death drive…as the return of the life force, of the part of it excluded by the imposition of the petrified mask of the ego.

http://ift.tt/2cB0da1

there is nothing…“constraining” about the fact that our innermost strivings are (pre)determined … when we feel thwarted in our freedom by the pressure of external reality, there must be something in us, some desire or striving, which is thus thwarted, but where do such strivings come from if not this same reality? … Our “free will” does not in some mysterious way “disturb the natural course of things;’ it is part and parcel of this course.

http://ift.tt/2cRsRF4

The “truth” of the struggle emerges only in and through defeat. … to pass from alienation to reconciliation, we do not have to change reality, but rather the way we perceive and relate to it. … reconciliation works-not as a positive gesture of resolving or overcoming the conflict, but as a retroactive insight into how there never really was a serious conflict, how the two opponents were always on the same side … in spite of the fact that Revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational State. Here also, then, one has to do something (offer an apology, enact a reign of Terror) in order to see how it is superfluous. … It only becomes possible to" “see how the Terror is superfluous and destructive after one has gone through it. … For us to be "truly” and “radically” free would entail that there be no positive content involved in our free act-if we want nothing “external” and particular or given to determine our behavior, then “this would involve being free of every part of ourselves”. … When a determinist claims that our free choice is “determined,” this does not mean that our free will is somehow constrained, that we are forced to act against our will. … What is “determined” is the very thing that we want to do “freely,” that is, without being thwarted by external obstacles.

http://ift.tt/2dbtqKA

The ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle. This notion of ideology is not just an abstract mental exercise: it fits perfectly with fascist anti-Semitism as the most elementary form o f ideology-one is even tempted to say: as ideology as such. ‘The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, the foreign intruder who disturbs and corrupts the harmony of the social order, is ultimately a fetishistic objectivization, a stand-in, for the “inconsistency” of the social order itself, for the immanent antagonism (“class struggle”) which generates the dynamic of its instability. Hegel’s interest in the “conflict of the opposites” is thus that of the neutral dialectical observer who discerns the “Cunning of Reason” at work in struggle: a subject engages in struggle, is defeated (as a rule, in his very victory), and this defeat brings him to his truth.

http://ift.tt/2cgkMpf

Saturday, 17 September 2016

objet petit a is the primordial foreign body that “sticks in the throat” of the subject, to the object-cause of desire that splits it up: Fichte himself defines… the non-assimilable foreign body that causes the subject division into the empty absolute subject and the finite determinate subject,… the moment of the “run-in”, the hazardous knock, the encounter of the Real in the midst of the ideality of the absolute I

http://ift.tt/2cvhJuc

Fichte was the first philosopher to focus on the uncanny contingency in the very heart of subjectivity: the Fichtean subject is not the overblown Ego as the absolute Origin of all reality, but a finite subject thrown, caught, in a contingent social situation forever eluding mastery.

http://ift.tt/2cFXBH6

the encounter of a woman stands for the encounter of the real of the other.’ ‘The abyssal fantasmatic Real of the Feminine which threatens to devour the male subject, is, in its very horror, a DEFENSE, an escape from the Real of the Other’s (woman’s) desire

http://ift.tt/2cf1twz

the ultimate victim of the atheist theoretical and practical rejection of religion is not religion (which, unperturbed, continues its life), but freedom itself, allegedly threatened by it. The radical atheist universe, deprived of religious reference, is the grey universe of egalitarian terror and tyranny

http://ift.tt/2cyC2Ju

Friday, 16 September 2016

An encounter of the Other’s desire…can be an experience of utter alienation (I am obsessed with the inaccessible obscure impenetrable divine Desire which plays games with me). …Let us return to our fundamentalist:…he loses his sensitivity for the enigma of the Other’s desire.

http://ift.tt/2d73gbS

finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent, traumatic even: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which causes love. …The excess of the beloved, what, in the beloved, eludes my grasp, is the very place of the inscription of my own desire into the beloved object - transcendence is the form of appearance of immanence. As the melodramatic wisdom puts it, it is love itself, the fact of being loved, that ultimately makes the beloved beautiful.

http://ift.tt/2ckdOmr

To believe “directly,” without the externalizing mediation of a ritual, is a heavy…burden; …through exerting a ritual, one has a chance of transferring this burdon onto an Other

Slavoj Zizek http://ift.tt/2cDhsbG

what if one kneels down and prays not so much to regain one’s own belief but, on the opposite, to GET RID of one’s belief, of its over-proximity, to acquire a breathing space of a minimal distance towards it? … In the “normal” cynical functioning of ideology…the true logic is: “Kneel down and you will thereby MAKE SOMEONE ELSE BELIEVE!” … “act as if you believe, and YOU WILL GET RID OF YOUR BELIEF - you will no longer have to believe yourself, your belief will already ex-sist objectified in your act of praying!”

Slavoj Zizek http://ift.tt/2cPbK5n

Thursday, 15 September 2016

Kneel down and you will believe!” has to be understood as involving a kind of self-referential causality: "Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!

http://ift.tt/2czGRBg

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity": even the best are no longer able to sustain their symbolic innocence,…while “the worst”…engage in (racist, religious, sexist…) fanaticism? Is this…not a good description of today’s …tolerant but anemic liberals, and the fundamentalists full of “passionate intensity”?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cMYIoJ

a desperate “sickness unto death” [is] the attitude of knowing one’s eternal duty but avoiding it; acedia is thus the tristitia mortifera, not simple laziness but desperate resignation—I want the object, but not the way to reach it, I accept the gap between desire and its object. In this precise sense, acedia is the opposite of zeal. One is even tempted to historicize this last sin: before modernity, it was melancholy (resisting pursuit of the Good); with capitalism, it was reinterpreted as simple laziness (resisting the work ethic); today, in our “post-”society, it is depression (resisting the enjoyment of life, or happiness in consumption).

Slavoj Zizek http://ift.tt/2cAmFks

Unconstrained assertion of sexuality deprived of the last vestiges of spiritual transcendence turns sex itself into a mechanical exercise.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/756116512805621760 http://ift.tt/2czZk2l

Wednesday, 14 September 2016

What if we are ‘really alive’ only if we commit ourselves with an excessive intensity which puts us beyond 'mere life’?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/756081682281820160 http://ift.tt/2cxZKWZ

The danger the West is courting in its ‘war on terrorism’: …they start by denouncing religion as the force of oppression which threatens human freedom; in fighting religion, however, they are compelled to forsake freedom itself

http://ift.tt/2co5zst

can we summon up the courage to formulate a Leftist alternative to democracy in order to break the vicious cycle of democratic corruption and the Rightist campaigns?

http://ift.tt/2cnGZYM

We should…reject the standard liberal wisdom according to which Islam still needs to accomplish the Protestant revolution which would open it up to modernity: this Protestant revolution was already accomplished more than two centuries ago, in the guise of the Wahhabi movement which emerged in (what is today) Saudi Arabia. Its basic tenet, the exercise of ijtihad (the right to reinterpret Islam on the basis of changing conditions), is the precise counterpart to Luther’s reading of the Bible. …The Wahhabis were extremely ‘purist’ and 'dogmatic’, opposed to any kind of cheap accommodation to new trends of Western modernity; and, simultaneously, they advocated the ruthless abandonment of old superstitious organic mores - the very formula of the 'Protestant’ return to origins against the corrupting inertia of tradition.

http://ift.tt/2crHKwL

Tuesday, 13 September 2016

As if what causes resentment against the USA is not its excess of power, but its lack of it.

http://ift.tt/2cYadfb

What broke down was their ‘objective’ illusion, the figure of the 'big Other’ against the background of which they could exert their ruthless drive for power: the Other on to which they transposed their belief, the Other which, as it were, believed on their behalf, their subject-supposed-to-believe, disintegrated. And did not something analogous happen in the aftermath of September 11?

http://ift.tt/2clTAGg

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait…are fully integrated into Western capitalism. Here, the USA has a very precise and simple interest: in order that these countries can be counted on for their oil reserves, they have to remain undemocratic (the underlying notion, of course, is that any democratic awakening could give rise to anti-American attitudes).

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on how the words “clash of civilization” are misleading http://ift.tt/2cufdaH

The pervert proclaims direct access to some big Other.

http://ift.tt/2cVcNQs

Monday, 12 September 2016

A specific “way of life” is not just composed of a set of abstract – Christian, Muslim – “values”: …it all of a sudden strikes us how stupidly meaningless and arbitrary our customs and rituals are – there is nothing natural in the way we embrace and kiss, in the way we wash ourselves, in the way we behave while eating… The point is thus not to recognise ourselves in strangers, but to recognise a stranger in ourselves – therein resides the innermost dimension of European modernity. The recognition that we are all, each in our own way, weird lunatics, provides the only hope for a tolerable co-existence of different ways of life.

http://ift.tt/2cmNGWE

What lies beyond this closed circle of ourselves – or, rather, the projections of our “repressed” evil side onto the other” – what we believe we encounter as the “authentic” other when we truly open ourselves up to them, the good, innocent other, is also our ideological fantasy.

http://ift.tt/2cUMKvn

the cause of problems which are immanent to today’s global capitalism are projected onto an external intruder. A suspicious gaze always finds what it is looking for: “proof” is everywhere, even if half of it is soon proven to be fake.

http://ift.tt/2cEcEBo

even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans; they seduce German girls – which they were not, of course) their anti-Semitism would still be pathological, since it represses the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position.

http://ift.tt/2clJypS

Sunday, 11 September 2016

the left also deeply disappointed me. Falling back into this safe pacifist attitude - violence never stops violence, give peace a chance

ZIZEK on the left not fully entering into the debate where the left is too absorbed by feeling moraööy superior and thus less able to prevent the wars since 9/11 http://ift.tt/2c8A56M

The reality that emerges from the Panama Papers leak is of class division, and it’s as simple as that. The papers demonstrate how wealthy people live in a separate world in which different rules apply, in which legal system and police authority are heavily twisted and not only protect the rich, but are even ready to systematically bend the rule of law to accommodate them.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c45OHA

This is our situation today: We are facing the shameless cynicism of the existing global order, whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights, etc.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2ck1qCw

What he cannot accept is the radical gap that forever separates his “real” qualities from his symbolic status (in the eyes of the others): all of a sudden, he is no longer a nobody avoided by respectable public but a famous author invited by the pillars of society, with even the beloved woman now throwing herself at his feet – but he is fully aware that nothing changed in him in reality, he is now the same person as he was, and even all his works were already written when he was ignored and despised. What Martin cannot accept is this radical de-centering of the very core of his personality which “resides in the minds of others”: he is nothing in himself, just a concentrated projection of others’ dreams. This perception that his agalma, what now makes him desired by others, is something that is outside of him, not only ruins his narcissism, but also kills his desire: “Something has gone out of me. I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything.” It is this “conclusion that he was nobody, nothing,” which drove him to suicide.

