From the very outset, the speaking subject displaces his belief onto the big Other qua the order of pure semblance, so that the subject never “really believed in it”; from the very beginning, the subject refers to some decentered other to whom he imputes this belief. All concrete versions of this “subject supposed to believe” (from small children for whose sake parents pretend to believe in Santa Claus, to the “ordinary working people” for whose sake Communist intellectuals pretend to believe in Socialism) are stand-ins for the big Other. So, what one should answer to the conservative platitude according to which every honest man has a profound need to believe in something, is that every honest man has a profound need to find another subject who would believe in his place…

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the subject is as it were “blackmailed” into passively submitting to some form of the primordial “passionate attachment,” since, outside of it, he simply does not exist. This non-existence is not directly the absence of existence, however, but a certain gap or void in the order of being which “is” the subject itself. … Fantasy is thus a defense-formation against the primordial abyss if dis-attachment that “is” the subject itself.

http://ift.tt/294pmGI

Europe is now caught in a vicious cycle, oscillating between the false opposites of surrender to global capitalism and surrender to anti-immigrant populism – which politics has a chance of enabling us to step out of this mad dance? This is what those who oppose Brexit didn’t see—shocked, they now complain about the “irrationality” of the Brexit voters, ignoring the desperate need for change that the vote made palpable. … Signs of chaos are everywhere—the recent debate on gun control in the US Congress descended into a sit-in protest by the Democrats—is it time to despair? Recall Mao Ze Dong’s old motto: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” A crisis is to be taken seriously, without illusions, but also as a chance to be fully exploited. Although crises are painful and dangerous, they are the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won. Is there not a struggle also in heaven, is the heaven also not divided—and does the ongoing confusion not offer a unique chance to react to the need for a radical change in a more appropriate way, with a project that will break the vicious cycle of EU technocracy and nationalist populism? The true division of our heaven is not between anemic technocracy and nationalist passions, but between their vicious cycle and a new pan-European project which will addresses the true challenges

Slavoj Zizek Could Brexit Breathe New Life Into Left-Wing Politics http://ift.tt/298hjN2

The “attachment to subjectivation” constitutive of the subject is thus none other than the primordial “masochist” scene in which the subject “makes/sees himself suffer,”

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a scene of passive suffering, or subjection, is staged which simultaneously sustains and threatens the subject’s being - only insofar, that is, as being remains foreclosed, primordially repressed. From this perspective, a new approach opens up to the recent artistic practices of sado-masochistic performance. In such practices, isn’t this very foreclosure ultimately undone? In other words, what if the open assuming/staging of the fantasmatic scene of primordial “passionate attachment” is.. subversive?

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Perhaps only in love ‘one can fully confront one‘s fundamental solitude’, Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/29g2uod

what if the open assuming/staging of the fantasmatic scene of primordial “passionate attachment” is far more subversive than the dialectic rearticulation and/or displacement of this scene?

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the rejection of multiculturalism introduces a false clarity into the situation: it is the foreign intruders who are disturbing our way of life.

ZIZEK on anti EU sentiments http://ift.tt/2901KHo

clinging to ethnic identity serves as a protective shield against the traumatic fact of being caught in the whirlpool of non-transparent financial abstraction – the true “foreign body” which cannot be assimilated is ultimately the infernal self-propelling machine of the Capital itself.

