In Eyes Wide Shut, “Nicole Kidmen tells Tom Cruise…about fantasising about cheating him with some naval officer they met… His desperate attempt to catch up with her fantasy” by cheating on her ends in a failure

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1210138158853246976 https://ift.tt/377qcj2

I fully support the struggle of transgender people against their legal segregation. [Their] 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 universal feature of human sexuality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1209235788359229440 https://ift.tt/2tJgd59

The Labour Party’s election failure in the UK proves that, for the progressive left to succeed, it will have to become considerably more revolutionary. The ‘softly, softly’ approach isn’t working

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1209147300280446976 https://ift.tt/2s8PM8R

anti-Semitism as a displaced anti-capitalism (instead of blaming the capitalist system, the rage is focused on a specific ethnic group accused of corrupting the system)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1208882994490085381 https://ift.tt/2ZgrpSH

That was the miracle of Corbyn. There what not even a trace of bad populism in Corbyn. Manipulating the worst fears and so on. Corbyn didn’t accept this game. It is todays modern left which truly stands for moral authority. https://t.co/fQUzKtGUxW

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1191512480268328960 https://ift.tt/2PV3c1q

Corbyn ignored the fearmongering. Corbyn didn’t answer at the same level of it. He succeeded. It worked. It is a wonderful ethical sign that people cannot be just manipulated. It is a great hope to all of us. https://t.co/fQUzKtGUxW

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1191512291071680512 https://ift.tt/2NF8POE

good manners make us better. That is why I am incidentally horrified by the latest trends in politics represented in particular by US President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which allow politicians to be publicly vulgar. https://t.co/bijZBGiHyB

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1185121614972833792 https://ift.tt/33GtDeY

Sweden fully participates in character assassination of courageous Assange, says Zizek. https://t.co/eQoDBNOfrj

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1182601267664838656 https://ift.tt/2ILV6E3

“resistance” is the norm today, and obstacle to effectively question dominant relations, says Zizek https://t.co/US6d4ystCa

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1181809823576403969 https://ift.tt/2OF3tVH

Greta calls us to listen to science and take science seriously, this does not mean science provides the political answers… Science enables us to discern the contours of the deadlock in which we are (the catastrophic ecological implications) https://t.co/79vdwKGV8P #postpolitics

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1181169083414392833 https://ift.tt/2OClRyD

Greta is not a totalitarian acting as an instrument of the scientific big Other, she is proposing scientific data as the base which should compel us elaborate a new emancipatory project and act upon it. https://t.co/UJYJJtkele #GretaThunberg #bigOther #Lacan #timeOfMonsters

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1181168376401534976 https://ift.tt/2M3XsjQ

Thunberg…is fighting against those who deny the threat https://t.co/Vn8xIkkyrO

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1181141711315197958 https://ift.tt/2VviA5t

‘We children are…to wake the adults up.’ This is how a true apostle talks, effacing herself from the picture again & again, fully aware that the focus on her, even if it is celebratory, works as a distraction from her message… Thunberg is…an apostle. https://t.co/sVyenV0onU

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1181137558882979840 https://ift.tt/2nuFRYM

what we are seeing today is not the disappearance of authority, of Master figures but its forceful reappearance – we are getting something unimaginable decades ago, obscene Masters. Trump is the emblematic figure of this new type of obscene populist Master https://t.co/dRwyaIf6aH

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1170702776155983872 https://ift.tt/2LELV99

even a modest debate about different grades of abuse is considered unacceptable­. Is freedom (of debate) then not…reduced to freedom solely for those who think like us? https://t.co/Xhkio9kAdX

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1167022314485157888 https://ift.tt/2UlOOPZ

Young Americans have soured on capitalism, and that’s what got Trump elected – [The establishment] ignored a clear, more leftist,..signal from BernieSanders & his movement. [By running Hillary, the centrists] failed the expectations of the American people” https://t.co/5O7hmU7HFJ

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1167019443114917888 https://ift.tt/2L5yoYZ

“If you want to do something good for society,…to avoid all totalitarian threats…, we should all go to this experience of accepting that at some day everything will finish. …This pushes you to strengthen ethical activity.” https://t.co/rSSkWWN9r7 On #Melancholia & #vonTrier

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1142466786132144128 https://ift.tt/2XMvxw4

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. The way to achieve this is…to do exactly what Sanders and Corbyn were doing

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1074377384898502656 https://ift.tt/2Y6VN3D

communism is…the name…of the difficult task of breaking out of the confines of the market-and- state frame…: It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do, as Brecht put it in his ‘In Praise of Communism’. …The problem/deadlock is its own solution

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1072247333633568769 https://ift.tt/2l7TifA

Robespierre…expressed in a touching way the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as was clear to him, a revolution ‘is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’ https://t.co/B9VgClTUWm

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1071489338620428289 https://ift.tt/2JxqruM

There can be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist one. …Communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, in place of the egalitarian collective, offers a solidary organic community. …Nazism was national socialism, not national communism

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1071076367666561025 https://ift.tt/32oWLHE

Where I find Arendt problematic is in her notion that this was pure bureaucratic evil: that individuals behaved as anonymous bureaucrats - caught in a machine, doing their duty and so on. The implied link between Kantian…unconditional duty & the Nazi executors is..false.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1070342783938945025 https://ift.tt/2XRfvQZ

Banality of evil…means the people who performed these horrible acts…were..ordinary. …You will not arrive at the dimension of Nazi evil by doing…psychological analysis… It was anonymous objectivized evil. …That’s the positive aspect of Arendt’s thesis.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1070327432681414657 https://ift.tt/2S2YzRY

Nazism is the ultimate perversion of the logic of supreme good. Nazism is not about the ultimate idiosyncratic assertion of autonomy. Nazism means that everything, even the worst crimes, should be undertaken for the good of the nation.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1070071496616353792 https://ift.tt/2S3BNJZ

Instead of confronting the deadlock, you pass to the act. Suicide is…this false passage a l’ acte. The symbolic deadlock becomes so unbearable that simply by killing yourself you resolve it. …Suicide bombings and so on, all these phenomena can be explained precisely by this

