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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.

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?

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

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)

Click here to view the embedded video.

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