ZIZEK on Jack London’s novel Martin Eden (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2cw31qf

Saturday, 10 September 2016

sex is “something impossible in the sense that we cannot make sense of it,” Zizek writes.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2cO5DS8

The ideal love-object lives on the brink of death, her life itself is overshadowed by imminent death'”she is marked by some hidden curse or suicidal madness … It is only when the poet loses his lady that he finally and truly acquires her, it is precisely through this loss that she gains her place in the fantasy space that regulates the subject’s desire.

http://ift.tt/2c9CDo3

Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality … multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.

ZIZEK (via slavoj—-zizek) http://ift.tt/2cOD85n

Insofar as symbolic castration is also one of the names of the gap between my immediate stupid being and my symbolic title (recall the proverbial disappointment of an adolescent: is that miserable coward really my father?), and since a symbolic authority can only function insofar as, in a kind of illegitimate short-circuit, this gap is obfuscated and my symbolic authority appears as an immediate property or quality of me as a person, each authority has to protect itself from situations in which this gap becomes palpable. For example, political leaders know very well how to avoid situations in which their impotence would have been revealed; a father knows how to hide from the gaze of his son his humiliating moments (when his boss shouts at him, etc.). What is protected by such strategies of “saving one’s face” is appearance: although I know very well my father is ultimately impotent, I refuse to believe it, which is why the effect of witnessing the open display of his impotence can be so shattering. Such humiliating moments fully deserve to be called “castrating experiences,” not because father is shown castrated-impotent, but because the gap between his miserable reality and his symbolic authority is rendered palpable and can no longer be ignored

http://ift.tt/2cCyXGF

Friday, 9 September 2016

the court power is lost when the door keeper tells him that this entrance was, from the very start, meant only for him. In other words, he tells the man from the country that the thing that fascinated him was, in a way, gazing back at him all along, addressing him. That is, the man’s desire was from the very start ‘part of the game.’ The whole spectacle of the Door of the Law and the secret beyond it was staged only to capture his desire.

ZIZEK ON THE TRIAL BY KAFKA http://ift.tt/2cMnCrO

the abyss of the depth of another personality is its utter impenetrability

http://ift.tt/2cJEc7X

The moment you define the death of Christ on the cross as this kind of commercial deal, God paid the price, first every good theologist will tell you you get immediately caught up in nonsense. God paid the price for our sins. Ok, fuck it. To whom did he pay the price? No wonder that in the first century of Christianity, the most popular theory was the dualistic theory, where they claimed that the death of Christ is a deal between God and the Devil. Here on Earth we are in the hands of the Devil, God told the Devil “I want to make a deal with you, I pay the highest price, my son, if you give me back humanity.” Which is again nonsense, we are in pagan dualism etc

http://ift.tt/2c6g972

to terrorize my left liberal friends, I’m one of the few people who is for death penalty. The true ethical act is always founded on the decision that has no guarantee. Well, but what is the role of the cultural historical circumstances? Absolutely. It’s always an act within circumstances. No, no, it’s not some kind of divine act.

http://ift.tt/2cjHrVj

Ideology is telling you: “be faithful to yourself”, “realize your true potential”, “try all..options”, “don’t fixate yourself”, Zizek writes

via http://twitter.com/AndreVantino (via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2cqLBek

Thursday, 8 September 2016

I always defended Plato against Aristotle. It’s very fashionable to say bad Plato, protototalitarian, versus more open, democratic Aristotle. Ha. Read Plato’s Republic and be careful just about two things: there is at least something that you don’t find in Plato. First, do you notice he doesn’t need slaves for his republic. Secondly, Plato explicitly says in his Republic that women and men are equal. It is totally contingent now that men have more authority but in his ideal state women are equal to men. One should stop with this story bad Plato, original European metaphysics and so on. If anything we can learn today that Plato’s critique of democracy which is a very precise critique, a very Jacobin critique, which says that even, if I simplify it, if democracy is not empirically corrupted, there is corruption, in the very basic idea of democracy, which means there is no common good, that state politics should be determined by pragmatic negotiations between your interest, my interest, the highest social pact could be about the compromise between private interests as it were. Insofar as we understand democracy in this way one should criticize democracy, there is a kind of a priori corruption in democracy as such, independent of empirical democracy.

http://ift.tt/2bXN78s

we should rethink the notion of communism in the sense of how to define this domain of the commons.

http://ift.tt/2c9tHe3

Reconciliation is when we see how, when we fight each other, this very fight already links us.

http://ift.tt/2c9bk96

..In this empty place in the very heart of the Other, we must locate the problematic of the death drive.

http://ift.tt/2c8QKG1

Wednesday, 7 September 2016

the message of Christ’s sacrifice is not “now I take it for you, you can screw it up again." No, it just opens the space for our struggle, and this is the paradox I like. This is what I like in what maybe is the best chapter of this book, the fifth one (of Puppet). To put it in very simple terms, Christ’s redemption doesn’t mean that, OK, now we can go watch hard-core movies because we are redeemed each time. No, it’s done, the Messiah is here, it’s done, means that the space is now open for struggle. It’s this nice paradox that the fact that the big thing happened does not mean it’s over. It precisely opens the space for struggle. This is what I find again so incredible.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cHghK5

this idea that in Christianity everything happened whereas in Judaism the Messiah is always postponed, always to-come, and so on. No, I like here this crazy radicality of Christianity which is that, no, it happened, it already happened. But precisely that doesn’t mean everything is already decided.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c8gdhH

All advertising addresses this fantasmatic space (“If you drink X, you will experience not just a drink, but also…”)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743858305102127104 http://ift.tt/2cl4vDJ

Reconciliation is when we see how, when we fight each other, this very fight already links us.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c8z5MS

Tuesday, 6 September 2016

when I ironically refer to myself as a Leninist, when people ask me “What kind of Leninist?” I always say the Lenin of 1915. When, with the fiasco of the First World War, everything shattered for Lenin. And what did he do? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel. That’s the Lenin that I like. To admit fully the disaster. The first task of a Marxist today is to be radically self-critical. To admit that it’s not just, you know, like the social democratic left betrayed a more radical legacy. No no no, the whole leftist project has to be radically re-thought.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cmJCGF

communism is a capitalist fantasy. Yes. But doesn’t it mean that capitalism is ultimately the only game in town? First, what I mean is that we should be more radical.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c5zT5u

we should rethink the notion of communism in the sense of how to define this domain of the commons.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2caWSPM

I always defended Plato against Aristotle. It’s very fashionable to say bad Plato, protototalitarian, versus more open, democratic Aristotle. Ha. Read Plato’s Republic and be careful just about two things: there is at least something that you don’t find in Plato. First, do you notice he doesn’t need slaves for his republic. Secondly, Plato explicitly says in his Republic that women and men are equal. It is totally contingent now that men have more authority but in his ideal state women are equal to men. One should stop with this story bad Plato, original European metaphysics and so on. If anything we can learn today that Plato’s critique of democracy which is a very precise critique, a very Jacobin critique, which says that even, if I simplify it, if democracy is not empirically corrupted, there is corruption, in the very basic idea of democracy, which means there is no common good, that state politics should be determined by pragmatic negotiations between your interest, my interest, the highest social pact could be about the compromise between private interests as it were. Insofar as we understand democracy in this way one should criticize democracy, there is a kind of a priori corruption in democracy as such, independent of empirical democracy.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c4o6nH

Monday, 5 September 2016

to terrorize my left liberal friends, I’m one of the few people who is for death penalty. The true ethical act is always founded on the decision that has no guarantee. Well, but what is the role of the cultural historical circumstances? Absolutely. It’s always an act within circumstances. No, no, it’s not some kind of divine act.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c3kzqi

The moment you define the death of Christ on the cross as this kind of commercial deal, God paid the price, first every good theologist will tell you you get immediately caught up in nonsense. God paid the price for our sins. Ok, fuck it. To whom did he pay the price? No wonder that in the first century of Christianity, the most popular theory was the dualistic theory, where they claimed that the death of Christ is a deal between God and the Devil. Here on Earth we are in the hands of the Devil, God told the Devil “I want to make a deal with you, I pay the highest price, my son, if you give me back humanity.” Which is again nonsense, we are in pagan dualism etc

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c7V1uI

multiculturalist whites retain a “position as the privileged” https://t.co/Zoy1XL27x2

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743740420211933184 http://ift.tt/2bOHft8

death drive is this idea of “self-sabotaging,” https://t.co/sSKE86zu13

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743739003380260865 http://ift.tt/2cu2DZy

if u do jokes “in the wrong context, in the wrong way, I’m well aware that this is racism.” https://t.co/T5p8KiPiTg

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743738514945114112 http://ift.tt/2c9IKIb

Sunday, 4 September 2016

no era “did more to undermine so-called family and community values than the Reagan era,” https://t.co/04t4J5G4Km

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743737829226754048 http://ift.tt/2c77GzI

disenchantment of our “social world accounts for the fascination exerted by cyber- space:” https://t.co/dXXWSv9TBR

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743736295839522816 http://ift.tt/2bPo8FE

it is “as if the screen of the interface is today’s version of the blank, of the unknown region” https://t.co/ajyUlTM4jZ

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743736022752628737 http://ift.tt/2criMz1

“cyber- space is not spectral enough.” https://t.co/6VW6dF1yBl

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743735523072565248 http://ift.tt/2bX2cTs

Kafka’s universe is a world where God – who up to this point has held himself at an assured distance – got t… https://t.co/KLuswhH7uG

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743734617593679872 http://ift.tt/2cqQFQA

Saturday, 3 September 2016

“the formula of the ‘absent God’ in Kafka does not work at all:” https://t.co/ITazMnH1kL

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743733858336595968 http://ift.tt/2cdXh2r

somehow you can return to the worst starting point, racist jokes and so on, but they function no longer as racist, but as a kind of obscene solidarity. To give you an extremely vulgar example, I met a big, black guy, and when we became friends, I went into it like, [assuming a naive, awe-filled whisper] ‘Is it true that you have, you know [makes gesture signifying a gigantic penis]?’ and (this is a racist myth I heard in Europe) 'Is it true that you blacks can control your muscles so that when you walk with a half erection and there is a fly here you can BAM! [slaps thigh] snap it with your penis?â€ We became terribly close friends! Now, I’m well aware of how risky these waters are, because if you do it in the wrong context, in the wrong way, I’m well aware that this is racism.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2caG2kg

Did you see that wonderful melodrama, Stella Dallas, with Barbara Stanwyck? She has a daughter who wants to marry into the upper class, but she is an embarrassment to her daughter. So, the mother - on purpose - plays an extremely vulgar, promiscuous mother in front of her daughterâ€™s lover, so that the daughter can drop her without guilt. The daughter can be furious with her and marry the rich guy. Thatâ€™s a more difficult sacrifice. Itâ€™s not, â€œI will make a big sacrifice and remain deep in their heart.â€ No, in making the sacrifice, you risk your reputation itself. Is this an extreme case? No, I think every good parent should do this.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2coXAcP