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1069149932110602242 https://ift.tt/2L9aWLC

from the perspective of someone with a number of friends who lived in…anti-authoritarian communes —..this apparent abolishment of authority generated an even more stifling authority: a kind of fake egalitarian community where prohibitions were even more radical and intrusive.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1069000187119616003 https://ift.tt/2LGHFHU

In order to have a happy love relationship, you must have a third common cause. You don’t see eye to eye — rather, you both look to the common cause, and this is how you can be happy in your interpersonal relationship. This was [overlooked by] the hippie movement

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1068637297170702336 https://ift.tt/2XSkxMQ

once Sisyphus reaches his goal, he experiences the fact that the real aim of his activity is the way itself, the alternation of ascent and descent.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1068580427303141377 https://ift.tt/30cpu0w

demanding from the people to renounce ordinary pleasures, provides an enjoyment of its own; [on authoritarianism]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1068274656715534336 https://ift.tt/2LIp0eT

‘The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that it is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.’ Is this remark by Kafka not the..definition of what went wrong in..communist states of the 20th century?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1067916128872267783 https://ift.tt/2RP1b5N

Working through is working through the resistance [against the analysis], turning it from the obstacle into the very resort of analysis

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1067828041194373121 https://ift.tt/2NqpPeG

true changes are painful… Violence should primarily be conceived as self-violence, as a violent reformation of the very substance of subjects being — therein resides the lesson of Fight Club.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1067545602853167108 https://ift.tt/2XnqNNu

something like ‘Fight Clubs’ is recently emerging: ‘toughman-fights’ in which only amateur men (and women also) engage in violent boxing matches, getting their faces bloody, testing their limits. …These fights…are part of the potentially redemptive disciplinary drive

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1067545351706406912 https://ift.tt/2RK8cVs

The point is not to win (losers are often more popular..) , but…not to remain lying on the floor. Although these fights stand under the sign of ‘God bless America! ‘…one should not dismiss them..: they are part of the potentially redemptive disciplinary drive.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1067544596022849536 https://ift.tt/2RLOwkb

What we need…is a certain violence against ourselves. In order to break out of an ideological, double-bind predicament, you need a kind of violent outburst. It is something shattering. Even if it is not physical violence, it is extreme symbolic violence

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1067538557072486407 https://ift.tt/2KHQJwh

The Real here is precisely that missed opportunity: the trauma of betrayal, of what might have been. The…fantasy of what might have happened is not simply an illusion, but functions as a betrayal or haunting of the Real.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1067152009084588032 https://ift.tt/2KEN8Pz

third world terror, disasters and so on were typically perceived as something fantasmatic and unreal…through a certain gaze that distanced them from the general experience of daily reality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1066786852877660160 https://ift.tt/2J4SdO2

Cyberspace is..a way of escape from traumas & a way to formulate traumas …There is the danger of being caught in a kind of imaginary..circular movement, but..cyberspace opens up a space for encountering…the imaginary Real..of illusion, the traumatic dimension..we foreclose

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1066422703480033280 http://bit.ly/2WZeZvt

Cyberspace is both a way of escape from traumas and a way to formulate traumas — and in this sens…the wound can only be healed by the spear that smote it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1066059561029836800 http://bit.ly/2YarAO2

The sad truth of the [London Riots] situation lies in this conflict between two poles of the underprivileged: those who still succeed in functioning within the system and those who…are only able to strike out at the other pole of their own community.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1066014823429885952 http://bit.ly/2Y3qWBD

The problem with the [London]riots was not their violence as such, but the fact that it was not truly self-assertive—in Nietzschean terms, it was reactive, not active, impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force, envy masked as a triumphant carnival https://t.co/PxKBzrtsUf

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065969540205563904 http://bit.ly/2ZBVRp5

[London Riots] We should reject the injunctions regarding which side to take…: are the small shop-keepers defending the petty bourgeoisie against a genuine if violent protest against the system or are they representatives of the genuine working class resisting…disintegration?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065961945617100802 http://bit.ly/2XpTKr0

The [London Riots] protesters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the stores looted were not those of richer neighborhoods, they were the hard-won acquisitions of the very stratum from which the protesters originated.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065954415406915584 http://bit.ly/2Ipzw8x

one should have the courage of one’s own convictions: one should dare to assume fully one’s identifications.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065694152841617408 http://bit.ly/2Xh4CYk

as Freud once remarked to his close friend Otto Bauer, a key figure of Austrian Social Democracy (and the brother of Ida, the legendary “Dora”): “Do not try and make men happy, they do not wish happiness.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065653706316832770 http://bit.ly/2WLbs41

If all sides do not share or respect the same civility then multiculturalism turns into legally regulated mutual ignorance or hatred. The conflict about multiculturalism…is not a conflict between cultures but…between different visions of how different cultures can…coexist

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065604614119190528 http://bit.ly/2XgVAKS

Instead of playing the Beautiful Soul and bemoaning the newly emerging racist Europe…, we should turn a critical eye upon ourselves, asking to what extent our own abstract multiculturalism has contributed to this sad state of things

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065561830343536641 http://bit.ly/31x4ZNP

this constitutive role of the Father in carving out the space for a viable enjoyment can be found in the deadlock of today’s permissiveness, where the master or expert no longer prohibits enjoyment but enjoins it (“sex is healthy,” etcetera), thereby effectively sabotaging it

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065540441947426816 http://bit.ly/2XUAkI5

Merkel declared…: “This multicultural approach, saying that we…live happily with each other, has failed. Utterly failed.” …Conservatives insisted that every state is based on a predominant cultural space that the members of other cultures..in the same space should respect

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065516512625213441 http://bit.ly/2KjDge2

commodification of sexuality: Houellebecq depicts the morning after the sexual revolution, the sterility of a universe dominated by the superego injunction to enjoy.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065330255261356032 http://bit.ly/2IDLydu

Already with Heine, not just with Marx…philosophy was the German substitute for the revolution. That is the dilemma: you can’t have both. It is false to claim that the French could have had philosophy if only they had been clever enough.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065240969707171846 http://bit.ly/31pWyDW

virtual reality…is a relatively banal idea. It doesn’t give us anything to think. Virtual reality..means: ‘…we can create with our technological toys an appearance that in the end we believe to be reality.’ In my view, it is the reality of the virtual which is interesting

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065200698629988353 http://bit.ly/2IrivJO

economic growth and global-capitalist processes structurally exclude democracy - even in the form that capitalism itself ascribes to it https://t.co/71vGEsYun1

