people who haven’t seen one actual refugee react aggressively to the very proposal of establishing a refugee center in their proximity; stories about incidents catch imagination, spread like wildfire and persist even after they are clearly proven false.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1MwOCHc

among the refugees are also terrorists, rapists, criminals, etc., but the vast majority are desperate people looking for a better life (in the same way that during the Cold War, among the refugees from the German Democratic Republic were hidden STASI agents). Among Europe’s xenophobes, however, this is given a paranoiac twist—immigrants appear (or pretend) to be desperate refugees, while in reality they are the spearheads of a new Islamic invasion of Europe. By way of this twist, the cause of problems that are immanent to today’s global capitalism is projected onto an external intruder: instead of refugees who are ultimately the victims of global capitalism, we get fundamentalist terrorists who threaten our way of life from outside.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1RyktGu

even if most of our prejudices about immigrants were proven to be true (they are hidden fundamentalist terrorists, they rape and they steal), the paranoiac talk about the immigrant threat is still an ideological pathology, it tells more about us, Europeans, than about immigrants. The true question is not “Are immigrants a real threat to Europe?” but “What does this obsession with the immigrant threat tell us about the weakness of Europe?”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1UkY4A2

rather than attacking the silent, low-class majority as racist and ignorant of the immigrants’ plight, or, at best, as stupid victims of racist big media propaganda, would not the truly humanitarian reaction be to address their actual concerns that express themselves in a racist way?

Slavoj Zizek - Stranger Danger To Resolve the Migrant Crisis We Must Recognize the Stranger Within Ourselves http://ift.tt/1WOXvMO

the humanitarian reaction almost imperceptibly transforms a political-economic problem into a moral one of “refugee crisis”

Zizek, on the danger of mixing politics with moralism http://ift.tt/1Rp0Mkl

Our very predominant reaction to the Muslim Otherness, keeping them at a distance (of hatred or respect), thereby helps the “threat” to become reality.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1RoOngh

the worst reaction to the racist anti-immigrant paranoia is to ignore eventual incidents and problems with immigrants, arguing that every critical mention of immigrants only feeds the racist enemies.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1UOZaTn

Once the socio-symbolic order is fully established, the very dimension which introduced the “transcendent” attitude that defines a human being, namely SEXUALITY, the uniquely human “undead” sexual passion, appears as its very opposite, as the main OBSTACLE to the elevation of a human being to pure spirituality, as that which ties him/ her down to the inertia of bodily existence?

http://ift.tt/1SAxKAH

Why the word ‘fuck’ & not ‘making love’? ‘We fuck in order to escape and stifle the excess of the dream that would overwhelm us

http://ift.tt/1Lc20jD

the function of the party is to hold open a gap in our setting so as to enable a collective desire for collectivity

Slavoj Zizek http://ift.tt/1TmzhLF

The fact that the majority cannot be convinced by the “rational” capitalist discourse and is much more prone to endorse a populist anti-elitist stance is not to be discounted as a case of lower-class primitivism: Populists correctly detect the irrationality of this rational approach; their rage directed at faceless institutions that regulate their lives in a nontransparent way is fully justified.

http://ift.tt/1LJQ3ll

Today, vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative of the radical right, so that the left finds itself in a surprising position as the defender of decency and public manners.

http://ift.tt/1QZEZTv

manners do matter—in tense situations, they are a matter of life and death, a thin line that separates barbarism from civilization.

http://ift.tt/21bUGq1

The function of Trump’s “refreshing” provocations and vulgar outbursts is precisely to mask the ordinariness of his program. His true secret is that if, by a miracle, he wins, nothing will change—in contrast to Bernie Sanders, the leftist Democrat whose key advantage over the academic politically correct liberal left is that he understands and respects the problems and fears of ordinary workers and farmers. The really interesting electoral duel would have been the one between Trump as the Republican candidate and Sanders as the Democratic candidate.

http://ift.tt/1QOzK2v

tasteless quips are meant to indicate that Trump doesn’t care about false manners and “says openly what he (and many ordinary people) think.” In short, he makes it clear that, in spite of his billions, he is an ordinary vulgar guy like all of us common people. However, these vulgarities should not deceive us: Whatever Trump is, he is not a dangerous outsider.

http://ift.tt/1oZ1s6M

violence practiced by the state—was made publicly acceptable at the very moment when public language was rendered politically correct in order to protect victims from symbolic violence.

http://ift.tt/1TP4tBK