Far from being pre-political, “universal Human Rights” designate the precise space of politicization proper: what they amount to is the right to universality as such, the right of a political agent to assert its radical non-coincidence with itself (in its particular identity), to posit itself â€“ precisely insofar as it is the “surnumerary” one, the “part with no part,” the one without a proper place in the social edifice â€“ as an agent of universality of the Social as such. The paradox is thus a very precise one, and symmetrical to the paradox of universal human rights as the rights of those reduced to inhumanity: at the very moment when we try to conceive political rights of citizens without the reference to universal “meta-political” Human Rights, we lose politics itself, i.e., we reduce politics to a “post-political” play of negotiation of particular interests. - What, then, happens to Human Rights when they are reduced to the rights of homo sacer, of those excluded from the political community, reduced to “bare life” â€“ i.e., when they become of no use, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights, are treated as inhuman?

http://ift.tt/2ciAP7c

the moment Human Rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with them has to change to ethics: reference to the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today’s “new reign of ethics”, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying to the victimized other political subjectivization. No wonder, then, that the advocates of such humanitarianism like to refer to the notion of a transpolitical radical Evil.

http://ift.tt/2bKoozm

Friday, 2 September 2016

when one speaks today of the decline of paternal authority, it is THIS father, the father of the uncompromising “No!”, who seems effectively to be in retreat; in his absence, in the absence of his prohibitory “No!”, new forms of the fantasmatic harmony between the symbolic order and jouissance can thrive again. This is what the so-called New Age “holistic” attitude ultimately is about, this renewal of the harmony between Reason and Life substance (Earth or macrocosm itself as a living entity) at the expense of the prohibitory “real father”. - These deadlocks indicate that today, in a sense, “the big Other no longer exists” however, in WHAT sense? The big Other is somewhat the same as God according to Lacan (God is not dead today He was dead from the very beginning, except He didn’t know it…): it never existed in the first place, i.e., the “big Other’s” inexistence is ultimately equivalent to Its being the symbolic order, the order of symbolic fictions which operate at a level different from direct material causality. … the “inexistence of the big Other” is strictly correlative to the notion of belief, of symbolic trust, of credence, of taking what other’s say “at their word’s value.”

http://ift.tt/2bKb6sK

It may appear that disintegration of the ethical substance is counteracted by the growth of political correctness, …however, …the ‘politically correct’ regulation participates in the same process of the disintegration of the ethical substance

http://ift.tt/2bJUku6

The obsessional neurotic: on the ‘constituted’, imaginary, phenomenal level he is of course caught in the masochistic logic of his compulsive acts, he is humiliating himself, preventing his success, organizing his failure, and so on

http://ift.tt/2c15gjR

analysis has to discover who - which subject - embodies for her the Other. Behind an extremely ‘feminine’ imaginary figure, we can thus generally discover some kind of masculine, paternal identification: she is enacting fragile femininity, but on the symbolic level she is in fact identified with the paternal gaze, to which she wants to appear likeable.

http://ift.tt/2ckuCbp

the dialectic of semblance and Real cannot be reduced to the rather elementary fact that the virtualization of our daily lives, the experience that we are living more and more in an artificially constructed universe, gives rise to an irresistible urge to ‘return to the Real’, to regain firm ground in some 'real reality’. … we should abandon the standard metaphorics of the Real as the terrifying Thing that is impossible to confront face to face, as the ultimate Real concealed beneath the layers of imaginary and/ or symbolic Veils: the very idea that, beneath the deceptive appearances, there lies hidden some ultimate Real Thing. … is the ultimate appearance - this Real Thing is a fantasmatic spectre whose presence guarantees the consistency of our symbolic edifice, thus enabling us to avoid confronting its constitutive inconsistency ('antagonism’). … does not the same go for the figure of Woman-Thing inaccessible to the male grasp? Is she also not the ultimate Spectre enabling men to avoid the constitutive deadlock of the sexual relationship?

http://ift.tt/2caOj61

Thursday, 1 September 2016

‘Woman is … a subject at its most fundamental, while man is a ridiculous fake, a false pretender. One can reach “maturity” — but not by adopting the position of the Master’, Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2chG6wf

I can well imagine that, in a particular situation, confronted with the proverbial ‘prisoner who knows’, whose words can save thousands, I might decide in favour of torture; however, even (or, rather, precisely) in a case such as this, it is absolutely crucial that one does not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle: given the unavoidable and brutal urgency of the moment, one should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very prohibition against elevating what we have done into a universal principle, do we retain a sense of guilt, an awareness of the inadmissibility of what we have done. In short, every authentic liberal should see these debates, these calls to 'keep an open mind’, as a sign that the terrorists are winning. And, in a way, essays like Alter’s, which do not openly advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this moment at least, explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too shocking, but the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear conscience

http://ift.tt/2bYY7jT

people laugh at me saying “oh, you want Leninism.” But no, sorry, I am not totally crazy.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/741309073916874752 http://ift.tt/2bHFWiU

Palestine today presents us with the “opportunity” of Ash’s subtitle because all of the standard “pragmatic” solutions to the “Middle East crisis” have repeatedly failed, which suggests that a utopian invention of a radical new space may be the only “realistic” choice.

http://ift.tt/2bU4a7e

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Here, of course, I claim we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous god. Family relations stand here metaphorically for the entire social network, for any particular ethnic substance that determines my place in the global order of things. The hatred enjoined by Christ is therefore not any kind of dialectical opposite of love, but the direct expression of love. It is love itself that enjoins me to unplug, as it were, from my organic community into which I was born, or, as St. Paul put it, “There are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks.

http://ift.tt/2bGSEyD

Wednesday, 31 August 2016

today’s much-decried “decline of Oedipus” (of the paternal symbolic authority) is precisely the return of figures which function according to the logic of the “primordial father” from “totalitarian” political leaders to the paternal sexual harasser

http://ift.tt/2bWAkBj

What if it is wrong and misleading to ask which of the four versions of the libidinal/symbolic economy of cyberspace that we outlined (psychotic suspension of the Oedipus; the continuation of the Oedipus with other means; the perverse staging of the Law; traversing the fantasy) is the “correct” one? What if these four versions are the four possibilities opened up by the cyberspace technology, so that, ultimately, the choice is ours? How will cyberspace affect us is not directly inscribed into its technological properties; it rather hinges on the network of socio-symbolic relations (of power and domination, etc.) which always–already overdetermine the way cyberspace affects us.

http://ift.tt/2bD6dvt

I am deprived of even my most intimate “subjective” experience, the way things “really seem to me,” that of the fundamental fantasy which constitutes and guarantees the kernel of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it… . According to the standard view, the dimen- sion which is constitutive of subjectivity is that of the phenome- nal (self) experience—I am a subject the moment I can say to myself: “No matter what unknown mechanism governs my acts, perceptions and thoughts, nobody can take from me what I see and feel now.” Lacan turns around this standard view: The “sub- ject of the signifier” emerges only when a key aspect of the sub- ject’s phenomenal (self) experience (his “fundamental fantasy”), becomes inaccessible to him, i.e., is “primordially repressed.” At its most radical, the Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism which regulates my phenomenal experience. So, in contrast to the commonplace, according to which we are dealing with a subject the moment an entity dis- plays signs of “inner life,” i.e., of a fantasmatic self-experience which cannot be reduced to external behavior, one should claim that what characterizes human subjectivity proper is rather the gap which separates the two, i.e., the fact that fantasy, at its most elementary, becomes inaccessible to the subject—it is this inac- cessibility which makes the subject “empty” ($). We thus obtain a relationship which totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experiences himself, his “inner states”: an “impossible” relationship between the empty, nonphenomenal sub- ject and the phenomena which remain inaccesible to the subject.

http://ift.tt/2cfy1uO

fantasy is by definition not “objective” (in the naive sense of “existing” independently of the subject’s perceptions); however, it is also not “subjective” (in the sense of being reducible to the subject’s consciously experienced intuitions). Fantasy rather belongs to the “bizarre category of the objectively subjective—the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you” (Dennett, 1991, p. 132).

http://ift.tt/2bJR5i9

Lacan’s notion of perversion (the pervert ritual) as a process which, far from undermining the symbolic Law, rather stands for a desperate attempt of the subject to stage the scene of installing…the rule of the Law, of its inscription onto the human body, thus enables us to throw a new light on the recent artistic tendencies of masochist body-performances— are they not an answer to the disintegration of the rule of Law, an attempt to restore the symbolic Prohibition? And, again, since the Law in its capacity of prohibiting direct (“incestuous”) access to jouissance is getting more and more inoperative, the only remaining way to sustain the Law is to posit is as identical with the very Thing which embodies jouissance.

http://ift.tt/2crkphn

Tuesday, 30 August 2016

The figure of the father as sexual harasser of his young daughters…stands in the very center of the so-called “false-memory syndrome”: Here, also, the suspended father as the agent of symbolic authority, i.e., the embodiment of a symbolic fiction, “re- turns in the real.” (What causes such controversy is the contention of those who advocate recovery of memories of childhood sexual abuses that sexual harassment by the father is not merely fantasized or, at least, an indissoluble mixture of fact and fantasy, but a plain fact, something that, in the majority of families, “really happened” in the daughter’s childhood

http://ift.tt/2bQflCn

conceive “conspiracy theory” as a kind of floating signifier which, as we have just seen, can be appropriated by different political options, enabling them to obtain a minimal cognitive mapping. This, then, is one version of the big Other which continues to exist in the wake of its alleged disappearance.

http://ift.tt/2bQ5zAe

SylviaPlath felt compelled to adopt the strategy of turning violence against herself as the only means of psychic liberation. For this reason, it is also far too simplistic to dismiss her thoroughly ambiguous hysterical attitude towards her father (horror at his oppressive presence and, simultaneously, her obvious libidinal fascination by him

http://ift.tt/2bGZGSx

Rape for Freud…has such a traumatic impact not simply because it is a case of such brutal external violence, but because it also touches on something disavowed in the victim herself. Freud writes, ‘If what [neurotics] long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented them in reality, they none the less flee from it’. Freud’s point is that…the core of our fantasy is unbearable to us. …The split hysterical position (that of complaining about being sexually misused and exploited, while simultaneously desiring it and provoking a man to seduce her) is…constitutive of subjectivity. …The reaction is here one of pure panic: the moment one mentions that a woman may fantasize about being raped or at least brutally mishandled, one hears the objections: 'This is like saying that Jews fantasize about being gassed in the camps, or African-Americans fantasize about being lynched!’

