tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49984455660920755922024-03-14T09:43:33.485-07:00My ❤️ will go onUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger492125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-58948475385595559242020-03-18T08:45:00.000-07:002020-03-18T08:45:01.752-07:00Slavoj Žižek: Monitor and Punish? Yes, Please! Many liberal and Leftist commentators have noted how the coronavirus epidemic serves to justify and legitimize measures of control and regulation of the people that had been till now unthinkable in a Western democratic society. Is the total lockdown of Italy not a totalitarian’s wet dream come true? No wonder that (at least the way it looks now) China, which had already widely practiced modes of digitalized social control, proved to be best equipped for coping with catastrophic epidemics. Does this mean that, at least in some aspects, China is our future? Are we approaching a global state of exception? Have Giorgio Agamben’s analyses gained new actuality?<br />
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It is not surprising that <a href="http://positionswebsite.org/giorgio-agamben-the-state-of-exception-provoked-by-an-unmotivated-emergency/">Agamben himself drew this conclusion</a>: he reacted to the coronavirus epidemic in a radically different way from the majority of commentators. He deplored the “frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic of coronavirus” which is just another version of flu, and asked: “Why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to create a climate of panic, thus provoking a true state of exception, with severe limitations on movement and the suspension of daily life and work activities for entire regions?”<br />
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Agamben sees the main reason for this “disproportionate response” in “the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm.” The imposed measures allow the government to seriously limit our freedoms by executive decree: “It is blatantly evident that these restrictions are disproportionate to the threat from what is, according to the NRC, a normal flu, not much different from those that affect us every year. /…/ We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.” The second reason is “the state of fear, which in recent years has diffused into individual consciousnesses and which translates into a real need for states of collective panic,for which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext.”<br />
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Agamben is describing an important aspect of the functioning of state control in ongoing epidemics. But there are questions that remain open: why would state power be interested in promoting such a panic, which is accompanied by distrust in state power (“they are helpless, they are not doing enough…”) and which disturbs the smooth reproduction of capital? Is it really in the interest of capital and state power to trigger a global economic crisis in order to reinvigorate their reign? Are the clear signs that not just ordinary people, but also state power itself is in panic, fully aware of not being able to control the situation – are these signs really just a stratagem?<br />
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Agamben’s reaction is the extreme form of a widespread Leftist stance of reading the “exaggerated panic” caused by the spread of the virus as a mixture of power exercise of social control and elements of outright racism (“blame nature or China”). However, such a social interpretation doesn’t make the reality of the threat disappear. Does this reality compel us to effectively curtail our freedoms? Quarantines and similar measures, of course, limit our freedom, and new Assanges are needed here to bring out their possible misuses. But the threat of viral infection also gave a tremendous boost to new forms of local and global solidarity, plus it made clear the need for control over power itself. People are right to hold state power responsible: you have the power, now show what you can do! The challenge that Europe faces is to prove that what China did can be done in a more transparent and democratic way:<br />
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“China introduced measures that Western Europe and the USA are unlikely to tolerate, perhaps to their own detriment. Put bluntly, it is a mistake to reflexively interpret all forms of sensing and modelling as ‘surveillance’ and active governance as ‘social control’. We need a different and more nuanced vocabulary of intervention.”[1]<br />
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Everything hinges on this “more nuanced vocabulary”: the measures necessitated by an epidemic should not be automatically reduced to the usual paradigm of surveillance and control propagated by thinkers like Foucault. What I fear today more than the measures applied by China (and Italy and…) is that they apply these measures in a way that will not work to contain the epidemic, while authorities will manipulate and conceal the true data.<br />
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Both alt-right and fake Left refuse to accept the full reality of the epidemic, each watering it down in an exercise of social-constructivist reduction, i.e., denouncing it on behalf of its social meaning. Trump and his partisans repeatedly insist that the epidemic is a plot by Democrats and China to make him lose the upcoming elections, while some on the Left denounce the measures proposed by the state and health apparatuses as tainted by xenophobia and, therefore, insist on shaking hands, etc. Such a stance misses the paradox: not to shake hands and to go into isolation when needed IS today’s form of solidarity.<br />
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Who, today, will be able to afford shaking hands and embracing? The privileged. Boccaccio’s Decameron is composed of stories told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the plague which afflicted the city. The financial elite will withdraw into secluded zones and amuse themselves there telling stories in the Decameron style. (The ultra-rich are already flocking with private planes to exclusive small islands in the Caribbean.) We, ordinary people, who will have to live with viruses, are bombarded by the endlessly repeated formula “No panic!”… and then we get all the data that cannot but trigger a panic. The situation resembles the one I remember from my youth in a Communist country: when government officials assured the public that there was no reason to panic, we all took these assurances as clear signs that they were themselves in a panic.<br />
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But panic is not a proper way to confront a real threat. When we react in a panic, we do not take the threat too seriously; we, on the contrary, trivialize it. Just think of how ridiculous the excessive buying of toilet paper rolls is: as if having enough toilet paper would matter in the midst of a deadly epidemic… So, what would be an appropriate reaction to the coronavirus epidemic? What should we learn and what should we do to confront it seriously?<br />
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When I suggested that the coronavirus epidemic may give a new boost of life to Communism, my claim was, as expected, ridiculed. Although it looks that a strong approach to the crisis by the Chinese state worked – at least it worked much better than what is going on now in Italy -, the old authoritarian logic of Communists in power also clearly demonstrated its limitations. One of them was that the fear of bringing bad news to those in power (and to the public) outweighs actual results. This was the reason why those who first reported on a new virus were arrested, and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-01/china-s-push-to-jump-start-economy-revives-worries-of-fake-data">there are reports</a> that a similar thing is going on now:<br />
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“The pressure to get China back to work after the coronavirus shutdown is resurrecting an old temptation: doctoring data so it shows senior officials what they want to see. This phenomenon is playing out in Zhejiang province, an industrial hub on the east coast, in the form of electricity usage. At least three cities there have given local factories targets to hit for power consumption because they’re using the data to show a resurgence in production, according to people familiar with the matter. That’s prompted some businesses to run machinery even as their plants remain empty, the people said.”<br />
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We can also guess what will follow when those in power note this cheating: local managers will be accused of sabotage and severely punished, thus reproducing the vicious cycle of distrust… A Chinese Julian Assange will be needed here to expose to the public this concealed side of how China is coping with the epidemic. So, if this is not the Communism I have in mind, what do I mean by Communism? To get it, it suffices to read the public declarations of WHO. <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/06/asia/coronavirus-covid-19-update-who-intl-hnk/index.html">Here is a recent one</a>:<br />
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“WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday that although public health authorities across the globe have the ability to successfully combat the spread of the virus, the organization is concerned that in some countries the level of political commitment does not match the threat level. ‘This is not a drill. This is not the time to give up. This is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops. Countries have been planning for scenarios like this for decades. Now is the time to act on those plans,’ Tedros said. ‘This epidemic can be pushed back, but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government.’”<br />
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One might add that such a comprehensive approach should reach well beyond the machinery of single governments: it should encompass the local mobilization of people outside state control as well as strong and efficient international coordination and collaboration. If thousands are hospitalized for respiratory problems, a vastly increased number of respiratory machines will be needed, and to get them, the state should directly intervene in the same way as it intervenes in conditions of war when thousands of guns are needed. And it should rely on the cooperation with other states. As in a military campaign, information should be shared and plans fully coordinated – THIS is all I mean by “Communism” needed today, or, as Will Hutton put it: “Now, one form of unregulated, free-market globalization with its propensity for crises and pandemics is certainly dying. But another form that recognizes interdependence and the primacy of evidence-based collective action is being born.” What now still predominates is the stance of “every country for itself”: “there are national bans on exports of key products such as medical supplies, with countries falling back on their own analysis of the crisis amid localised shortages and haphazard, primitive approaches to containment.”<br />
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The coronavirus epidemic does not signal just the limit of market globalization, it also signals the even more fatal limit of nationalist populism, which insists on full state sovereignty. It’s over with “America (or whoever) first!” since America can be saved only through global coordination and collaboration. I am not a utopian here; I don’t appeal to an idealized solidarity between people. On the contrary, the present crisis demonstrates clearly how global solidarity and cooperation is in the interest of the survival of all and each of us, how it is the only rationally egotistic thing to do. And it’s not just coronavirus: China itself suffered a gigantic swine flu months ago, and it is now threatened by the prospect of a locust invasion. Plus, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/05/governments-coronavirus-urgent-climate-crisis">Owen Jones noted</a>, the climate crisis kills many more people around the world than coronavirus, but there is no panic about this…<br />
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From a cynical vitalist standpoint, one would be tempted to see the coronavirus as a beneficial infection, which allows humanity to get rid of the old, weak and ill, like pulling out a half-rotten weed, and thus contributes to global health. The broad Communist approach I am advocating is the only way for us to really leave behind such a primitive vitalist standpoint. Signs of curtailing unconditional solidarity are already discernible in ongoing debates, as in the following note about the role of the “three wise men” if the epidemic takes a more catastrophic turn in the UK: “NHS patients could be denied lifesaving care during a severe coronavirus outbreak in Britain if intensive care units are struggling to cope, senior doctors have warned. Under a so-called ‘three wise men’ protocol, three senior consultants in each hospital would be forced to make decisions on rationing care such as ventilators and beds, in the event hospitals were overwhelmed with patients.” What criteria will the “three wise men” rely on? Sacrifice the weakest and eldest? And will this situation not open up the space for immense corruption? Do such procedures not indicate that we are getting ready to enact the most brutal logic of the survival of the fittest? So, again, the ultimate choice is either this or some kind of reinvented Communism.<br />
