I don’t have the time to work on it anymore and this blog has reached it’s limit in a way. Thanks for the support, but there won’t be any new posts for a while, I’ve got other stuff to do.
- Mariborchan
Polity | Amazon
Upcoming in July, 2010
Twenty years ago, Alain Badiou’s first Manifesto for Philosophy rose up against the all-pervasive proclamation of the “end” of philosophy. In lieu of this problematic of the end, he put forward the watchword: “one more step”.
The situation has considerably changed since then. Philosophy was threatened with obliteration at the time, whereas today it finds itself under threat for the diametrically opposed reason: it is endowed with an excessive, artificial existence. “Philosophy” is everywhere. It serves as a trademark for various media pundits. It livens up cafés and health clubs. It has its magazines and its gurus. It is universally called upon, by everything from banks to major state commissions, to pronounce on ethics, law and duty. In essence, “philosophy” has now come to stand for nothing other than its most ancient enemy: conservative ethics.Badiou’s second manifesto therefore seeks to demoralize philosophy and to separate it from all those “philosophies” that are as servile as they are ubiquitous. It demonstrates the power of certain eternal truths to illuminate action and, as such, to transport philosophy far beyond the figure of “the human” and its “rights”. There, well beyond all moralism, in the clear expanse of the idea, life becomes something radically other than survival.
Product Details
Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Polity (July 7 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0745648614
ISBN-13: 978-0745648613
See also:
Alain Badiou – Manifesto for Philosophy
Slavoj Žižek – The Big Other Doesn’t Exist (Spring – Fall 1997):
These vicissitudes signal that, today, “the big Other doesn’t exist” is more radical than the usual one, synonymous with symbolic order: this symbolic trust, which persists against all sceptical data, is more and more undermined. The first paradox of this retreat of the big Other is discernible in the so-called “culture of complaint” with its underlying logic of ressentiment: 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 more the subject’s structure is “narcissistic,” the more he blames the big Other, and thus asserts his dependence on it. The “culture of complaint” thus calls on the big Other to intervene, and to set things straight (to recompense the damaged sexual or ethnic minority, etc., although how exactly this is to be done is a matter of different ethico-legal “committees”). The specific feature of the “culture of complaint” lies in its legalistic twist, in the endeavor to translate the complaint into the legal obligation of the Other (usually the State) to indemnify one for what? For the very unfathomable surplus-enjoyment of which I am deprived, whose lack makes me feel deprivileged. Thus, is not the “culture of complaint” today’s version of the hysterical impossible demand, addressed to the Other, which effectively wants to be rejected, since the subject grounds its existence in its complaint:”I am insofar as I make the Other responsible and/or guilty for my misery”? The gap here is insurmountable between this logic of complaint and the true “radical” (“revolutionary”) act which, instead of complaining to the Other and expecting it to act (i.e. displacing the need to act onto it), suspends the existing legal frame and itself accomplishes the act. What is wrong with the complaint of the truly deprivileged is that, instead of undermining the position of the Other, they still address It: they, translating their demand into legalistic complaint, confirm the Other in its position by their very attack.
Slavoj Žižek – Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism (October 28th, 1999):
Havel praised the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia as the first case of a military intervention in a country with full sovereign power, undertaken not out of any specific economico-strategic interest but because that country was violating the elementary human rights of an ethnic group. To understand the falseness of this, compare the new moralism with the great emancipatory movements inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These were movements directed not against a specific group of people, but against concrete (racist, colonialist) institutionalised practices; they involved a positive, all-inclusive stance that, far from excluding the ‘enemy’ (whites, English colonisers), made an appeal to its moral sense and asked it to do something that would restore its own moral dignity. The predominant form of today’s ‘politically correct’ moralism, on the other hand, is that of Nietzschean ressentiment and envy: it is the fake gesture of disavowed politics, the assuming of a ‘moral’, depoliticised position in order to make a stronger political case. This is a perverted version of Havel’s ‘power of the powerless’: powerlessness can be manipulated as a stratagem in order to gain more power, in exactly the same way that today, in order for one’s voice to gain authority, one has to legitimise oneself as being some kind of (potential or actual) victim of power.
