Slavoj Žižek in the Guardian… June 11, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in The Left.trackback
Got to admit I quite like the man. It’s never entirely clear how much of his public persona is a construct, or perhaps more accurately an exaggeration of his intrinsic personality, but the man can write, write well and write cogently about the left.
For those who might have missed it an interview here… here’s a thought or two…
He’s not against democracy, per se, he just thinks our democratic institutions are no longer capable of controlling global capitalism. “Nice consensual incremental reforms may work, possibly, at a local level.” But localism belongs in the same category as organic apples, and recycling. “It’s done to make you feel good. But the big question today is how to organise to act globally, at an immense international level, without regressing to some authoritarian rule.”
Spot on. And in a way this from one of the early paragraphs seems to sum him up, though as what I cannot work out…
Now he’s back in the living room, a clinically tidy little sliver of functional space lacking any discernible aesthetic, the only concessions being a poster for the video game Call Of Duty: Black Ops, and a print of Joseph Stalin. Žižek pours Coke Zero into plastic McDonald’s cups decorated in Disney merchandising, but when he opens a kitchen cupboard I see that it’s full of clothes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWtn7iECkyY Zizek speaking in Greece very recently on a panel with SYRIZA frontman:
few old bits
08 guardian interview
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/09/slavoj.zizek
Ecology:A New Opium of the Masses (lecture)
http://www.lacan.com/zizekecologyvideo.html
On Egypt last year
always entertaining and compelling anyway
this too
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/08/haiti-aristide-lavalas
I was impressed the first time I saw him speak, back in 2000, and for one thing in particular: it was a meeting in a philosophy dept, full to overflowing of show -offy grad students wanting to impress the great man with their questions at the end…….and one local SWP head (this was Essex) who started a rambling, not too coherent ‘question’ about overthrowing capitalism and Seattle and so on; the chairman, *famous philosopher* went to cut the questioner off, so he could move on to something more sophisticated, but Zizek wouldn’t let him, and heard him out, and then gave a long detailed and entirely serious answer – whereas some of the smart boys in their polo necks and horn rims got throwaway quips.
There is a video, I think, of him talking about his days in a ‘barely tolerated’ dissident magazine. He recalls that the government of the day would have elections (which they would invariably win by a 93/94% majority). The obvious thing for a dissident magazine to do would have been to denounce the elections as a sham,but this would have allowed the regime would have just brushed them aside as young contrarians and nothing more. Life goes on.
Zizek and his editors decided to do something differently: treat the elections as if they were serious, hotly contested, and scrupulously fair. This seemingly involved psephological analysis of the results (complete with some concern that the government’s vote share had dropped from 96% in the previous elections)) and some opinion pieces declaring that the people had made a decisive and historic choice.
Needless to say, they were shut down the next day and all were hauled in questioning.
Ugh…lots of typos there.
Thanks for all those ec, Oireachtas Retort. Some good viewing there. ANd the guy speaks a lot of sense.
sonofstan, one thing that comes through loud and clear is a sort of genuine humanity. And he’s a political animal, no doubt about it but also someone who is comfortable with philosophy and particularly he revels in the supposedly ‘difficult’ aspects of it. I’m amazed he’s 63. I always thought he was younger.
‘Comfortable with philosophy’ the was Messi is comfortable with a football – in full Hegelian flight he’d scare Hegel.
argh ‘…the way…’
True. I guess what I’m saying is that when you look at the attack by Johann Hari on him that smiffy references below (and granted it’s Johann Hari!) it’s clear that Žižek is not afraid to be ‘difficult’ or shy away from what one line of criticism makes out to be nonsense when it’s anything but.
I have to also recommend his perverts guide to cinema documentary. It is really fun.Can’t hack his books at all but he is pretty compelling as a speaker.
Thanks for flagging this. I read the interview and while it’s fun, it’s hardly Zizek at his best. He’s a strange figure, but well worth persevering with, including his books. They’re not easy reads, can be quite rambling and – I won’t say incoherent, but he has a tendency to hop from one idea to another without any clear, overarching thesis. But there are moments of real brilliance throughout.
The criticism from the likes of Johann Hari, who’s cited in that interview, that ZIzek is an unreconstructed Stalinist is nonsense, although it is an image he (Zizek) tends to cultivate in a tongue-in-cheek way. However, when it comes to his political writing, some of his most interesting work is when he engages with the political legacy of Stalinism, and with revolutionary terror, as he does in ‘Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?’, ‘In Defence of Lost Causes’ and in his introductions to three of the Verso Revolutions series, on Robespierre, Trotsky and Mao. The slim work ‘First as tragedy, then as farce’ on the global crisis is also worth a read. His most recent ‘political’ book ‘Living in the End Times’ is a bit of a curate’s egg, and a lot of it consists of recycled ideas and articles he’s come up with elsewhere, but is worth a look.
Most of all, though, his articles in the LRB (http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/slavoj-zizek) are extremely accessible.
