Archive of The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
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What to Read on Egypt and the Arab Spring
If 2011 saw a monumental change in the governments of the Middle East, 2012 has demonstrated that revolution takes some time, that conflict is sustained and that some of the same challenges are not consigned to history.
Protests continue in Egypt’s capital Cairo, as over one hundred thousand demonstrators have recently taken to the streets and gathered once again in Tahrir Square in opposition to dictatorial decrees by President Mohammed Morsi. With only one hundred days in power, Morsi’s fledgling tenure as president has resulted in examples of sweeping authority, transferring all executive and legislative powers from the military council to his offices.
Such actions are reminiscent of the power exercised by former President Hosni Mubarak. The on-going distrust of Morsi’s presidency returns the chant of the 2011 revolution: "The people want to bring down the regime".
These are Verso’s key titles on the challenges facing Egypt and the Middle East, where uprising continues from the hopefulness of the Arab Spring to the challenges ahead.
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'Long Live the Dialectic', Long Live the Nothing
Steven Connor, in the Times Literary Supplement, sums up the major importance of Slavoj Žižek's ''everlasting gobstopper of a book" Less Than Nothing. In a single paragraph, Connor explains Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as the 'engorgement' of Spirit through the dialectical movement of history (spirit meets its negative antagonist in the form of matter or the material world and responds by both preserving and overcoming both thesis and antithesis through the process of sublation), the principle of the postmodernist reaction to it (denouncing the Hegelian dialectic as one of several totalising conceptions of the world that it rejects) and finally Žižek's critical thrust that manages to:
both discredit postmodernist arguments in their dependence on a dishing of Hegel, and to endorse the objections to totality that are key to those postmodernist arguments.
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Žižek is a cool guy who doesn’t look at explosions
Why? It’s ideology, stupid. After his 1,200-page Lacanese-Hegelian philosophical treatise, Žižek has returned to his other prism—popular culture. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Director Sophie Fiennes new film with Žižek, premiered at the 56th BFI London Film Festival next week to a packed cinema. As I watched the 90-minute cinematic remix of various twentieth-century films including Zabriski Point, The Sound of Music, They Live, The Titanic, Seconds, Taxi Driver and more, Zizek in his characteristically witty style, expliained his concept of ideology.
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Seumas Milne: The End of the New World Order as We Know It
[T]he ministers involved in the Blair government were terrified of the demonstration. They were terrified of the strength of public opinion.
The first twelve years of the 21st century have been eventful ones. Beginning with the biggest terrorist attack on American soil, it has since followed with an increasingly drawn out illegal war, uprising in the Arab world, the biggest global financial crisis since the Wall Street Crash in the 1930s and a global backlash to the stranglehold of neoliberal economics. The New World Order that began with the election of George H.W. Bush is under threat.
Slavoj Žižek singled out 2011 as the Year of Dreaming Dangerously but Seumas Milne's new book The Revenge of History points to the first decade of 21st century, and more accurately the summer of 2008 as the "watershed" moment of the decline of the New World Order. Until this time, socialism was a concept resigned to the end of the Cold War, an 80s throwback that was not due to make a return any time soon. Global capitalism had lead the way. Neoliberal economics. Free markets. Western dominance.
Seumas Milne, the Guardian columnist, has compiled his writing from over the last decade into this collection, an amalgam that revisits the decade with a new perspective, one that was widely disagreed with at the time. Interviewed by Joe Kennedy in the Quietus, he recalls how Michael Gove referred to the collective opinion on this renegade group of journalists as the 'Prada-Meinhof' group: "It just drove home to me how everything the establishment – politicians, the mainstream media – had said proved to be utterly wrong, and everything we had said had turned out to be correct."
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Slavoj Zizek Interviewed on CBC's The Current
Last week, the “Elvis Presley” of philosophy Slavoj Žižek, author of The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, decided to stop by at the CBC’s The Current and got host Anna Maria Tremonti to ruminate on Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the politics of Batman.