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But things go much deeper than that. What I find especially annoying is how, when our media announce some closure or cancellation, they as a rule add a fixed temporal limitation: the “schools will be closed till April 4” formula. The big expectation is that, after the peak which should arrive fast, things would return to normal. In this sense, I was already informed that a university symposium is just postponed to September… The catch is that, even when life eventually returns to normal, it will not be the same normal we were used to before the outbreak: things we were used to as part of our daily life will no longer be taken for granted; we’ll have to learn to live a much more fragile life with constant threats lurking just behind the corner.<br />
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For this reason, we can expect that viral epidemics will affect our most elementary interactions with other people and objects around, inclusive of our own bodies: avoid touching things which may be (invisibly) “dirty,“ do not touch hooks, do not seat on public toilets or on benches in public places, avoid embracing others and shaking their hands… And even be careful about how you control your own body and your spontaneous gestures: do not touch your nose or rub your eyes – in short, do not play with yourself. So, it’s not only the state and other agencies that will control us; we should learn to control and discipline ourselves! Maybe, only virtual reality will be considered safe, and moving freely in an open space will be reserved for the islands owned by the ultra-rich.<br />
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But even here, at the level of virtual reality and the internet, we should remind ourselves that, in the last decades, the terms “virus” and “viral” were mostly used to designate digital viruses which were infecting our web-space and of which we were not aware, at least not until their destructive power (say, of destroying our data or our hard-drive) was unleashed. What we see now is a massive return to the original literal meaning of the term: viral infections work hand in hand in both dimensions, real and virtual.<br />
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So, we’ll have to change our entire stance toward life, toward our existence as living beings among other forms of life. In other words, if we understand “philosophy” as the name for our basic orientation in life, we’ll have to experience a true philosophical revolution. Maybe we can learn something about our reactions to the coronavirus epidemic from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who, in her On Death and Dying, proposed the famous scheme of the five stages of how we react upon learning that we have a terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact: “This can’t be happening, not to me.”); anger (which explodes when we can no longer deny the fact: “How can this happen to me?”); bargaining (the hope we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact: “Just let me live to see my children graduate.”); depression (libidinal disinvestment: “I’m going to die, so why bother with anything?”); acceptance (“I can’t fight it, I may as well prepare for it.”). Later, Kübler-Ross applied these stages to any form of catastrophic personal loss (joblessness, death of a loved one, divorce, drug addiction), and also emphasized that they do not necessarily come in the same order, nor are all five stages experienced by all patients.<br />
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One can discern the same five stages whenever a society is confronted with some traumatic break. Let’s take the threat of ecological catastrophe: first, we tend to deny it (it’s just paranoia, what happens are the usual oscillations in weather patterns); then comes anger (at big corporations which pollute our environment, at the government which ignores the dangers) followed by bargaining (if we recycle our waste, we can buy some time; plus, there are good sides to it also: we can grow vegetables of Greenland, ships will be able to transport goods from China to the US much faster on the northern route, new fertile land is becoming available in northern Siberia due to the melting of permafrost…), depression (it’s too late, we’re doomed…), and, finally, acceptance: we are dealing with a serious threat and we’ll have to change our entire way of life!<br />
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The same holds for the growing threat of digital control over our lives: first, we tend to deny it (it’s an exaggeration, a Leftist paranoia, no agency can control our daily activity…), then we explode in anger (at big companies and secret state agencies who know us better than we know ourselves and use this knowledge to control and manipulate us), which is followed by bargaining (authorities have the right to search for terrorists, but not to infringe upon our privacy…), depression (it’s too late, our privacy is lost, the time of personal freedoms is over), and, finally, acceptance: digital control is a threat to our freedom; we should make the public aware of all its dimensions and engage in fighting it!<br />
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Even in the domain of politics, the same holds for those who are traumatized by Trump’s presidency: first, there was denial (don’t worry, Trump is just posturing, nothing will really change if he takes power), followed by anger (at the dark forces which enabled him to take power, at the populists who support him and pose a threat to our moral substance…), bargaining (all is not yet lost, maybe Trump can be contained, let’s just tolerate some of his excesses…), depression (we are on the path to Fascism, democracy is lost in the US), and acceptance: there is a new political regime in the US, the good old days of American democracy are over, let’s face the danger and calmly plan how we can overcome Trump’s populism…<br />
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In medieval times, the population of an affected town reacted to the signs of the plague in a similar way: first denial, then anger (at our sinful lives for which we are punished, or even at the cruel God who allowed it), then bargaining (it’s not so bad, let’s just avoid those who are ill…), then depression (our life is over…), then, interestingly, orgies (since our lives are over, let’s get out of it all the pleasures still possible – drinking, sex…), and, finally, acceptance: here we are, let’s just behave as much as possible as if normal life goes on…<br />
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And is this not also how we are dealing with the coronavirus epidemic that exploded at the end of 2019? First, there was a denial (nothing serious is going on, some irresponsible individuals are just spreading panic); then, anger (usually in a racist or anti-state form: the dirty Chinese are guilty, our state is not efficient…); next comes bargaining (OK, there are some victims, but it’s less serious than SARS, and we can limit the damage…); if this doesn’t work, depression arises (let’s not kid ourselves, we are all doomed). But what would acceptance look like here? It is a strange fact that the epidemic displays a feature common with the latest round of social protests (in France, in Hong Kong…): they don’t explode and then pass away; rather, they stay here and just persist, bringing permanent fear and fragility to our lives. But this acceptance can take two directions. It can mean just the re-normalization of illness: OK, people will be dying, but life will go on, maybe there will be even some good side effects… Or acceptance can (and should) propel us to mobilize ourselves without panic and illusions, to act in collective solidarity. <br />
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What we should accept, what we should reconcile ourselves with, is that there is a sub-layer of life, the undead, stupidly repetitive, pre-sexual life of viruses, which always was here and which will always be with us as a dark shadow, posing a threat to our very survival, exploding when we least expect it. And at an even more general level, viral epidemics remind us of the ultimate contingency and meaninglessness of our lives: no matter how magnificent spiritual edifices we, humanity, bring out, a stupid natural contingency like a virus or an asteroid can end it all… Not to mention the lesson of ecology which is that we, humanity, may also unknowingly contribute to this end.<br />
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To make this point clearer, let me shamelessly quote a popular definition: viruses are “any of various infectious agents, usually ultramicroscopic, that consist of nucleic acid, either RNA or DNA, within a case of protein: they infect animals, plants, and bacteria and reproduce only within living cells: viruses are considered as being non-living chemical units or sometimes as living organisms.” This oscillation between life and death is crucial: viruses are neither alive nor dead in the usual sense of these terms. They are the living dead: a virus is alive due to its drive to replicate, but it is a kind of zero-level life, a biological caricature not so much of death-drive as of life at its most stupid level of repetition and multiplication. However, viruses are not an elementary form of life out of which more complex forms developed. They are purely parasitic; they replicate themselves through infecting more developed organisms (when a virus infects us, humans, we simply serve as its copying machine). It is in this coincidence of the opposites – elementary and parasitic – that resides the mystery of viruses: they are a case of what Schelling called “der nie aufhebbare Rest,” a remainder of the lowest form of life that emerges as a product of malfunctioning of higher mechanisms of multiplication and continues to haunt (infect) them, a remainder which cannot ever be re-integrated as the subordinate moment of a higher level of life.<br />
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Here we encounter what Hegel calls “speculative judgment,” an assertion of the identity of the highest and the lowest. Hegel’s best-known example is “Spirit is a bone” from his analysis of phrenology in Phenomenology of Spirit, and our example should be “Spirit is a virus.” Is human spirit also not some kind of virus that parasitizes of the human animal, exploits it for its own self-reproduction, and sometimes threatening to destroy it? And, insofar as the medium of spirit is language, we should not forget that, at its most elementary level, language is also something mechanic, a matter of rules we have to learn and follow.<br />
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Richard Dawkins claimed that memes are “viruses of the mind,” parasitic entities which “colonize” the human mind, using it as a means to multiply themselves. It is an idea whose originator was none other than Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy is usually perceived as a much less interesting author than Dostoyevsky – a hopelessly outdated realist for whom there is basically no place in modernity, in contrast to Dostoyevsky’s existential anguish. Perhaps, however, the time has come to fully rehabilitate Tolstoy, his unique theory of art and humanity in general, in which we find echoes of Dawkins’s notion of memes. “A person is a hominid with an infected brain, host to millions of cultural symbionts, and the chief enablers of these are the symbiont systems known as languages”[2] – is this passage from Dennett not pure Tolstoy? The basic category of Tolstoy’s anthropology is infection: a human subject is a passive empty medium infected by affect-laden cultural elements that, like contagious bacilli, spread from one individual to another. And Tolstoy goes here to the end: he does not oppose to this spread of affective infections a true spiritual autonomy; he does not propose a heroic vision of educating oneself to be a mature autonomous ethical subject by way of getting rid of infectious bacilli. The only struggle is the struggle between good and bad infections: Christianity itself is an infection, if – for Tolstoy – a good one.<br />
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Maybe, this is the most disturbing thing we can learn from the ongoing viral epidemic: when nature is attacking us with viruses, it is in a way sending our own message back to us. The message is: what you did to me, I am now doing to you.<br />
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<b>Notes:</b><br />
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[1] Benjamin Bratton, personal communication.<br />