Zizek on anti EU sentiments http://ift.tt/28WHCTv

Dear Britain, When Stalin was asked in the late 1920s which is worse, the right or the left, he snapped back: “They are both worse!” And this is my first reaction to the question of whether or not to leave the EU. I am not interested in sending love letters to the British public with the sentimental message: “Please stay in Europe!” What interests me is ultimately only one question. Europe is now caught in a vicious cycle, oscillating between the false opposites of surrender to global capitalism and surrender to anti-immigrant populism – which politics has a chance of enabling us to step out of this mad dance? The symbols of global capitalism are secretly negotiated trade agreements such as the Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa) or Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The social impact of TTIP is clear enough: it stands for nothing less than a brutal assault on democracy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS), which allow companies to sue governments if their policies cause a loss of profits. Simply put, this means that unelected transnational corporations can dictate the policies of democratically elected governments. So how would Brexit fare in this context? From a leftwing standpoint, there are some good reasons to support Brexit: a strong nation state exempted from the control of Brussels technocrats can protect the welfare state and counteract austerity politics. However, I am worried about the ideological and political background of this option. From Greece to France, a new trend is arising in what remains of the “radical left”: the rediscovery of nationalism. All of a sudden, universalism is out, dismissed as a lifeless political and cultural counterpart of “rootless” global capital. The reason for this is obvious: the rise of rightwing nationalist populism in western Europe, which is now the strongest political force advocating the protection of working class interests, and simultaneously the strongest political force able to give rise to proper political passions. So the reasoning goes: why should the left leave this field of nationalist passions to the radical right, why should it not “reclaim la patrie from the Front National”? In this leftwing populism, the logic of Us against Them remains, however here “they” are not poor refugees or immigrants, but financial capital and technocratic state bureaucracy. This populism moves beyond the old working class anticapitalism; it tries to bring together a multiplicity of struggles from ecology to feminism, from the right to employment to free education and healthcare. The recurrent story of the contemporary left is that of a leader or party elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world” (Mandela, Lula) – but sooner or later, usually after a couple of years, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs the mechanisms, one is very swiftly punished by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest. So how can we push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is over? I remain convinced that our only hope is to act trans-nationally – only in this way do we have a chance to constrain global capitalism. The nation-state is not the right instrument to confront the refugee crisis, global warming, and other truly pressing issues. So instead of opposing Eurocrats on behalf of national interests, let’s try to form an all-European left. And it is because of this margin of hope that I am tempted to say: vote against Brexit, but do it as a devout Christian who supports a sinner while secretly cursing him. Don’t compete with the rightwing populists, don’t allow them to define the terms of the struggle. Socialist nationalism is not the right way to fight the threat of national socialism.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/291gkP2

Judith Butler rejects the Lacanian symbolic a priori as a new version of the transcendental framework which fixes the coordinates of our existence in advance, leaving no space for the retroactive displacement of these presupposed conditions.

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it is Lacan who allows us to conceptualize the distinction between imaginary resistance – false transgression which reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning - and the effective symbolic rearticulation via the intervention of the real of an act.

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In the performance of an obsessional ritual, one designated to keep at bay the illicit temptation, the ritual itself becomes the source of libidinal satisfaction. It is thus the “reflexivity” involved in the relationship between regulatory power and sexuality, the way the repressive regulatory procedures themselves get libidinally invested, that functions as a source of libidinal satisfaction. And it is this radical masochistic reflective turn which remains unaccounted for in the standard notion of the “internalization” of social norms

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The exemplary case of the unconscious “passionate attachments” which sustain Power is precisely the inherent reflective eroticization of the regulatory power-mechanisms and procedures themselves.

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the existing order of Power is also supported by unconscious “passionate attachments,” attachments publicly non-acknowledged by the subject

http://ift.tt/28M30LZ

Recall the relationsnip towards homosexuality in a soldiers’ community, which operates at two clearly distinct levels: the explicit homosexuality is brutally attacked, those identified as gays are ostracized, beaten up every night, etc.; however, this explicit homophobia is accompanied by an excessive set of implicit web of homosexual innuendos, inner jokes, obscene practices, etc

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what about the clear contrast between the “standard” way prisoners were tortured in the previous Saddam’s regime and the US Army tortures? In the previous regime, the accent was on direct brutal infliction of pain, while the US soldiers focused on psychological humiliation. … To anyone acquainted with the reality of the US way of life, the photos immediately brought to mind the obscene underside of the US popular culture - the initiatic rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo in order to be accepted into a closed community. Do we not see similar photos in regular intervals in the US press, when some scandal explodes in an army unit or in a high school campus, where the initiatic ritual went overboard and soldiers or students got hurt beyond a level considered tolerable, forced to assume a humiliating pose, to perform debasing gestures (like penetrating their anal opening with a beer bottle in front of their peers), to suffer being pierced by needles…

