If you look at all successful revolutions, they usually happen when power is already weakening. …Freedom is the condition of liberation. In order to liberate yourself, you must be free. Even in revolution, it goes the same way.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057329440076824576 http://bit.ly/2ArsxYl

I’m not against democracy. The point is not to criticize democracy in the sense that we need an authoritarian regime. The key is to ask questions about the representative democracy we have today: is it still able to capture the social discontent

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057329090297032706 http://bit.ly/2RpdWX9

In England…there was a…show on the BBC & people were voting…“who is the most hated person in Britain?” Tony Blair won. But a week later, he won the election. …There is some…dissatisfaction, which cannot be captured by the electoral system.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057328951960449026 http://bit.ly/2LDRR1G

China weathered this financial crisis much more easily than elsewhere . The great danger is that all of a sudden, because of its virtual nature, crisis erupts. What is needed more and more are big radical decisions. In the democracy we have now, it’s difficult.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057327876830310400 http://bit.ly/2SqEowL

in 2008, the banks generally put a limit on borrowing because people were not paying back loans, …this…pushed the economy further down. But in China, the…political power bureau gave an order: “No, you should give people even more credit.“ https://t.co/sY2uruR6K6

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057327651868889088 http://bit.ly/2rYEb8E

The…country can…be in ruin & people starving & then a financial expert…tells you the economy is in a good state. We saw just this after the 2008 crisis. The shock was that nothing happened in reality, but all of a sudden we realized that we were in a terrible crisis.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057321020447703042 http://bit.ly/2TgwWEF

When you chat erotically on the internet, even showing your photos or whatever, you feel like you are in contact with the global world, but you are still isolated in a private space. It’s a kind of global solipsism.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057320690716721152 http://bit.ly/2EN3oLr

Apple… The key is to prevent these clouds from being privately owned

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057320548844404737 http://bit.ly/2PXOHq8

We will have instant access… Everything…accessible, but only…through a company that owns it all:…content and computers. The question is, what is this everything? Everything will be censored. …Global access…grounded in…monopolistic privatization of the cloud

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057320280958398465 http://bit.ly/2ELbrsm

Marx was too optimistic. For Marx, capitalist exploitation has to take place in conditions of legal freedom… All have the same rights formally…but…if you don’t have money, you have to sell yourself… But now,…worldwide capitalism can no longer sustain or tolerate this

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057319056728944645 http://bit.ly/2QK0aPf

global warming doesn’t simply mean that it will get warmer everywhere, it means there will be..extremes. …If global warming continues, there may be…ice age in Western Europe. It’ s a theory about the Gulf Stream: if it gets warmer, the Gulf Stream will no longer reach Europe

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057305416185602048 http://bit.ly/2BzYe1f

American politics is…based on the premise that…the world will be in chaos.. So we…isolate ourselves…& have control over a few vital issues, like oil… And the others?… Let them starve. So communism is once again at the gates.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057303879489122305 https://ift.tt/2Cs8TwN

communism? I like the aspect of common, in the sense that we are facing mega problems where old notions of sovereign states or even issues like ecology are being questioned.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057302803633393664 https://ift.tt/2A7HWNf

In Slovenia, we have a proverb that, if you talk too much, you are afraid something could happen & talk a lot to make sure it doesn’t. It’s a little bit like this with Arab countries. Everybody was saying they needed democracy, but afraid that democracy would finally come about

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057302324316647424 https://ift.tt/2S8zuo7

capitalism was a radical revolution. Because the whole notion of stability has changed with capitalism or even with capitalistic democracy:…[without constant change and growth] things…fall apart. Capitalism changed the whole logic of social space

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057298191241150465 https://ift.tt/2CjvgVg

the problems, to which communism tried to provide an answer, are still here, more than ever. They are returning.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057287546227560449 https://ift.tt/2EyZUMp

What will be the answer? I don’t know. Maybe we don’t have an answer. Maybe it will be a catastrophe, maybe, I don’t know…What shocks me, again & again, is how so-called specialists are proven wrong. …The problems, to which communism tried to provide an answer, are still here

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057285733948506112 https://ift.tt/2SOstsj

Ours is..the..opposite of the…20th-century..in which the left knew what had to be done (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat), but had to wait..for the proper moment… We have to act now,..the consequence of non-action:…We will be forced to live ‘as if we were free’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056961553365381120 https://ift.tt/2S8MeLa

I don’t share the hope of my liberal friends. The marriage between capitalism and democracy is over. The lesson of Wall Street for me is that the true utopia does not mean we can have a different society.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056959649877057536 https://ift.tt/2EvtlyS

I don’t mean “ revolutionary ” in the sense of killing people, but I mean “revolutionary left” precisely in the sense of certain radical measures which could safeguard, as we would like to see it, the liberal legacy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056959515298619394 https://ift.tt/2BdquXt

