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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://ift.tt/2eE3442

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://ift.tt/2eu9Ibk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://ift.tt/2effHnN

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

http://ift.tt/2eGJYLj

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

http://ift.tt/2dW4Ugg

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

http://ift.tt/2edwNlV

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

http://ift.tt/2dSx3DL

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

http://ift.tt/2e7des0

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

http://ift.tt/2dR0t6d

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

http://ift.tt/2dQBtMi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://ift.tt/2dPfmnP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://ift.tt/2edYQR0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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