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

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

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

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

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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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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