If a new secular left does not emerge…we will find ourselves reaching what in Europe we ironically call “capitalism with Asian values,” which means totalitarian capitalism.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056959303746240513 https://ift.tt/2RQY2So

This should be our message to center liberals: “Ah, you got rid of us, the extreme left, and now you have religious fundamentalists”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056958702954180610 https://ift.tt/2EoF8zd

fascism literally…takes the place of the leftist revolution: its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, which the left was not able to mobilize.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056957823979081728 https://ift.tt/2G5R6iR

“Communism is not the name of a solution but the name of…the problem of the com­mons in all its dimensions - the commons of nature as the substance of our life”, says Zizek https://t.co/1seApwJN9U

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056625326145572865 https://ift.tt/2QCw1AH

the supreme irony: as it functions today, ideology appears as its exact opposite, as a radical critique of ideological utopias.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056546465219309568 https://ift.tt/2SyBWUM

The main function of ideological censorship today is…to denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which is something like a gulag.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056545812078096386 https://ift.tt/2zP0kKC

the superrich…live in a universe in which, within its ideological imaginary, the “lower class” surrounding world simply does not exist

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056544389093302275 https://ift.tt/2Egghxy

One cannot help but note that one feature basic to the attitude of these gated superrich is fear: fear of external social life itself. …Secluded communities…isolated by an…invisible cupola

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056543419986837507 https://ift.tt/2rmPWoZ

Communism really is an “eternal” idea…in the sense that it has to be reinvented in each new historical situation.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056541735533400065 https://ift.tt/2E3bkHx

Critical leftists have ..only succeeded in soiling those in power… The real point is to castrate those in power.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056540940947677186 https://ift.tt/2rjEc6p

How the market will react depends on…how much people think others will trust…intervention. …We devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056539926643331072 https://ift.tt/2zvqAd1

Men are slowly turning into perpetual adolescents, with no clear passage of initiation into maturity (aquiring a profession, even education no longer play this role) …To supplant this lack…youth gangs proliferate…providing…social identity. #thugpride #londonriots

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056536503764033539 https://ift.tt/2FQo8n0

a new and global anti-nuclear movement…should focus…on those superpowers who assume the right to monopolize nuclear weapons. Public mention of the use of nuclear weapons should be treated as a criminal offense

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056534497968246785 https://ift.tt/2E2dR5z

when plolitics proper is..replaced by expert social administration, the only remaining [allowed] source of conflict is cultural tensions (ethnic, religious) tensions.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056532595285090304 https://ift.tt/2zu4gAe

People want the appearance of choice, not real choice-making. This is how our democracies function - with our consent: we act as if we are freely deciding… A ‘crisis of democracy’ does not occur when people stop believing in their own power but…stop trusting the elites

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055825901919920128 https://ift.tt/2FUg4Bs

When the fight against anti-Semitism and the struggle for Palestinian rights are not conceived as parts of the same endeavour, we find ourselves in a new state of barbarism. https://t.co/GefLI9IJTS

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055827534242349057 https://ift.tt/2RhKRte

Assange..wrote,…the US Democratic..establishment..embraced the ‘We didn’t lose - Russia won’ narrative..because if they didn’t,..the insurgency created by Bernie Sanders…would dominate the party. …And the US Democratic establishment diabolizes Trump to get rid of Sanders.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055825254281547776 https://ift.tt/2PRfdGq

The task is not to build a coalition between the radical Left and the fascist Right, but to cut off the working-class oxygen supply to the alt-right by addressing their voters. …Exactly what Sanders and Corbyn were doing and which was the root of their relative success

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055823204906864642 https://ift.tt/2TF3aKx

There is a program behind Trump’s provocations. …Trump’s (and others’) vulgar obscenities are part of their populist strategy to sell…lower taxes for the rich, less healthcare…People are ready to swallow many things of they are presented to them with laughter

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055822728400461824 https://ift.tt/2PROppu

What if the very duality of Trump’s personality…is what makes him attractive to Christian conservatives, what if they secretly identify with this very duality…-his high moral stance, accompanied by…lewdness & vulgarity"?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055821845889474561 https://ift.tt/2zot2Sy

By the end of the 1960s, the US economy was no longer able to continue the recycling of its surpluses to Europe and Asia: its surpluses had turned into deficits. …Instead of tackling…deficits, it decided to…boost deficits. And who would pay for them? The rest of the world!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055818988175978496 https://ift.tt/2DDBwIx

Class struggle is back as the main determining factor of our political life…even if the stakes appear to be totally different, from humanitarian crises to ecological threats, class struggle lurks in the background and casts its ominous shadow

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055818024278605824 https://ift.tt/2ziXDkm

Trump’s wrong vision is nonetheless based on the correct insight that the existing world system no longer works. An economic cycle is coming to an end