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1065156656579919874 http://bit.ly/2I5oEfN

The Americans…want to combine their world, their power to be able to intervene militarily in the world wherever they want, with a new isolationism, new walls… And democracy is defined in such a radically new way in this process that only its name remains https://t.co/JkPJuHR6b8

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064926746011725824 http://bit.ly/2I2IyZ0

1989 was not the end of utopias,…not the end of communism, but..the unleashing of the great utopia of liberal capitalism… And September 11 is the answer to it; if it means anything at all, it means..this utopia is today dead. https://t.co/IgtNaAxolJ

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064879863990022149 http://bit.ly/2XtmAUo

accept..that divine violence is brutally unjust: it is often..terrifying, not a sublime intervention of divine goodness… Marx re-binds violence into the process out of which a New Order arises (‘midwife’ of a new society), while in Hegel, the unbinding remains non-sublated.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064835888339914752 http://bit.ly/2In2BQY

WTO and the IMF: Here I agree in part with…Hardt and Negri’s Empire. People like Lafontaine in Germany were fooling themselves if they believed that decisions could be democratized that are made on this economic level. How do you democratize the banking institutions?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064815648507858946 http://bit.ly/2Z5Ev3R

In asserting the threat of ‘abstract negativity’ to the existing order as a permanent feature…Hegel is here more materialist than Marx: in his theory of war (& of madness), he is aware of the repetitive return of the 'abstract negativity’ which violently unbinds social links

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064790556545552385 http://bit.ly/31aP732

To be the object of another’s passion is a difficult position to be in. ..Anti-harassment struggles are…reflections of the fight against this annoying neighbour. ..The ultimate logic of…anti-harassment is…about..contact; how to keep a proper distance

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064604220907708416 http://bit.ly/312OmsU

the democratic..frame is already accommodated to this capitalist structure. To..change the capitalist structure, one must also change this democratic political frame; one cannot do it by enforcing changes through democratic electoral procedures which remain the same as before

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064562775475793920 https://slavoj--zizek.tumblr.com/post/185323965951/the-democraticframe-is-already-accommodated-to

no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, solutions are sought solely through those democratic mechanisms which themselves form part of the apparatuses of the ‘bourgeois’ state that guarantees the undisturbed reproduction of capital. In this ..sense,…the..enemy is…democracy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064517445443043330 http://bit.ly/2WEucpM

surplus enjoyment is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some ‘normal’, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitutively an 'excess’ [on capitalism’s excessive core]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064470873460146178 http://bit.ly/2QDSn2o

Here, we encounter Stiglitz’s..limitation: Does he…not imply that there is another, proper capitalism, in which markets are really and fairly competitive, not our ‘distorted markets in which corporations and the rich can (and unfortunately do) exploit everyone else’?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064450785520611328 http://bit.ly/2W3pM7F

the key to actual freedom resides in the…social relations, from the market to the family. Here…change…entails precisely revolutionary class struggle rather than democratic elections or any other ‘political’ measure in the narrow sense of the term https://t.co/vUZXfEA8ID

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064426825479266304 http://bit.ly/2HLhZaJ

We do not vote on who owns what…- such matters remain outside the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one will effectively change things by ‘extending’ democracy into the economic sphere by, say, reorganizing the banks to place them under popular control

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064412797151395840 http://bit.ly/2JMLcnM

the influx of immigrant workers… is part of the strategy of capital to hold in check the workers’ demands. This is why, in the United States, Bush did more for the legalization of the status of Mexican illegal immigrants than the Democrats caught in trade union pressures.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064407409945395205 http://bit.ly/2X9Yrlw

economic growth and global-capitalist processes structurally exclude democracy – even in the form that capitalism itself ascribes to it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064249886042816513 http://bit.ly/2WtYsDC

in a way you do encounter the impossible. You cannot say this is mere transcendental illusion of confusing an empirical object with the impossible Thing. The vagina is impossible, but it is not simply an illusion.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064246614548602880 http://bit.ly/2WnqzEB

[he learns] to assume directly his relationship to the object that gives body to his jouissance, bypassing the proxy who enjoys in his place, instead of him. …In assuming my fundamental fantasy I take upon myself the..kernel of my being…whose distance sustains my..activity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064205387199582209 http://bit.ly/2ws5r1z

a pervert..assumes the position of..pure instrument of the Other’s jouissance: for the (male) pervert, the sexual act..involves a clear division of labor in which he reduces himself to a pure tool of..enjoyment; he is doing the hard work..while the woman..stares into the air

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064160077328908288 http://bit.ly/2QlF1ay

people…know very well that the commodity-money is nothing but a reified form of the appearance of social relations, that, beneath the “relations between things,” there are “relations between people.” …In their social activity, they act as if they do not know this

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064108476236996608 http://bit.ly/30LWVZ8

it is the capitalist order itself whose..dynamics is destroying the..family.. (incidentally, a fact more true today than in Marx’s time), as well as expropriating the large majority of the population.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1064066948156350464 http://bit.ly/2HwAU98

there are Others who, through smoking, are enjoying themselves too intensely in a self­destructive way — and this is unbearable. Here you have at its purest the figure of the intrusive neighbour who enjoys him or herself too much. …The Neighbour is the Real

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063883471586680833 http://bit.ly/2Vz0Wwd

You can refer to Marx without any problems… But if you refer to Lenin,…it is unbelievable how everybody said to me afterwards that it was merely a cheap provocation. Excuse me, but when I organized a colloquium in Essen, as I later found out,..German secret service popped up

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063882180047368198 http://bit.ly/2Qkx4CR

the democratic political frame is already accommodated to..capitalist structure. To really change..capitalist structure, one must also change this democratic political frame; one cannot do it by enforcing changes through..electoral procedures which remain the same as before

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063873529144168448 http://bit.ly/2WQy7Nh

prayer wheels that do the praying for you, are not as stupid and “primitive” as they..seem,..they harbor a momentous liberating potential. By…surrendering my innermost content, including my dreams and anxieties, to the Other, a space opens up in which I am free to breathe

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063790137878986753 http://bit.ly/2Vwag3R

about his new novel I…asked Hanif Kureishi: “But the hero is nonetheless [again] an immigrant with a Pakistani father who is a failed writer” He replied: “What’s the problem? Do we not all have Pakistani fathers who are failed writers?” He was right https://t.co/v1ZOP6hJHX