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[2] Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves, London: penguin Books 2004, p. 173.<br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/monitor-and-punish-yes-please/">Slavoj Žižek: Monitor and Punish? Yes, Please! </a></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">See also:</span><br />
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2020/03/slavoj-zizek-coronavirus-situation-is.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus situation is way too serious to be in panic</a> (video)</h3>
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<span style="background-color: cyan; color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</a></span></h3>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-25656358727495286162020-03-16T03:44:00.001-07:002020-03-16T03:44:11.402-07:00Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus situation is way too serious to be in panicTop officials in a number of countries including the UK, US and across the Medittaranean in Europe have been infected by Covid-19... or are in self-quarantine. And many say politics is a vulnerable profession - due to the average age of lawmakers.<br />
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Slavoj Zizek talks about the impact of Covid-19 outbreak.<br />
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HabyJi66l0w" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , "trebuchet" , "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">See also: </span></span><br />
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<li><b style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.199999809265137px; text-align: center;"><i style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2020/03/slavoj-zizek-coronavirus-is-kill-bill.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism</a></i></b></li>
<li><b style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.199999809265137px; text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><a href="https://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2020/03/slavoj-zizek-global-communism-or-jungle.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">Slavoj Zizek: Global communism or the jungle law, coronavirus forces us to decide</a></i></b></b></li>
</ul>
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<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 38px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: right;">
<span style="background-color: cyan; color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</a></span></h3>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-76521851441529887882020-03-13T12:59:00.001-07:002020-03-13T12:59:26.252-07:00Slavoj Zizek: What the coronavirus & France protests have in common (and is it time for ORGIES yet?)Epidemic outbreaks – just like social protests – don’t erupt and then disappear; they persist and lurk around, waiting to explode when it’s least expected. We should accept this, but there are two ways to do it.<br />
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People outside China thought that a quarantine would be enough to tackle the virus’s spread, and that they are more or less safe behind that ‘wall.’ But now that coronavirus cases have been reported in over 20 countries, a new approach is needed. How are we to deal with such traumatic threats?<br />
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<b style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.199999809265137px; text-align: center;">See also: <a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2020/03/slavoj-zizek-coronavirus-is-kill-bill.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><i>Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism</i></a></b></div>
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Maybe we can learn something about our reactions to the coronavirus epidemics from psychiatrist and author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who, in On Death and Dying, proposed the famous schema of the five stages of how we react upon learning that we have, for example, a terminal illness: Denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact, as in “This can’t be happening, not to me.”); Anger (which explodes when we can no longer deny the fact, as in “How can this happen to me?”); Bargaining (the hope we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact, as in “Just let me live to see my children graduate.”); Depression (libidinal disinvestment, as in “I'm going to die, so why bother with anything?”); and finally Acceptance (“I can't fight it, I may as well prepare for it.”). <br />
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Kübler-Ross later applied these stages to any form of catastrophic personal loss (joblessness, death of a loved one, divorce, drug addiction) and also emphasized that they do not necessarily come in the same order, nor are all five stages experienced by all patients.<br />
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One can discern the same five stages whenever a society is confronted with some traumatic event. Let’s take the threat of ecological catastrophe.<br />
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First, we tend to deny it: ‘it’s just paranoia, all that really happens are the usual oscillations in weather patterns’. Then comes anger – at big corporations that pollute our environment and at the government which ignores the dangers. That is followed by bargaining: ‘if we recycle our waste, we can buy some time; plus, there are good sides to it also, we can now grow vegetables in Greenland, ships will be able to transport goods from China to the US much faster via the northern route, new fertile land is becoming available in northern Siberia due to the melting of permafrost.’ It is then followed by depression (‘it’s too late, we’re lost’), and, finally, acceptance – ‘we are dealing with a serious threat and we’ll have to change our entire way of life!’ <br />
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The same holds for the growing threat of digital control over our lives. Again, first, we tend to deny it, and consider it ‘an exaggeration’, ‘more Leftist paranoia’, ‘no agency can control our daily activity.’ Then we explode in anger at big companies and secret state agencies who ‘know us better than we know ourselves’ and use this knowledge to control and manipulate us. It’s followed by bargaining (authorities have the right to search for terrorists, but not to infringe upon our privacy), depression (it’s too late, our privacy is lost, the age of personal freedoms is over). And, finally, comes acceptance: ‘digital control is a threat to our freedom, we should render the public aware of all its dimensions and engage ourselves to fight it!’ <br />
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Even in the domain of politics, the same holds for those who are traumatized by Trump’s presidency: first, there was a denial (‘don’t worry, Trump is just posturing, nothing will really change if he takes power’), followed by anger (at the ‘dark forces’ that enabled him to take power, at the populists who support him and pose a threat to our moral substance), bargaining (‘all is not yet lost, maybe Trump can be contained, let’s just tolerate some of his excesses’), and depression (‘we are on the path to Fascism, democracy is lost in the US’), and then acceptance: ‘there is a new political regime in the US, the good old days of American democracy are over, let’s face the danger and calmly plan how can we overcome Trump’s populism.’<br />
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In medieval times, the population of an affected town reacted to the signs of plague in a similar way: first denial, then anger (at our sinful lives for which we are punished, or even at the cruel God who allowed it), then bargaining (it’s not so bad, let’s just avoid those who are ill), then depression (our life is over), then, interestingly, orgies (‘since our lives are over, let’s get all the pleasures still possible – drinking, sex…’). And, finally, there was acceptance: ‘here we are, let’s just behave as much as possible as if normal life goes on.’<br />
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And is this not also how we are dealing with the coronavirus epidemics that exploded at the end of 2019? First, there was a denial (nothing serious is going on, some irresponsible individuals are just spreading panic); then, anger (usually in a racist or anti-state form: the dirty Chinese are guilty, our state is not efficient…); next comes bargaining (OK, there are some victims, but it’s less serious than SARS, and we can limit the damage); if this doesn’t work, depression arises (let’s not kid ourselves, we are all doomed). <br />
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But how would our acceptance look here? It is a strange fact that these epidemics display a feature common with the latest round of social protests such as those in France or in Hong Kong: they don’t explode and then fizzle away, they stay here and just persist, bringing permanent fear and fragility to our lives. <br />
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What we should accept, what we should reconcile ourselves with, is that there is a sub-layer of life, the undead, stupidly repetitive, pre-sexual life of viruses, which always was here and which will always be with us as a dark shadow, posing a threat to our very survival, exploding when we least expect it. <br />
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And at an even more general level, viral epidemics remind us of the ultimate contingency and meaninglessness of our lives: no matter how magnificent spiritual edifices we, humanity, create, a stupid natural contingency like a virus or an asteroid can end it all. Not to mention the lesson of ecology which is that we, humanity, may also unknowingly contribute to this end.<br />
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But this acceptance can take two directions. It can mean just the re-normalization of illness: OK, people will be dying, but life will go on, maybe there will be even some good side effects. Or acceptance can (and should) propel us to mobilize ourselves without panic and illusions, to act in collective solidarity. <br />
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<b>Source:</b> <i><a href="https://www.rt.com/op-ed/481213-coronavirus-protests-slavoj-zizek/">Slavoj Zizek: What the coronavirus & France protests have in common (and is it time for ORGIES yet?)</a></i><br />
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<b style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">See also:</span></b></div>
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<b style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> <i><a href="https://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2020/03/slavoj-zizek-global-communism-or-jungle.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">Slavoj Zizek: Global communism or the jungle law, coronavirus forces us to decide</a></i></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: cyan; color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-books.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: lime;"><strike>ZIZEK BOOKS</strike></span></span></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-44213111563382107412020-03-12T14:13:00.003-07:002020-03-12T14:13:38.047-07:00Slavoj Zizek: Global communism or the jungle law, coronavirus forces us to decideAs panic over coronavirus spreads, we have to make the ultimate choice – either we enact the most brutal logic of the survival of the fittest or some kind of reinvented communism with global coordination and collaboration.<br />
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Our media endlessly repeat the formula “<i>No panic!</i>” And then we get all the reports which cannot but trigger panic. The situation resembles the one I remember from my youth in a communist country: when government officials assured the public that there is no reason to panic, we all took these assurances as clear signs that they were themselves in panic.<br />
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<b>See also: <a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2020/03/slavoj-zizek-coronavirus-is-kill-bill.html"><i>Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism</i></a></b></div>
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<b>It’s too serious to lose time with panic</b><br />
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Panic has a logic of its own. The fact that, in the UK, due to the coronavirus panic even toilet paper rolls have disappeared from the stores reminds me of a weird incident with toilet paper from my youth in socialist Yugoslavia. All of a sudden, a rumor started to circulate that there was not enough toilet paper in the stores. The authorities promptly issued assurances that there was enough toilet paper for the normal consumption, and, surprisingly, this was not only true but people mostly even believed it was true. <br />
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However, an average consumer reasoned in the following way: I know there is enough toilet paper and the rumor is false, but what if some people take this rumor seriously and, in a panic, will start to buy excessive reserves of toilet paper, causing this way an actual lack of toilet paper? So I better go and buy reserves of it myself. <br />