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055817323695742978 https://ift.tt/2Dx4SYP

the twists of Stalinism: In 1943, when Italy capitulated, Jurančič led a rebellion of Yugoslav prisoners. …Under his leadership, 2,000 starved prisoners single-handedly disarmed 2,200 Italian soldiers. After the war, he was arrested and put in a prison on the nearby small Goli Otok (“naked island”), a notorious Communist concentration camp. While there, he was mobilized in 1953, together with other prisoners, to build a monument to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 1943 rebellion on Rab - in short, as a prisoner of Communists, Jurančič was building a monument to himself

https://ift.tt/2Fsp54w

Will Self reproached me for still counting on some big ‘revolutionary’ act that will turn…prevent our slide towards catastrophe. …So what can we do…? Self’s answer: nothing big, just…enjoy our isolated life, jerking off … Such a cynical…stance suits…those in power

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055814398479122432 https://ift.tt/2DsUtgW

Insofar as human rights were first proclaimed during the French Revolution, one should note the irony of the fact that Calais is a French city.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055812980888211462 https://ift.tt/2Kc28Sa

The web is now our most important commons, and the struggle for its control is the struggle today. The enemy is the combination of privatized and state-controlled commons

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055808042841858049 https://ift.tt/2z8JyGb

Our side will be accused of playing into the enemy’s hands (like the campaign against Assange), but we should get used to it and learn to strike back with interest, ruthlessly playing one side against another… Were Lenin & Trotsky also not accused of being paid by the Germans?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055807229981536257 https://ift.tt/2K8f2jM

We also need a narrow striking force of dedicated ‘engineers’ (hackers, whistle-blowers …)… Its task will be to 'take over’ the digital grid, to rip it out of the hands of corporations and state agencies that now de facto control it… Let a hundred WikiLeaks blossom! -S.Z.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055806488470536194 https://ift.tt/2PtfOOw

The big question remains:…Can we even imagine today an authentic Communist power? What we get is disaster (Venezuela), capitulation (Greece), or a full return to capitalism (China)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051965398587985922 https://ift.tt/2OK4R5Q

It is possible to tolerate limited elements of capitalism without allowing the logic of capital to become the overdetermining principle

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051964977047842816 https://ift.tt/2B3aqJ8

not..hackers…nudged the people towards Trump -…they probably did try…- but our own data-processing [Cambridge Analytica], who allied their forces with political ones. …The big bad wolf who distorts our democracy is right here…& this…Assange was claiming all the time.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051961400992690178 https://ift.tt/2Fto4cP

Although capitalism can..turn ecology into a new field of..investment…, [climate change] fundamentally precludes a market solution. ..Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies trust in the…market’s ‘invisible hand’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051944123001950208 https://ift.tt/2OEEVZk

instead of focusing on individual greed and approach the problem of growing inequality in moralist terms, the task is to change the system so that it will no longer allow or even solicit “greedy” acting.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051897451655979009 https://ift.tt/2PocMuZ

it is because of their focus on concrete enemies that Left populists…endorse…nationalism, presenting their struggle as a defense against international financial capital. …One should nonetheless insist that…resistance against global capital has to be itself global.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051894030152417284 https://ift.tt/2Pgk2sC

the rise of Trump is..the effect of the failure of liberal-democratic consensus https://t.co/s47ukyR17T #populismstudies

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051892191344435202 https://ift.tt/2RHZG8m

This urge to construct the Enemy is another fatal limitation of populism. Today, the ultimate “enemy” is not a concrete social agent but in some sense the system itself, a certain functioning of the system https://t.co/s47ukyR17T #zizek #populismstudies #antisemitismstudies

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051888014182535169 https://ift.tt/2PicGoF

Here we encounter the truth of populism: its failure to confront the real of the capital. The supreme populist moment (referendum victory) immediately reverted into capitulation, into confession of impotence with regard to the capitalist order. #populism https://t.co/s47ukyR17T

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051886974133563394 https://ift.tt/2RFlAcx

Leftist politics today does not need (just) confrontational passion;…it needs…cold rationality. Cold analysis and passionate struggle… need each other. The formula…of a passionate confrontation directed against lifeless universalism is..all too formal

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051886681782145028 https://ift.tt/2DmN1oi

the ideology of neoliberalism… is anything but “rational.” …It is.. confrontational,…it brutally excludes those who do not accept it under the pretext that they are dangerous anti-democratic utopians. Its expert knowledge is ideology at its purest

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051871497927761920 https://ift.tt/2F24291

“the idea of world-wide elections..is self-defeating…: "People feel bound by..elections only when they share a basic bond… If the experience of other voters is alien to me,…then…I have..no reason to accept the verdict”“ says Zizek citing Yuval Harari on liberal bias.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051857588055408641 https://ift.tt/2JArqsG

those who advocate a radical opening of the borders to refugees: are they aware that, since our democracies are nation-state democracies, their demand equals the suspension of democracy, since they encourage a gigantic change,…without democratic consultation of its population?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051853397111001088 https://ift.tt/2qnJUnq