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063752386026659840 http://bit.ly/2VFdg2O

the true universality is not that of the ideal being-a-father, but that of failure itself. Therein resides today’s..impasse: in the..father’s growing reluctance to accept the symbolic mandate “father"http://-this..is the..motif that runs through Spielberg https://t.co/v1ZOP6hJHX

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063707078559236096 http://bit.ly/2LJVtCS

the…twist Kureishi experienced in his father is part of EVERY father,…everybody’s father…failed to live up to his mandate & left to his son the task to settle his symbolic debts. In this sense..Kureishi’s Pakistani failed writer is…a singular standing in for..universality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063621042151804928 http://bit.ly/2EbXHEZ

I am myself so tired of the purist pseudo-Marxist critique of advertising as part of commodity fetishism that I am almost tempted to propose the following guideline: a critical social theorist who is not able to enjoy advertisements should not be taken seriously

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063567483792175104 http://bit.ly/2Yy7Svx

all that is holy is profaned. It is this crazy dynamic of global capitalism that makes effective resistance..difficult… The rage exploding across Europe today is, as Franco Berardi put it…“impotent and inconsequential, as consciousness & coordinated action seem beyond..reach”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063566165463756802 http://bit.ly/2JwPhM1

I..support PussyRiot’s..performance. What u wrote about masks reminds me of…Nietzsche’s “what must a person have suffered if he needs to be a clown that badly” One shld unconditionally defend the apparently…clownish attitude…as..only appropriate reaction to…violent events

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063547287996112896 http://bit.ly/30cqmTD

Dear Nadezhda,…Pussy Riot’s very existence communicates to thousands..that opportunist cynicism is not the only option, that we are not totally disoriented, that there still is a common cause worth fighting for. …As the old saying goes, fortune favors the brave! Yours, Slavoj

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063542252079915008 http://bit.ly/2YfFtdg

This is how a true Master works: he doesn’t try to guess what people want; he simply obeys his own desire and leaves it up to others to decide if they want to follow him. In other words, his power stems from his fidelity to his desire, from refusing to compromise on it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063529680773570560 http://bit.ly/2WyirOj

If we are not able to step outside the compulsion of the system, the gap between the frantic dynamics it imposes and our corporeal and cognitive limitations sooner or later brings about a fall into depression

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063519616188727296 http://bit.ly/2vPadpf

the neighbour is the Real. …An injunction like ‘Love thy neighbour’ is precisely one of the ways of avoiding the trauma of the neighbour.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063516050816327680 http://bit.ly/2Q33bXz

Pussy Riot does not propose…destabilization of the existing static order-in a deeper sense, it is today’s society that is caught in a crazy capitalist dynamic with no inner sense or measure, and it is Pussy Riot which de facto offers a stable ethico-political point.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063500739153195008 http://bit.ly/2ZZfs3D

“fundamentalists” are, for all their apparent passion, ultimately puppets used and manipulated by the cold logic of state power. The task is not to crush them, but to try to redirect their passion against those who use and manipulate them.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063478115920429059 http://bit.ly/2Lq44e5

it is “normal” life itself which, in a way, becomes “carnivalized,” with its constant reversals, crises, and reinventions, such that it is now the critique of capitalism, from a “stable” ethical position, which increasingly appears as the exception.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063466556619988998 http://bit.ly/2vEXIg5

not, let’s have…sex so..we no longer need to fantasize, but, rather,…you can get lost in fantasy,…it can overwhelm you, &…a..sexual act is a defensive measure to control this explosion… The Real here is in the fantasy & you escape into reality to..control this excess

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063214563967950848 http://bit.ly/2IXRSPs

The belief is..that with a little bit of good sex you get real satisfaction, so who needs to fantasize? But I think…you can get lost in fantasy &…the sexual act…is a measure to control this explosion of fantasy… You turn into reality..to stifle the fantasmatic explosion

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063207769501835264 http://bit.ly/2JbT1Ci

Nazism is the ultimate perversion of the logic of supreme good. ..Nazism means… even the worst crimes, should be undertaken for the good of the nation. …The logic of the holocaust is…inscribed in the tension between…moral law and its obscene underside superego.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063205103719653376 http://bit.ly/2J7f64Z

today’s real utopians are…experts who…believe that the..state of things can go on indefinitely, that we are not approaching the moment of an apocalyptic choice. If nothing in fact changes, then all of a sudden we will find ourselves living in a much darker society.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063205099584057345 http://bit.ly/2GKkl7N

does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms powerful enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are..antagonisms:..ecological catastrophe,…new forms of apartheid, new walls

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063203782715195393 http://bit.ly/2vrBTR1

today’s worldless’ dynamic capitalism radically changes the very coordinates of the communist struggle - the enemy is no longer the State to be undermined from its point of symptomal torsion, but a flux of permanent self-revolutionizing.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063194957220073472 http://bit.ly/2DDWRR1

the Hegelian approach…acknowledges [revolution’s] universal, eternal moment. The communist Idea persists: it survives the failures of its realization as a spectre which returns…in..endless persistence…captured in Beckett’s…‘Fail again. Fail better’ https://t.co/vcwOltNHGU

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063181062208151553 http://bit.ly/2IKTWdJ

the commons can also be restored to collective…humanity…without communism, in…an authoritarian-communitarian regime. [On the danger of looming authoritarianism]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063179874716782593 http://bit.ly/2PykWNT

recall..Hegel’s sublime words on the French Revolution …which…did not prevent him from coldly analysing the inner necessity of this explosion of abstract freedom turning into…self-destructive…terror. …Hegels critique is..accepting the..principle of the French Revolution

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063167566309408769 http://bit.ly/2IVgqYI

the voices from below ring with malicious joy all around us: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! How noble your vision of creating a just society was! Our hearts beat with you but our reason told us..your noble plans would finish only in misery and new unfreedoms!’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063159838862200832 http://bit.ly/2US3WrO

One aspect of the Real is that it’s impossible, but the other aspect is that it happens but it is impossible to sustain, impossible to integrate.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063152908286521344 http://bit.ly/2Dv5SMt

