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…
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…
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.
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.
The events in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck the city provide a new addition to this series of “subjects supposed to…”—the subject supposed to loot and rape. We all remember the reports on the disintegration of public order, the explosion of black violence, rape and looting. However, later inquiries demonstrated that, in the large majority of cases, these alleged orgies of violence did not occur: Non-verified rumors were simply reported as facts by the media.
Isn’t the same thing happening in Haiti?
See TheRealNews (which includes an interview by Peter Hallward):
Žižek first directly develops a certain theoretical line in a straightforward way, with all its oscillations and blind alleys, and then goes on to condense the result in precise, but compressed formulas. In fact, Žižek’s lectures and books relate like the discourse of analysand and analyst during treatment. In lectures, Žižek acts as an analysand: he ‘free-associates’, improvises, skips and jumps, addressing his public, which is thus put into the role of a kind of collective analyst. In comparison, his writings are more condensed, formulaic; they throw out ambiguous propositions that often appear like oracles, challenging the reader to start working on them, to translate them into clear theses and provide examples and logical demonstrations of their sense. In contrast to the usual academic procedure, where the author formulates a thesis and then tries to sustain it through arguments, not only does Žižek more often than not leave this work to the reader, but often the reader must even determine what exactly is Žižek’s actual thesis among the multitude of conflicting formulations or the ambiguity of a single oracular formulation. In this precise sense, Žižek’s books are like an analyst’s interventions, whose aim is not to provide the analysand with a ready-made opinion or statement, but to set the analysand to work.
So what and how to follow? Books or lectures? The only proper answer is a variation on the old ‘tea or coffee’ joke: Yes, please! One should follow both. If you go directly to the books, there’s a chance you won’t get anything, so you should start – but not stop – with the lectures since, if you listen to nothing but the lectures, you also won’t get it. The impression that the lectures are clearer and more transparent than the books is deeply misleading: they often oscillate, experiment with different approaches. The proper way is to listen to a lecture and then go on to read the corresponding book so as to ‘get the point’ of the lecture. The books are clear, they provide precise formulas, but we can only understand them after listening to the lecture that fills in their background.
Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, is one of those countries that only makes the news when it is struck by disaster. But despite the images of desperation that are now zooming around the globe — not to mention the periodic stories of abject poverty that filter out of the country — its people are not passive victims.
This is a good moment to reread Slavoj Žižek’s review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, which New Statesman first published in 2008. Žižek traces Haiti’s predicament, from the French Revolution to the downfall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.
Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence…
You call yourself a Leninist but the media in the West has called you a ‘rock star’ and the ‘Marx Brother’. How do you react to such labels?
With resigned melancholy. They try to say that this guy may be interesting and provocative but he is not serious. To them, I am like a fly that annoys you and provokes you but should not be taken seriously. Though, of late, they have been dubbing me as someone more threatening. In the last two years, the tone has changed. First, there were Marx Brothers’ jokes and now they say I am the most dangerous philosopher in the West. But I don’t care.
In het algemeen zijn het de politici die problemen maken en niet mensen van een andere cultuur. In elk geval de culturen mixen, transformeren, er is een historische dynamiek.
It is always perilous to approach Lacan from a philosophical point of view. For he is an anti-philosopher, and no one is entitled to take this designation lightly.
Considering him in relation to the Pre-Socratics is a still more risky undertaking. References to these thinkers in Lacan’s work are rare, scattered, and above all mediated by something other than themselves. There is, moreover, the risk of losing one’s thought in a latent confrontation between Lacan and Heidegger, which has all the attractions of a rhetorical impasse.
