Continental Philosophy

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Slavoj Zizek “The Uses and Misuses of Violence” Lecture

Date: Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Time: 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm

Location: Nunemaker Auditorium, Monroe Hall

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School EGS who uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia where he lives to this day but he has lectured at universities around the world. He was analyzed by Jacques Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan’s son in law, and is probably the most successful and prolific post-Lacanian having published over fifty books including translations into a dozen languages. He is a leftist and, aside from Lacan he was strongly influenced by Marx, Hegel and Schelling. In temperament, he resembles a revolutionist more than a theoretician. He was politically active in Slovenia during the 80s, a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in 1990; most of his works are moral and political rather than purely theoretical. He has considerable energy and charisma and is a spellbinding lecturer in the tradition of Lacan and Kojeve.

Tickets or Fees: Free

For additional information contact: Mark Gossiaux by email at gossiaux@loyno.edu

via “The Uses and Misuses of Violence” | Department of Philosophy | Loyola University New Orleans.

from lacan dot com

http://www.lacan.com/lacan1.htm

Slavoj Zizek
Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Frontline

http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=347

[…]
Les non-dupes errent
So when even products of the allegedly “liberal” Hollywood display the most blatant ideological regression, are any further proofs needed that ideology is alive and kicking in our post-ideological world? Consequently, it shouldn’t surprise us to discover ideology at its purest in what may appear as Hollywood at its most innocent: the big blockbuster cartoons. “The truth has the structure of a fiction” – is there a better exemplification of this thesis than cartoons in which the truth about the existing social order is rendered in such a direct way which would never be allowed in the narrative cinema with “real” actors?

Berlusconi in Tehran
Slavoj �i�ek

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now?

The rest

The Slavoj Zizek Masterclass ‘Notes towards a definition of communist culture’ which took place at Birkbeck College last week (15 – 19 June) is now avaliable as a podcast to listen to (and download) at the following URL:
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/category/academic-service/academic-service-archive/

You knew it was coming, here is Zizek on Iran (but remarkably uninsightful, in my opinion).

For better ones, see the Iranian filmmaker Makhmalbaf (and here), Hamid Dabashi, and of course Robert Fisk.

I usually do not deal with current events on this site. In this case, not only the objective questions affect me subjectively, blurring some lines, I also believe that the events in iran have significant philosophical importance for our times.

(Thanks to Marcus, Peter and Azadeh for some of the links)

Earlier this month, as many readers know, Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Zizek all participated at the conference “On the Idea of Communism.” For those of us who sadly missed it, Monthly Review has a good recap of links. If you know of more, please post them in the comments! (See also the lacan.com article)

Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6

Slavoj Zizek
Beckett with Lacan – part 1
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=78

The achievement of Joyce simultaneously signals his limit, the limit which pushed Beckett to break with him. If there ever was a kenotic writer, the writer of the utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference, it is Beckett. We touch the Lacanian Real when we subtract from a symbolic field all the wealth of its differences, reducing it to a minimum of antagonism.

Beckett with Lacan – part 2
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=102

The basic constellation is thus the dialogue between the subject and the big Other, where the couple is reduced to its barest minimum: the Other is a silent impotent witness which fails in its effort to serve as the medium of the Truth of what is said, and the speaking subject itself is deprived of its dignified status of “person” and reduced to a partial object. And, consequently, since meaning is generated only by means of the detour of the speaker’s word through a consistent big Other, the speech itself ultimately functions at a pre-semantic level, as a series of explosions of libidinal intensities.

Alain Badiou
Figures of Subjective Destiny: Samuel Beckett
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=21

Why there is a close relationship between poetry and philosophy, or more generally between literature and philosophy? It’s because philosophy finds in literature some examples of completely new forms of the destiny of the human subject. And precisely new forms of the concrete becoming of the human subject when this subject is confronted to its proper truth.

On Communism – Libération 01/26.08
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=125

My position, reinforced by a recent trip to Palestine, is that today it is absolutely imperative to separate politics from religion, just like it should be separated, for example, from racial or identity questions. Religions can and must coexist in the same country, but only if politics and the State are separate.