The only way for the global capitalist system to…avoid the communist solution, will be to reinvent some kind of socialism - in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with Asian values, or whatever. The future will be communist . . . or socialist https://t.co/lHSD6DBdjX

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063145682352115712 http://bit.ly/2W10MyC

Nazism was national socialism, not..communism. …Socialism…offers a solidary organic community …in place of the egalitarian collective. …There cannot be a communist antisemitism. If it appears otherwise, as in Stalin’s last years, it is..an indicator of a lack of fidelity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063140878204764160 http://bit.ly/2VZMEWb

‘Socialism failed, capitalism is bankrupt. What comes next?’ The answer is: communism. Socialism wants to solve…antagonisms without [solving the antagonism of] the singular universality of the proletariat.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063118309779038208 http://bit.ly/2W1tYFS

we do not accept the Other as such. We implicitly…test the Other against our notions of human rights…& equality &…say we accept those of your customs which pass this test. We already filter the Other, and what passes the filter is allowed. [on pride in one’s fake tolerance]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063113204174340096 http://bit.ly/2GnSZo4

What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians having ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063105637327011840 http://bit.ly/2UPg4Ks

we definitely have to ‘begin from the beginning’, that is, not to 'build further upon the foundations’ of the revolutionaiy epoch of the twentieth century (which lasted from 1917 to 1989), but to 'descend’ to the starting point and follow a different path

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063099383602913280 http://bit.ly/2Dlhh12

It is not that the Nazi evil was something banal; it is that the executors of this evil were ordinary banal persons. …So an important consequence is…it was anonymous objectivized evil. And that is the horror of it. That’s the positive aspect of Arendt’s thesis.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063074144709996544 http://bit.ly/2GrAsbF

if we begin from the position of respect for the Other’s passionate religious identification, we become embroiled in a..complex that obliges us..to respect…far more unpleasant..rituals: for example..burning the wife after the husband has died…practised in parts of India

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1063026364482273280 http://bit.ly/2v4mBl7

listening with..friends to a blues song on tv I said,..from the voice, the woman would seem to be African American, although her name is very European. …They claimed..it is incorrect to identify people by natural characteristics, that this is reductive https://t.co/w7Wrs5qxbZ

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062986003961516033 http://bit.ly/2UYD6h5

I asked them whether I’m allowed to identify people in any way, and they replied, no. So what we have is a total prohibition of any particular kind of identification, which means precisely that you must read the Other as an abstraction, as if they were already dead.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062985359951388672 http://bit.ly/2Uz9doj

cyber­space virtualization is necessarily supplemented by different forms of the ‘return of the Real’ — [i.e.] body mutilations…: ‘I feel unreal…as if I don’t exist…as if I am in a…virtual state & when I cut myself…I feel…back in contact with reality.’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062982558680576000 http://bit.ly/2Z9gb1G

it is never simply me and my partner. There is at the centre of any relationship the object-cause of desire

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062833683521044480 http://bit.ly/2IcUXLl

standard interpretation: a self-complacent..couple…seduced into fantasizing &..before getting lost in this abyss of…desire, they control themselves & step back. But I think what Eyes Wide Shut really shows is a traversing of the fantasy through experiencing its stupidity.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062831166426886144 http://bit.ly/2v0eNAw

Nicole Kidman & Tom Cruise …in Eyes Wide Shut:…The authentic fantasy — the fantasy that holds any real meaning — is her fantasy and what he desperately tries to do is to match up to, or resuscitate, something that would be at the level of her fantasy. Ultimately, he fails.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062830481916469248 http://bit.ly/2GbMpSy

fantasy….stages the mythical…narrative,…the illusion that we are renouncing something which we previously possessed.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062827959319433216 http://bit.ly/2UBH9Ql

Cyberspace is both a way of escape from traumas and a way to formulate traumas

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062792940639137792 http://bit.ly/2D29YeJ

‘We love each other too much, so let us stage a superficial love imbroglio involving the two couples in order to acquire a distance towards this unbearable burden of our own passion.’ [On Mozart’s Cosi]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062791036735500288 http://bit.ly/2uQvDCb

the original love is no less ‘artificial’ than the second. So, since one love counts as much as the other, the couples in Cosi can return to their initial marital arrangement. …In the end, we ascertain that we always-already were what we wanted to become

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062789523044814855 http://bit.ly/2IfoAL6

when you are thinking that you are doing your duty for the sake of duty, secretly we know you are doing it for some private perverse enjoyment. The disinterested point of the law is a fake, as there are private pathologies behind them.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062753350033309701 https://ift.tt/2HZQsTY

the clash of civilizations is the politics of the end of history. When you no longer have ideological-political struggles proper, every struggle can only appear in a totally mystified way as an ethnic or reli­gious clash of civilizations.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062710568405164032 https://ift.tt/2uJoZ0f

not…that ethics should be subordinated to power struggles, but in terms of accepting radical contingency. …You don’t have any guarantee in any norms whatsoever. You have to risk and to decide. …Do not compromise your desire. Do not look for support in any form of big Other.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062661508721766400 https://ift.tt/2K0aQ9B

Depoliticized ethics means that you rely on some figure of the big Other. But the Lacanian act is precisely the act in which you assume that there is no big Other.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062618668050407424 https://ift.tt/2CLSWBu

The Nazis were in this sense play­ing bureaucratic roles in order to enhance their pleasure. Secretly, they knew that the rituals of duty were a pretence to disguise the enjoyment derived from doing something horrible - even..guilt feelings generated here served..their pleasure

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062609843935240194 https://ift.tt/2FNuCkv

how often those people who pretend to be ultra-tolerant and multiculturalist respond along the lines of ‘maybe this goes in your primitive Balkan, but, sorry, here we are tolerant’ Their very identification of me in this way engenders a specific obscene enjoyment.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062599775130918912 https://ift.tt/2Vb4h5i

the most horrible thing to encounter for a human being is this abyss of free will; when somebody simply acts out of free will.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062256280696483840 https://ift.tt/2HQHMzo

clinging to ethnic identity serves as a protective shield against the trauma of being caught up in the vortex of non-transparent financial abstraction. The true “foreign body” that cannot be assimilated is ultimately the infernal self-propelling machine of Capital itself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1062024793124495360 https://ift.tt/2UhiRe2

