Posted by Farhang Erfani on 9th July 2008
Click here to read the articles
An Extrinsic Eagleton — Roland Boer
Buddhism, Apophasis, Faith — Mario D’Amato
From Representation to Constituent Power: Religion, or Something Like It, in Hardt and Negri’s Empire — Chris Fox
Politics and Perversion: Situating Zizek’s Paul — Adam Kotsko
The Traps of the Sublime — Agata Bielik-Robson
The Sublime and the Messianic: A Reply to Agata Bielek-Robson — Clayton Crockett
Posted in Globalization, Journal Articles, Political Philosophy, Radical Democracy, Religion, Zizek | No Comments »
Posted by Farhang Erfani on 23rd June 2008
Alan Schrift, Questioning Authority: Nietzsche’s Gift to Derrida
Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward, Kierkegaard’s “Mystery Of Unrighteousness” In The Information Age (via wood’s lot)
Zizek, “The Secret Clauses of the Liberal Utopia”:
The necessity of ‘secret clauses’ is part of communication itself. In a scene from Break Up, the nervous Vince Vaughn angrily reproaches Jennifer Anniston: ‘You wanted me to wash the dishes, and I’ll wash the dishes – what’s the problem?’ She replies: ‘I don’t want you to wash the dishes – I want you to want to wash the dishes!’ This is the minimal reflexivity of desire, its ‘terrorist’ demand: I want you not only to do what I want, but to do it as if you really want to do it. This brings us to civility: an act of civility is precisely to feign that I want to do what the other asks me to do, so that my complying with the other’s wish does not exert pressure on him/her. The film Borat is at its most subversive not when the hero is simply rude and offensive (for our Western eyes and ears, at least) but, on the contrary, when he desperately tries to display civility. During a dinner in an upper class house, he asks where the toilet is, goes there and then returns with his shit carefully wrapped in a plastic bag, asking the hostess in a hushed voice where he should put it. This is a model metaphor for a truly subversive political gesture: not throwing shit at those in power, but bringing those in power a bag of shit and politely asking them how to get rid of it.
Posted in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Zizek | 1 Comment »
Posted by Farhang Erfani on 12th June 2008
From Jodi Dean
When is a Truth not a Truth?
When it has to be excessively enforced.
This is how Zizek responds to Stavrakakis’s siding with Badiou on the matter of totalitarian danger.
Badiou warns of the totalitarian danger of enforcing a truth on a situation and ignoring the nameless or multiplicity of reality that resists subsumption under a truth-procedure. Zizek criticizes Badiou on this point on the grounds of an incompatibility between truth and excessive enforcement. He writes:
a Truth is never enforced, because the moment the fidelity to Truth functions as an excessive enforcement, we are no longer dealing with a Truth, with fidelity to a Truth-event.
This doesn’t strike me as convincing, particularly insofar as Truth is determined retroactively. For this determination to be made, ruthless enforcement may well be necessary. Perhaps the better way to put this is to say that ‘excessive’ has a termporal characteristic. What may seem excessive at one point is later determined to have been just right, even measured as a response. The indeterminacy here is unavoidable.
Zizek’s example of Stalinism is particularly problematic. He says that the truth that was not a truth that Stalinism enforced was the vision of a centralized planned economy. This is a problem for a number of reasons.
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Posted in Badiou, Blog Trotting, Zizek | No Comments »
Posted by Farhang Erfani on 28th May 2008
Zizek seems to be getting quite a few open letters these days.
The new issue of London Review of Books has a few letters about his take on the Tibet.
Link
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Posted by Farhang Erfani on 26th May 2008
As most of you know, there has been an interesting exchange between Zizek and Critchley.
Zizek published a review of Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
. The review was reproduced this past february in Harpers. (Link to the review.)
Critchley has answered Zizek, in the May issue. Link to his answered, fortunately reproduced on the blogosphere.
Posted in Lacan, Marx and Marxism, Political Philosophy, Zizek | 5 Comments »
Posted by Farhang Erfani on 21st May 2008
Just in case you missed his latest media appearance. (Though he may have appeared elsewhere since this is about ten days old!)
Link
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Posted by Farhang Erfani on 30th April 2008
Slavoj Žižek is less a philosopher than a phenomenon. The son of Slovenian Communists, and the representative on earth (so to speak) of the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Žižek has been travelling the globe like an intellectual rock star for the past twenty years, gathering as he goes an immense fan club. He is outrageous, provocative and entertaining. He was, he tells us, tempted to suggest for the dust jacket of one of his books: “In his free time, Žižek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders”.
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Posted in Philosophers in the News, Zizek | 1 Comment »
Posted by Farhang Erfani on 27th April 2008
Posted in Videos, Zizek | 1 Comment »