http://ift.tt/2byChH2

Lacan identified the beginning of the movement of ideas that finally gave birth to psychoanalysis as being that of…the Romantic notion of ‘pleasure in pain’. …Prior to this moment, the universe was one in which the Unconscious was not yet operative, in which the 'subject’ was identified with the Light of Reason as opposed to the impersonal Night of drives, and not, in the very kernel of its being, this Night itself; afterwards, the very impact of psychoanalysis transformed artistic literary practice (Eugene O'Neill’s plays, for example, already presuppose psychoanalysis, whereas Henry James, Katherine Mansfield and even Kafka do not). It is also within this horizon that du Maurier moves- this space of the heroic innocence of the Unconscious in which irresistible passions freely roam around. There is one term that encapsulates everything that renders this space-and du Maurier’s writing itself-so problematic for contemporary feminism: feminine masochism. What du Maurier stages again and again in a shamelessly direct way is the different figure of 'feminine masochism’, of a woman enjoying her own ruin, finding a tortured satisfaction in her subjection and humiliation

http://ift.tt/2bPJVKT

Monday, 29 August 2016

fantasy is that which provides the basic coordinates of…‘reality’. …In order to fulfil this function, it has to remain hidden, it must exert its efficiency in the background

http://ift.tt/2c10ylR

Fantasy is far from being opposed to reality. Fantasy is that which provides the basic coordinates of what we experience as ‘reality’ (as Lacan puts it, 'everything we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy’)

http://ift.tt/2c5HwcU

Distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions) and refusal to take it seriously ends up in today’s conspiracy theories.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740601882318622720 http://ift.tt/2bVuqSa

Distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions) and refusal to take it seriously ends up in today’s conspiracy theories.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740601882318622720 http://ift.tt/2bVuqSa

My remaining hope is a very sad, pessimistic hope. The ruling system of ideology created such high democratic expectations that it cannot live up to them. Gradually, it will have to violate them. Once people are given certain rights, even if they are purely ideological, it’s difficult to take these rights from them. It won’t be easy to discipline people, to say, “No, we promised you too much.” If you combine this with likely future economic upheavals…. My worry is not the worry of many of my leftist friends, like, “Why are you dreaming about revolutions? The system will just go on.” No - I am almost tempted to say unfortunately, because unstable pre-revolutionary situations are not a holiday of history. They can be very unpleasant. But they will compel us to invent new political forms. In a couple of years, we will be literally forced to reinvent new ways

http://ift.tt/2c4OPBZ

the function of the obscene superego supplement of the (divine) Law is to mask this impotence of the big Other, and since Christianity REVEALS this impotence, it is, quite consequently, the first (and only) religion to radically leave behind the split between the official/public text and its obscene initiatic supplement: in it, there is no hidden untold story. In this precise sense, Christianity is the religion of Revelation: everything is revealed in it,

http://ift.tt/2c4hcA0

Sunday, 28 August 2016

what is revealed in Christianity is not just the entire content, but, more specifically, that THERE IS NOTHING - NO SECRET - TO BE REVEALED BEHIND IT

http://ift.tt/2c7uHSq

The second thing to note is how, while professing their solidarity with the poor, liberals encode culture war with an opposed class message: more often than not, their fight for multicultural tolerance and women’s rights marks the counter-position to the alleged intolerance, fundamentalism, and patriarchal sexism of the “lower classes.” The way to unravel this confusion is to focus on the mediating terms the function of which is to obfuscate the true lines of division. The way “modernization” is used in the recent ideological offensive is exemplary here: first, an abstract opposition is constructed between “modernizers” (those who endorse global capitalism in all its aspects, from economic to cultural) and “traditionalists” (those who resist globalization). Into this category of those-who-resist are then thrown all, from the traditional conservatives and populist Right to the “Old Left” (those who continue to advocate Welfare state, trade unions…). This categorization obviously does comprise an aspect of social reality

http://ift.tt/2buIw93

the wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism (“class struggle”) which overdetermines all others and thus serves as the “concrete universal” of the entire field. Feminist struggle can be articulated into a chain with the struggle for social emancipation of the lower classes, or it can (and it certainly does) function as an ideological tool of the upper-middle classes to assert their superiority over the “patriarchal and intolerant” lower classes; and class antagonism is as it were “doubly inscribed” here: it is the specific constellation of the class struggle itself which explains why the feminist struggle was appropriated by upper classes. (The same goes for racism: it is the dynamics of class struggle itself which explains why direct racism is strong among the lowest white workers.) The third thing to take note of is the fundamental difference between feminist/anti-racist/anti-sexist etc. struggle and class struggle: in the first case, the goal is to translate antagonism into difference (“peaceful” coexistence of sexes, religions, ethnic groups), while the goal of the class struggle is precisely the opposite, i.e., to “aggravate” class difference into class antagonism. So what the series race-gender-class obfuscates is the different logic of the political space in the case of class: while the anti-racist and anti-sexist struggle are guided by the striving for the full recognition of the other, the class struggle aims at overcoming and subduing, annihilating even, the other - even if not a direct physical annihilation, class struggle aims at the annihilation of the other’s socio-political role and function. In other words, while it is logical to say that anti-racism wants all races to be allowed to freely assert and deploy their cultural, political and economic strivings, it is obviously meaningless to say that the aim of the proletarian class struggle is to allow the bourgeoisie to fully assert its identity and strivings… In one case, we have a “horizontal” logic of the recognition of different identities, while, in the other case, we have the logic of the struggle with an antagonist. The paradox here is that it is the populist fundamentalism which retains this logic of antagonism, while the liberal Left follows the logic of recognition of differences, of “defusing” antagonisms into co-existing differences: in their very form, the conservative-populist grass-roots campaigns took over the old Leftist-radical stance of the popular mobilization and struggle against upper-class exploitation. This unexpected reversal is just one in a long series. In today’s US, the traditional roles of Democrats and Republicans are almost inverted: Republicans spend state money, thus generating record budget deficit, de facto build a strong federal state, and pursue a politics of global interventionism, while Democrats pursue a tough fiscal politics that, under Clinton, abolished budget deficit. Even in the touchy sphere of socio-economic politics, Democrats (the same as with Blair in the UK) as a rule accomplish the neoliberal agenda of abolishing the Welfare State, lowering taxes, privatizing, etc., while Bush proposed a radical measure of legalizing the status of the millions of illegal Mexican workers and made healthcare much more accessible to the retired. The extreme case is here that of the survivalist groups in the West of the US: although their ideological message is that of religious racism, their entire mode of organization (small illegal groups fighting FBI and other federal agencies) makes them an uncanny double of the Black Panthers from the 1960s. We should thus not only refuse the easy liberal contempt for the populist fundamentalists (or, even worse, the patronizing regret of how “manipulated” they are); we should reject the very terms of the culture war. Although, of course, as to the positive content of most of the debated issues, a radical Leftist should support the liberal stance (for abortion, against racism and homophobia…), one should never forget that it is the populist fundamentalist, not the liberal, who is, in the long term, our ally. In all their anger, the populists are not angry enough - not radical enough to perceive the link between capitalism and the moral decay they deplore

http://ift.tt/2bSk31m

far from cheerfully assuming the inexistence of the big Other, the subject blames the Other for its failure and/or impotence, as if the Other is guilty for the fact that it doesn’t exist, i.e. as if impotence is no excuse. The more the subject’s structure is “narcissistic,” the more he blames the big Other, and thus asserts his dependence on it. The “culture of complaint” thus calls on the big Other to intervene, and to set things straight (to recompense the damaged sexual or ethnic minority, etc., although how exactly this is to be done is a matter of different ethico-legal “committees”). The specific feature of the “culture of complaint” lies in its legalistic twist, in the endeavor to translate the complaint into the legal obligation of the Other (usually the State) to indemnify one for what? For the very unfathomable surplus-enjoyment of which I am deprived, whose lack makes me feel deprivileged. Thus, is not the “culture of complaint” today’s version of the hysterical impossible demand, addressed to the Other, which effectively wants to be rejected, since the subject grounds its existence in its complaint:“I am insofar as I make the Other responsible and/or guilty for my misery”?

http://ift.tt/2bJvF6l

the growth of “conspiracy theories” as a form of popular “cognitive mapping” seem to counter the retreat of the big Other. These phenomena cannot be simply dismissed as “regressive,” as new modes of “escape from freedom,” as unfortunate “remainders of the past” which will disappear if only we continue more resolutely on the deconstructionist path of historicisation of every fixed identity, of unmasking the contingency of every naturalized self-image. Rather, these disturbing phenomena compel us to elaborate the contours of the big Other’s retreat: The paradoxical result of this mutation in the “inexistence of the Other” (of the growing collapse of the symbolic efficiency) is precisely the re-emergence of the different facets of a big Other which exists effectively

http://ift.tt/2bJeeTF

Saturday, 27 August 2016

the awareness that there is no hidden content, makes [a woman] even more enigmatic.

Slavoj Zizek on the femme fatale in detective novels and noir films (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2c55iJh

we are not directly ourselves, we play the role of ourselves, we imitate a fiction of what we are. … the big Other is this agency of social rules … which confers on everything we do a minimal aspect of theatricality … our desire is always … mediated by the Other (the symbolic texture which provides the scripts for possible desires)

slavoj zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bIuBBx

Why is Christianity opposed to sexuality? Not because in sexuality our lower nature explodes, but because sexuality competes with pure spirituality as the primordial metaphysical activity.

Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing, p441 (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bWhmcI

all our attempts to generate new meanings are ..a form of ..a longing to regain the lost ..Thing.

Slavoj Zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bYYslg

in sexuality, man’s object is ..the fantasy..to which no actual woman can ever correspond..(..sublime infatuation). ..The ..actual woman in her uniqueness is annihilated.

Slavoj Zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bIFpea

Friday, 26 August 2016

the awareness that there is no hidden content, makes [a woman] even more enigmatic. He desperately clings to the conviction that, behind the cold manipulative surface, there must be a heart of gold to be saved, […] and that her cold manipulative approach is just a kind of defensive strategy.

Slavoj Zizek on the femme fatale in detective novels and noir films (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bNBbEi

reconciliation is not an overcoming of alienation, but a reconciliation with alienation itself.

slavoj zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bEKeIn

Desire desires desiring itself

Less Than Nothing - SLAVOJ ZIZEK, borrowing from NIETZSCHE (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bp8CyV

melancholia is not that you lose the object; you have the object but you lose the cause of desire. Everything is here, you lose desire for it.

s. zizek, twitter.com/extimacy (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bMK9CY

sexuality can infect everything: not because it is “the strongest” component in people’s lives, exerting a hegemony over all other components, but because it is the one most radically thwarted in its actualization

LESS THAN NOTHING - SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bpM9gf

Thursday, 25 August 2016

in sexuality, man’s object is ..the fantasy..to which no actual woman can ever correspond..(..sublime infatuation). ..The ..actual woman in her uniqueness is annihilated.

Slavoj Zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bKQAFs

Kafka is a ‘writer of absence’, describing a world that remains religious in its structure but in which the central place belonging to God is empty.

less than nothing - S. Zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bmDbjz

Far from being suicidal, far from indicating a desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a hold on reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) to ground the ego firmly in bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as nonexistent.