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1ScPX1T

It is as if the first and foremost effect of migration is to foreground even more the blood relations, thus violating the basic territorial definition of a modern state: the member of a state is not defined by his/her “blood” (ethnic identity), but by being fully acknowledged as residing in the state’s territory – and the state’s unity was historically established precisely by the violent erasure of local blood links. In this sense, the modern state as such is the outcome of an “inner migration,” of the transubstantiation of one’s identity: even if, physically, one does not change one’s dwelling, one is deprived of a particular identity with its local color

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as was made clear in Fascism, violence explodes precisely when one tries to deny the gap and bring together the two dimensions of blood AND soil into a harmonious unity; this bringing-together accounts for the “innocent” tautological formulas of today’s neoracists: le Pen’s entire program can be summed up in “France to the French!” (and this allows us to generate further formulas: “Germany to Germans!”, etc.) - “We do not want anything foreign, we want only what is ours!”…

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‘All our attempts to generate new meanings are’ ‘a longing to regain the lost’ Thing, Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/263z3zQ

already in the mid-1970s, the leading figures around Tito were aware that Yugoslavia’s economic situation was catastrophic; however, since Tito was nearing his death, they made a collective decision to postpone the outbreak of a crisis till his death - the price was the fast accumulation of external debt in the last years of Tito’s life. When, in 1980, Tito finally dies, the economic crisis did strike with revenge, leading to a 40 per cent fall of standard of living, to ethnic tensions and, finally, civil and ethnic war that destroyed the country - the moment to confront the crisis adequately was missed. One can thus say that what put the last nail in the coffin of Yugoslavia was the very attempt by its leading circle to protect the ignorance of the Leader, to keep his gaze happy.

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In Taxi Driver, the final outburst of Travis (Robert de Niro)” is “against the pimps who control the young girl he wants to save (Jodie Foster). Crucial is the implicit suicidal dimension of this passage à l'acte: when Travis prepares for his attack, he practices in front of the mirror the drawing of the gun; in what is the best-known scene of the film, he addresses his own image in the mirror with the aggressive-condescending "You talkin’ to me?”. In a textbook illustration of Lacan’s notion of the “mirror stage,” aggressivity is here clearly aimed at oneself, at one’s own mirror image. This suicidal dimension reemerges at the end of the slaughter scene when Travis, heavily wounded and leaning at the wall, mimics with the forefinger of his right hand a gun aimed at his blood-stained forehead and mockingly triggers it, as if saying “The true aim of my outburst was myself.” The paradox of Travis is that he perceives HIMSELF as part of the degenerate dirt of the city life he wants to eradicate, so that, as Brecht put it apropos of revolutionary violence in his The Measure Taken, he wants to be the last piece of dirt with whose removal the room will be clean.

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

If May 68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the recent revolt was just an outburst with no pretense to any kind of positive vision - if the commonplace that “we live in a post-ideological era” has any sense, it is here. Is this sad fact that the opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a meaningful utopian project, but only as a meaningless outburst, not the strongest indictment of our predicament?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1OqR97e

If one were to open the borders, the first to rebel would be local working classes. It is thus becoming clear that the solution is not “tear down the walls and let them all in,” this easy empty demand of soft-hearted liberal “radicals.” The only true solution is to tear down the TRUE Wall, not the police one, but the social-economic one: to change society so that people will no longer desperately try to escape their own world.

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

the official (Christian, democratic…) discourse is accompanied and sustained by a whole nest of obscene brutal racist, sexist, etc., fantasies, which can only be admitted in a censored form.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1U9JVqe

The outrage caused by the caricatures of Muhammad in Muslim communities provides yet another proof that religious beliefs are a force to be reckoned with. Deplorable as the violence of the Muslim crowds may be, the reckless and cynical Western libertarians must also learn their lesson from it: the limits of secular disenchantment. Or so we are told. Is namely this really the lesson to be learned from the mobs killing, looting and burning on behalf of religion? For a long time, we were told that, without religion, we are reduced to egotistic animals fighting for their lot, with the only morality that of the pact of the wolves, and that only religion can elevate us to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as the main source of murderous violence around the world, one is getting tired of the assurances that the Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting a noble spiritual message of their creed. What about restoring the dignity of atheism, perhaps our only chance for peace?