So what path will China take? …their historical enmity towards the bourgeoisie as a class fits perfectly with the progress of contemporary capitalism towards a managerial system without the bourgeoisie—in both cases, as Stalin put it long ago, “cadres decide everything.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061985806338965505 https://ift.tt/2uxDlAJ

The goal of Deng’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without a bourgeoisie (as the new ruling class); now however, Chinese leaders are becoming painfully aware that capitalism without a stable hierarchy (brought by the bourgeoisie as a new class) generates permanent instability

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061940501794955264 https://ift.tt/2FBQBuE

we should focus on…features that characterize contemporary capitalism: the long-term trend of shifting from profit to rent (in its two main forms: rent based on privatized “common knowledge,” & rent based on natural resources); the much stronger structural role of unemployment

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061890112018149377 https://ift.tt/2JC95PC

what we want…is..clear; but do we really know…what we are ready to renounce…”? …As Communists, we should abstain from any positive imagining of the future Communist society. Recall…: “If anyone tells you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ don’t believe it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061823448140394502 https://ift.tt/2UPJOm1

Keep in mind the open meaning of…apokálypsis (“lifting of the veil” or “revelation”): a disclosure of something hidden…in an era dominated by falsehood… Its arrival cannot but cause terror & confusion—recall HeinerMüller’s motto: the first appearance of the new is the dread

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061756730990870529 https://ift.tt/2FpQ51y

The only violence that I advocate is in situations where there is a terrorist or autocratic violent regime - usually you might call it…civil disobedience. Like when you start to behave as if you don’t admit the legitimacy of public authority… Violence should only be defensive

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061752949926445056 https://ift.tt/2uoIzyQ

[On Egypt’s Arab Spring Revolution of Tahir Square] Even though there were some tanks, people ignored them and went on to embrace the soldiers. Isn’t this a model of how to resist?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061708919763075074 https://ift.tt/2TmVDim

This is why we should return…to Hegel’s “tragic” vision of the social process where no hidden teleology is guiding us, where every intervention is a jump into the unknown, where the result always thwarts our expectations

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061661121285971969 https://ift.tt/2UMAmA5

The left should learn, from the twentieth century, the horror of state terror or violence. Violence of leftist progressives should basically be defensive violence, in the sense that “We occupy the square . We defend if you attack us but not this kind of aggressive violence”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061639722844520448 https://ift.tt/2ufrDKS

it was not that Marx was too utopian in his Communist dreams, but that…what Marx conceived as Communism remained an idealized image of capitalism, capitalism without capitalism, that is, expanded self-reproduction without profit and exploitation.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061617063419088896 https://ift.tt/2UJgYDU

Hitler’s problem was how to save the capitalist regime, how to prevent revolution. He did not really act;..his actions were fundamentally reactions. And he was doing all this just to make things stay the way they had been.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061612079008960512 https://ift.tt/2F8Q2XS

Although fascists claim that they represent all the people, it is obvious they’re never able to do so. They always need some kind of external threatening movement, like Jews, foreigners etc. In other words, they have much more sacrificial logic, as in “Somebody has to be killed”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061601957297700864 https://ift.tt/2UGQhzF

“those in power don’t know either. Pussy Riot’s Your message is that, in Europe today, the blind are leading the blind. This is why it is so important that you persist” [Letter to Pussy Riot member when she was imprisoned. In: Comradely Greetings]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061594409081421829 https://ift.tt/2O6hAB4

When it is said that people are not afraid, it doesn’t mean that they are crazily heroic. Of course, if you see a policeman shooting at you, you should…run away. But…you no longer take the leadership seriously. Those in power know this is the most dangerous moment for them

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061588116329369600 https://ift.tt/2O2fnGK

[Zizek to imprisoned PussyRiot member] “It may sound crazy but although I am an atheist, you are in my prayers. Prayers that you will soon see your family, children, friends. Prayers that you will at least have some time to read and reflect in peace while in prison! All my love”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061575548953116672 https://ift.tt/2JbUlXo

the..appropriate reply to an ecologist trying to convince us of the impending threat is…: “Don’t worry, the catastrophe will come for sure!—the impossible is already happening all around us; but watch patiently, don’t indulge in the..perverse pleasure of thinking ‘This is it!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1061028186962714624 https://ift.tt/2TMFNld

today’s excessive catastrophism (the mantra that “the end of the world is near”) is itself a defense mechanism, a way of obfuscating the real dangers, of not taking them seriously

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1060941421333618688 https://ift.tt/2Hd4Msa

the..taboo with…the word “communism” is the result of the defeat of…emancipatory struggle, so that when one abandons the word, one sooner or later also betrays the content

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059941040529043457 https://ift.tt/2NU6Ndb

one should have the courage of one’s own convictions: one should dare to assume fully one’s identifications.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059853222578401285 https://ift.tt/2SU0lDO

anti-Semitism as…elementary form of of accepting capitalism: if a “leftist” movement resorts to anti-Semitism…it displaces the cause of capitalist antagonisms,…evoking the fantasy that, once we get rid of this Other, we will get capitalism without its antagonisms.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059832809869770755 https://ift.tt/2IZkqsB

Everyone is…saying…the emperor is naked (democracies…torturing…suspects…etc.), and…nobody seems to mind. The system just goes on…as if the emperor has his clothes on.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059808975225610240 https://ift.tt/2IZifoW

a fetish..enables you to..participate in the..capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is;..that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059764880083959808 https://ift.tt/2UkqVY9

Even if, in this way, we do not get what we wanted and/or expected, we none the less change the coordinates of what appears…as ‘possible’ and give birth to something genuinely new.” https://t.co/humdVPtvBZ

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059738430438064129 https://ift.tt/2EQyS27

I despise the kind of book that tells you … how to make yourself happy! The first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059718316347006976 https://ift.tt/2SIpn94

There is thus an interconnection between the rising anti-immigrant tide…and the ongoing financial crisis: clinging to ethnic identity serves as a protective shield against the traumatic fact [that] the true ‘foreign body’ which cannot be assimilated is…Capital itself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059649126927867909 https://ift.tt/2EsgnQ3

Fundamentalism is a reaction – a false, mystifying, reaction, of course – against a real flaw of liberalism

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059584944694087680 https://ift.tt/2H7RufH