(via slavoj–zizek) http://ift.tt/2bjO74S

The problem of our ..era is not that we cannot remember the past, ..but that we cannot remember the present itself - that we cannot ..narrate it properly.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bJOeGR

Wednesday, 24 August 2016

fantasy provides the frame which enables us to experience the real of our lives as a meaningful Whole – the disintegration of a fantasy can have disastrous consequences.

s. zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bjtozQ

in love, I also am nothing, but as it were a Nothing humbly aware of itself, … made rich through the very awareness of its lack.

s. zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bX5IB3

The idea of the fatal woman possesses you totally. What, ultimately, this image, fascinating image of the fatal woman stands for is death. … The ultimate abyss is not a physical abyss, but the abyss of the depth of another person. … when you see … into his or her eyes, you see the abyss. That’s the true spiral which is drawing us in.

Slavoj Zizek on the eyes as “windows to the soul,” pervert’s guide to cinema (via sinthematica) http://ift.tt/2bCvACV

The reassuring lesson of fantasy is that “I was brought about with a special purpose”. At the end of treatment, instead of being bothered of what I am for the others, I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being. The subject becomes ‘cause of itself’ no longer looking for a guarantee of his or her existence in another’s desire.

http://ift.tt/1kNuZLI (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bOgSFH

no matter how passionately we act, our desire is always a desire of the Other, mediated by the Other (the symbolic texture which provides the scripts for possible desires); we are not directly ourselves, we play the role of ourselves, we imitate a fiction of what we are.

Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing, Suture & Pure Difference (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bW4VQO

Tuesday, 23 August 2016

You see, now, you’ve discovered the real secret: beyond the door is only what your desire introduces there.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on A possible way for the doorkeeper in Kafka’s novel to answer the question “why do you pretend to guard the entrance to some enormous secret, when ..there is no secret beyond the door” (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bf6pV2

Desire is caught in the logic of “this is not that,” while love as authentic sublimation fully accepts that “this is that”.

Slavoj Zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bTugLk

the idiot for whom I endeavour to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself. ..Two idiots, two average men, … stand for the inherent imbecility of the big Other

s. zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2by5Xie

“God is unconscious”. … To be an atheist, it is no longer sufficient to declare that one “doesn’t believe (in God)”, since the true site of my beliefs is not my conscious acts, but the unconscious. This, of course, does not mean the psychological claptrap that “even if I try to deny God, deep in myself I continue to believe” - the unconscious is not “deep in me”, it is out there, in my … interactions.

Zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bDLo7t

I’m telling myself, “No, I’m not yet writing. I’m just putting down ideas.” Then, at a certain point, I tell myself, “Everything is already there. Now I just have to edit it.”

slavoj zizek (via nonschool) http://ift.tt/2bLutNG

Monday, 22 August 2016

I think the discourse of political correctness hides extreme violence.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via nonschool) http://ift.tt/2brmdV6

Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it.

“Happiness is for opportunists. ..Happiness is a category of slaves.” ZIZEK (via slavoj–zizek) http://ift.tt/2bys2iD

The psychoanalyst reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via slavoj–zizek) http://ift.tt/2bv0gSf

love occurs when the loving subject discovers that the treasure in the beloved is just a deceiving fetish, that the true treasure is the fragile beloved

slavoj zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2bc3RbV

Sunday, 21 August 2016

sex is ..a desperate ..measure aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on this netherworld which is not about anything forbidden or crazy, but is simply the netherworld of existence, of being alive and being unable to know how to respond to this aliveness. (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2buBzqW

Perhaps, the opposition of Lynch’s “straight” hero and Highsmith’s “normal” Ripley determines the extreme coordinates of today’s late capitalist ethical experience - with the strange twist that it is Ripley who is uncannily “normal,” and the “straight” man who is uncannily weird, even perverted. How, then, are we to break out of this deadlock? Both heroes have in common the ruthless dedication to pursue their goal, so the way out may seem to be to abandon this common feature and plea for a more “warm,” compassionate humanity ready to accept compromises. Is, however, such a “soft” (in short: unprincipled) “humanity” not the predominant mode of subjectivity today, so that the two films merely provide its two extremes? -…The figure the Lynchean “straight” man who pursues his goal with the cunning resourcefulness of Tom Ripley.

http://ift.tt/2bunDgT

Highsmith’s Ripley is in a way disconnected from the reality of flesh, disgusted at the Real of life, of its cycle of generation and corruption. Marge, Dickie’s girlfriend, provides an adequate characterization of Ripley: “All right, he may not be queer. He’s just a nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life.” Insofar as such coldness characterizes a certain radical lesbian stance, one is tempted to claim that, rather than being a closet gay, the paradox of Ripley is that he is a male lesbian. This disengaged coldness that persists…beneath all possible shifting identities gets somehow lost in the film. The true enigma of Ripley is why he persists in this shuddering coldness, retaining a psychotic disengagement from any passionate human attachment, even after he reaches his goal and recreates himself as the respectable art-dealer living in the rich Paris suburb.

http://ift.tt/2bab4re

the film “gatsbyizes” Ripley into a new version of the American hero who recreates his identity in a murky way. What gets lost here is best exemplified by the crucial difference between the novel and the film: in the film, Ripley has the stirrings of a conscience, while in the novel, the qualms of conscience are simply beyond his grasp. This is why the making-explicit of Ripley’s gay desires in the film also misses the point. Minghella implies that, back in the ies, Highsmith had to be more circumspect to make the hero palatable to the large public, while today we can say things in a more overt way. However, Ripley’s coldness is not the surface effect of his gay stance, but rather the other way round

http://ift.tt/2b9ZSYe

All the talk about Tom’s homosexuality is here misplaced: Dickie is for Tom not the object of his desire, but the ideal desiring subject, the transferential subject “supposed to know /how to desire/.” In short, Dickie becomes for Tom his ideal ego, the figure of his imaginary identification: when he repeatedly casts a coveting side-glance at Dickie, he does not thereby betray his erotic desire to engage in sexual commerce with him, to HAVE Dickie, but his desire to BE like Dickie. So, to resolve this predicament, Tom concocts an elaborated plan: on a boat trip, he kills Dickie and then, for some time, assumes his identity. Acting as Dickie, he organizes things so that, after Dickie’s “official” death, he inherits his wealth

http://ift.tt/2bElsWk

Saturday, 20 August 2016

Nowhere in his work is there any trace of what Lacan called the “narcissism of the lost cause”, displayed by those who cannot wait for the revolution to fail so that they might admire and bemoan it. This is what made Lenin the politician of the th century - the century of the passion of the real. As Alain Badiou has said, whereas the th century was characterised by utopian or ‘scientific’ projects and ideals which were to be fulfilled in the future, the th aimed at delivering the thing itself, at realising the longed-for New Order. The ultimate and defining experience of the th century was the direct experience of the real as distinct from everyday social reality - the real, in its extreme violence, is the price to be paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality. Recalling the trenches of the first world war, Ernst Jünger celebrated face-to-face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression, whether in the form of an encounter with the Lacanian real - the thing Antigone confronts when she violates the order of the city - or of Bataillean excess. In the domain of sexuality, the icon of this passion of the real is Oshima’s Ai No Corrida, in which the couple’s love is radicalised into mutual torture and eventually death - a clear echo of Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Another

http://ift.tt/2b912no

Lenin realises that the main task for the Bolsheviks is to meet the responsibilities of a progressive bourgeois regime (the universal provision of education and so on). However, the fact that the agent of development is proletarian revolutionary power changes the situation fundamentally: there is a chance that these measures will be implemented in such a way as to throw off their bourgeois ideological framework - education will serve the people, rather than being a mask for the promotion of bourgeois class interests.

http://ift.tt/2br7kPO

In his writings of 1917, Lenin saves his most acerbic irony for those who engage in a vain search for some kind of guarantee for the revolution, either in the guise of a reified notion of social necessity (“it’s too early for the socialist revolution, the working class isn’t yet mature”), or of a normative, democratic legitimacy (“the majority of the population isn’t on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic”).

http://ift.tt/2bqVi8Z

In 1914, an entire world disappeared, taking with it not only the bourgeois faith in progress, but the socialist movement that accompanied it. Lenin (the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) felt the ground fall away from beneath his feet - there was, in his desperate reaction, no sense of satisfaction, no desire to say “I told you so.” At the same time, the catastrophe made possible the key Leninist Event: the overcoming of the evolutionary historicism of the Second International. The kernel of the Leninist ‘utopia’ - the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state and invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police force or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of social matters - arises directly from the ashes of . It wasn’t a theoretical project for some distant future: in October , Lenin claimed that “we can at once set in motion a state apparatus

Seize the day Lenins legacy - The Guardian - SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2bKy1Tc

“metaphorical meaning of the Titanic is nothing but an attempt to escape this terrifying impact of the Thing,” https://t.co/fbXRUZ6pOA

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740025441067651072 http://ift.tt/2bKlEqu

Friday, 19 August 2016

“enjoyment, in its stupidity, is possible only on the basis of certain non-knowledge, ignorance.” https://t.co/ecuCohxEBQ

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740023679308955648 http://ift.tt/2baFNmI

“access to knowledge is then paid with the loss of enj oyment” https://t.co/EtqW1F8euy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740023610790817792 http://ift.tt/2bE4iJy

“it is Ripley who is uncannily "normal,” and the “straight” man who is uncannily weird, even perverted.“ https://t.co/Wm1p41HrA5

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740022466345635840 http://ift.tt/2b65u5J

“Ripley’s coldness is not the surface effect of his gay stance, but rather the other way round.” https://t.co/1vWQoWtcQ9

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740021297783144448 http://ift.tt/2bn30mD

Zizek on western buddhism “a vague feel-good spiritualism without any SPECIFIC obligations:” https://t.co/J4XBej6MYY

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740020752292970496 http://ift.tt/2bDmAuH

Thursday, 18 August 2016

“normality is the special form of psychosis - of not being traumatically caught in the symbolic cobweb,” https://t.co/M896mYN61z

