the populists are fighting a war that cannot be won. If Republicans were effectively to ban abortion, if they were to prohibit the teaching of evolution, if they were to impose federal regulation on Hollywood and mass culture, this would mean not only their immediate ideological defeat, but also a large-scale economic depression in the US. The outcome is thus a debilitating symbiosis: although the ruling class disagrees with the populist moral agenda, it tolerates their “moral war” as a means to keep the lower classes in check, i.e., to enable them to articulate their fury without disturbing their economic interests. What this means is that CULTURE WAR IS CLASS WAR in a displaced mode - so much for those who claim that we leave in a post-class society

http://ift.tt/2aH9HSS

today, the big Other’s inexistence has reached a much more radical dimension: What is more and more undermined is precisely this symbolic trust which persists against all skeptical data. …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 big Other is responsible for the very fact that it wasn’t able to do anything: The more the subject’s structure is “narcissistic,” the more he puts the blame on the big Other and thus asserts his dependence on it. The basic feature of the “culture of complaint” is thus a call, ad- dressed at the big Other, to intervene and to set things straight

http://ift.tt/2aAU4d1

The basic trick of anti-Semitism is to displace social antagonism into antagonism between the sound social texture…and the Jew as the force corroding it

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on racism, antisemitism and islamophobia (via slavoj-zizek) http://ift.tt/2aHZG4J

back to the function of 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?…If you…transpose the feminine veil into the veil which conceals the ultimate Truth, the true stakes of the Muslim veil become even clearer. …Woman is [perceived as] a threat because she stands for…a succession of veils beneath which there is no ultimate hidden core; by veiling her, we create the illusion that there is, beneath the veil, the feminine Truth

http://ift.tt/2azxVvG

truly fascist is the fetishizing of violence for its own sake https://t.co/UGS7cyObCa

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/741684169982480384 http://ift.tt/2akYNm4

we have a lot of “anti-capitalism,” indeed an overload of anti-capitalism, but it is an ethical anti-capitalism. In the media, everywhere one finds stories about how this company is exploiting people someplace and ruining the environment, or this bank is ruining hardworking people’s funds. All of these are moralistic critiques of distortions. This is not enough. The anti-capitalism of the popular media remains at the level of something to be resolved within the established structure: through investigative journalism, democratic reforms, and the like

http://ift.tt/2akPClC

Post-war Austria is a country whose very existence is based on a refusal to ‘work through’ its traumatic Nazi past - proving that Waldheim was evading confrontation with his past emphasized the exact trait-of-.identification of the majority of voters. The theoretical lesson to be learned from this is that the trait-of­ identification can also be a certain failure, weakness, guilt of the other, so that by pointing out the failure we can unwittingly reinforce the identification. Rightist ideology in particular is very adroit at offering people weakness or guilt as an identifjring trait

http://ift.tt/2aEQu4z

. growing disenchantment of our actual 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

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2aGzZBM

Writing can be a symptom to which we cling, afraid that if we stop writing, we cease to exist, thus, “if the symptom dissolves, the subject loses the ground under his feet, he disintegrates,” Zizek says.

ANDRE VANTINO (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2ayuDsF

Eros and Thanatos are not two opposite drives that compete and combine their forces (as in eroticized masochism); there is only one drive, libido, striving for enjoyment, and “death drive” is the…space of its formal structure. …Death drive is above all silent (not given in experience). …How can the motif of death which appears to assemble the most negative aspects of the psychic life be in itself what is most positive, transcendentally positive, to the point to affirm repetition? Deleuze writes: “Eros has to be repeated, can be experienced only in repetition, while Thanatos (as the transcendental principle) is that what gives repetition to Eros, what submits Eros to repetition”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK citing Deleuze (via slavoj-zizek) http://ift.tt/2aFTo5K

The only way to react to excessive political correctness, I claim, is propagating dirty jokes

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2agrBbv

The feature which disturbs the racist in his Other (the way they laugh, the smell of their food …) is … 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 encounter are digital phantoms: Our point is rather that cyberspace is not spectral enough

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2aDx9Qw

“‘being American’, less and less gives rise to the sublime effect” https://t.co/l5Plte0nyp

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743739208976633856 http://ift.tt/2axeGCL

we “are now dealing with the ‘ethnicization of the national’,” https://t.co/So48PuRrn6