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It is even not necessary to believe that some others take the rumor seriously – it is enough to presuppose that some others believe that there are people who take the rumor seriously – the effect is the same, namely the real lack of toilet paper in the stores. Is something similar not going on in the UK (and also in California) today?<br />
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The strange counterpart of this kind of ongoing excessive panic is the total lack of panic where it would have been fully justified. In the last couple of years, after the SARS and ebola epidemics, we were told again and again that a new much stronger epidemic is just a matter of time, that the question is not IF but WHEN it will occur. Although we were rationally convinced of the truth of these dire predictions, we somehow didn’t take them seriously and were reluctant to act and engage in serious preparations – the only place we dealt with them were in apocalyptic movies like Contagion.<br />
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What this contrast tells us is that panic is not a proper way to confront a real threat. When we react in panic we do not take the threat too seriously. On the contrary, we trivialize it. Just think at how ridiculous the excessive buying of toilet paper rolls is: as if having enough toilet paper would matter in the midst of a deadly epidemic. So what would be an appropriate reaction to the coronavirus epidemic? What should we learn and what should we do to confront it seriously?<br />
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<b>What I mean by communism </b><br />
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When I suggested that the coronavirus epidemic may give a new boost of life to communism, my claim was, as expected, ridiculed. Although it looks that the strong approach to the crisis by the Chinese state worked – at least it worked much better than what goes on now in Italy, the old authoritarian logic of communists in power also clearly demonstrated its limitations. One of them was that the fear of bringing bad news to those in power (and to the public) outweighs actual results – this was apparently the reason why those who first shared information on a new virus were <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/china-coronavirus-whistleblowers-speak-out-vanish-2020-2#a-friend-of-xu-told-the-guardian-that-the-professor-was-placed-under-house-arrest-after-he-returned-to-beijing-following-the-lunar-new-year-celebration-1">reportedly</a> arrested, and there are reports that a similar thing is going on now.<br />
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“<i>The pressure to get China back to work after the coronavirus shutdown is resurrecting an old temptation: doctoring data so it shows senior officials what they want to see</i>,” <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-01/china-s-push-to-jump-start-economy-revives-worries-of-fake-data">reports</a> Bloomberg. “<i>This phenomenon is playing out in Zhejiang province, an industrial hub on the east coast, in the form of electricity usage. At least three cities there have given local factories targets to hit for power consumption because they’re using the data to show a resurgence in production, according to people familiar with the matter. That’s prompted some businesses to run machinery even as their plants remain empty, the people said.</i>”<br />
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We can also guess what will follow when those in power note this cheating: local managers will be accused of sabotage and severely punished, thus reproducing the vicious cycle of distrust… A Chinese Julian Assange would be needed here to expose to the public this concealed side of how China is coping with the epidemic. So if this is not the communism I have in mind, what do I mean by communism? To get it, it suffices to read the public declarations of WHO – <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/06/asia/coronavirus-covid-19-update-who-intl-hnk/index.html">here</a> is a recent one:<br />
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WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week that although public health authorities across the globe have the ability to successfully combat the spread of the virus, the organization is concerned that in some countries the level of political commitment does not match the threat level. “<i>This is not a drill. This is not the time to give up. This is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops. Countries have been planning for scenarios like this for decades. Now is the time to act on those plans,</i>” Tedros said. “<i>This epidemic can be pushed back, but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government.</i>”<br />
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One might add that such a comprehensive approach should reach well beyond the machinery of single governments: it should encompass local mobilization of people outside state control as well as strong and efficient international coordination and collaboration. <br />
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If thousands will be hospitalized for respiratory problems, a vastly increased number of respiratory machines will be needed, and to get them, the state should directly intervene in the same way as it intervenes in conditions of war when thousands of guns are needed, and it should rely on the cooperation of other states. As in a military campaign, information should be shared and plans fully coordinated – THIS is all I mean by ‘communism’ needed today, or, as Will Hutton put it: “<i>Now, one form of unregulated, free-market globalization with its propensity for crises and pandemics is certainly dying. But another form that recognizes interdependence and the primacy of evidence-based collective action is being born.</i>” <br />
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<b>Global coordination & collaboration necessary </b><br />
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What now still predominates is the stance of “<i>every country for itself</i>”: “<i>There are national bans on exports of key products such as medical supplies, with countries falling back on their own analysis of the crisis amid localised shortages and haphazard, primitive approaches to containment,</i>” Will Hutton <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/the-coronavirus-outbreak-shows-us-that-no-one-can-take-on-this-enemy-alone">wrote</a> in the Guardian. <br />
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The coronavirus epidemic does not signal just the limit of market globalization, it also signals the even more fatal limit of nationalist populism which insists on full state sovereignty: it’s over with ‘America (or whoever) first!’ since America can be saved only through global coordination and collaboration. <br />
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I am not a utopian here, I don’t appeal to an idealized solidarity between people – on the contrary, the present crisis demonstrates clearly how global solidarity and cooperation is in the interest of survival of all and each of us, how it is the only rational egotist thing to do. And it’s not just coronavirus: China itself suffered a gigantic swine flu months ago, and it is now threatened by the prospect of a locust invasion. Plus, as Owen Jones <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/05/governments-coronavirus-urgent-climate-crisis">noted</a>, climate crisis kills much more people around the world than coronavirus, but there is no panic about this.<br />
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From a cynical vitalist standpoint, one would be tempted to see coronavirus as a beneficial infection which allows humanity to get rid of the old, weak and ill, like pulling out the half-rotten weed, and thus contributes to global health. <br />
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The broad communist approach I am advocating is the only way for us to really leave behind such a primitive vitalist standpoint. Signs of curtailing unconditional solidarity are already discernible in the ongoing debates, as in the following <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/coronavirus-weakest-patients-could-be-denied-lifesaving-care-due-to-lack-of-funding-for-nhs-doctors-admit/ar-BB10raxq?ocid=spartanntp">note</a> about the role of the “<i>three wise men</i>” if the epidemics takes a more catastrophic turn in the UK: “<i>NHS patients could be denied life saving care during a severe coronavirus outbreak in Britain if intensive care units are struggling to cope, senior doctors have warned. Under a so-called ‘three wise men’ protocol, three senior consultants in each hospital would be forced to make decisions on rationing care such as ventilators and beds, in the event hospitals were overwhelmed with patients.</i>”<br />
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What criteria will the “three wise men” rely on? Sacrifice the weakest and eldest? And will this situation not just open up space for immense corruption? Do such procedures not indicate that we are getting ready to enact the most brutal logic of the survival of the fittest? So, again, the ultimate choice is: this or some kind of reinvented communism.<br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.rt.com/op-ed/482780-coronavirus-communism-jungle-law-choice/">Slavoj Zizek: Global communism or the jungle law, coronavirus forces us to decide</a></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">See also:</span></div>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2020/03/slavoj-zizek-coronavirus-is-kill-bill.html"><span style="font-size: large;">Slavoj Zizek: <i>Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism</i></span></a></div>
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-23856840608317931512020-03-12T01:31:00.002-07:002020-03-12T14:16:24.085-07:00Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communismThe ongoing spread of the coronavirus epidemic has also triggered vast epidemics of ideological viruses which were laying dormant in our societies: fake news, paranoiac conspiracy theories, explosions of racism.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy4LuZ98p7uzy3Wow-EexF_MXeS31m_5XZTAM24BDu_HdqZQIx7kb-jhU7tN-7VXUcwl93c8Lhg5mPTshrdP_PlcfxJ9LQF-qNWbWsUXVV79UIZ2ZEahbXWedTZvUABytbabkky9KNAw4/s1600/5e57e77020302716dd6c0b91.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy4LuZ98p7uzy3Wow-EexF_MXeS31m_5XZTAM24BDu_HdqZQIx7kb-jhU7tN-7VXUcwl93c8Lhg5mPTshrdP_PlcfxJ9LQF-qNWbWsUXVV79UIZ2ZEahbXWedTZvUABytbabkky9KNAw4/s400/5e57e77020302716dd6c0b91.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b>See also: <i><a href="https://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2020/03/slavoj-zizek-global-communism-or-jungle.html">Slavoj Zizek: Global communism or the jungle law, coronavirus forces us to decide </a></i></b></div>
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The well-grounded medical need for quarantines found an echo in the ideological pressure to establish clear borders and to quarantine enemies that pose a threat to our identity.<br />
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But maybe another – and much more beneficial – ideological virus will spread and hopefully infect us: the virus of thinking about an alternate society, a society beyond nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation. <br />
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Speculation is often heard today that the coronavirus may lead to the fall of communist rule in China, in the same way that (as Gorbachev himself admitted) the Chernobyl catastrophe was the event which triggered the end of the Soviet communism. But there is a paradox here: the coronavirus will also compel us to re-invent communism based on trust in the people and in science.<br />
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In the final scene of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill 2,’ Beatrix disables the evil Bill and strikes him with the “<i>Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique</i>” – the most deadly blow in all of martial arts. The move consists of a combination of five strikes with one’s fingertips to five different pressure points on the target’s body. After the target walks away and has taken five steps, their heart explodes in their body and they fall to the ground.<br />
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This attack is part of martial arts mythology and is not possible in real hand-to-hand combat. But, back to the film, after Beatrix does it, Bill calmly makes his peace with her, takes five steps and dies… <br />
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What makes this attack so fascinating is the time between being hit and the moment of death: I can have a nice conversation as long as I sit calmly, but I am all this time aware that the moment I start to walk, my heart will explode and I will drop dead.<br />