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740020432770727936 http://ift.tt/2bqgGjh

the sadistic pervert gives body to the Will-to-Enjoy, which torments the victim in order to obtain the fullness of being. Lacan’s thesis is, therefore, that this manifest relationship conceals another latent relation, which contains the truth of the first one. This other relation, the object-cause of desire to the split subject, is represented in the lower level of the scheme. The sadist as aggressive Will-to-Enjoyment is but a semblance

http://ift.tt/2b7MhTq

The notion of a politics which would not have been a series of mere pragmatic interventions, but the politics of Truth, is dismissed as “totalitarian.” The breaking out of this deadlock, the reassertion of a politics of Truth today, should take the form of a return to Lenin. Why Lenin, why not simply Marx? Is the proper return not the return to origins proper? Today, “returning to Marx” is already a minor academic fashion. Which Marx do we get in these returns? On the one hand, the Cultural Studies Marx, the Marx of the postmodern sophists, of the Messianic promise; on the other hand, the Marx who foretold the dynamic of today’s globalization and is as such evoked even on Wall Street. What these both Marxes have in common is the denial of politics proper

http://ift.tt/2bMFfaN

unconditional will [means] to intervene into the situation, not in the pragmatic sense of “adjusting the theory to the realistic claims through necessary compromises,” but, on the contrary, in the sense of dispelling all opportunistic compromises, of adopting the unequivocal radical position from which it is only possible to intervene in such a way that our intervention changes the coordinates of the situation. The contrast is here clear with regard to today’s Third Way “postpolitics,” which emphasizes the need to leave behind old ideological divisions and to confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert knowledge and free deliberation that takes into account concrete people’s needs and demands

http://ift.tt/2biXGAJ

The only way out of this debilitating deadlock is for Europe to resuscitate its legacy of radical and universal emancipation. The task is to move beyond mere tolerance of others to a positive emancipatory Leitkultur, which can only sustain authentic co-existence and immixing of different cultures, and to engage in the forthcoming battle for Leitkultur. Don’t just respect others—offer then a common struggle, since our problem today are common.

http://ift.tt/2bwhvTJ

A Hilton hotels ad consists of a simple claim: “Travel doesn’t only get us from A to B. It should also make us a better person.” Can one even imagine such an ad a decade ago? … Capitalism has integrated the legacy of 1968, the critique of alienated consumption: authentic experience matters.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2beUgQj

Wednesday, 17 August 2016

death drive is the morbid attachment to some obscure jouissance which entraps the subject in the self-destructive vicious cycle

http://ift.tt/2bCUX70

People like to identify themselves. “I can be stupid but I’m still at the top. The wiseguy is my vice, he is doing all the dirty jobs for me.” There is something appealing in this, I think. Again, my basic position is drop the point that people want to know; people don’t want to know. I’m not engaged in any conservative psychology of, you know, “People prefer ignorance, it’s only for us, the evolutionary or spiritual elite to lead them.” I’m not saying this is an eternal fact. I’m just describing how specifically today’s ideology works

http://ift.tt/2bfIcgR

Liberal multiculturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face https://t.co/YwPdqgtZeY

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739500867502657536 http://ift.tt/2b5ghPE

Every side pretends to fight Isis in order to hit" enemies other than Isis, says Zizek

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2b1W4eX

The deal on refugees between the EU and Turkey, announced at the end of November 2015 – Turkey will curb the flow of refugees into Europe in exchange for generous financial help, initially of 3 billion Euro – is a shamelessly disgusting act, a proper ethico-political catastrophe. Is this how the ‘war on terror’ is to be conducted, by succumbing to the Turkish blackmail and rewarding one of the main culprits of the rise of ISIS in Syria? The opportunistic-pragmatic justification of this deal is clear (bribing Turkey is the most obvious way to limit the flow of refugees), but the long-term consequences will be catastrophic.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2bCeh43

how does a totalitarian power keep you in check, hold you? By offering you some perverse enjoyment, and you have to renounce that, and it hurts, liberation hurts

http://ift.tt/2byi282

The failure of the symbolic induces the subject to cling to imaginary simulacra, to sensual spectacles

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739078495746314240 http://ift.tt/2aZxNCZ

Tuesday, 16 August 2016

What is unconscious is, at its most radical, not the wealth of illicit “repressed” desires but the fundamental Law itself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739078164182388736 http://ift.tt/2aTjBjF

the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, its very formation is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739077991762919425 http://ift.tt/2bgwYqg

should Muslims (mostly immigrant workers from the old Yugoslav republics) be allowed to build a mosque? While conservatives opposed the mosque for cultural, political and even architectural reasons, the liberal weekly journal Mladina was consistently outspoken in its support for the mosque, in keeping with its concern for the rights of those from other former Yugoslav republics. Not surprisingly, given its liberal attitudes, Mladina was also one of the few Slovenian publications to reprint the infamous caricatures of Muhammad. And, conversely, those who displayed the greatest “understanding” for the violent Muslim protests those cartoons caused were also the ones who regularly expressed their concern for the fate of Christianity in Europe. These weird alliances confront Europe’s Muslims with a difficult choice: the only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the “godless” atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies. The paradox is that Muslims’ only real allies are not those who first published the caricatures for shock value, but those who, in support of the ideal of freedom of expression, reprinted them. While a true atheist has no need to boost his own stance by provoking believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the problem of the Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other’s beliefs. Respect for other’s beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple “regimes of truth,” disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth. What, however, about submitting Islam — together with all other religions — to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

http://ift.tt/2bEe2qv

the Army community itself relies on a thwarted/disavowed homosexuality as the key component of the soldiers’ male-bonding.

http://ift.tt/2bvNm7m

Alienation means (also) that distance is included into the very social texture: even if I live side by side with others, the normal state is to ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others; I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external “mechanical” rules, without sharing their “inner world” - and, perhaps, the lesson to be learned is that, sometimes, a dose of alienation is indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life. Sometimes, alienation is not a problem but a solution.What

http://ift.tt/2bfvhcC

Monday, 15 August 2016

the contemporary ‘politically correct’ liberal attitude which perceives itself as surpassing the limitations of its ethnic identity (‘citizen of the world’ without anchors in any particular ethnic community), functions, within its own society, as a narrow elitist upper-middle-class circle clearly opposing itself to the majority of common people, despised for being caught in their narrow ethnic or community confines.

http://ift.tt/2aZtJod

Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures—the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.

http://ift.tt/2biHSQQ

in contrast to the ‘nationalization of the ethnic’—the de-ethnicization, the ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung) of the ethnic into the national—we are now dealing with the ‘ethnicization of the national’, with a renewed search for (or reconstitution of) ‘ethnic roots’.

http://ift.tt/2btJfti

in order to be ‘a good American’, one does not have to renounce one’s ethnic roots—Italians, Germans, Blacks, Jews, Greeks, Koreans, they are ‘all Americans’, that is, the very particularity of their ethnic identity, the way they ‘stick to it’, makes them Americans. This transubstantiation by means of which the tension between my particular ethnic identity and my universal identity as a member of a Nation-State is surpassed, is threatened today: it is as if the positive charge of pathetic patriotic identification with the universal frame of the American Nation-State has been seriously eroded; ‘Americanness’, the fact of ‘being American’, less and less gives rise to the sublime effect of being part of a gigantic ideological project—‘the American dream’—so that the American state is more and more experienced as a simple formal framework for the coexistence of the multiplicity of ethnic, religious or life-style communities. Modernism in Reverse   This gradual collapse—or, rather, loss of substance—of the ‘American dream’ bears witness to the unexpected reversal of the passage from primary to secondary identification described by Hegel: in our ‘postmodern’ societies, the ‘abstract’ institution of secondary identification is increasingly experienced as an external, purely formal frame that is not really binding, so that one is more and more looking for support in ‘primordial’, usually smaller (ethnic, religious) forms of identification. Even when these forms of identification are more ‘artificial’ than national identification—as is the case with the gay community—they are more ‘immediate’ in the sense of seizing the individual directly and overwhelmingly, in his specific ‘way of life’

http://ift.tt/2bv4M6J

Screw ideology. Screw movie analyses. What really interests me is the following insight: if you look at the very core of psychoanalytic theory, of which even Freud was not aware, it’s properly read death drive - this idea of beyond the pleasure principle, self-sabotaging, etc.

http://ift.tt/2byLYoq

Sunday, 14 August 2016

Adorno and Horkheimer’s formal logic was correct. The whole project in The Dialectic of Enlightenment is “let’s paint the ultimate outcome of the administered world as unavoidable, as catastrophe, for this is the only way to effectively counteract it.” Adorno and Horkheimer had the right insight; I agree with their formal procedure

http://ift.tt/2aTmuwe

Did you see that wonderful melodrama, Stella Dallas, with Barbara Stanwyck? She has a daughter who wants to marry into the upper class, but she is an embarrassment to her daughter. So, the mother - on purpose - plays an extremely vulgar, promiscuous mother in front of her daughter’s lover, so that the daughter can drop her without guilt. The daughter can be furious with her and marry the rich guy. That’s a more difficult sacrifice. It’s not, “I will make a big sacrifice and remain deep in their heart.” No, in making the sacrifice, you risk your reputation itself. Is this an extreme case? No, I think every good parent should do this.

http://ift.tt/2brbtVo

Dirty jokes are ambiguous. On the one hand, of course, I’m well aware they can be racist, sexist, and so on. On the other hand,..what’s the trick? Humor. It’s a kind of dialectical double reversal. And this is when they really admit you. That somehow you can return to the worst starting point, racist jokes and so on, but they function no longer as racist, but as a kind of obscene solidarity. To give you an extremely vulgar example, I met a big, black guy, and when we became friends, I went into it like, [assuming a naïve, awe-filled whisper] “Is it true that you have, you know [makes gesture signifying a gigantic penis]?” and (this is a racist myth I heard in Europe) “Is it true that you blacks can control your muscles so that when you walk with a half erection and there is a fly here you can BAM! [slaps thigh] snap it with your penis?” We became terribly close friends! Now, I’m well aware of how risky these waters are, because if you do it in the wrong context, in the wrong way, I’m well aware that this is racism.

http://ift.tt/2brphhS

harassment - is construed as oppressive. Incidentally, the only way to react to excessive political correctness, I claim, is propagating dirty jokes.

http://ift.tt/2bqNpSF

we have what right wingers usually refer to as a liberal, extreme narcissism, this “culture of complaint,” or, “culture of victimization.”

http://ift.tt/2b8LMHu

Saturday, 13 August 2016

How would you defend yourself against charges that you are promoting terrorism or romanticizing revolutionary violence? Žižek: Such charges may be a below-the-belt blow. Believe me, from my personal experience, coming from an ex-socialist country, I know very well the misery of living in a post-revolutionary society.

http://ift.tt/2b76FCK

universe is thus in a sense more “open” than the universe of science: It implies the gateway into the indefinite Beyond, while the direct global model of the mod- ern science is effectively “closed,” i.e., it allows for no Beyond. The universe of modern science, in its very “meaninglessness,” involves the gesture of “going through fantasy,” of abolishing the dark spot, the domain of the Unexplained which harbors fantasies and thus guarantees Meaning: Instead of it, we get the meaningless mechanism.