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743739726830526466 http://ift.tt/2amLSxJ

“respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.” https://t.co/HswJflEdOZ

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743740552990986240 http://ift.tt/2aCNkh2

Strange things are happening, financial meltdowns occur which affect our daily lives, but these events are experienced as totally opaque, and the rejection of multiculturalism introduces a false clarity

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2ahqaau

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.

http://ift.tt/2af2fdg

the radical pursuit of secularization, the turn towards our worldly life, transforms this life itself into an ‘abstract’ anaemic process.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/756081682281861120 http://ift.tt/2afETJf

What if, when we focus on mere survival, even if it is qualified as ‘having a good time’, what we ultimately lose is life itself?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/756081682361491456 http://ift.tt/2akVdTC

In the case of so-called “fundamentalists,” this “normal” functioning of ideology in which the ideological belief is transposed onto the Other is disturbed by the violent return of the immediate belief - they “really believe it.” The first consequence of this is that the fundamentalist becomes the dupe of his fantasy (as Lacan put it apropos Marquis de Sade), immediately identifying himself with it. …One plays with such fantasies, not “taking them seriously,” it is in this way that they fulfill their function - and the fundamentalist lacks this minimal distance towards his fantasy.

http://ift.tt/2ae7Ct6

In order to avoid the traumatic randomness of chance, ‘we read meanings into’ our calamities. … ‘accepting the chanciness’ of our calamities ‘without the implication of’ ‘hidden meaning’ 'was the greatness of Job’ in the Book of Job, Zizek says.

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

The perception of oneself as a victim: …This notion of the subject as an irresponsible victim involves the…narcissistic perspective from which every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to… imaginary balance [of] the liberal free subject

http://ift.tt/2a5RV6q

Capitalism… manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure. …Capitalism blinds us. … It enables us to believe in the possibility of success, which hides the traumatic fact that our only satisfaction lies in failure and loss.

http://ift.tt/2arsKh2

capitalist machinery…is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. …The circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limit

ZIZEK CITING MARX http://ift.tt/2aL7eCQ

drive propels the entire capitalist machinery; it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. The capitalist drive thus belongs to no definite individual - it is rather that those individuals who act as direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to practice it. We enter the mode of the drive when (as Marx put it) the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement.

http://ift.tt/2ahB5oz

it is much easier to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from a blind, impersonal force

http://ift.tt/2aeXMJB

The struggling subject needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of his own consistency, his very identity hinges on his opposing the enemy, so much so that his (eventual) victory amounts to his own defeat or disintegration. As Hegel likes to put it, in fighting the external enemy, one (unknowingly) fights one’s own essence. So, far from celebrating engaged struggle, Hegel’s point is rather that every embattled position, every taking of sides, bas to rely on a necessary illusion (the illusion that, once the enemy is annihilated, I will achieve the full realization of my being)

http://ift.tt/2a8d8ya

What was the” “‘terror’ if not a kind of hysterical acting out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the..economic order..?

http://ift.tt/2a7Z9s3

The lack of wealth..is generated by the very excess of production. ..The very attempt to abolish..poverty by producing more wealth leads to more poverty

http://ift.tt/2as3aty

as the Right becomes more and more openly vulgar…, it is perhaps the task…of the Left to restore some simple good manners

http://ift.tt/2at2Ah5

The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough, so they are not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work.

http://ift.tt/2a7fxci

In the culture of complaint I am insofar as I make the Other responsible or guilty for my misery.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740228215554314240 http://ift.tt/2aqBncU

“The wreck of the Titanic was a form in which society lived the experience of its own death,” https://t.co/c6s5GCOyeN

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740024909766766592 http://ift.tt/2adERfB

we can no longer have this confidence where history is going. History is going into the abyss.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739868211383029760 http://ift.tt/2aqAwcj

trauma ‘is a retroactive effect of its failed symbolization,’ Zizek writes.