“no point in waiting for the right moment when a smooth change might be possible …One has to take the risk & intervene… Only…this can…change the situation… The..universe of manipulation can all of a sudden crumble & undo itself.” #LikeAThiefInBroadDaylight #SlavojZizek

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051453915139588096 https://ift.tt/2ERc4Bd

“Music is the substance which renders the true heart of the subject,…the “Night of the World”” - “With the shift away from the Enlightenment subject of rational logos” music is this “abyss of radical negativity,” says Zizek

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051443661932777472 https://ift.tt/2ACBy1c

In love the gaze of the Other remains even if the Other ceased to exist” & “sees in me more than myself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051418544460783616 https://ift.tt/2RoQiGE

gigantic inputs of money fail to generate production since they mostly disappear in the operations of fictitious capital. This is why one should reject the standard liberal Hayekian interpretation of exploding debt (the costs of supplying a welfare state)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051177453018931200 https://ift.tt/2zaXnDd

should we continue to play the humanitarian game of taking care of those left behind, or should we tackle the much more difficult task of changing the global system that generates them? Without such a change, our situation will be increasingly irrational

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051176416732176384 https://ift.tt/2AvxXlm

https://t.co/rxQpMFvTIA we have to be pushed from outside, since our “natural state” is one of inert hedonism; of…“human animal.” …The more we live as “free individuals with no master,” the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1049985696868560898 https://ift.tt/2D7oPWY

Macron’s triumphant victory is…dangerous,..his victory did not..awaken us – its effect is…: sighs of relief everywhere, the nightmare is over, thank God the danger was kept at bay, Europe and our democracy are saved, so now we can go back to our liberal-capitalist sleep again

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1049934102873423873 https://ift.tt/2D2xmdu

Western powers… create a pseudo-‘cultural’ antagonism between refugees and the local lower-class population, engaging them in a conflict which transforms a politico-economic struggle into one of the ‘clash of civilizations’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048864711608029184 https://ift.tt/2AqgN8Z

One has to take the risk and intervene, even if reaching the goal appears (and is, in some sense) impossible – only by doing this can one change the situation so that the impossible becomes possible, in a way that can never be predicted

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048827687186456576 https://ift.tt/2PPMVrR

the change is already happening in broad daylight: capitalism is openly disintegrating and changing into something else. We do not perceive this ongoing transformation because of our deep immersion in ideology

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048827269047898113 https://ift.tt/2Jb3xaU

The same holds for psychoanalytic treatment, where resolution also comes as a thief in broad daylight, as an unexpected by-product, never as the achievement of a posited goal. This is why psychoanalytic practice is something that is possible only because of its own impossibility

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048827021634281472 https://ift.tt/2S71TeC

the ideology of personal freedom could silently merge with the logic of victimhood (freedom being reduced to the freedom to bring out one’s victimhood)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048736133084053509 https://ift.tt/2q43e8Y

In today’s predominant form of individuality, the self-centered assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048735687615418373 https://ift.tt/2PJFt1s

The notion of the subject as an unresponsible victim is driven by a..narcissistic perspective in which every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject’s precarious imaginary balance; as such, it is…the inherent supplement to, the liberal free subject

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048734397342670849 https://ift.tt/2yMVYm3

this..emerging world-less civilization..affects the young, who oscillate between the intensity of..burning out (sexual enjoyment, drugs..,..violence), and the endeavour to succeed (study,…career,..money…within the..capitalist order). ..Tansgression..becomes the norm

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048617971323719680 https://ift.tt/2AgsQWc

this..emerging world-less civilization..affects the young, who oscillate between the intensity of..burning out (sexual enjoyment, drugs..,violence), and the endeavour to succeed (study,…career, earn money…within the existing capitalist order). ..Tansgression..becomes the norm

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048600691391041536 https://ift.tt/2PE9pMu

the possibility to choose and consume imperceptibly turns into a superego obligation to choose. The nihilist dimension of this space of freedoms can only function in a permanently accelerated way – the moment it slows down, we become aware of the meaninglessness

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048558833596030976 https://ift.tt/2IWW4vV

We live in an extraordinary era in which there is no tradition on which we can base our identity, no frame of meaningful universe which might enable us to lead a life beyond hedonist reproduction

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048558407630901249 https://ift.tt/2QQj9TL

Sloterdijk is the ultimate ‘prodder’, the one who is not afraid to ‘think dangerously’ and to question the presuppositions of human freedom and dignity, of our liberal welfare state https://t.co/7fhpYjHYa0