http://ift.tt/2aKqKD4

for Heidegger, modern sci- ence stands for the metaphysical “danger”: It poses a threat to the universe of meaning. There is no meaning without some dark spot, without some forbidden/impenetrable domain into which we project fantasies which guarantee our horizon of meaning. Perhaps, this very growing disenchantment of our ac- tual social world accounts for the fascination exerted by cyber- space: It is as if, in it, we encounter again a Limit beyond which the mysterious domain of the fantasmatic Otherness opens up, as if the screen of the interface is today’s version of the blank, of the unknown region

http://ift.tt/2aUuJu1

That is to say, why was the Christian injunction “love thy neighbor like thyself” so problematic for Freud? The proximity of the Other which makes a neighbor a neighbor is that of jouissance: When the presence of the Other becomes unbearable, suffocating, it means that we experience his or her mode of jouissance as too intrusive. And, what is the contempo- rary “postmodern” racism, if not a violent reaction to this virtual- ization of the Other, a return of the experience of the neighbor in his or her (or their) intolerable, traumatic presence? The fea- ture which disturbs the racist in his Other (the way they laugh, the smell of their food …) is thus precisely the little piece of the real which bears witness to their presence beyond the symbolic order. We are thus far from bemoaning the loss of the contact with a “real,” flesh-and-blood other in cyberspace, in which all we en- counter are digital phantoms: Our point is rather that cyber- space is not spectral enough.

http://ift.tt/2aSNDFJ

virtualization cancels the distance between a neighbor and a distant foreigner, insofar as it suspends the presence of the Other in the massive weight of the Real:

http://ift.tt/2aQVNIk

Friday, 12 August 2016

Either America will persist in, strengthen even, the deeply immoral attitude of “Why should this happen to us? Things like this don’t happen HERE!”, leading to more aggressivity towards the threatening Outside, in short: to a paranoiac acting out. Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world, making the long-overdued move from “A thing like this should not happen HERE!” to “A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!”. Therein resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only way to ensure that it will not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE ELSE.

http://ift.tt/2aSTaaV

this notion of the “clash of civilizations” has to be thoroughly rejected: what we are witnessing today are rather clashes WITHIN each civilization. Furthermore, a brief look at the comparative history of Islam and Christianity tells us that the “human rights record” of Islam (to use this anachronistic term) is much better than that of Christianity: in the past centuries, Islam was significantly more tolerant towards other religions than Christianity. NOW it is also the time to remember that it was through the Arabs that, in the Middle Ages, we in the Western Europe regained access to our Ancient Greek legacy. While in no way excusing today’s horror acts, these facts nonetheless clearly demonstrate that we are not dealing with a feature inscribed into Islam “as such”

http://ift.tt/2bdKuzz

Recall the phenomenon of “cutters” (mostly women who experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with razors or otherwise hurt themselves), strictly correlative to the virtualization of our environs: it stands for a desperate strategy to return to the real of the body. As such, cutting is to be contrasted with the standard tattoo inscriptions on the body, which guarantee the subject’s inclusion in the (virtual) symbolic order — with the cutters, the problem is the opposite one, namely the assertion of reality itself. Far from being suicidal, far from signalling a desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) to firmly ground our ego in our bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existing. The standard report of cutters is that, after seeing the red warm blood flowing out of the self-inflicted wound, the feel alive again, firmly rooted in reality. So, although, of course, cutting is a pathological phenomenon, it is nonetheless a pathological attempt at regaining some kind of normalcy, at avoiding a total psychotic breakdown.

http://ift.tt/2aIrdW5

“Communicating via e-mail” is “a situation of Hysteria. There is actually a great deal of uncertainty” in such communication, Zizek says.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738392858290446337 http://ift.tt/2b4iwnl

The only way to stick out, the only support you can find, is to stick to your particular way of enjoyment, which then involves you in this racial paranoia, of course. You formulate your identity on the fantasy that the Other is the one who automatically wants to steal from you. These are the two basic fantasies: one is that the Other wants to steal from us our precious enjoyment, usually the fantasy behind the racist idea of David Duke-blacks, others, they want to ruin the American way of life. The other idea, like with the Jew, is that the Other possesses some kind of excessive and strange enjoyment, which is in itself a threat to us

http://ift.tt/2bnNBBe

Thursday, 11 August 2016

racism is a kind of reaction to this universal field of the signifier, the only way to not be dissolved and lost in this universality. The only way to stick out, the only support you can find, is to stick to your particular way of enjoyment, which then involves you in this racial paranoia, of course.

http://ift.tt/2aQ9kSq

What is the Thatcherist dream? It is that by hard work you win; luck is around the corner. Now of course the leftist Labor Party counteroffensive said that this is an illusion, only a few of us might get rich; the majority of us won’t get rich. But they missed the point, because the identification that Thatcher’s discourse gave you was not that you would actually become rich, but, rather, the discourse gave you the opportunity to identify yourself as the one who might get rich next

http://ift.tt/2bldbK8

Adorno and Horkheimer’s formal logic was correct. The whole project in The Dialectic of Enlightenment is “let’s paint the ultimate outcome of the administered world as unavoidable, as catastrophe, for this is the only way to effectively counteract it.” Adorno and Horkheimer had the right insight; I agree with their formal procedure

http://ift.tt/2bm4E6J

Did you see that wonderful melodrama, Stella Dallas with Barbara Stanwyck? She has a daughter who wants to marry into the upper class, but she is an embarrassment to her daughter. So, the mother - on purpose - played an extremely vulgar, promiscuous mother in front of her daughter’s lover, so that the daughter could drop her, without guilt. The daughter could be furious with her and marry the rich guy. That’s a more difficult sacrifice. It’s not “I will make a big sacrifice and remain deep in their heart.” No, in making the sacrifice, you risk your reputation itself. Is this an extreme case? No, I think every good parent should do this.

http://ift.tt/2aOw86d

men who actually perform rapes do not fantasize about raping women – on the contrary, they fantasize about being gentle, about finding a loving partner; rape is rather a violent passage a l’acte emerging from their incapacity to find such a partner in real life

(via slavoj-zizek) http://ift.tt/2b1NPPq

Wednesday, 10 August 2016

melancholy stands for the presence of the object itself deprived of our desire for it – melancholy occurs when we finally get the desired object, but are disappointed at it. In this precise sense, melancholy (disappointment at all positive, empirical objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) effectively is the beginning of philosophy. Say, a person who, all his life, was used to live in a certain city and is finally compelled to move elsewhere, is, of course, saddened by the prospect of being thrown into a new environment – however, what is it that effectively makes him sad? It is not the prospect of leaving the place which was for long years his home, but the much more subtle fear of losing his very attachment to this place. What makes me sad is the fact that I am aware that, sooner or later – sooner than I am ready to admit -, I will integrate myself into a new community, forgetting the place which now means to me so much. In short, what makes me sad is the awareness that I will lose my desire for (what is now) my home.

http://ift.tt/2bhU8Se

Recall the proverbial example of a severe sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture; his excuse to himself (and to others) is: “I myself find it hard to exert such pressure on the poor kids, but what can I do - it’s my duty!” This is what psychoanalytic ethics thoroughly forbids: in it, I am fully responsible not only for doing my duty, but no less for determining what my duty is.

http://ift.tt/2aNmcZz

reject any reference to duty as an excuse: “I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty..,” Kant’s ethics of unconditional duty is often taken as justifying such an attitude - no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kantian ethics when he tried to justify his role in planning and executing the holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Fuhrer’s orders. However, the aim of Kant’s emphasis on the subject’s full moral autonomy and responsibility is precisely to prevent any such maneuver

http://ift.tt/2aKZkYz

sex is “traumatic in its breath-taking intensity, something impossible in the sense that we cannot ever make sense of it,” Zizek writes.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738038486284935168 http://ift.tt/2aH0wg4

sexuality is in the domain of the Lacanian Real as there is “something traumatic in its breath-taking intensity”, Slavoj Zizek writes.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738037993630502912 http://ift.tt/2bjcIFy

Tuesday, 9 August 2016

Since sexuality is the domain in which we get most close to the intimacy of another human being,…sexual enjoyment is real

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738037408881606656 http://ift.tt/2aY3pvy

sexuality is the domain in which we get most close to the intimacy of another human being totally exposing ourselves https://t.co/UEaF1o4CN7

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738036611007582209 http://ift.tt/2b1gSRz

an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my neighbor – the neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. The core of this presence, of course, is the neighbor’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the neighbor himself. For this reason, Lacan’s Che vuoi? is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable not only for us, but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?” The temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor – for example, what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. What Levinas obfuscates is the monstrosity of the neighbor, monstrosity on account of which Lacan applies to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King’s The Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. No wonder, then, that Judaism is also the religion of divine Law which regulates relations between people: this Law is strictly correlative to the emergence of the neighbor as the inhuman Thing. That is to say, the ultimate function of the Law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbor, to retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor.

http://ift.tt/2b6rcMu

Enjoyment is what serves nothing, and the great effort of today’s hedonist-utilitarian “permissive” society is to tame…this excess

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737681813460647936 http://ift.tt/2bcmfyZ

the consumerist is calculating his pleasures, well protected from all kinds of harassments and other health threats

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737679462469410816 http://ift.tt/2aPtE8p

Monday, 8 August 2016

the jouisseur propre is ready to consummate his very existence in the deadly excess of enjoyment

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737679354696716288 http://ift.tt/2aHSGG2

the enlightened hedonist carefully calculates his pleasures to prolong his fun and avoid getting hurt

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737679235544961024 http://ift.tt/2b9wJlU

enjoyment is a deadly excess beyond pleasure, which is by definition moderate. https://t.co/31a80ukLTC

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737678778223230976 http://ift.tt/2bf41vS

The key decisions are negotiated in secret The political process deals with issues towards which capital is indifferent (like culture wars)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737678108434812928 http://ift.tt/2b8FNnM

we still implicitly conceive conflicts in the Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophies, as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions, or as conflicts based on the fanatic identification to one’s ethnic roots (and what is “the ethnic” here if not again a codeword for nature?)

http://ift.tt/2aMgEQL

Sunday, 7 August 2016

After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as “unreasonable” and unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse “reasonably” racist protective measures or, as today’s Brasillachs, some of them even Social Democrats, tell us: “We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and east European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant defensive measures is to organise a reasonable anti-immigrant protection.” This vision of the detoxification of one’s neighbour suggests a clear passage from direct barbarism to barbarism with a human face. It reveals the regression from the Christian love of one’s neighbour back to the pagan privileging of our tribe versus the barbarian Other.

http://ift.tt/2aFisun

political correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear https://t.co/YwPdqgtZeY

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737640041367908353 http://ift.tt/2aF73us

we entered a new era in which the predominant form of the exercise of state power became a depoliticised expert administration and the co-ordination of interests. The only way to introduce passion into this kind of politics, the only way to actively mobilise people, is through fear: the fear of immigrants, the fear of crime, the fear of godless sexual depravity, the fear of the excessive state (with its burden of high taxation and control), the fear of ecological catastrophe, as well as the fear of harassment (political correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear).

http://ift.tt/2aSPCXk

discrepancies between what you really are and what you appear to be in digital space can lead to murderous violence. https://t.co/IfgG9YTXA9

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737603412519321600 http://ift.tt/2aEjwNU

Foucault was adamantly opposed to this ethics of true self-expression: he strictly delimited his ethics of the subject’s self-construction from what he called the “Californian ethics” still subordinated to the truth regime-some expert or initiatic knowledge tells us “what we truly are” and thus impels us to realize our “true self.”