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Is the idea of those who speculate about how the coronavirus epidemic could lead to the fall of communist rule in China not similar? Like some kind of social “<i>Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique</i>” on the country’s communist regime, the authorities can sit, observe and go through the motions of quarantine, but any real change in the social order (like trusting the people) will result in their downfall. <br />
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My modest opinion is much more radical: the coronavirus epidemic is a kind of “<i>Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique</i>” attack on the global capitalist system – a signal that we cannot go on the way we were up until now, that a radical change is needed.<br />
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<b>Sad fact, we need a catastrophe </b><br />
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Years ago, Fredric Jameson drew attention to the utopian potential in movies about a cosmic catastrophe (an asteroid threatening life on Earth, or a virus killing humanity). Such a global threat gives birth to global solidarity, our petty differences become insignificant, we all work together to find a solution – and here we are today, in real life. The point is not to sadistically enjoy widespread suffering insofar as it helps our cause – on the contrary, the point is to reflect upon a sad fact that we need a catastrophe to make us able to rethink the very basic features of the society in which we live.<br />
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The first vague model of such a global coordination is the World Health Organization, from which we are not getting the usual bureaucratic gibberish but precise warnings proclaimed without panic. Such organizations should be given more executive power. <br />
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Bernie Sanders is mocked by skeptics for his advocacy of universal healthcare in the US – is the lesson of the coronavirus epidemic not that even more is needed, that we should start to put together some kind of GLOBAL healthcare network? <br />
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A day after Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi appeared at a press conference in order to downplay the coronavirus spread and to assert that mass quarantines are not necessary, he made a short statement admitting that he has contracted the coronavirus and placed himself in isolation (already during his first TV appearance, he had shown signs of fever and weakness). Harirchi <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/25/irans-deputy-health-minister-i-have-coronavirus">added</a>: “<i>This virus is democratic, and it doesn’t distinguish between poor and rich or between statesman and an ordinary citizen.</i>” <br />
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In this, he was right – we are all in the same boat. It is difficult to miss the supreme irony of the fact that what brought us all together and pushed us into global solidarity expresses itself at the level of everyday life in strict commands to avoid close contacts with others, even to self-isolate.<br />
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And we are not dealing only with viral threats – other catastrophes are looming on the horizon or already taking place: droughts, heatwaves, massive storms, etc. In all these cases, the answer is not panic but hard and urgent work to establish some kind of efficient global coordination.<br />
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<b>Will we only be safe in virtual reality?</b><br />
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The first illusion to dispel is the one formulated by US President Donald Trump during his recent visit to India, where he said that the epidemic would recede quickly and we just have to wait for the spike and then life will return to normal. <br />
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Against these all too easy hopes, the first thing to accept is that the threat is here to stay. Even if this wave recedes, it will reappear in new, maybe even more dangerous, forms.<br />
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For this reason, we can expect that viral epidemics will affect our most elementary interactions with other people and objects around us, including our own bodies – avoid touching things that may be (invisibly) dirty, don’t touch hooks, don’t sit on toilet seats or public benches, avoid embracing people or shaking their hands. We might even become more careful about spontaneous gestures: don’t touch your nose or rub your eyes.<br />
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So it’s not only the state and other agencies that will control us, we should also learn to control and discipline ourselves. Maybe only virtual reality will be considered safe, and moving freely in an open space will be restricted to the islands owned by the ultra-rich.<br />
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But even here, at the level of virtual reality and internet, we should remind ourselves that, in the last decades, the terms “<i>virus</i>” and “<i>viral</i>” were mostly used to designate digital viruses which were infecting our web-space and of which we were not aware, at least not until their destructive power (say, of destroying our data or our hard-drive) was unleashed. What we see now is a massive return to the original literal meaning of the term: viral infections work hand-in-hand in both dimensions, real and virtual.<br />
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<br />
<b>Return of capitalist animism </b><br />
<br />
Another weird phenomenon that we can observe is the triumphant return of capitalist animism, of treating social phenomena like markets or financial capital as living entities. If one reads our big media, the impression one gets is that what we should really worry about are not thousands who already died (and thousands more who will die) but the fact that “<i>markets are getting nervous.</i>” The coronavirus is increasingly disturbing the smooth running of the world market and, as we hear, growth may fall by two or three percent.<br />
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Does all this not clearly signal the urgent need for a reorganization of the global economy which will no longer be at the mercy of market mechanisms? We are not talking here about old-style communism, of course, just about some kind of global organization that can control and regulate the economy, as well as limit the sovereignty of nation-states when needed. Countries were able to do it against the backdrop of war in the past, and all of us are now effectively approaching a state of medical war.<br />
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Plus we should also not be afraid to note some potentially beneficial side effects of the epidemic. One of the symbols of the epidemic is passengers caught (quarantined) on large cruise ships – good riddance to the obscenity of such ships, I am tempted to say. (We only have to be careful that travel to lone islands or other exclusive resorts will not become again the privilege of the rich few, as it was decades ago with flying.) Car production is also seriously affected by the coronavirus – which is not too bad, as this may compel us to think about alternatives to our obsession with individual vehicles. The list goes on.<br />
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In a recent speech, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said: “<i>There is no such thing as a liberal. A liberal is nothing more than a communist with a diploma.</i>”<br />
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What if the opposite is true? If we designate as “<i>liberals</i>” all those who care for our freedoms, and as “<i>communists</i>” those who are aware that we can save these freedoms only with radical changes since global capitalism is approaching a crisis? Then we should say that, today, those who still recognize themselves as communists are liberals with a diploma – liberals who seriously studied why our liberal values are under threat and became aware that only radical change can save them.<br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.rt.com/op-ed/481831-coronavirus-kill-bill-capitalism-communism/">Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism</a></i><br />
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<b style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">See also:</span></b></div>
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<b style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"> <i><a href="https://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2020/03/slavoj-zizek-global-communism-or-jungle.html">Slavoj Zizek: Global communism or the jungle law, coronavirus forces us to decide</a></i></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: cyan; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-books.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: lime;"><strike>ZIZEK BOOKS</strike></span></span></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-66323356338283246722020-03-07T08:47:00.000-08:002020-03-07T08:55:47.002-08:00Slavoj Žižek: A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name - 34 Untimely InterventionsWith irrepressible humor, Slavoj Žižek dissects our current political and social climate, discussing everything from Jordan Peterson and sex "unicorns" to Greta Thunberg and Chairman Mao. Taking aim at his enemies on the Left, Right, and Center, he argues that contemporary society can only be properly understood from a communist standpoint.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: start;"><b><a href="https://bit.ly/2THS88e">A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name</a></b></i></td></tr>
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<br />
Why communism? The greater the triumph of global capitalism, the more its dangerous antagonisms multiply: climate collapse, the digital manipulation of our lives, the explosion in refugee numbers - all need a radical solution. That solution is a Left that dares to speak its name, to get its hands dirty in the real world of contemporary politics, not to sling its insults from the sidelines or to fight a culture war that is merely a fig leaf covering its political and economic failures. As the crises caused by contemporary capitalism accumulate at an alarming rate, the Left finds itself in crisis too, beset with competing ideologies and prone to populism, racism, and conspiracy theories. <br />
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<i><b><a href="https://bit.ly/2THS88e">A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name</a></b></i> is Žižek's attempt to elucidate the major political issues of the day from a truly radical Leftist position. The first three parts explore the global political situation and the final part focuses on contemporary Western culture, as ?i?ek directs his polemic to topics such as wellness, Wikileaks, and the rights of sexbots. This wide-ranging collection of essays provides the perfect insight into the ideas of one of the most influential radical thinkers of our time.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Slavoj Žižek: <i><a href="https://bit.ly/2THS88e">A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name</a></i></span></b><br />
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<b>Table of Contents </b><br />
<br />
Introduction: From the Communist Standpoint<br />
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The Global Mess<br />
1 200 Years After: Is Marx Alive, Dead, or a Living Dead?<br />
2 Why Secondary Contradictions Matter: A Maoist View<br />
3 Nomadic // Proletarians<br />
4 Should the Left’s Answer to Rightist Populism Really be a “Me Too”?<br />
5 When Unfreedom Itself is Experienced as Freedom<br />
6 Only Autistic Children Can Save Us!<br />
7 They are Both Worse!<br />
8 A Desperate Call for (T)Reason<br />
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The West…<br />
9 Democratic Socialism and Its Discontents<br />
10 Is Donald Trump a Frog Embracing a Bottle of Beer?<br />
11 Better Dead than Red!<br />
12 “There is Disorder Under Heaven, the Situation is Excellent”<br />
13 Soyons realistes, demandons l’impossible!<br />
14 Catalonia and the End of Europe<br />
15 Which Idea of Europe is Worth Defending?<br />
16 The Right to Tell the Public Bad News<br />
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…And The Rest<br />
17 It’s the Same Struggle, Dummy!<br />
18 The Real Anti-Semites and Their Zionist Friends<br />
19 Yes, Racism is Alive and Well!<br />
20 What is to be Done When Our Cupola is Leaking?<br />
21 Is China Communist or Capitalist?<br />
22 Venezuela and the Need for New Clichés<br />
23 Welcome to the True New World Order! <br />
24 A True Miracle in Bosnia<br />
<br />
Ideology<br />
25 For Active Solidarity, Against Guilt and Self-Reproach<br />
26 Sherbsky Institute, APA<br />
27 Welcome to the Brave New World of Consenticorns!<br />
28 Do Sexbots have Rights?<br />
29 Nipples, Penis, Vulva…and Maybe Shit<br />