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

In the culture of complaint I want the Other (usually the State) to indemnify me for the surplus-enjoyment of which I am deprived

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739094454435450884 http://ift.tt/2aqA8up

It’s no use to accept that the big Other doesnt exist if u end up believing in an Other of the Other, i.e. a conspiracy pulling the strings

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739077013747736578 http://ift.tt/2adEC4k

there was a show in BBC on who was the most hated politician and Tony Blair came first. One week later he won the elections. This worries me

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739060776250580993 http://ift.tt/2aqAOjk

we still implicitly conceive conflicts in the Third World countries…as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737648047656710144 http://ift.tt/2adEK3H

we still implicitly conceive conflicts in the Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophies

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737647538459824128 http://ift.tt/2aqA8dT

Explaining “traumatic events with conspiracy theories is” for Zizek wrong even when “factually right” & offers the traumatised false coping.

via http://twitter.com/lacanians (via lacanians) http://ift.tt/2adFLso

“Love thy neighbor!” means “Love the Muslims!” OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL. https://t.co/AnoOzbNsZB

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737327096360501248 http://ift.tt/2aqAlxT

‘what if we have anti-democratic resistance of the people themselves (“authoritarian populism”)?’, Žižek asks. http://ift.tt/2ad8RLI

http://ift.tt/2a0Lu4z

No wonder that the European project which is widely debated today fails to engage, to raise passions: it is ultimately a project of administration, not of ideological passion … when Leftists deplore the fact that today only the Right has the passion, is able to propose a new mobilizing imaginary, and that the Left only administers, what they do not see is the structural necessity of what they perceive as a mere tactical weakness of the Left.

http://ift.tt/2aoYtRc

Giving men the fantasy ‘they hallucinate about’, often helps ‘destroying the spectral aura of “feminine mystery”’, by showing to men how hollow their fantasy was in comparison to the woman herself, Zizek says.

http://ift.tt/2ark0aj

In order to avoid the traumatic randomness of chance, ‘we read meanings into’ our calamities and ‘accepting the chanciness’ of our calamities ‘without the implication of’ 'hidden meaning’ 'was the greatness of Job’ in the Book of Job, Zizek says.

http://ift.tt/2apdWmb

Something ‘loses its “alienated” character of a foreign force’ ‘the moment the subject renounces its attachment to “the notion that there is deep inside’ it some treasure, Zizek says.

http://ift.tt/2an70FS

the pervert’s ‘illusion is that he possesses a’ ‘knowledge which enables him to regulate his access to jouissance’. ‘The pervert’s dream is to transform sexual activity into’ 'purpose-oriented activity which can be’ 'executed according to’ plan, Zizek says.

http://ift.tt/2a32cSs

The masochist, thinking ‘he knows it for her,’ ‘pretends to speak from the position of knowledge (about the other’s desire)’. He perversely ‘exerts control through’ 'what he is for the Other’: 'the object of’ their jouissance, Zizek says.

http://ift.tt/2abdWEW

The bad guy in films has to be pathological to distract from the social dimension. “Psychological depravity” and violence distract us from having to deal with the films’ unresolved questions about capitalism’s “anonymous, utterly non-psychological” side, Zizek notes.

Film violence is a way to end a film with clear results, with the hero winning. Film makers use violence as an easy way out: through the violence of good guy against bad guy, cinema avoids the intricacies of capitalism that are system inherent and cannot be solved by taking the bad guys out of the game. - Andre Vantino citing Slavoj Zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2ab0lNW

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/29VYJ78

If there ever was a passionate attachment to the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its loss, it is the attachment of Israelis and many diaspora Jews to the ‘Holy Land’ and above all to Jerusalem. The present troubles are supreme proof of the consequences of such a radical fidelity, when taken literally. For almost two thousand years, when the Jews were fundamentally a nation without land, living in exile, their reference to Jerusalem was a negative one, a prohibition against ‘painting an image of home’ or indeed against feeling at home anywhere on earth. Once the return to Palestine began a century ago, the metaphysical Other Place was identified with a specific place on the map and became the object of a positive identification, the place where the wandering which characterises human existence would end. The identification, negative and positive by turns, had always involved a dream of settlement. When a two-thousand-year-old dream is finally close to realisation, such realisation has to turn into a nightmare.