Fabio Polidori – An Interview with Slavoj Zizek (2000):
What bothers me apropos of the recent comeback of human rights is that they rely on what Nietzsche identified as the moralistic ressentiment and envy: they imply the fake gesture of the disavowed politics, of assuming a ‘moral’, depoliticized stance in order to make a stronger political case. We are dealing here with a perverted version of what, in the good old days of dissidence, Vaclav Havel called the «power of the powerless»: one manipulates one’s powerlessness as a stratageme in order to gain more power, in exactly the same way that today, in our politically correct times, in order for one’s voice to gain authority, one has to legitimize oneself as being some kind of a (potential or actual) victim of power. This stance is not assertive, but controlling, leveraging, bridling – like the ‘ethical committess’ in sciences popping up everywhere today, which are mainly concerned with how to define the limits and prevent things (say, biogenetic engineering) from happening. So, in this perspective, every actual ACT is bad: when Serbs cleanse Kosovo of Albanians, it’s bad; when NATO intervenes to prevent it, it’s bad; when the KLA strikes back, it’s bad – every excuse is good, since it allows us to claim that, of course, we await and want an act, but a proper moralistic act the conditions for which are just never here – like the proverbial falsely enlightened husband who, in principle, agrees that his wife can take lovers, but complains apropos of every actual lover she chooses «Ok, you can have lovers, but not THIS one, why did you have to pick up precisely THIS miserable guy!?»
See also:
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (page 85, chapter Terrorist Resentment)
Friedrich Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo
Alenka Zupančič – The Shortest Shadow; Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two
Nietzsche and the Political
Philosopher, professor and author Judith Butler arrived in Israel this month, en route to the West Bank, where she was to give a seminar at Bir Zeit University, visit the theater in Jenin, and meet privately with friends and students. A leading light in her field, Butler chose not to visit any academic institutions in Israel itself. In the conversation, conducted in New York several months ago, Butler talks about gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and how Jewish values drove her to criticize the actions of the State of Israel…
U. of Minnesota Press | Amazon | Download
Some two hundred years after the publication of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a polemically written philosophical essay of nearly 1,000 pages, disrespectfully entitled Critique of Cynical Reason, captured the imagination and the passions of readers in Germany. Contrary to Kant’s philosophical treatise, which, over a hundred years after its appearance, still made Musil’s Tor-less sweat with fear and nausea, Peter Sloterdijk’s treatise became an immediate success offering German intellectuals a master lesson in the pleasures of the text. Within only a few months over 40,000 copies had been sold, and the liberal feuilletons outdid each other in heaping praise on the author by comparing him to Nietzsche, Spengler, Schopenhauer. Since much of this praise focused on Sloterdijk’s critique of the Enlightenment, popular in West Germany since the conservative Tendenzwende of the 1970s, the Left responded by trying to relegate Sloterdijk’s essay to the dustbin of history, as a rotten ware of late capitalist decline…
Fundamentalna nemogućnost koja određuje ljudsko stanje je nemogućnost seksualne veze. Nije stoga čudo da ‘Avatar’ slijedi hollywoodsku formulu proizvodnje pararezigniranog bijelog heroja koji seks pronalazi tek među divljacima…
For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary…
Vol 3, No 4 (2009)
Text
The International Journal of Žižek Studies (IJŽS) is an online, peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to investigating, elaborating, and critiquing the work of Slavoj Žižek. IJŽS is an interdisciplinary journal that is open and welcoming to diverse approaches, methodologies, interpretations, and language of composition.
To utilize the medium-specific qualities of the Web, IJŽS has no pre-set publication dates. Papers will be accepted after peer review into a rolling programme of publication with the expectation of one Volume per calendar year and a variable number of issues per volume depending upon the number and quality of submissions received. This online publication schedule avoids needlessly imitating the limitations of paper-based publications whilst retaining the value of its tried and tested peer review process. The aim is for a journal with high standards but one that also has maximum flexibility and responsiveness to topical issues.
When France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant in his latest book, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”, his observations were greeted with the usual adulation. To support his attack, Bernard-Henri Lévy — a showman-penseur known simply by his initials, BHL — cited the little-known 20th-century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul.
There was one problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left Bank.