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

To fully assume our “being-towards-death” as ‘the ultimate annihilation’ of ‘symbolic identity’ is to endure the 'confrontation with the Real, with the impossibility constitutive of desire,’ Slavoj Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/1ZIj7fk

what if the true caricatures of Islam are the violent anti-Danish demonstrations themselves, offering a ridiculous image which exactly fits the Western cliché? ..It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure will be on you.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1UIXY2W

‘psychic space is too wild and sometimes we have to make love, not to get the real thing but to escape from the real,’ Zizek says.

via http://twitter.com/AndreVantino (via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/1Yhh42T

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.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/21di1Zi

Nestle now emphasizes that no milk of Danish cows is used in their products. The French supermarket chain Carrefour in Egypt informs their “dear clients” that out of “solidarity” with Islamic community they “don’t carry Danish products.” The horror is that they both accepted the stigmatization of a whole country.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/21b04KQ

When the will of the majoity clearly violates basic emancipatory freedoms, one has not only the right but also the duty to oppose that majority. This is not reason to despise democratic elections—only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/22QRi6e

reference to duty as the excuse to do our duty should be rejected as hypocritical; suffice it to recall the proverbial example of a severe sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture. Of course, 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!” The more pertinent example is that of a Stalinist politician who loves mankind, but nonetheless performs horrible purges and executions; his heart is breaking while he is doing it, but he cannot help it, it’s his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity… What we encounter here is the properly perverse attitude of adopting the position of the pure instrument of the big Other’s Will: it’s not my responsibility, it’s 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: isn’t it nice to be able to inflict pain on others with the full awareness that I’m not responsible for it, that I merely fulfill the Other’s Will…this is what Kantian ethics prohibits. This position of the sadist pervert provides the answer to the question: How can the subject be guilty when he merely realizes an “objective”, externally imposed necessity? By subjectively assuming this “objective necessity,” i.e. by finding enjoyment in what is imposed on him. So, at its most radical, Kantian ethics is NOT “sadist,” but precisely what prohibits assuming the position of a Sadean executioner.

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desiring is not in itself “pathological.” In short, Lacan asserts the necessity of a “critique of pure desire”: in contrast to Kant, for whom our capacity to desire is thoroughly “pathological” (since, as he repeatedly stresses, there is no a priori link between an empirical object and the pleasure this object generates in the subject), Lacan claims that there is a “pure faculty of desire,” since desire does have a non-pathological, a priori object-cause-this object, of course, is what Lacan calls objet petit a.

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Lacan does not try to make the usual “reductionist” point that every ethical act, as pure and disinterested as it may appear, is always grounded in some “pathological” motivation (the agent’s own long-term interest, the admiration of his peers, up to the “negative” satisfaction provided by the suffering and extortion often demanded by ethical acts); the focus of Lacan’s interest rather resides in the paradoxical reversal by means of which desire itself (i.e. acting upon one’s desire, not compromising it) can no longer be grounded in any “pathological” interests or motivations and thus meets the criteria of the Kantian ethical act, so that “following one’s desire” overlaps with “doing one’s duty.”

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Recall a frightening detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we learn how close to nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27 1962. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. “A guy named Arkhipov saved the world,” was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident

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Stalker, when confronted with the “Golden Sphere” - as the Room in which desires are realized is called in the novel -, does undergo a kind of spiritual conversion, but this experience is much closer to what Lacan called “subjective destitution”: an abrupt awareness of the utter meaningless of our social links, the dissolution of our attachment to reality itself - all of a sudden, other people are derealized, reality itself is experienced as a confused whirlpool of shapes and sounds, so that we are no longer able to formulate our desire.

http://ift.tt/1U3igFB

the (relative) prosperity and peace of the “civilized” West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the “barbarian” Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo.

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sex is “something impossible in the sense that we cannot make sense of it” which is why in order to function, it’s enriched through" fantasy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738040061124608003 http://ift.tt/1sODCMv