http://ift.tt/2a2bhyK

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/2aoof9M

the city of Petah Tikva created a hotline that parents and friends can use to inform on Jewish women who mix with Arab men. The women are then treated as pathological cases and sent to a psychologist. In 2008, the southern city of Kiryat Gat launched a program in its schools to warn Jewish girls about the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown a video calledSleeping with the Enemy, which describes mixed couples as an “unnatural phenomenon.” Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu once told a local newspaper that the seduction of Jewish girls is “another form of war,” and a religious organisation called Yad L'Achim conducts military-style rescues of women from “hostile” Arab villages, in co-ordination with the police and army. In 2009, a government-backed television advertising campaign, later withdrawn, urged Israeli Jews to report relatives abroad who were in danger of marrying non-Jews. It is no wonder that, according to a poll from 2007, more than half of all Israeli Jews believe that intermarriage should be equated with “national treason.”

http://ift.tt/2a1IJWv

the child’s provocations ultimately conceal and express a demand, addressed at the figure of authority, to set a limit

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737155504888250368 http://ift.tt/2ajScoB

What we experience today are acrimonious splits over ideological lifestyle issues, where fierce debates rage and choices are solicited (on abortion, on gay marriages, etc.), but where basic economic policy is presented as a depoliticized domain of expert authority. The proliferation of “overdemocracy” with its “excesses” of a “culture of complaint” is ultimately the front whose backside is the silent, sturdy weaving of economic, corporatist logic.

http://ift.tt/29R6rmO

An Everyday Occupation, [8] described how, although the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: its primary forms are application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits. It is this micro-management of the daily life which does the job of securing the slow but steadfast Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one’s family, to farm one’s own land, to dig a well, to go to work, to school, to a hospital… One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented to earn a living, denied housing permits, etc. Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world” – however, in the last year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality which makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The State of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow process, invisible, ignored by the media, a kind of underground digging of the mole, so that, one day, the world will awaken and realize that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-free, and that we can only accept the fact.

http://ift.tt/2a6AeXq

class struggle is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews, so that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such

http://ift.tt/2a1Q5q4

the Muslim fundamentalists are not true fundamentalists, they are already ‘modernists’, a product and a phenomenon of modern global capitalism - they stand for the way the Arab world strives to accommodate itself to global capitalism.

http://ift.tt/2akIqFw

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 past centuries, Islam has been significantly more tolerant towards other religions than Christianity.

ZIZEK on what is wrong with the thesis of a “clash of civilizations” http://ift.tt/2af1uVP

The task is to talk openly about all the unpleasant issues without a compromise with racism. In this way, we prevent a true encounter with a real neighbour and his or her specific way of life.

http://ift.tt/2agaeaW

How many fanatical defenders of religion started with ferociously attacking contemporary secular culture, and ended up forsaking religion itself (losing any meaningful religious experience)? And is it not true that the liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they will end up discarding freedom and democracy themselves, if only they can fight terrorism?

http://ift.tt/2acPFOk

the spectacle of a murderous Europe leaving thousands of drowned bodies at its borders – is a self-serving one, with no emancipatory potential whatsoever. Everything “bad” about the other is dismissed, either as our (Western racist) projection onto the other, or as being the result of our (Western imperialist) mistreatment, through colonial violence, of the other.

http://ift.tt/29RvfXq

There is something so disturbingly tragic in this idea of the wealthiest country in the world bombing one of the poorest countries.

ZIZEK on bombing Afghanistan http://ift.tt/29WDBzP

left-liberals: the worse the situation gets, the more they feel morally superior.

http://ift.tt/2a9Dx0J

Either [we will see] more aggressivity towards the threatening Outside in short: to a paranoiac acting out. Or [we] will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World: accepting its arrival in the Real world, making the long-overdue move from ‘A thing like this shouldn’t happen here!’ to 'A thing like this shouldn’t happen anywhere!’. That is the true lesson of the attacks: the only way to ensure that it will not happen here again is to prevent it happening anywhere else.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on attacks in the West. Welcome To The Desert Of The Real http://ift.tt/29NP4Qh

The structure of perverse self-assurance is one in which one claims ‘direct access to some figure of the big Other’ so that’ one claims to be ‘able to act directly as the instrument of the big Other’s will’, Zizek writes. I.e. one claims that one acts in the name of progress or in the name of security or in the name of the ideal of enjoyment as a big Other

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

Something ‘loses its “alienated” character of a foreign force’ ‘the moment the subject renounces its attachment to “the notion that there is deep inside’ it some treasure, Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/29LEY61

not all of a woman is caught up in the phallic jouissance: She is always split between a part of her which accepts the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinating the man, attracting the male gaze, and another part of her which resists being drawn into the dialectic of (male) desire, a mysterious jouissance beyond Phallus about which nothing can be said

http://ift.tt/29MLoNO

what about psychoanalysis? Is psychoanalysis not precisely the point at which the “man of reason” reestablishes his dialogue with madness, rediscovering the dimension of truth in it?