Slavoj Zizek http://ift.tt/1kWPDXl (via jujutsu-with-zizek) Omg… (via sinthematica) http://ift.tt/2aJ8sAF

Saturday, 6 August 2016

while professing their solidarity with the poor, liberals encode their culture war with an opposed class message. More often than not, their fight for multicultural tolerance and women’s rights marks the counter-position to the alleged intolerance, fundamentalism, and patriarchal sexism of the “lower classes.” One way to unravel this confusion is to focus on the mediating terms whose function is to obfuscate the true lines of division.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2b41rt8

The image does not represent the product; rather, the product represents the image.

We buy a product, an organic apple, ..because it represents the image of a healthy lifestyle. - SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2aQMURQ

Borderline is not a transition from a pre-psychotic condition to psychosis or the breakdown of the mask of the “pathological” Ego, which supposedly maintained the appearance of unity. On the contrary, it is the first step towards the “normalisation” of pathological Narcissus, a point in its hysterisation

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2aq3XfH

The reassuring… fantasy is that “I was brought about with a special purpose”

Slavoj Zizek (via lacanians) http://ift.tt/2aCWnQa

Friday, 5 August 2016

Instead of being bothered of what I am for the others, I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via lacanians) http://ift.tt/2aVqFeZ

The subject becomes ‘cause of itself’,..no longer looking for a guarantee of his or her existence in another’s desire.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via lacanians) http://ift.tt/2aAyEvG

The hysteric is able to enjoy..the lover only..insofar as it maintains a potential status..in the guise of fantasies about what “might have” happened.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via lacanians) http://ift.tt/2aoop0c

perversion can be a defense against the Real of death and sexuality, the contingent imposition of sexual difference

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737399359512432641 http://ift.tt/2azU1x8

virtualization cancels the distance between a neighbor and a distant foreigner, insofar as it suspends the presence of the Other in the massive weight of the Real: neighbors and foreigners, all are equal in their spectral screen-presence. That is to say, why was the Christian injunction “love thy neighbor like thyself” so problematic for Freud? The proximity of the Other which makes a neighbor a neighbor is that of jouissance: When the presence of the Other becomes unbearable, suffocating, it means that we experience his or her mode of jouissance as too intrusive. And, what is the contempo- rary “postmodern” racism, if not a violent reaction to this virtualization

http://ift.tt/2aGFGxF

Women are less of a danger once one jumps into their trap voluntarily. … Die Frauen verlieren ihre Gefährlichkeit, wenn man in eine Falle freiwillig hineinspringt.

KAFKA (via franz—-kafka) http://ift.tt/2aJt5uk

I said yes to everything. This is how one turns suffering into a magic force. Ich habe zu allem ja gesagt. So wird das Leid zum Zauber

Kafka (via franz—-kafka) http://ift.tt/2aXvEMr

How cruel is a god who lets it happen that we cannot recognize him. Wie grausam ist aber ein Gott, der zuläßt, daß seine Geschöpfe ihn nicht erkennen.

KAFKA (via franz—-kafka) http://ift.tt/2aJt5dO

Thursday, 4 August 2016

Death drive does NOT reside in Wagner’s heroes’ longing to die, to find peace in death: it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying - a name for.. life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain

http://ift.tt/2aBRGTV

the liberal critique of the “tyranny of the Good” comes at a price: the more its program permeates society, the more it turns into its opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser evil, once asserted as the principle of the new global order, gradually takes on the very features of the enemy it claims to oppose. In fact, the global liberal order clearly presents itself as the best of all possible worlds: its modest rejection of utopias ends with imposing its own market-liberal utopia which will become reality when we subject ourselves to the mechanisms of the market

http://ift.tt/2aMo4mb

egalitarian solidarity and equality of men&women is lacking in the Muslim “fundamentalism” no matter how anti-imperialist it pretends to be.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737344987181031424 http://ift.tt/2aRnQLJ

“so it is written” was the ultimate seal of authority, the presupposed.. meaning of the written text was the object of belief par exellence

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737331539676147713 http://ift.tt/2aLVAZV

“Plato’s critique of writing” aims “to deprive writing of its sacred character” https://t.co/5tCiO8E4K2

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737330765927731200 http://ift.tt/2awJl2c

Wednesday, 3 August 2016

Critchley’s (and Badiou’s) position not that of relying on the fact that someone else will assume the task of running the state machinery, enabling us to engage in the critical distance towards the state? Furthermore, if the space of emancipatory politics is defined by a distance towards the state, are we not abandoning the field (of the state) all too easily to the enemy? Is it not crucial WHAT form the state power has? Does this position not lead to the reduction of this crucial question to a secondary place: ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what kind of state we have?

http://ift.tt/2aTtzSS

writing was the monopoly of the ruling elite, its character was sacred, “so it is written” was the ultimate seal of authority, the presupposed mysterious meaning of the written text was the object of belief par

http://ift.tt/2auolZY

so many fundamentalist preachers turned out to be secret sexual perverts https://t.co/AnoOzbNsZB

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737326265112399872 http://ift.tt/2aRdM6F

the Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around itself. There is thus an element of truth even in the most constricted Moral Majority vision of the depraved America dedicated to mindless pleasures, in the conservative horror at this netherworld of sexploitation and pathological violence: what they don’t get is merely the Hegelian speculative identity between this netherworld and their own position of fake purity — the fact that so many fundamentalist preachers turned out to be secret sexual perverts

http://ift.tt/2atHUSn

it was through the Arabs that, in the Middle Ages, we in the Western Europe regained access to our Ancient Greek legacy. While in no way excusing today’s horror acts, these facts nonetheless clearly demonstrate that we are not dealing with a feature inscribed into Islam “as such,” but with the outcome of modern socio-political conditions. On a closer look, what IS this “clash of civilizations” effectively about? Are all real-life “clashes” not clearly related to global capitalism? The Muslim “fundamentalist” target is not only global capitalism’s corroding impact on social life, but ALSO the corrupted “traditionalist” regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. The most horrifying slaughters (those in Ruanda, Kongo, and Sierra Leone) not only took place — and are taking place — within the SAME “civilization,” but are also clearly related to the interplay of global economic interests. Even in the few cases which would vaguely fit the definition of the “clash of civilisations” (Bosnia and Kosovo, south of Sudan, etc.), the shadow of other interests is easily discernible.

http://ift.tt/2auP074

Every Narcissus is intrinsically convinced that he is an exception, an “outcast”. Externally, he respects the “rules of the game”, he is a conformist; in reality, he “does not take the game seriously”, he “plays it” only to escape punishment and become successful in society. The pathological narcissus is even convinced that everybody else does the same: life in society is a game, everybody wears a mask, everybody is a criminal hiding behind a conformist appearance and thinking only about how to exploit and trick other people

(via zizek-on-love) http://ift.tt/2b2v4u4

Tuesday, 2 August 2016

According to Kant, as I have already mentioned, the mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of individuals as well as of their merits: “The guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature (natura daedala rerum). In her mechanical course we see that her aim is to produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their discord.” And this is ideology at its purest. One can claim that the notion of ideology only became possible in the liberal universe, with its founding distinction between ordinary people immersed in their worlds of meaning - of (what appears from the properly modern perspective) the confusion between facts and values - and the cold, rational observers who are able to perceive the world the way it is, without moralistic prejudices, as a mechanism regulated by laws (of passions) like any other natural mechanism. It is only in this modern universe that society appears as an object of a possible experiment, as a chaotic field on which one can (and should) apply a value-free theory or science given in advance - a political “geometry of passions,” or economy, or racist science. Only this modern position of a value-free scientist approaching society in the same way as a natural scientist approaches nature, is ideology proper, not the spontaneous attitude of the meaningful experience of life dismissed by the scientist as a set of superstitious prejudices - it is ideology because it imitates the form of natural sciences without really being one.

http://ift.tt/2b1hLdC

Should Muslims (mostly immigrant workers from the old Yugoslav republics) be allowed to build a mosque? While conservatives opposed the mosque for cultural, political and even architectural reasons, the liberal weekly journal Mladina was consistently outspoken in its support for the mosque, in keeping with its concern for the rights of those from other former Yugoslav republics. Not surprisingly, given its liberal attitudes, Mladina was also one of the few Slovenian publications to reprint the infamous caricatures of Muhammad. And, conversely, those who displayed the greatest “understanding” for the violent Muslim protests those cartoons caused were also the ones who regularly expressed their concern for the fate of Christianity in Europe. These weird alliances confront Europe’s Muslims with a difficult choice: the only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the “godless” atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies. The paradox is that Muslims’ only real allies are not those who first published the caricatures for shock value, but those who, in support of the ideal of freedom of expression, reprinted them. While a true atheist has no need to boost his own stance by provoking believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the problem of the Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other’s beliefs. Respect for other’s beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple “regimes of truth,” disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth. What, however, about submitting Islam — together with all other religions — to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

http://ift.tt/2agtN5t

moral outrage emerges in order to find a precarious compromise between a host of inconsistent and opposed attitudes (sadism and masochism, attachment and rejection, blaming the other and feeling one’s own guilt).

http://ift.tt/2aQMKJK

After the disintegration of the large, all-encompassing, Leftist narratives of progress, when political activity dissolved into a multitude of identity-issues, the excess over this particular struggles can only find an outlet in impotent moralistic outrage.

http://ift.tt/2afMRB1

It is not only that…the Other’s jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance. The ultimate incompatibility is not between mine and other’s jouissance, but between myself and my own jouissance, which forever remains an ex-timate intruder. It is to resolve this deadlock that the subject projects the core of its jouissance onto an Other, attributing to this Other full access to a consistent jouissance. Such a constellation cannot but give rise to jealousy: In jealousy, the subject creates/imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded. The same definition applies to what one can call political jealousy, from the anti-Semitic fantasies about the mysterious practices and abilities of the Jews (which sometimes reach the level of madness, like the claim that Jewish men also menstruate) to the Christian fundamentalists’ fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians. As Klaus Theweleit, a scholar of fascist sociology, pointed out, it is all too easy to read such phenomena as mere “projections”: Jealousy can be quite real and well-founded; other people can and do have as much more intense sexual life than the jealous subject—a fact that, as Lacan remarked, doesn’t make jealousy any less pathological.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2axn9DU

Monday, 1 August 2016

the true conspiracy (of Power) consists in the very attempt to persuade subjects that they are victims of irrational, impenetrable forces,

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on ORSON WELLES’ version of KAFKA’s THE TRIAL (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2agBLHk

even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.

Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2aDFH7x