Babette Babich

The mode of vicarious presence is an intriguing one -- but with tickets to a talk, sold out / given out in advance there is little option.  Still the palliative effect is perhaps the most intriguing: folks who would otherwise have raised their hands to no end in an audience can now do more than that...but is there more communicated?
What is true is that Zizek remains the most interesting political thinker on the matter of contemporary concerns, and one does need to think from the left for this.
(Posted before Sundays' talk begins in earnest...)

The vicarious participation effect of distance viewing seems to be the wave of the future.  Those who, in traditional conferences, would simply vainly raise their hands to no end can now comment as they like.  But this does not mean that there will be more of what Gadamer called conversation.
What is true is that Zizek remains the most interesting commentator on the political circumstance to date.  And what  remains even more accurate is that one has to take or make such commentary from the left.  Because (and of course) there is the small matter of a performative contradiction on the right, which is to say, the powers that be.
(Written before the events began on Sunday morning....)

Wendy Brown will be pleased by this engagement ... but does Jodi Dean need to begin with Brown in order to talk about left wing desire?  And with Benjamin and 1929 Berlin is the reference to the left and its melancholy not saddled with more than a little ahistoricism? Why not talk about today's left? Today's melancholy? Sans Benjamin however much fun he is to read ... ah but we are clearly still there. Except and this is the problem today: for the differences. Where are our "revolutionary hacks"?

This is a flattened Lacan so far...

But Balibar likes it!

And then sneaks in his own "distinction"

On Sotillo's question, And then there is Nietzsche's ekphrasis of a very different Duerer, a male knight, with rather more cares (real, anyone?) and less alchemic symbolism

Jodi Dean in response to Balibar: "for crying out loud, capitalism is broken"
Yes!  American theorizing at  it's best!

The problem of 'taking the stuff' of the 1% is that it is not what one supposes it to be.  The collapse of financial markets is not a problem for the 1% but it is a problem for the 99%
Moreover the same streaming technology that allows me to write this is an instrument of unprecedented control, i.e., practical control and thought control.
It is not Foucault who is missing from this but Baudrillard...

Useful question from Zizek, side effect of called for changes, inevitably and delicately, with reference to the French Revolution, 'the' terror...
and that is also the small matter of blood on one side or another.