http://ift.tt/29PzWTj

We are dealing here with the level of material signs that resists meaning and establishes connections that are not grounded in narrative symbolic struc­tures: they just relate in a kind of pre-symbolic cross-resonance. They are neither signifiers nor the famous Hitchcockian stains, but elements of what, a decade or two ago, one would have called cinematic écriture. In the last years of his teaching, Lacan established the difference between symptom and sinthom: in contrast to symptom, which is a cipher of some repressed meaning, sinthom has no determinate meaning – it just gives body, in its repetitive pattern, to some elementary matrix of jouissance, of excessive enjoyment — although sinthoms do not have sense, they do radiate jouis-sense. Hitchcock’s sinthoms are thus not mere formal patterns: they already condense a certain libidinal investment. As such, they determined his creative process: Hitchcock did not proceed from the plot to its translation in cinematic audio-visual terms. He rather started with a set of (usually visual) motifs that haunted his imagination, imposing themselves as his sintboms; then, he constructed a narrative that served as the pretext for their use. These sinthoms provide the specific flair, the substantial density of the cinematic texture of Hitchcock’s films: without them, we would have a lifeless formal narrative.

http://ift.tt/29Obwe9

From the normal perspective of the enlightened rational pursuit of self-interest, the inconsistency of this ideological stance is obvious: the populist conservatives are literally voting themselves into economic ruin. Less taxation and deregulation means more freedom for the big companies that are driving the impoverished farmers out of business; less state intervention means less federal help to small farmers; and so on. In the eyes of the US evangelical populists, the state stands for an alien power and, together with the UN, is an agent of the Antichrist: it takes away the liberty of the Christian believer, relieving him of the moral responsibility of stewardship, and thus undermines the individualistic morality that makes each of us the architect of our own salvation – how do we combine this with the unprecedented explosion of state apparatuses under Bush? No wonder large corporations are delighted to accept such evangelical attacks on the state, when the state tries to regulate media mergers, to put strictures on energy companies, to strengthen air pollution regulations, to protect wildlife and limit logging in national parks, and so forth. It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as the ideological justification of the unfettered power of what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous entity which, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2ajb9qh

My friend Ariel Dorfman wrote recently: ‘America has the chance to become a member of the community of nations. America always behaves as though it were special. It should use this attack as an opportunity to admit that it is not special, but simply and truly part of this world.’ That’s the big choice. There is something so disturbingly tragic in this idea of the wealthiest country in the world bombing one of the poorest countries. It reminds me of the well-known joke about the idiot who loses a key in the dark and looks for it beneath the light. When asked why, he says: 'I know I lost it over there, but it’s easier to look for it here.’ But at the same time I must confess that the left also deeply disappointed me. Falling back into this safe pacifist attitude - violence never stops violence, give peace a chance

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2agPK14

If we are engaged in the same struggle, if we discover that…being feminists and ecologists, or feminists and workers, we all of a sudden have this insight: ‘My God, but our struggle is ultimately the same!’ This political universality would be the only authentic universality. And this, of course, is what is missing today, because politics today is increasingly a politics of merely negotiating compromises between different positions.

True Love is: You Can Insult the Other - SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/29GBAKP

[With] this politically correct respect…You still have the aggression towards the other.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/29EAFXs

‘The subject who makes herself the Other’s object-cause becomes her own cause,’ Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/29DBjD2

Another thing that bothers me about this multiculturalism is when people ask me: ‘How can you be sure that you are not a racist?’ My answer is that there is only one way. If I can exchange insults, brutal jokes, dirty jokes, with a member of a different race and we both know it’s not meant in a racist way. If, on the other hand, we play this politically correct game - 'Oh, I respect you, how interesting your customs are’ - this is inverted racism, and it is disgusting. In the Yugoslav army where we were all of mixed nationalities, how did I become friends with Albanians? When we started to exchange obscenities, sexual innuendo, jokes.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/29vzmcf