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048558123299028992 https://ift.tt/2OYQuii

thinking, insofar as its innermost potential is to think freely and ‘against itself’, is what, from the standpoint of conventional thinking, cannot but appear as ‘evil’ https://t.co/hGIfFKmmIP

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048557848467296256 https://ift.tt/2NExFMo

sad..to see Habermas trying to control the explosive results of biogenetics and curtail its philosophical consequences – his..endeavour betrays the fear…that the the old image of human dignity and autonomy will [not] survive unscathed. [@allenlanebooks typo: “not” is missing]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048555977115664385 https://ift.tt/2yfle57

Plato submitted ancient customs and myths to ruthless rational examination, Descartes undermined the medieval harmonious universe, Spinoza ended up being excommunicated, Hegel unleashed the all-destructive power of negativity, Nietzsche demystified the very basis of our morality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048553592817422336 https://ift.tt/2OKpjHZ

a weirdly perverted situation in which the official ‘Left’ is enforcing austerity politics (at the same time advocating multicultural rights), while the populist Right is implementing anti-austerity measures to help the poor (while pursuing a xenophobic nationalist agenda)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048552937553891328 https://ift.tt/2E9U4lx

Parties like Die Linke in Germany represent the interests of their working-class constituency – better healthcare and retirement conditions, higher wages, and so on; this automatically puts them within the confines of the existing system

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048549346516631552 https://ift.tt/2pKfYlc

Our predicament is..that..resistance to global capitalism…fails to recognize the many trends which clearly signal capitalism’s progressive disintegration. (A Thief In Broad Daylight) https://t.co/6zT25Nf3xv

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048510135637880832 https://ift.tt/2OPDvzv

The task of the Left is…to change the prospect of what appears possible. (A Thief In Broad Daylight, 2018) https://t.co/C3hwRo3ybB

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048508655753224192 https://ift.tt/2ynD8BB

Music is the substance which renders the true heart of the subject, which is what Hegel called the “Night of the World,” the abyss of radical negativity: music becomes the bearer of the true message beyond words with the shift away from the Enlightenment subject of rational logos

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/996665332034129920 https://ift.tt/2Gz6NKk

Kant’s transcendental turn concerns the excess of the Night in the very heart of the subject (the dimension of the Undead), what Tomlison called the “internal otherworldliness…,the inaccessible excess which forms the very core of the subject.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/996295388335394817 https://ift.tt/2GyAdID

if I am attacked and rejected, I am not contaminated, I’m very much a purist. The most important thing is not if people reject you or not but that you are not contaminated, appropriated.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/994123574427504640 https://ift.tt/2Kl0MDs

redemption is for me already the collective itself. The zero level of political… you know when Christ says when he appears after his death “Whenever there is love between the two of you, I am there.” That’s redemption. Redemption is collectivity as this emancipatory collectivity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/993761183944642560 https://ift.tt/2jSl9N5

We read Paul in the way of “God is dead”, God is telling us “It’s up to you, I need your help.” So, to put it in very brutal terms, as Alain Badiou once told me in a conversation, the Holy Ghost is the Communist Party, it’s the community of believers

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/991953027274805249 https://ift.tt/2wi24N6

in an apocalyptic time, that is to say, how to avoid the dilemma of either the old substantial community or dispersed liberal individualism.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/991585599592288257 https://ift.tt/2HRnTbM

the others jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/991225878528094209 https://ift.tt/2KETET5

what is this feminine depression that suspends the causal link, the causal enchainment of our acts to external stimuli, if not the founding gesture of subjectivity, the primordial act of freedom, of breaking up our insertion into the nexus of causes and effects.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/990865863371907073 https://ift.tt/2jwCfjm

[against the notion] of a deadened, lethargic woman aroused from her numbness by a man‘s call…, Lynch can be said to be a true anti-Weininger, [who was] the paradigm of anti-feminism… For Lynch, the “original fact” is… depression

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/990499691640049665 https://ift.tt/2HO1pV4

Man ‘bombards’ her with shocks in order to arouse her attention and thereby pull her out of her numbness - in short, in order to reinstate her in the ‘proper’ order of causality [unable to accept how subjectivity is void of order]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/990139823792050177 https://ift.tt/2jnYbNB

in Weininger’s… anti-feminism,… man’s fascination with a woman results from his Fall

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/989777443748593664 https://ift.tt/2reSZz5

in…modern anti-feminism, woman presents herself to man, endeavouring to fascinate his gaze and thus to drag him down from the spiritual heights into the pit of sexual debauchery -

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/989413921349165057 https://ift.tt/2HJOvHA

A Greek statue is the perfect human form, the balance of body and spirit – however, as such, it has to be without gaze: Their eyes are flat, pure surfaces, not the punctual window into the depth of the soul, since such a crack in the bodily surface would disturb its unity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/989051536327282688 https://ift.tt/2JCkAla