30 Cuaron’s Roma: The Trap of Goodness<br />
31 Happiness? No, Thanks!<br />
32 Assange has Only us to Help Him!<br />
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Appendix<br />
33 Is Avital Ronell Really Toxic?<br />
34 Jordan Peterson as a Symptom…of What?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: start;"><b><a href="https://bit.ly/2THS88e">A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name</a></b></i><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;"> </span></td></tr>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-books.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: lime;"><strike>ZIZEK BOOKS</strike></span></span></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-50478557181455500722020-02-20T01:31:00.002-08:002020-02-20T01:31:17.028-08:00Slavoj Žižek: The Optimism of Melancholia<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b style="background-color: lime;">SEE ALSO:</b><br />
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<ul>
<li><b><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2017/05/slavoj-zizek-why-be-happy-when-you.html">Slavoj Žižek: <i>Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?</i></a></b></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><b><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2017/05/slavoj-zizek-dont-act-just-think.html">Slavoj Žižek: <i>Don't Act. Just Think.</i></a></b></li>
</ul>
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<li><b><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2016/03/zizeks-10-favorite-films-from-criterion.html">Žižek’s 10 Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection</a></b></li>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-books.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: lime;"><strike>ZIZEK BOOKS</strike></span></span></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-9882775144975733912020-02-12T11:16:00.001-08:002020-02-12T11:33:04.588-08:00Slavoj Žižek on Synthetic Sex and "Being Yourself"<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7xYO-VMZUGo" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<b style="background-color: lime;">SEE ALSO:</b><br />
<br />
<ul><li><b><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2017/05/slavoj-zizek-why-be-happy-when-you.html">Slavoj Žižek: <i>Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?</i></a></b></li>
</ul><ul><li><b><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2017/05/slavoj-zizek-dont-act-just-think.html">Slavoj Žižek: <i>Don't Act. Just Think.</i></a></b></li>
</ul><ul><li><b><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2016/03/zizeks-10-favorite-films-from-criterion.html">Žižek’s 10 Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection</a></b></li>
</ul><br />
<div style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.199999809265137px; text-align: justify;"><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 38px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: right;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.199999809265137px; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><br style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.199999809265137px;" /> <div style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.199999809265137px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-books.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: lime;"><strike>ZIZEK BOOKS</strike></span></span></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-86856627911307099672019-12-05T01:18:00.002-08:002019-12-05T01:18:27.516-08:00Slavoj Zizek: There is no conflict between the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against Israeli occupation<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Today, the charge of antisemitism is addressed at anyone who critiques Israeli policy</i></span></div>
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Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that, if you are attacked for the same text by both sides in a political conflict, this is one of the few reliable signs that you are on the right path. In the last decades, I have been attacked by a number of very different political actors (often on account of the same text!) for antisemitism, up to advocating a new Holocaust, and for perfidious Zionist propaganda (see the last issue of the antisemitic Occidental Observer). So I think I’ve earned the right to comment on the recent accusations against the Labour Party regarding its alleged tolerance of antisemitism.<br />
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I, of course, indisputably reject antisemitism in all its forms, including the idea that one can sometimes ”understand” it, as in: “considering what Israel is doing on the West Bank, one shouldn’t be surprised if this gives birth to antisemitic reactions”. More precisely, I reject the two symmetrical versions of this last argument: “we should understand occasional Palestinian antisemitism since they suffer a lot” as well as “we should understand aggressive Zionism in view of the Holocaust.” One should, of course, also reject the compromise version: “both sides have a point, so let’s find a middle way…”.<br />
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Along the same lines, we should supplement the standard Israeli point that the (permissible) critique of Israeli policy can serve as a cover for the (unacceptable) antisemitism with its no less pertinent reversal: the accusation of antisemitism is often invoked to discredit a totally justified critique of Israeli politics. Where, exactly, does legitimate critique of Israeli policy become antisemitism? More and more, mere sympathy for the Palestinian resistance is condemned as antisemitic. Take the two-state solution: while decades ago it was the standard international position, it is more and more proclaimed a threat to Israel's existence and thus antisemitic.<br />
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Things get really ominous when Zionism itself evokes the traditional antisemitic cliché of roots. Alain Finkielkraut wrote in 2015 in a letter to Le Monde: “The Jews, they have today chosen the path of rooting.” It is easy to discern in this claim an echo of Heidegger who said, in a Der Spiegel interview, that all essential and great things can only emerge from our having a homeland, from being rooted in a tradition. The irony is that we are dealing here with a weird attempt to mobilise antisemitic clichés in order to legitimize Zionism: antisemitism reproaches the Jews for being rootless; Zionism tries to correct this failure by belatedly providing Jews with roots. No wonder many conservative antisemites ferociously support the expansion of the State of Israel.<br />
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However, the trouble with the settlement project today is that it is now trying to get roots in a place which was for thousands of years inhabited by other people. That’s why I find obscene a recent claim by Ayelet Shaked, the former Israeli justice minister: “The Jewish People have the legal and moral right to live in their ancient homeland.” What about the rights of Palestinians?<br />
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For me, the only way out of this conundrum is the ethical one: there is ultimately no conflict between the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against what the State of Israel is now doing on the West Bank. The two struggles are part of one and the same struggle for emancipation. Let’s mention a concrete case. Some weeks ago, Zarah Sultana, a Labour candidate, apologised for a Facebook post in which she backed the Palestinian right to “violent resistance”: “I do not support violence and I should not have articulated my anger in the manner I did, for which I apologize.” I fully support her apology, we should not play with violence, but I nonetheless feel obliged to add that what Israel is now doing on West Bank is also a form of violence. No doubts that Israel sincerely wants peace on the West Bank; occupiers by definition want peace in their occupied land, since it means no resistance. So if Jews are in any way threatened in the UK, I unconditionally and unequivocally condemn it and support all legal measures to combat it–but am I permitted to add that Palestinians in the West Bank are much more under threat than Jews in the UK?<br />
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Without mentioning Corbyn by name, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis recently wrote in an article for the Times that “a new poison–sanctioned from the top–has taken root in the Labour Party.” He conceded: “It is not my place to tell any person how they should vote,” though went on to add: “When December 12 arrives, I ask every person to vote with their conscience. Be in no doubt, the very soul of our nation is at stake.” I find this presentation of a political choice as a purely moral one ethically disgusting–it reminds me of how, decades ago, the Catholic Church in Italy did not explicitly order citizens to vote for Christian Democracy, but just said that they should vote for a party which is Christian and democratic. <br />
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Today, the charge of antisemitism is more and more addressed at anyone who deviates from the acceptable left-liberal establishment towards a more radical left–can one imagine a more repellent and cynical manipulation of the Holocaust? When protests against the Israel Defense Forces' activities in the West Bank are denounced as an expression of antisemitism, and (implicitly, at least) put in the same line as Holocaust deniers–that is to say, when the shadow of the Holocaust is permanently evoked in order to neutralise any criticism of Israeli military and political operations–it is not enough to insist on the difference between antisemitism and the critique of particular measures of the State of Israel. One should go a step further and claim that it is the State of Israel that, in this case, is desecrating the memory of Holocaust victims, ruthlessly using them as an instrument to legitimise present political measures.<br />
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As Mirvis wrote, the soul of our nation is indeed at stake here–but also, the soul of the Jewish nation. Will Jews follow Finkielkraut and “take roots”, using their sacred history as an ideological excuse, or will they remember that ultimately we are all strangers in a strange land? Will Jews allow Israel to turn into another fundamentalist nation-state, or remain faithful to the legacy that made them a key factor in the rise of modern civil society? (Remember that there is no Enlightenment without the Jews.) For me, to fully support Israeli politics in the West Bank is a betrayal not just of some abstract global ethics, but of the most precious part of Jewish ethical tradition itself.<br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/labour-jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-zionism-israel-slavoj-zizek-a9231006.html">There is no conflict between the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against Israeli occupation</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-8887482768670050912019-12-01T09:54:00.000-08:002019-12-01T09:54:09.549-08:00LIVESTREAM: Slavoj Žižek: "Why I Am Still A Communist" - December 7, 2019<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Holberg Debate: Slavoj Žižek: "<i>Why I Am Still A Communist</i>"</span></div>
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Saturday, December 7, 2019 at 3 PM – 5:15 PM</div>
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bgPqk8-HPGQ" width="560"></iframe><br /></div>
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Slavoj Žižek has been called the «the most dangerous philosopher in the West» and a cultural theorist superstar, as he mixes Marxism with pop culture and psychoanalysis. Three decades after the fall of «Communism» in Eastern Europe, why does Žižek still call himself a communist?<br />
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Even though Europe’s authoritarian Socialist states have been gone for about 30 years, socialism and communism have not disappeared from the lexicon of political ideas in the West.<br />
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Here, the last decade has seen both a crisis of capitalism, high levels of polarisation and turmoil, a rediscovering of Marxism in certain circles, and a mainstream American Left that advocates «democratic socialism».<br />
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What exactly such terms mean to their advocates and critics, however, remains unclear, as the US enters one of the most contentious election years ever. And while the Nordic “social democracies” may be known for their expansive welfare states, arguing that they still represent “socialism” would likely require a stretch of both concepts and imagination.<br />
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In an age where the principles of the free marked have become the driving force of both the economy, public services, foreign policy, and education, “communism” remains a dirty word among the political establishment.<br />