Why is Christianity opposed to sexuality? Not because in sexuality our lower nature explodes, but because sexuality competes with pure spirituality as the primordial metaphysical activity.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059527061101002753 https://ift.tt/2NAJViM

Desire is caught in the logic of “this is not that,” while love as authentic sublimation fully accepts that “this is that”.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059490829130174464 https://ift.tt/2UdAUPc

the true conspiracy (of Power) consists in the very attempt to persuade subjects that they are victims of irrational, impenetrable forces

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059471718442590208 https://ift.tt/2GLvoA4

the true site of my beliefs is not my conscious acts, but the unconscious. …The unconscious is not “deep in me”, it is out there, in my … interactions.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059444022526332933 https://ift.tt/2Ee8JJ7

in sexuality, man’s object is ..the fantasy..to which no actual woman can ever correspond..(..sublime infatuation). ..The ..actual woman in her uniqueness is annihilated.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059420115358400513 https://ift.tt/2VpikUx

Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail..the developed countries ‘help’ the undeveloped with aid, credit and so on, and thereby avoid..their complicity in..the miserable situation

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059400201327312896 https://ift.tt/2EbcvCX

in love, I also am nothing, but as it were a Nothing humbly aware of itself, … made rich through the very awareness of its lack.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059376042891186178 https://ift.tt/2NqGwTn

Happiness is for opportunists. ..Happiness is a category of slaves.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059355928313634816 https://ift.tt/2GEWCID

instead of being bothered of what I am for the others, I fully assume the..contingency of my being. The subject becomes ‘cause of itself’ no longer looking for a guarantee [about oneself] in another’s desire. [No longer clinging to] “I was brought about with a special purpose”.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059340813270958080 https://ift.tt/2tz2EC9

our desire is always mediated by the Other (the symbolic texture which provides the scripts for possible desires); we are not directly ourselves, we play the role of ourselves, we imitate a fiction of what we are.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059324553128787968 https://ift.tt/2E2fbTt

love occurs when the loving subject discovers that the treasure in the beloved is just a deceiving fetish, that the true treasure is the fragile beloved

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059163406337560577 http://bit.ly/2V9suZb

this discourse of “resistance” is the norm today, and, as such, the main obstacle to the emergence of the discourse that would effectively question the dominant relations

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059126914210844673 http://bit.ly/2SbInfR

sex is ..a desperate ..measure aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059104253027983362 http://bit.ly/2TSydCs

universality is…the violent experience of how, across the cultural divide, we share the same antagonism.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059081607687143425 http://bit.ly/2tqMxGM

Modernity involves ..the inability of subjects to assume symbolic mandates. What prevents them ..is the ..perception of a ‘stain of enjoyment’ in the big Other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059058953907331075 http://bit.ly/2GtJOVy

At the beginning, of course, Lacan was totally incomprehensible to us and it took us some years - to be quite honest, up until around 1975/6 before, after a further quasi­religious revelation, finally we made the choice: Lacan. So this period was one of confusion and experiment.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059038829628309506 http://bit.ly/2BBA9YJ

The modern subject can assert its radical autonomy…only insofar as its autonomy is sustained by the social substance. No wonder this gesture…of mercy intervening at the..moment of the subject’s assertion of..autonomy, is discernible throughout the history of opera

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1059016163768840194 http://bit.ly/2N66wn1

the cynical functioning of ideology: that in order to function ideology shouldn’t take itself too seriously. …The top party nomenclatura didn’t take their own official ideology seri­ously, …those who took it seriously were perceived as a threat.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058994776236789760 http://bit.ly/2BA4ozw

In ‘The Piano Teacher’..what repulses him is this total disclosure of her desire…. The displayed fantasy forms the core of her being, that…“in her more than herself,” and [his] sexual act..is..a defense-formation against the threat embodied in the [anxiety-generating] fantasy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058977229424807936 http://bit.ly/2DxcRmW

sexual difference is not…between 2 modes of symbolization… It’s not: you’ve a…set of..human features (reason,…) & on top of that there are men & women. …Difference as such is universal. To be human..means…to live a…difference that pertains to a..fundamental deadlock

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058964633514577922 http://bit.ly/2I4S9R5

@ sexual difference is…the difference that pertains to a..fundamental deadlock of the symbolic order. …Difference as such is universal. To be human being means…to live a certain difference [/suffer an antagonism],…to be differentiated along the lines of sexual difference.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058963361453535232 http://bit.ly/2TG1oZn

It is..properly traumatic for a human animal to accept that his life is not just a stupid process of reproduction and attaining pleasures, but that it is in the service of a Truth.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058962129565425664 http://bit.ly/2GiCR9v

Perhaps, it is only when one is in love that one can fully confront one’s fundamental solitude.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058767744357883907 http://bit.ly/2MTxazu

Fascism emerged as an attempt to master capitalism’s excesses, to build a kind of capitalism without capitalism.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058763258855899141 http://bit.ly/2ULdgJE

we were excluded from academia… As a Society, we had the right to organize lectures and courses, which we did to propagate the theory. But these were still communist times and you could not organize spon­taneously; you had to have some institutional coverage.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058743216692965376 http://bit.ly/2HVzIyh

There is an old romantic formula: the true company is only when you can share your solitude, or some such rubbish. And that’s how [Mladen, Alenka and I function]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058716721635299330 http://bit.ly/2TrHmli

I think that everything to do with institutions should be faked. I don’t know what this is, I never analyse myself. …in a deeper sense I don’t think we were cheat­ing. The work was always done, which is why I am telling this so publicly.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058694073857515520 http://bit.ly/2SmWPFT

my whole economy of writing is in fact based upon an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing. I never begin with the idea that I am going to write something. I always have to begin with one or two observations that lead on to other points

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058675248869052417 http://bit.ly/2MKXKL6

Today’s panicky anti-fascism doesn’t bring hope, it kills..the hope that we’ll really get rid of the threat of racist populism… The task is to cut off the working class oxygen supply to the alt-right by addressing their voter. The way to achieve this is to move more to the left

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058652556791025665 http://bit.ly/2SjWovR

When I first use an example, I am usually too stupid to understand fully its implications - I am not yet at the level of this example. It’s only in the next book, or even later, when I return to the same example that I fully develop its potential.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058632400698331136 http://bit.ly/2G1kKF0