This, for Lacan, is beauty – the domesticated ugliness of the gaze. The painter gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/988687752857292801 https://ift.tt/2HDLhWi

the painting we are looking at “returns the gaze.” Insofar as this gaze, the blind spot of the painting, is an ugly “phallic” protuberance, an excess that disturbs the painting’s harmony, a work of art has to obfuscate this stain..if it is to become beautiful.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/988324108466294784 https://ift.tt/2HAuvr0

it is, of course, well known that 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; … this Absence itself conceals an inert, nightmarish presence ..of an obscene Superegoic object

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/988322854637891584 https://ift.tt/2vPzWAH

When it.. arrives at what it was striving for –… emancipation from the sacred, from social utility,… – the prize becomes worthless; the emancipation of art turns into the emancipation from art… –is.. not.. modern art effectively.. caught..in.. permanent.. self-questioning

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/987966751500656641 https://ift.tt/2Kd1vr7

The very form of sitcoms seems to evoke the Hegelian “spurious infinity”: There are no big issues, just melodramatic complications that pop up and disappear

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/987600586483949569 https://ift.tt/2KaKT3a

Hegel prophesied the end of art because he failed to perceive radical antagonisms that persist in the apparently nonantagonistic self-reconciled bourgeois society where individuals are condemned to lead a prosaic everyday life.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/987235693293424640 https://ift.tt/2HP4bwq

that art plays a key role within an epoch means that in this epoch Spirit is not reconciled with itself – this is why it still needs sensual embodiment (in a work of art).

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/986878340777873408 https://ift.tt/2JcIJP9

the price of happiness is that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desire. In our daily lives, we (pretend to) desire things which we do not really desire, so that, ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we »officially« desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/986512171105443840 https://ift.tt/2vEzNjQ

not only are we controlled and manipulated, but »happy« people secretly and hypocritically demand to be manipulated for their own good.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/986156077766119424 https://ift.tt/2HdHqmq

Truth and happiness don’t go together. Truth hurts; it brings instability; it ruins the smooth flow of our daily lives. The choice is ours: do we want to be happily manipulated or expose ourselves to the risks of authentic creativity?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/985790036334596096 https://ift.tt/2vwCXWC

The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/985430037565407232 https://ift.tt/2HbYp8U

Man as such is nature sick unto death, derailed, run off the rails through a fascination with a lethal Thing.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/985067651088207874 https://ift.tt/2vq7O7c

The symptom is… a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment — that is why, even after the completed interpretation, the subject is not prepared to renounce his symptom

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/984698972446121984 https://ift.tt/2JOWW64

You, the subject, must identify yourself with the place where your symptom already was; in its pathological particularity you must recognize the element which gives consistency to your being. -

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/984342872332865537 https://ift.tt/2qDgGSj

Wylie’s plan was to break into facebook, harvest the profiles of…people…, use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles, and then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/984066325927604225 https://ift.tt/2JIFPmj

At a certain point, Wylie was genuinely freaked out: “It’s insane. The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/984065798200348674 https://ift.tt/2HuSLLZ

It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more successful than ourselves

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/983975453831680000 https://ift.tt/2qphA4E

The horror of the Holocaust cannot be represented; but this excess of represented content over its aesthetic representation has to infect the aesthetic form itself.What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/983748962912960512 https://ift.tt/2IKBHRz

80% of us “left behind.” …What about the prospect of reuniting..all the “living dead” of the..capitalism,..left behind by the neo-capitalist “progress,”…should we..play the humanitarian game of taking care of those left behind, or should we tackle…changing the global system

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/982678073643536384 https://ift.tt/2IHtvkL

I can never see the picture at the point from which it is gazing at me: … The gaze as object is a blemish that prevents me from looking at the picture from a safe, ‘objective’ distance, framing it as something which is at the disposal of my grasping view.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/982566855801016321 https://ift.tt/2GHDnP3

The problem is not that humans do not recognize their own nature, but rather the opposite: The problem is that they see much more to be their own nature than is actually the case. They have the curious tendency to see themselves and their freedom in everything they do

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/982239322991575040 https://ift.tt/2q9tv6v

Lacan’s position is that only lesbians are true heterosexuals, while gays and straight heterosexuals are homosexual.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/979629479818616836 https://ift.tt/2GIgwmk

objet a designates what is in an object more than this object itself, its unreachable core—… what causes love is some elusive je ne sais quoi in the beloved, some X that cannot be pinned down to any perceptible particular feature of the beloved

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/979270711889063937 https://ift.tt/2GzW5be

this X does not exist in itself, it is the inscription of my desire into the object (which is why, as they say, a human being appears sublime only to the gaze of the subject in love with him/her).

