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