Slavoj Žižek – First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
The title of this book is intended as an elementary IQ test for the reader: if the first association it generates is the vulgar anti-communist cliche-”You are right-today, after the tragedy of twentieth-century totalitarianism, all the talk about a return to communism can only be farcical!”-then I sincerely advise you to stop here. Indeed, the book should be forcibly confiscated from you, since it deals with an entirely different tragedy and farce, namely, the two events which mark the beginning and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2008.
See also:
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – Lecture at Cooper Union
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – LSE Lecture
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – Economic Crisis and Ideology Critique Today (upcoming)
Les matins de France Culture
Hi Mariborchan, I’m working on a translation of a section of Zizek’s book and bumped into some difficulties recently, and thought you might be able to point me towards how to sort them out….
On p. 128 Zizek writes:
“Since the Cultural Revolution signals the failure of the attempt to destroy the state from within, to abolish the state, is the alternative then simply to accept the state as a fact, as the apparatus which takes care of “servicing the goods:’ and to operate at a distance towards it (bombarding it with prescriptive proclamations and demands)? Or is it, more radically, that we should aim at a subtraction from the hegemonic field which, Simultaneously, violently intervenes into this field, reducing it to its OCCLUDED MINIMAL DIFFERENCE?”
I’m having problems with this latter term “OCCLUDED MINIMAL DIFFERENCE”…really not quite sure what this means or where the term comes from…do yo, by any chance, know?
Would greatly appreciate if you could help me out on this one.
Thanks.
to which language do you translate?
Aborted^>Engagement : A book review
“I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) ” – Whitman or Zizek?
What is the nature of Zizek’s game?
Look at action not the stories we tell! So we are instructed on Page 41 ( “the first lesson of psychoanalysis …’the richness of inner life’ is fundamentally fake.” etc.) again on 49 concerning Nixon and also applicable to the person of Zizek?
Let us do as instructed! “As you say, so it is master”
par exemple (E pluribus unim) :
Actions – Ziezk lives as privileged white men of the mobile capitalist classes do i.e. he globe trots, spends his days watching movies and his nights with models (yet as we see in the first pages of the book he still envies the “super wealthy”).
Stories – Zizek is a philosopher and big communist leftist.
And a Deuce:
Action – Ziezk globe trots, watches movies and fucks models.
Stories – Zizek loftily invokes Lenin’s “go some place and learn learn learn” (since he is just “a modest philosopher who’s function is to pose questions.” and to “have no easy answers”.
Given Zizek’s often expressed fantasy of putting his rivals “in gulag” after his coming to power we should turn the invective against political enemy Berlusconi (Page 50-51) to the person of Uncle Zizek himself.
Zizek looks and acts like a corrupt buffoon, but do not be deceived he is a corrupt buffoon.
Page 51 – “Berlusconi is what he appears to be, this appearance nonetheless remains deceptive. (How succinctly ‘clever all too clever’ is our dear Uncle Zizek?)
With reference to the last paragraph of page 61 and explication of ideological functioning i.e. on how “authority is exerted by (expert) knowledge” etc., one can see that the trance created by the symbolic order (A kapitalist dominant university discourse, by the way.) gives Zizek Brain (my pet term). This ideological stupor is precisely what Homer is hipping us too when he speaks of the scepter (passed between the Argive kings) of which he informs us “its power never dies”.
For someone primarily interested in philosophy rather then politics what is Zizek? A slightly more sophisticated Bill O’reilly for the so called ‘Left’, a ‘in fantasy’ rival of Berlusconi, good fodder for thought? Zizekianism with a human face is still no philosophy, the philosopher has no clothes rather he has Brain.