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/978900774569771009 https://ift.tt/2JlmirJ

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 implementing a new ‘code of discretion’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/978543420036743168 https://ift.tt/2uKjeCo

I move in a social space where I interact with others, obeying certain external ‘mechanical’ rules, without sharing their inner world. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that, sometimes, a dose of alienation is indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/978181030090862592 https://ift.tt/2EeQSjb

The true function of the Name-of-the-Father..is..to allow the subject to “symbolically kill” the father, to be able to abandon father..and freely set on one’s own path in the world. …Kafka’s reluctance to assume the Name-of-the-Father is.. indication of his failure to break off

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/977821155875794944 https://ift.tt/2J8YQxW

It is not that father’s excessive vitality undermines his symbolic authority; it is, rather, the other way round, i.e., the very fact that one is bothered by father’s excessive vitality already presupposes the failure of symbolic authority.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/977471348686622720 https://ift.tt/2GKJi5d

What bothers Kafka is the over-presence of his father: he is too much alive, too obscenely intrusive. However, this…father’s “too-muchness”..is ultimately the too-muchness of life itself, the humiliating quality of the father’s excess of vitality which undermines his authority.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/977106444356112386 https://ift.tt/2GoJB6w

Fritzl defended himself thus: If it weren’t for me, Kerstin wouldn’t be alive today, I’m no monster. I could have killed them all. Then…no one would have found me out.’ What is crucial here is the underlying premiss: as a father, he had the right to exercise total power

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/976745456381448193 http://bit.ly/2GUoHJc

Fritzl is also a child of 1968, ruthlessly realizing his fantasy. …It is misleading…to describe Fritzl as inhuman. He was, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘human, all too human’. No wonder Fritzl complained that his own life had been 'ruined’ by the discovery of his secret family.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/976550904458567680 https://ift.tt/2GmpdhZ

Fritzl is also a child 1968, ruthlessly realizing his fantasy. …It is misleading…to describe Fritzl as inhuman. He was, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘human, all too human’. No wonder Fritzl complained that his own life had been 'ruined’ by the discovery of his secret family.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/976380413747826688 https://ift.tt/2Iah0y1

I wouldn’t like to live in a stupid society where I would have to be all the time engaged in local communitarian politics. …My idea of society is that… some invisible alienated machinery takes care of things so that I can… watch movies, read and write.. books and so on.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/976021804052606976 https://ift.tt/2GauSrp

that at any point the end may be near.. pushes you to strengthen ethical activity. The result… is not, “Oh, the end may be near, so let’s kill, let’s just enjoy”. No, it’s the opposite. Again, paradoxically, I claim it’s not a superficially but profoundly optimistic film.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/975659413276065792 https://ift.tt/2Gn6CpA

I like to live in a society where you do whatever you want. Just please don’t express yourself too much. I like people who know how to control themselves. I believe in..manners. This aspect… that you stage a certain image of yourself, this doesn’t bother me with online dating.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/975295840091889664 https://ift.tt/2Gmqw3S

One would have thought the situation is this one: In normal conversation we control ourselves. Then when I cannot any longer control myself, I explode. No, I claim precisely this moment of explosion are the most precisely trained structures, artificial, if you want.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/974937153154310144 https://ift.tt/2pANART

after 10 minutes of talking dirty, we tell to each other okay, we paid our tribute to ugliness. We got rid of it. Now we can finally be what we are and talk in a nice polite way, you know.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/974573507827916800 http://ift.tt/2IJToS3

we have a certain perverse superego duty to talk dirty. And after you get rid of that, we can believe what we are. This is why I have always had a deep sympathy — although I’m not practicing — for sadomasochist sexuality.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/974300457991639040 http://ift.tt/2G1oL8I

The illusion proper to the Unconscious is not that its core eludes us forever, it is the very illusion that there is some hidden core which eludes us. …The Unconscious is not a Real that forever eludes.., it is this very twisted structure of failures, repetitions, displacements

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/973685146590294016 http://ift.tt/2GMG0fo

“Prohibition produces dissatisfied, desiring subjects, subjects who remain securely within the confines of the social order. Desire is consonant with the social order because of its reliance on absence rather than presence,” McGowan writes.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/973676652432707584 http://ift.tt/2FLJGRb

the..chauvinist scenario:…all the time I dream, “if my wife were to disappear…it would open up new life for me with the mistress.” You know what every psychoanalyst will tell you quite often happens? That then, for some reason, wife goes away, you lose the mistress, also.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/973658148627152899 http://ift.tt/2FJwOLo

what you want is not really to live with the mistress but to keep her at a distance as an object of desire about which you dream. And this is not just an excessive situation. I claim that this is how things function. We don’t really want what we think we desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/973657748062851073 http://ift.tt/2tVgRwl

Marx traced it but he wasn’t radical enough. Marx’s dream of communism was that we can get capitalist dynamics without the obstacle

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/973648419322585096 http://ift.tt/2GADQPE

