the populists are fighting a war that cannot be won. If Republicans were effectively to ban abortion, if they were to prohibit the teaching of evolution, if they were to impose federal regulation on Hollywood and mass culture, this would mean not only their immediate ideological defeat, but also a large-scale economic depression in the US. The outcome is thus a debilitating symbiosis: although the ruling class disagrees with the populist moral agenda, it tolerates their “moral war” as a means to keep the lower classes in check, i.e., to enable them to articulate their fury without disturbing their economic interests. What this means is that CULTURE WAR IS CLASS WAR in a displaced mode - so much for those who claim that we leave in a post-class society

http://ift.tt/2aH9HSS

today, the big Other’s inexistence has reached a much more radical dimension: What is more and more undermined is precisely this symbolic trust which persists against all skeptical data. …Far from cheerfully assuming the inexistence of the big Other, the subject blames the Other for its failure and/ or impotence, as if the Other is guilty for the fact that it doesn’t exist, i.e., as if impotence is no excuse—the big Other is responsible for the very fact that it wasn’t able to do anything: The more the subject’s structure is “narcissistic,” the more he puts the blame on the big Other and thus asserts his dependence on it. The basic feature of the “culture of complaint” is thus a call, ad- dressed at the big Other, to intervene and to set things straight

http://ift.tt/2aAU4d1

The basic trick of anti-Semitism is to displace social antagonism into antagonism between the sound social texture…and the Jew as the force corroding it

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on racism, antisemitism and islamophobia (via slavoj-zizek) http://ift.tt/2aHZG4J

back to the function of veil in Islam: what if the true scandal this veil endeavors to obfuscate is not the feminine body hidden by it, but the inexistence of the feminine?…If you…transpose the feminine veil into the veil which conceals the ultimate Truth, the true stakes of the Muslim veil become even clearer. …Woman is [perceived as] a threat because she stands for…a succession of veils beneath which there is no ultimate hidden core; by veiling her, we create the illusion that there is, beneath the veil, the feminine Truth

http://ift.tt/2azxVvG

truly fascist is the fetishizing of violence for its own sake https://t.co/UGS7cyObCa

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/741684169982480384 http://ift.tt/2akYNm4

we have a lot of “anti-capitalism,” indeed an overload of anti-capitalism, but it is an ethical anti-capitalism. In the media, everywhere one finds stories about how this company is exploiting people someplace and ruining the environment, or this bank is ruining hardworking people’s funds. All of these are moralistic critiques of distortions. This is not enough. The anti-capitalism of the popular media remains at the level of something to be resolved within the established structure: through investigative journalism, democratic reforms, and the like

http://ift.tt/2akPClC

Post-war Austria is a country whose very existence is based on a refusal to ‘work through’ its traumatic Nazi past - proving that Waldheim was evading confrontation with his past emphasized the exact trait-of-.identification of the majority of voters. The theoretical lesson to be learned from this is that the trait-of­ identification can also be a certain failure, weakness, guilt of the other, so that by pointing out the failure we can unwittingly reinforce the identification. Rightist ideology in particular is very adroit at offering people weakness or guilt as an identifjring trait

http://ift.tt/2aEQu4z