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So why is Žižek still a communist?<br />
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"At the 2019 Holberg Debate, we are honoured to be joined by two big thinkers: Slavoj Žižek and Tyler Cowen. Prof. Žižek will deliver his keynote address, “Why I Am Still A Communist”, before being interviewed by Prof. Cowen. In the subsequent Q & A session, we encourage everyone to contribute with questions and comments, either from the floor, or via Twitter. Twitter users may use hashtag #qholberg for questions and submit their comments either in writing or as video snippets. Questions may be submitted at any time, before or during the event. In other words: You are welcome to submit your questions today."<br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-32602901350708125472019-11-28T06:49:00.003-08:002019-11-28T06:50:08.812-08:00Slavoj Zizek: Will the global Left allow right-wing nationalists to take control of society's discontent?Three decades after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, there's now unease about liberal capitalism. It's benefitting the global Right more than leftists.<br />
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Today, it’s commonplace to emphasize the “miraculous” nature of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 30 years ago, this month. Back then, it was like a dream come true, something unimaginable even a couple of months earlier. Soon after, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards.<br />
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Who, before then, in Poland could have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president? However, one should add that an even greater “miracle” happened only a couple of years later: the return of the ex-Communists to power through free democratic elections. Walesa was soon totally marginalized and much less popular than General Wojciech Jaruzelski who, a decade and a half earlier, crushed Solidarity with the military coup d’etat.<br />
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At this point, one usually mentions “capitalist realism”: East Europeans simply didn’t possess a realistic image of capitalism. They were full of immature utopian expectations. The morning after the enthusiasm of the drunken days of victory, people had to sober up and undergo a painful process of learning the rules of the new reality, i.e., the price one has to pay for political and economic freedom. It was, effectively, as if the European Left had to die twice: first as the “totalitarian” Communist Left, then as the moderate democratic Left which, since the 1990's, has been gradually losing ground.<br />
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However, things are a little bit more complex. When people protested against the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, what the large majority had in mind was not capitalism. They wanted social security, solidarity, and justice. They wanted the freedom to live their own lives outside state control and to come together and talk as they pleased. They wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy.<br />
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In short, the vague ideals that inspired the protesters were to a large extent taken from the socialist ideology itself. And, as we learned from Freud, what is repressed often returns in a distorted form – in our case, what was repressed from the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of rightist populism.<br />
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No wonder how, after a long time of preaching openness and globalization, developed countries are now into building new walls, because the new formula is free movement of commodities instead of free movement of people.<br />
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In his interpretation of the fall of East European Communism, Jurgen Habermas proved to be the ultimate Left Fukuyamaist, silently accepting that the existing liberal-democratic order is the best possible, and that, while we should strive to make it more just, etc., we should not challenge its basic premises.<br />
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This is why he welcomed precisely what many leftists saw as the big deficiency of the anti-Communist protests in Eastern Europe: the fact that these protests were not motivated by any new visions of the post-Communist future – as he put it, the central and eastern European revolutions were just what he called “rectifying” or “catch-up” revolutions: their aim was to enable central and eastern European societies to gain what the western Europeans already possessed. In other words, to return to European “normality.”<br />
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However, the likes of the Yellow Vests, and other similar protests, are definitely NOT catch-up movements. They embody the weird reversal that characterizes today’s global situation. The old antagonism between “ordinary people” and the financial-capitalist elites is back with a vengeance, with “ordinary people” exploding in protest against elites accused of being blind to their suffering and demands.<br />
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Yet, what is new is that the populist Right proved to be much more adept in channeling these explosions in its direction than the Left. Alain Badiou was thus fully justified to say apropos the Yellow Vests: “Tout ce qui bouge n'est pas rouge” – “all that moves (creates unrest) is not red.”<br />
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Today’s populist Right participates in the long tradition of popular protests which were predominantly leftist. Some revolts today (Catalonia, Hong Kong) can even be considered a case of what is sometimes called the revolts of the rich – remember that Catalonia is, together with Basque country, the richest part of Spain and that Hong Kong is per capita much wealthier than China. There is no solidarity with the exploited and poor of China in Hong Kong, no demand for freedoms for all in China, just the demand to retain one’s privileged position.<br />
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Here, then, is the paradox we have to confront: the populist disappointment at liberal democracy is the proof that 1989 and 1990 was not just a catch-up revolution. Instead, it was about something more than achieving liberal-capitalist 'normality'. Freud spoke about Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ( the discontent/unease in culture); today, 30 years after the fall of the Wall, the ongoing new wave of protests bears witness of a kind of Unbehagen in liberal capitalism, and the key question is: who will articulate this discontent? Will it be left to nationalist populists to exploit it? Therein resides the big conundrum facing the Left.<br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.rt.com/op-ed/474473-left-protests-communism-nationalists-zizek/">Slavoj Zizek: Will the global Left allow right-wing nationalists to take control of society's discontent?</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-32377252152064550702019-11-25T23:55:00.002-08:002019-11-25T23:55:50.719-08:00Slavoj Zizek: Free Julian Assange — his fate is inextricably tied to our own<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">We are dealing with the basic meaning of our freedom and human rights</span></i></div>
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I visited Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison on November 21. One small detail, insignificant in itself, did strike me as emblematic of how prisons function with regards to welfare and human rights.<br />
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All the guards were very kind and repeatedly emphasized that everything they do is for our own good. For example, Assange is in solitary confinement 23 hours per day. He has to eat all his meals alone in his cell, and when he is allowed out for an hour he can’t meet other prisoners. The communication with a guard who accompanies him is reduced to a minimum. Why such severe treatment since he is now just in protective custody? (He served his prison time and he is only there to prevent him escaping extradition.)<br />
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The explanation I was given was a predictable one: it is for his own good — since he is a traitor hated by many, he may be attacked if he mixes with other people. But the craziest case of this ‘care’ happened when Assange’s assistant, who accompanied me, brought me a cup of coffee which was put onto a table where Julian and I were sitting. I took off the plastic cover of the cup, took a sip and then put the cup back on the table without putting on the plastic cover back on; within seconds a guard approached and signaled to me with a hand gesture (very kindly, it is a humanist prison if there ever was one) that I should put the cover back on the cup of coffee. I did as I was told, but I was slightly surprised by this demand and asked a member of staff when leaving the prison why it was given. The explanation was again a warm human one — something like: ‘It is for your own good and protection, sir. You were sitting at a table with a dangerous prisoner, probably prone to violent acts, and seeing between the two of you an open cup of hot coffee into your face…’ I felt warmth in my heart at being so well protected, and I just imagined the threat I might have been exposed to if I were to be visiting Assange in a Russian or Chinese prison — the guards would undoubtedly ignore this noble safety measure and expose me to a terrible danger!<br />
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My visit took place a couple of days after Sweden dropped its own demand for extradition, clearly admitting, after additional interrogation of witnesses, that there are no grounds for prosecution. However, this decision is not without an ominous background. When there are two demands for extradition, a judge has to decide which comes first, and if Sweden is chosen then this may jeopardize the US extradition — it can be delayed and public opinion in Sweden itself may even turn against it. Now, with only the US asking for extradition, the situation is much clearer.<br />
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Where now are all those journalists who wrote that Assange should be extradited to Sweden instead of the US? Or, incidentally, those who babbled that he is a paranoiac, that there is no extradition awaiting him, that if he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy he will be free after a couple of weeks in prison, that all he has to fear is fear itself? This last claim is for me a kind of negative proof of God’s inexistence: if there were to be a just God, then a lightning bolt would strike the author of this obscene paraphrasing of Roosevelt’s famous quip.<br />
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Since I already mentioned China, I cannot restrain myself from reminding readers what triggered the large protests in Hong Kong that have been going on for months: China’s demand that Hong Kong accepts the law which will compel Hong Kong authorities to extradite its citizens to China when China demands it. It seems the UK is more subservient to the US than Hong Kong is to China: the UK government sees nothing problematic in extraditing a person accused of a political crime to the US. China’s demand is even more justified since Hong Kong is ultimately part of China — the formula is ‘one country, two systems’. Obviously, the relationship between UK and the US is ‘two countries, one system’ (the American one, of course).<br />
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Brexit is said to be a means to assert British sovereignty, and now, in the way Britain has treated Assange, we can already see what this sovereignty amounts to — subservience to US demands. Now is the time for all honest Brexiteers to staunchly oppose Assange’s extradition. We are no longer dealing with a minor legal or political matter, but with something which concerns the basic meaning of our freedom and human rights. When will the general public understand that the story of Assange is a story about themselves, that their fate will be deeply affected by the decision over his extradition? We should help Julian not out of some vague humanitarian concern and sympathy for a miserable victim, but out of a concern for our own future.<br />
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<b>Source:</b> <i><a href="https://spectator.us/free-julian-assange-fate-inextricably-tied/">Free Julian Assange — his fate is inextricably tied to our own</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-43935343467832034922019-11-23T02:20:00.003-08:002019-11-23T02:20:40.222-08:00Slavoj Zizek: Margaret Atwood’s work illustrates our need to enjoy other people’s painHeaven is not enough, and has to be supplemented by the permission to take a look at another’s suffering – only in this way, as Aquinas says, the blessed souls ‘may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly’<br />