Fascism…obfuscates the real antagonisms which cut across our societies. Exactly the same holds for the figure of “fascist” in today’s liberal imagination: it enables people to obfuscate deadlocks which lie at the root of our crisis.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058617289426243584 http://bit.ly/2Uqyz2Y

The way to over­come an idea is to exemplify it,..an example never simply exemplifies a notion; it..tells..what is wrong with this notion… Stating it as a certain life practice…produces something more which undermines it,…minimally undermines what it is an example of.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058612253526814720 http://bit.ly/2DFN4dB

The obscenity of the situation is breath-taking: global capitalism is now presenting itself as the last protection against fascism, and if you try to point this out you are accused of complicity with fascism.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058603442313351169 http://bit.ly/2SdUIUG

Every minimal doubt and reserve is immediately proclaimed a sign of secret collaboration with fascism.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058600060185952256 http://bit.ly/2G97Q7p

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.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058586021997264896 http://bit.ly/2G3Befe

All our attempts to generate new meanings are ..a longing to regain the lost ..Thing.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058584338734952448 http://bit.ly/2HuDkqv

hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, deconstructionism…are clearly in some kind of a crisis and appear to have exhausted their possibilities

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058478954024198146 http://bit.ly/2UghrwD

Giorgio Agamben…defines twentieth-century contentration camps as the ‘truth’ of the entire Western political project.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058441244974690304 http://bit.ly/2MusuzC

The automatic dismissal of entertaining any thoughts outside the established postpolitical coordinates as “populist demagoguery” is hitherto the purest proof that we effectively live under a new Denkverbot.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058407203831533569 http://bit.ly/2U86NrZ

some of my readers, I know, get annoyed, that some of my books may appear repetitive. But this is not simple repetition; it is, rather, that I have to clarify, I have to make the point which I missed the first time.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058393339018522627 http://bit.ly/2FGqgwL

Far from expressing tasteless disrespect,..jokes are the only way to deal with the unbearably traumatic reality: they render quite adequately our helpless perplexity, belying all pathetic compassion with the victims as a truly tasteless blasphemy.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058380783726006272 http://bit.ly/2FKNroW

the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of ‘what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis’, and so on.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058366914081292289 http://bit.ly/2Hl3Brf

ironically, the rightist racist populism is [a sign] that “class struggle,” [is] far from..“obsolete”… The lesson the Left should learn from it is that one should…merely oppose populist..racism on behalf of multiculturalist openness, obliterating its displaced class content.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058356844320690177 http://bit.ly/2sCbnmE

‘I want to buy some land for a house close to Srebrenica - do you know what the prices are?’ 'Prices vary, they depend on what kind of land you want - with or without bones.’ …Such jokes are the only way to deal with the unbearably traumatic reality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058343045618376705 http://bit.ly/2APyRt4

For the enlightened liberal-technocratic elite, populism is inherently protofascist, the demise of political reason, a revolt in the guise of the outburst of blind utopian passions.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1058316582982770690 http://bit.ly/2FzO30o

I love the other…on account of the very troubling excess of life in him/her. …As they say, there is something cold in perfect beauty. …This “imperfection,” the obstacle which makes me love someone, is objet petit a, the “pathological” tic

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057751615237693440 http://bit.ly/2Fsbolo

democratic struggle should not be fetishized; it is one form of struggle, and its choice should be determined by a global strategic assessment of circumstances, not by its immanent superior value.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057681155451949057 http://bit.ly/2D7tDKq

insofar as Communism is supposed to abolish “oppressive” prohibitions that serve…domination, the subject has to confront the..deadlock of desire. …Instead of introducing…solidary satisfaction, Communism threatens to unleash..imbalances & selfdestructive cycles of resentment

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057673971305451520 http://bit.ly/2RpZqzd

We just want local communal organization.” I don’t believe in that. I always try to enumerate how many things have to function at a state level so that they could do their so-called “local self-management or communal organization.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057391765215428613 http://bit.ly/2TJmRQF

that the Putin regime is harsh but effective…is..not true. He’s..the voice of the majority of the oligarchs. …In the financial crisis, the state used its enormous reserves to help the oligarchs much more than ordinary people who were in trouble.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057381665209831424 http://bit.ly/2TGX2R8

the left should get rid of this idea..that..we must be subversive… No! …The…triumph of the ruling ideology has been to keep this moral majority on their side & to present the left as crazy… The left hasn’t yet reached the zero level of crisis.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057377898926088192 http://bit.ly/2FgZ33v

everything you do can be misread. …It…happened to me in the US. I looked a woman in the eye & was accused of visual rape . …We perceive any excessive proximity of other people to be violence: “Just don’t come too close to me.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057372863869673475 http://bit.ly/2RjFD4v

when Western European social democracy is still successful, what is so bad about this? Nothing. But the point is that, unfortunately, because of economic necessities, this social democratic system is approaching its end.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057371595449229312 http://bit.ly/2CWBfQd

for them, the enemy is still patriarchal… But, as I tell them all the time, this is no longer the ruling ideology… The ruling ideology today is “Realize yourself! Experiment! Be satisfied! Do what you want with your life.” It’s a kind of generalized hedonism.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057371595335966720 http://bit.ly/2Au5JHq

the left should drop this model of immediate transparent democracy. It cannot be globalized in order to function. It needs a very strong state apparatus, which regulates things. If not, things will happen, as you can see today, just like capitalism which is getting so chaotic

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057360267380690945 http://bit.ly/2FciWYH

What fascinates me, therefore, is the idea that we the left should now take over this ideology: “We are the true law and order. We are the true morality.” I very much like this idea of the left taking this position.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057330475855962115 http://bit.ly/2s9isuq

It’s too easy to say that state power is corrupted, so let’s withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power. If you want revolution, you should be a part of law and order. There’ s nothing dishonorable about people wanting basic security.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057330346113617922 http://bit.ly/2CNxoEY

I like to feel safe. Horrible things happen if you don’t have..basic law and order. …People believe that the police are usually much more efficient and aligned in authoritarian countries. But this is the myth of strong authoritarian countries.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057330086029000704 http://bit.ly/2F24t25

The problem is that when the situation is totally desperate…it’s much more probable that some dictator or new authoritarian figure will emerge.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1057329695451176960 http://bit.ly/2CLhhI1