I have to confess, I have got his new book, the 1000-pager on Hegel, but I’m scared to go near it.
I’m scared to go into a book shop, in case it’s there and i buy it, and then i have to deal with it at home.
One for the Dublin Marxist Reading Group? (I jest!!!)
I intend to go to the bookshop, photograph pages 351, 741 and 934, and quote extensively from them to impress all and sundry.
This will probably be the first book on Hegel to sell more than 5000 non-libraray copies. Fair play to the man.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej5rceb4-hQ This is the full drama / documentary from the BBC Terror – Robespierre and the French Revolution. It’s a very interesting documentary and it features interviews throughout with Zizek and Simon Sharma arguing the merits of the revolution and the policies of Robespierre.
For anyone with the time and/or stamina here’s the contents of the new book:
LESS THAN NOTHING. HEGEL AND THE SHADOWS OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
Slavoj Zizek was born, is still alive, and writes books.
INTRODUCTION: EPPUR SI MUOVE
I THE DRINK BEFORE
1 Vacillating the Semblances
“What we cannot speak about we must show” – Idea‘s Appearing – From Fictions to Semblances – Dialectical gymnastics? No, thanks! – From the One to den – “Nothing Exists” – Gorgias, not Plato, was the arch-Stalinist!
2 »Where There Is Nothing, Read That I Love You«
A Christian Tragedy? – The Big Other – The Death of God – The Atheist Wager – “Do not compromise your desire” – Lacan Against Buddhism
3 Fichte’s Choice
From Fichte’s Ich To Hegel’s Subject – The Fichtean Wager – Finite Absolute – The Posited Presupposition – The Fichtean Bone In the Throat – The First Modern Theology
II THE THING ITSELF: HEGEL
4 Is it still possible to be a Hegelian today?
Hegel versus Nietzsche – Struggle and Reconciliation – A Story to Tell – Changing the Destiny – The Owl of Minerva – Potentiality versus Virtuality- The Hegelian Circle of Circles
Interlude 1: Marx as a Reader of Hegel, Hegel as a Reader of Marx
5 Parataxis: Figures of dialectical process
In Praise of Understanding – Phenomena, Noumena, and the Limit – The Differend – Negation of Negation – Form and Content – Negation Without a Filling
Interlude 2: Cogito in the History of Madness
6 “Not only as Substance, but also as Subject”
Concrete Universality – Hegel, Spinoza… and Hitchcock – The Hegelian Subject – Absolute Knowing – The Idea’s Constipation? – The Animal That I Am
Interlude 3: King, Rabble, War… and Sex
7 The Limits of Hegel
A List – Necessity as Self-Sublated Contingency – Varieties of Self-Relating Negation – The Formal Aspect – Aufhebung and Repetition – From Repetition to Drive
III THE THING ITSELF: LACAN
8 Lacan as a Reader of Hegel
The Cunning of Reason – The Lacanian Prosopopoeia – Lacan, Marx, Heidegger – The “Magical Force” of Reversal – Reflexion and Supposition – Beyond Intersubjectivity – Drive Against Will – The Unconscious of Self-Consciousness
Interlude 4: Borrowing From the Future, Changing the Past
9 Suture and Object
From Differentiality to the Phallic Signifier – From the Phallic Signifier to objet a – Sibelius’s Silence – The Pure Difference
Interlude 5: Correlationism And its Discontents
10 Objects, Objects Everywhere
Subtraction, Protraction, Obstruction… Destruction – Objet a between Form and Content – Voice and Gaze – The Grandmother’s Voice – Master and its Specter – The Two Sides of Fantasy – Image and Gaze – Presence – “The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture” – Leave the Screen Empty!
Interlude 6: Cognitivism and the Loop of Self-Positing
11 The non-All, or, the Ontology of Sexual Difference
Sexual Difference in the Disenchanted Universe – The Real of Sexual Difference – Formulas of Sexuation: the All with an Exception – Formulas of Sexuation: the non-All – The Antinomies of Sexual Difference – Why Lacan Is Not a Nominalist – Negation of Negation: Lacan versus Hegel? – »There IS a non-Relationship«
IV THE CIGARETTE AFTER
12 The Foursome of Terror, Anxiety, Courage… and Enthusiasm
Being/World/Event – Truth, Inconsistency, and the Symptomal Point – There is no Human Animal – From Terror to Enthusiasm – Badiou and Anti-Philosophy
13 The Foursome of Struggle, Historicity, Will… and Gelassenheit
Why Lacan Is Not a Heideggerian – Hegel versus Heidegger – The Torture-House of Language – An Alternate Heidegger – From Will To Drive – The Non-Historical Core of Historicity – From Gelassenheit to Class Struggle
14 The Ontology of Quantum Physics
The Ontological Problem – Knowledge In the Real – Agential Realism – The Two Vacuums – Y’a de den
CONCLUSION: THE POLITICAL SUSPENSION OF THE ETHICAL
For some reason, I’m reminded of this: