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Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.
Upcoming Events
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February 15, 2012
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
Marx Reloaded—blue or red pill?
Screening and panel discussion with Paul Mason, Robin Blackburn, Laurie Penny & Jason Barker
Blog
Jacques Rancière postpones visit to Israel following an appeal from Palestinian boycott movement
French political philosopher and leading intellectual Jacques Rancière has postponed a visit to Israel, where he was due to speak at Tel Aviv University, after receiving an open letter from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
PACBI, in a letter published online, wrote to Rancière urging him "in the strongest terms" to cancel his visit to the university which they claim "is complicit in maintaining a regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid." The letter went on to explain that Rancière's decision to ignore the letter would "violate the Palestinian call for boycott," and, "constitute a blunt rejection of the appeal from over 170 civil society organisations that comprise the Palestinian BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement."
Rancière was invited to Tel Aviv by, among others, Ariella Azoulay director of the Photo Lexic Research Group at the Minerva Humanities Center. In response to the letter from the PACBI, Rancière, who was due to give a lecture on 25 January, explained why he initially agreed to speak in Israel,
I accepted the invitation to contribute to the debate on the image, of a research group whose work on photography is closely related to the exposure of violations of the rights of the Palestinian people since the birth of the State of Israel.
"Theorizing a communism for the twenty-first century"- The Idea of Communism reviewed on Libcom
In his rigorous review of The Idea of Communism for Libcom, Alasdair Thompson walks us through the main themes of this collection of essays by some of today's most important political thinkers. Edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, The Idea of Communism was developed in the wake of a 2009 conference of the same name at Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities. Thompson's review looks at a number of these texts in relation to each other, including work by Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou and Alberto Toscano.
"Democracy must be reinvented"—Žižek on Occupy & the Arab Spring
Slavoj Zizek in an interview for Germany's Deutsche Welle television, talking about Occupy, communism and the need for a reinvention of democracy.
Books
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Less Than Nothing
Slavoj Žižek's masterwork on the Hegelian legacy
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Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
Undermining the liberal-democratic consensus that enables the designation of totalitarianism. -
Revolution at the Gates
How to reinvent Lenin in the era of “cultural capitalism.”
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Living in the End Times
Žižek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse.”
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Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
The Hegelian legacy, Left strategy, and post-structuralism versus Lacanian psychoanalysis.
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The Idea of Communism
An all-star cast of radical intellectuals discuss the continued importance of communism.
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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)
Hitchcock gets onto the analyst’s couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies.
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In Defense of Lost Causes
Acclaimed, adrenalin-fuelled manifesto for universal values.
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First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
From the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.
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The Fragile Absolute
Argues that the subversive core of the Christian legacy forms the foundation of a politics of universal emancipation.
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The Plague of Fantasies
The relations between fantasy and ideology, and the deluge of digital phantasms surrounding us.
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The Sublime Object of Ideology
Exploring the ideologies fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.
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The Ticklish Subject
A specter is haunting Western thought, the specter of the Cartesian subject.
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For They Know Not What They Do
The eminent philosopher explodes the roles of pleasure and desire in contemporary politics and culture.
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The Indivisible Remainder
Confronts Schelling with Hegel, and illuminates popular culture and modern subjectivity.
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Virtue and Terror
Robespierre’s justification of the Terror in the French Revolution.
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Lacan
A dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan, uncovering his hidden inspirations.
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The Metastases of Enjoyment
The status of women and the role of violence in contemporary culture and politics.
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Iraq
Žižek analyzes the bizarre logic used to justify the attack on Iraq.
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Welcome to the Desert of the Real
Probing beneath the level of TV punditry, Žižek offers a highly original and readable account that serves as a fascinating and insightful comprehension of the events of September 11.
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Mapping Ideology
Indispensable contemporary writing on the subject of ideology.
Discussions
Discussions occur on book pages throughout the site. The most recent discussions about the works of Slavoj Žižek are listed below.
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Zizek and the critique of political economy
Against his friend and comrade Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek has been arguing strongly for the need for a return to Marx's critique of political economy—as borne out by his engagement with value theory and Moishe Postone's work in Living in the End Times. But what are we to make of Zizek's own understanding of value theory, when he claims that, strictly speaking from a Marxist perpective, Chavez's Venezuela is "exploiting" the US through oil rents? -
How does theology enlist the service of historical materialism? What is this service?
I have a quote from Zizek I’m having a little trouble with. Its this one:
Today, when the historical materialist analysis is receding, practiced
as it were under cover, rarely called by its proper name, while the
theological dimension is given a new lease on life in the guise of the
“postsecular” Messianic turn of deconstruction, the time has come
to reverse Walter Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history:
“The puppet called ‘theology’ is to win all the time. It can easily be
a match for anyone if it enlists the service of historical materialism,
which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”The trouble I’m having is with “if it enlists the service of historical materialism,” That is to say I dont understand in what way this service is enlisted, or for that matter, what it is. Can anyone help me?
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Fetishization and Reification, Human Constants or the Particular Products of Capitalism?
Grappling with Marx's theoretical dilemma on whether class struggle is the product of capitalism, coterminus with it or its condition, Zizek suggests that this same dilemma illuminates the difference between Lukác's History and Class Consciousness and Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, wherein he latter authors "cut [the] link" (that Lukác maintains) between fetichization and reification on one hand and captitalism on the other, considering them products of "instrumental reason" (e.g. using people as a means to an ends), "...which functions as a kind of a priori of thewhole of human history but no longer rooted in any concrete historical formations. The over-arching totality is thus no longer that of capitalism, or commodity production : capitalism itself becomes one of the manifestations of instrumental reason." (p. 204)
This problem is resolved if we merely extend our notion of "human history" to go back to Pleistocene (hunter-gatherer) times and follow it through the agricultural revolution and the dawn of civilization, viz. citification, the creation of cities. Hunter-gatherer cultures are dominated by scarcity of the means of survival. There is a social hierarchy, but it is not based on possessions, because most daytime activity is devoted to the search for food. Once agriculture is discovered, however, a few milenia after the last glacial maximum around 12,000 years ago, there is surplus production, permitting substantial population grown and eventually leading to the establishment of cities, around six or seven thousand years ago. With surplus production comes the accumulation of wealth, the creation of classes (workers, owners, priests, etc.), the establishment of chiefdoms and then city-states, and finally conquest, as some city-states covet the resources of their neighbors, devote a certain amount of their surplus to military materiel, and gobble up their neighbors.
It is an abstract nicety to call the motivations for these appropriations "instrumental reason." They could also be called greed, covetousness, or imperial arrogance. In any case, they only arise when there is surplus, and the first sustained surpluses in human history (starting at least 40,000 years ago and not 5,000 years ago) come with the invention of agriculture.
Capitalism from this perspective is merely a concentration, institutionalization, mechanization, and acceleration of organizations based on technological advances and greatly expanded populations, to produce exponentially more surplus value and its resultant accumulation, and finally engendering the inequality and suffering that we are so familiar with, and which motivated Marx to deconstruct it.
So Adorno & Horkheimer had the right intuition; they simply lacked the expanded perspective in pre-history to concretize it.