Voir aussi:
Bernard-Henri Lévy a laughing stock for quoting fictional philosopher
L’idée du communisme
Slavoj Žižek – Les matins de France Culture
Slavoj Žižek, André Glucksmann, Guy Sorman & Cynthia Fleury – Ce Soir
Slavoj Žižek with Bernard-Henri Lévy – Violence & the Left in Dark Times
Slavoj Žižek – Puissances du Communisme
Pred nekaj leti ste marsikoga presenetili, ko ste zapustili redno mesto profesorja na ljubljanski filozofski fakulteti, da bi lahko končno živeli in delali kot filozof. Slišim, da se počasi spet vračate.
Letos prvič po dolgem času predavam v okviru novega podiplomskega programa psihoanaliza, za katerega je veliko zanimanje. Za to, da sem pred leti zapustil predavateljsko mesto, pri čemer sem čez čas vendarle sprejel mesto raziskovalca, je bilo krivih več dejavnikov, predvsem pa je bila odločilna skepsa do lastnega položaja v tem univerzitetnem sistemu in do načina, na katerega se je ta sistem začel razvijati. V nekem trenutku sem uvidel, da je položaj na fakulteti, ki sem si ga sam pridobil in zgradil, postal kletka.
This is a clip from The Culture Show (Episode 22) which aired on 28. January 2010 at 19:00. The description on BBC’s website reads: “Paul Mason meets Slavoj Žižek, described as the most dangerous philosopher in the West, and asks him about his book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.”, but it wasn’t really a serious discussion. What we got instead is another manipulation of video material from BBC, so in the end it just looks as a very strange mashup of unconnected statements.
Two controversial thinkers discuss a timeless but nonetheless urgent question: should philosophy interfere in the world?
Nothing less than philosophy is at stake because, according to Badiou, philosophy is nothing but interference and commitment and will not be restrained by academic discipline. Philosophy is strange and new, and yet speaks in the name of all – as Badiou shows with his theory of universality.
Similarly, Zizek believes that the philosopher must intervene, contrary to all expectations, in the key issues of the time. He can offer no direction, but this only shows that the question has been posed incorrectly: it is valid to change the terms of the debate and settle on philosophy as abnormality and excess.
At once an invitation to philosophy and an introduction to the thinking of two of the most topical and controversial philosophers writing today, this concise volume will be of great interest to students and general readers alike.
Ce colloque a été organisé à l’Université de Paris VIII par la “société Louise Michel”, les 22-23 janvier 2010, en hommage à Daniel Bensaïd, décédé le 12 Janvier. Žižek apparait dans la quatrième table ronde intitulée «communistes sans communisme” à côté de Michel Surya, Tamas Gaspar, Jacques Rancière, et Samuel Pierre Dardot Johsua. Stathis Kouvélakis était le modérateur.
Voir aussi:
npa2009.org
D’autres vidéos de la conférence
Slavoj Žižek, André Glucksmann, Guy Sorman & Cynthia Fleury – Ce Soir
Slavoj Žižek – Les matins de France Culture
Bernard-Henri Lévy et Slavoj Žižek: le débat
L’idée du communisme
DAS MAGAZIN: Slavoj Žižek, was sehen Sie, wenn Sie morgens die Augen öffnen?
Slavoj ŽIŽEK: Was ich sehen will? Oder was ich tatsächlich sehe? Ich habe dieses kleine zwanghafte Ritual: Wenn mein Sohn bei mir ist, wie heute, stelle ich den Wecker auf 7 Uhr 25, damit er rechtzeitig in die Schule kommt. Aber dann wache ich immer schon früher auf, weil ich mich frage: Wird der Wecker wirklich funktionieren? Ich bin wach, beobachte und warte. Wenn das nicht die ganze Schönheit einer Zwangsneurose zeigt.
DAS MAGAZIN: Was sagt Ihnen das über sich selbst?
ŽIŽEK: Ich will mich nicht analysieren. Ich finde das widerlich.
DAS MAGAZIN: Analysieren Sie andere?
ŽIŽEK: Schauen Sie mich doch an. Man muss wirklich ernsthafte Probleme haben, um zu einem Analytiker wie mir zu gehen. Ausserdem würde ich sofort das Fenster aufmachen und sagen: Hier, spring!
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