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