Goebbels’ Totaler Krieg speech in early 1943. He does something ingenious in a terrifying way. All he promises to German people is more suffering. He says: “Do you want a war that will be so total that you cannot even imagine how much you will suffer?” And they all cheer

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/973648004996653056 http://ift.tt/2pfG5AF

I agree with its goals.. but think about the figure…silently presupposed by political correctness, its obsession with harassment and victimisation, we are always threatened. …The vision beneath political correctness is very sad, a vision of ‘we are all potential victims’.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/973647801551814656 http://ift.tt/2FSN5Nd

We have to go through capitalism, but at the same time…move on, not because I am a utopian… …Capitalism is approaching a crisis in the sense that the problems it encounters today…it will not be able to resolve on its own.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/973646602362589184 http://ift.tt/2FxYHG1

our late-capitalist reality in which total sexual permissiveness causes anxiety and impotence or frigidity instead of liberation

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/963743393875746816 http://ift.tt/2EJoREO

Fundamentally we never know what we are doing. …I fight..against visions that somehow in communism private life will be better. Who knows?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/947390631390928897 http://ift.tt/2GbHf7b

If you don’t feel guilty you don’t really enjoy it. You have to add guilt to pleasure to really enjoy it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/947033288069341186 http://ift.tt/2E1SwpS

All he promises to Germans is suffering: “Do you want a war that will be so total that you cannot even imagine how much you will suffer?”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/946667166908272641 http://ift.tt/2DZ4d0l

all these stupid metaphors like “our conscious ego is just like the tip of the iceberg.” No, the unconscious is purely phenomenal for Freud.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/946302209737838593 http://ift.tt/2mZAPjE

Today, all our main terms we use…are false terms - “war on terror”, “democracy and freedom”, “human rights”, etc. etc. are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. Our “freedoms” themselves serve to mask…our deeper unfreedom.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/946248862058106881 http://ift.tt/2rrXYQe

the true step beyond racism is not to change language, but even to use the same language but in a different, ironic, non-racist way.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/945941081698586624 http://ift.tt/2DTl1pu

I doubt you can have real contact with another person without a small exchange of obscenities.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/945577440579129344 http://ift.tt/2ERZAof

my secret hope is that there is a certain strata of people who are not just looking for jokes

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/945216308500680705 http://ift.tt/2FQ4SSD

publishers put pressure on me to write a best seller on Donald Trump. Why should I? He’s not interesting as a person; he’s a boring idiot

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/944852662734000129 http://ift.tt/2mCmzw0

Hegel is “the most sublime of all hysterics”: …only hysteria produces..knowledge in contrast to University discourse, which..reproduces it

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/944496569981767680 http://ift.tt/2mBifwT

Insofar as philosophy is a case of Master’s discourse, psychoanalysis acts as the agent of its..hystericization. (Incontinence of the Void)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/944129144002154496 http://ift.tt/2FBRaCv

The early Bolsheviks..were not able to perceive in the Stalinist terror the ultimate offspring of their own acts.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/943764240854380544 http://ift.tt/2mAGCM1

The early Bolsheviks would have been shocked at what the Soviet Union had turned into by the 1930s (..many of those..were..liquidated..)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/943408144646098944 http://ift.tt/2moaOJy

The true courage is not to imagine an alternative but to accept the consequences of the fact that there’s no clearly discernible alternative

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/943041977611939841 http://ift.tt/2qZGniy

the dream of an alternative…functions as a fetish that prevents us thinking through to the end the deadlock of our predicament.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/942682124372578304 http://ift.tt/2EuqzWQ

[Today] even the most pessimistic diagnosis finishes with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/942319722363793409 http://ift.tt/2mlXRAD

Agamben said in an interview “thought is the courage of hopelessness” ─ an insight that is especially pertinent for our historical moment.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/941956133069180928 http://ift.tt/2Eny41w

There are those who out of the frustration of their desire for the West turn towards (self-)destructive nihilism

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/941591172883066880 http://ift.tt/2D6vDRF

The..voice of truth cannot but appear as ‘irrational’ in its lack of consideration for the opinions of others, in its refusal of..compromise

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/941233818605891584 http://ift.tt/2m6PMQf

To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities, what is in Lenin more than Lenin himself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/940872692521209856 http://ift.tt/2Aybn8H

[With WWI a world disappeared including the socialist movement]. Born in this moment..Lenin..was able to discern the..chance for revolution.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/940502755520794624 http://ift.tt/2Csozh0

This does not mean to return to Lenin. To repeat Lenin is to accept that “Lenin is dead”.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/940140366807879681 http://ift.tt/2EOQUjl

Lenin was the..one to articulate the truth of the catastropy [of 1914 in which an entire world disappeared including the socialist movement]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/939783005584920576 http://ift.tt/2CxB4va

1914:…an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but also the socialist movement that accompanied it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/939419410166702080 http://ift.tt/2CAqHEd