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is pleased to announce its program for the 2009 Summer School.
Location: 1888 Building, University of Melbourne.
Enrol at http://www.mscp.org.au

Week 1 January 26 – 30
11am – 1pm: Foucault and Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life (Ashley Woodward)
2pm – 4pm: History of Philosophy IV: Medieval Philosophy, Part 2 (Late Medieval Era) (Ian Weeks)

Week 2 February 2 – 6
11am – 1pm: Environmental Political Theory from Spinoza to Negri (Kate Noble)
2pm – 4pm: History of Philosophy V: Rationalism (Jon Roffe)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

Week 3 February 9 – 13
11am – 1pm: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction (James Williams)
2pm – 4pm: Heidegger’s Being and Time (James Garrett)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

Week 4 February 16 – 20
11am – 1pm: On Slavoj Zizek’s Political Theory, or: Would You Like A Politics With That? (Matthew Sharpe)
2pm – 4pm: Dialectics of Enlightenment (Bryan Cooke)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

For further information and enrollment please visit our website: http://www.mscp.org.au

Link

‘You cannot make a living just being a theoretician’: An Interview with Jean-Michel Rabaté
With Jeroen Lauwers & Thomas Van Parys

Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology
Rudi Visker

Beyond Resistance: a response to Žižek’s critique of Foucault’s subject of freedom
Aurelia Armstrong

Alain Badiou: Problematics and the Different Senses of Being in Being and Event
Sean Bowden

Eugen Fink and the Question of the World
Stuart Elden

Between Rupture and Repetition: Intervention and Evental Recurrence in the Thought of Alain Badiou
Hollis Phelps

Zizek responds to The New Republic review (mentioned previously here).

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x0eyNkNpL0">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x0eyNkNpL0/0.jpg" alt="YouTube Preview Image" />

h/t: kevin

TOC

The ego, the Other and the primal fact — Toru Tani

Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism — Dermot Moran

Some differences between Kant’s and Husserl’s conceptions of transcendental philosophy — Thomas J. Nenon

Heidegger in Mexico: Emilio Uranga’s ontological hermeneutics — Carlos Alberto Sanchez

A non-Bergsonian Bachelard — Jean François Perraudin

Laughing at finitude: Slavoj Žižek reads Being and Time — Thomas Brockelman

Ricoeur and the pre-political — Farhang Erfani and John F. Whitmire

Link

(h/t: Marcus Leis Allion)

Adam Kirsch at the New Republic has a very vigorous review of Zizek’s Violence and In Defense of Lost Causes

What Zizek really believes about America and torture can be seen in his new book, Violence, when he discusses the notorious torture photos from Abu Ghraib: “Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people; in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.” Torture, far from being a betrayal of American values actually offers “a direct insight into American values, into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the U.S. way of life.” This, to Zizek’s many admirers, is more like it.

It also provides a fine illustration of the sort of dialectical reversal that is Zizek’s favorite intellectual stratagem, and which gives his writing its disorienting, counterintuitive dazzle.

Read the rest

Noam Chomsky called for people to vote for Obama ‘without illusions’. I fully share Chomsky’s doubts about the real consequences of Obama’s victory: from a pragmatic perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will make only some minor improvements, turning out to be ‘Bush with a human face’. He will pursue the same basic policies in a more attractive way and thus effectively strengthen the US hegemony, damaged by the catastrophe of the Bush years.

There is nonetheless something deeply wrong with this reaction – a key dimension is missing from it. Obama’s victory is not just another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all the pragmatic calculations and manipulations that involves. It is a sign of something more. This is why an American friend of mine, a hardened leftist with no illusions, cried when the news came of Obama’s victory. Whatever our doubts, for that moment each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.

The rest

Josefina Ayerza
To resume again…
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII1.html

Jacques-Alain Miller
A Reading of the Seminar From an Other to the other IV
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII2.html

Jacques-Alain Miller
The Other Side of Lacan
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII3.html

Alain Badiou
The Son’s Aleatory Identity in Today’s World
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII4.html

Lilia Mahjoub
The Image in the Fantasy
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII5.html

Massimo Recalcati
Madness and Structure in Jacques Lacan
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII6.html

Jean-Luc Nancy
Strange Foreign Bodies
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII7.html

Slavoj Zizek
Why Lacan Is Not a Heideggerian
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII8.html

Josefina Ayerza
Cecily Brown, Doug Aitken
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII9.html