Let me briefly address sexual harassment for a moment. Of course I am opposed to it, but let’s be frank. Say I am passionately attached, in love, or whatever, to another human being and I declare my love, my passion for him or her. There is always something shocking, violent in it. This may sound like a joke, but it isn’t - you cannot do the game of erotic seduction in politically correct terms.

http://ift.tt/29CQDnc

Angela Merkel, declared at a meeting of young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union: “This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other, has failed. Utterly failed.” With this, she was echoing the debate about Leitkultur (the dominant culture) from a couple of years ago, when conservatives insisted that every state was based on a predominant cultural space which the members of other cultures who live in the same space should respect. Instead of bemoaning the newly emerging racist Europe, such statements announce, we should be self-critical, asking to what extent our own abstract multiculturalism contributed to this sad state of things. If all sides do not share or respect the same civility, then multiculturalism turns into legally regulated mutual ignorance or hatred

http://ift.tt/29Gx4vF

The conflict about multiculturalism already is one about Leitkultur: it is not a conflict between cultures, but between different visions of how different cultures can and should co-exist, about the rules and practices these cultures have to share if they are to co-exist. One should thus avoid getting caught in the liberal game of “how much tolerance can we afford”: should we tolerate it if they prevent their children going to state schools? If they force their women to dress in a certain way? If they arrange marriages or brutalise gay people? At this level, of course, we are never tolerant enough, or we are already too tolerant, neglecting the rights of women, gay people etc. The only way to break out of this deadlock is to propose and fight for a positive universal project shared by all participants. Struggles where “there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks” are many, from ecology to the economy.

http://ift.tt/29uCr11

The task is to move beyond mere tolerance of others to a positive emancipatory Leitkultur which can sustain authentic co-existence. Don’t just respect others, offer a common struggle, since our problems today are common.

Zizek on insisting that integration means accepting eurpean values of emancipatory universality http://ift.tt/29v8pZo

bad people do bad things — they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

Slavoj Žižek http://ift.tt/29DSuJ7

the patriarchal erotic discourse creates the femme fatale as the inherent threat against which the male identity should assert itself.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/29sIH64

it was the EU which demanded limiting the weekly work hours, etc., and the UK government complained that such a measure will affect the competitiveness of the British industry… In short, the so much vilified “Brussels bureaucracy” was also a protector of minimal workers’ rights – in exactly the same way as it is today the protector of the rights of the refugees against many “sovereign” nation-states which are not ready to receive them.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/29OKZLP

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.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/29n9YaP

When I say we live in a post-political world, I refer to a wrong ideological impression. We don’t really live in such a world, but the existing universe presents itself as post-political in the sense that there is some kind of a basic social pact that elementary social decisions are no longer discussed as political decisions. They are turned into simple decisions of gesture and of administration. And the remaining conflicts are mostly conflicts about different cultures.

http://ift.tt/29uPE9K

The shrink ‘stands for the inconsistency, failure, of the big Other,’ ‘de-subjectivizing his words, depriving them of the quality of’ ‘his intention-to-mean. The goal is no longer for the analysand to assume the meaning of his speech,’ but the inconsistency of meaning. 'The psychoanalyst reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire,’ Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/29fmd6l

in Slovenia… I am rather perceived as some dark, ominous, plotting, political manipulator, a role I enjoy immensely and like very much.

http://ift.tt/29rhROo

What I hate most are the beautiful souls of the left wing who complain about their losses, that everything is corrupted

http://ift.tt/29hfGKb

Women, much more than men, are able to enjoy by proxy, to find deep satisfaction in the awareness that their beloved partner enjoys

http://ift.tt/29ax9Xa

Recall ‘A Few Good Men’… Tom Cruise…succeeds in proving that the defendants followed the so-called “Code Red,” the unwritten rule of a military community which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a fellow-soldier who has broken the ethical standards of the Marines. Such a code condones an act of transgression, it is “illegal,” yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group. It has to remain under cover of the night, unacknowledged, unutterable – in public, everyone pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence. While violating the explicit rules of community, such a code represents the “spirit of community” at its purest, exerting the strongest pressure on individuals to enact group identification. Are thus the Abu Ghraib tortures not part of the Code Red rules? Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people: in being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture, they got the taste of its obscene underside which forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy, and freedom. No wonder, then, that it is gradually becoming clear how the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not a limited case, but part of a widespread practice.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/298ELVK