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A well-crafted worldwide publicity campaign is raising expectations for The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her Handmaid’s Tale. This, perhaps, is the right moment to take a deeper look into the reasons of our fascination with the dark world of the Republic of Gilead.<br />
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Since Gilead is run by Christian fundamentalists, the best way to begin is with theology.<br />
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In his Summa Theologica, philosopher Thomas Aquinas concludes that the blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful for them. Aquinas, of course, takes care to avoid the obscene implication that good souls in heaven can find pleasure in observing the terrible suffering of other souls, because good Christians should feel pity when they see suffering. So, will the blessed in heaven also feel pity for the torments of the damned? Aquinas’s answer is no: not because they directly enjoy seeing suffering, but because they enjoy the exercise of divine justice.<br />
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But what if enjoying divine justice is the rationalisation, the moral cover-up, for sadistically enjoying the neighbour’s eternal suffering? What makes Aquinas’s formulation suspicious is the surplus enjoyment watching the pain of others secretly introduces: as if the simple pleasure of living in the bliss of heaven is not enough, and has to be supplemented by the enjoyment of being allowed to take a look at another’s suffering – only in this way, the blessed souls “may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly”.<br />
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We can easily imagine the appropriate scene in heaven: when some blessed souls complain that the nectar served was not as tasty as the last time, and that blissful life up there is rather boring after all, angels serving the blessed souls would snap back: “You don’t like it here? So take a look at how life is down there, at the other end, and maybe you will learn how lucky you are to be here!”<br />
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And the corresponding scene in hell should also be imagined in a totally different way: far away from the divine gaze and control, the damned souls enjoy an intense and pleasurable life in hell – only from time to time, when the Devil’s administrators of hell learn that the blessed souls from heaven will be allowed to observe briefly life in hell, they kindly implore the damned souls to stage a performance and pretend to suffer terribly in order to impress the idiots from heaven.<br />
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In short, the sight of the other’s suffering is the obscure cause of desire which sustains our own happiness (bliss in heaven) – if we take it away, our bliss appears in all its sterile stupidity. And, incidentally, does the same not hold for our daily portion of Third World horrors – wars, starvations, violence – on TV screens? We need it to sustain the happiness of our consumerist heaven.<br />
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And this brings us to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: a case of the direct “critical” depiction of the oppressive atmosphere of an imagined conservative-fundamentalist rule. The novel and the television series allow us to dwell in the weird pleasure in fantasising a world of brutal patriarchal domination. Of course, nobody would openly admit the desire to live in such nightmarish world, but this assurance that we really don’t want it makes fantasising about it, imagining all the details of this world, all the more pleasurable. Yes, we feel pain while experiencing this pleasure, but psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s name for this pleasure-in-pain is jouissance.<br />
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The obverse of this ambiguity is the fundamental blindness of Atwood’s tale for the limitations of our liberal-permissive universe: the entire story is an exercise in what American literary critic Fredric Jameson called “nostalgia for the present” – it is permeated by the sentimental admiration for our liberal-permissive present ruined by the new Christian-fundamentalist rule, and it never even approaches the question of what is wrong in this present so that it gave birth to the nightmarish Republic of Gilead. “Nostalgia for the present” falls into the trap of ideology because it is blind to the fact that this present permissive paradise is boring, and (exactly like the blessed souls in paradise) it needs a look into the hell of religious fundamentalism to sustain itself.<br />
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This is ideology at its purest, ideology in the simple and brutal sense of legitimising the existing order and obfuscating its antagonisms. In exactly the same way, liberal critics of Trump and alt-right never seriously ask how our liberal society could give birth to Trump.<br />
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In this sense, the image of Donald Trump is also a fetish: the last thing a liberal sees before confronting class struggle. That’s why liberals are so fascinated and horrified by Trump: to avoid the class topic. German philosopher Friedrich Hegel’s motto, “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere”, fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonises Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.<br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-testaments-human-rights-slavoj-zizek-a9105151.html">Margaret Atwood’s work illustrates our need to enjoy other people’s pain</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-56954043229802055072019-11-22T12:19:00.000-08:002019-11-22T12:19:26.979-08:00Slavoj Zizek: Trump’s conflict with China is a real war – both will shed blood for control of capitalism’s monstrous machine<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">The big problem for America is how to justify its imperial role. It needs a permanent threat of war, offering itself as the universal protector of all other states</span></i></div>
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The trade war between the US and China can only fill us with dread. How will it affect our daily lives? Will it result in a new global recession or even geopolitical chaos?<br />
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To orient ourselves in this mess, we should bear in mind some basic facts. The trade conflict with China is just the culmination of a war which began years ago when Donald Trump fired the opening shot aimed at the biggest trading partners of the US by deciding to levy tariffs on the imports of steel and aluminium from the EU, Canada and Mexico.<br />
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Trump was playing his own populist version of class warfare: his professed goal was to protect the American working class (are metal workers not one of the emblematic figures of the traditional working class?) from “unfair” European competition, thereby saving American jobs. And now he is doing the same with China.<br />
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Trump’s impulsive decisions are not just expressions of his personal quirks, they are reactions to the end of an era in a global economic system. An economic cycle is coming to an end – a cycle which began in the early 1970s, a time when, what Yanis Varoufakis calls the “Global Minotaur”, was born. The monstrous engine that was running the world economy from the early 1970s to 2008.<br />
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By the end of the 1960s, the US economy was no longer able to continue the recycling of its surpluses to Europe and Asia: its surpluses had turned into deficits. In 1971, the US government responded to this decline with an audacious strategic move: instead of tackling the nation’s burgeoning deficits, it decided to do the opposite, to boost deficits. Who would pay for them? The rest of the world. How? By means of a permanent transfer of capital that rushed across the two great oceans to finance America’s deficits.<br />
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This growing negative trade balance demonstrates that the US became a non-productive predator. In the last decades, it had to suck up a $1bn daily influx from other nations to buy for its consummation and is, as such, the universal Keynesian consumer that keeps the world economy running. (So much for the anti-Keynesian economic ideology that seems to predominate today.) This influx, which is effectively like the tithe paid to Rome in antiquity, or the gifts sacrificed to the Minotaur by the Ancient Greeks, relies on a complex economic mechanism: the US is trusted as the safe and stable centre, so that all others, from the oil-producing Arab countries to western Europe and Japan – and now even China – invest their surplus profits in the US.<br />
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Since this trust is primarily ideological and military, not economic, the problem for the US is how to justify its imperial role. It needs a permanent threat of war, offering itself as the universal protector of all other “normal” (that is, not “rogue”) states.<br />
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Since 2008, however, this world system has been breaking down. During the Obama years, Paul Bernanke, chair of the Federal Reserve, gave another breath of life to this system. Ruthlessly exploiting the fact that the US dollar is the global currency, he financed imports by printing money fast. Trump has decided to approach the problem in a different way: ignoring the delicate balance of the global system, he has focused on elements which may be presented as “injustice” for the US – gigantic imports reducing domestic jobs, for example.<br />
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But what Trump decries as “injustice” is simply part of a system which has profited the US; the US were effectively robbing the world by importing stuff and paying for it by debts and printing money.<br />
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Consequently, in his trade wars, Trump cheats: he wants the US to continue to be a global power but refuses to pay even the nominal price for it. He follows his “America first” principle, ruthlessly privileging US interests, while still acting as a global power.<br />
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Even if some of the US arguments against China and its trade may appear reasonable, they are undoubtedly one-sided: the US profited from the situation decried by Trump as unjust, and Trump wants to keep profiting also in the new situation. The only way out left for others is on some basic level unite to undermine the central role of the US as a global power secured by its military and financial might. One should be as ruthless as Trump in this struggle. Our predicament can only be stabilised by the collective imposition of a new world order no longer led by the US. The way to beat Trump is not to imitate him with “China first”, “France first,” and so on, but to oppose him globally and treat him as an embarrassing outcast.<br />
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This does not mean that the sins of those who oppose the US should be forgiven. It is typical that Trump proclaimed he is not interested in the democratic revolt in Hong Kong, dismissing it as China’s internal affair. While we should support the revolt, we should just be careful that it will not be used as an argument for the US trade war against China – we should always bear in mind that Trump is ultimately on the side of China.<br />
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So should we nonetheless be glad that the ongoing trade war is just an economic war? Should we find solace in the hope that it will end with some kind of truce negotiated by managers of our economies?<br />
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No. Geopolitical rearrangements which are already discernible here could easily explode into (at least local) real wars. Trade wars are the stuff real wars are made of. Our global situation more and more resembles that of Europe in the years before the First World War. It is just not yet clear where will be our Sarajevo – Ukraine, the South China Sea, or closer to home.<br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/us-china-trade-war-trump-us-economy-mexico-steel-a9046501.html">Trump’s conflict with China is a real war – both will shed blood for control of capitalism’s monstrous machine</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-13843789606613201802019-11-21T13:07:00.001-08:002019-11-21T13:07:09.956-08:00Slavoj Zizek: Yes, it is a climate crisis. And your tiny human efforts have never seemed so meagre<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>We are like soccer fans in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from our seats, in a superstitious belief that this will somehow influence the outcome</i></span></div>
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Talk of a climate crisis moves to the top of the agenda again, just as the burning of the Amazon forests drifts from our headlines. But are we really heading towards a collective suicide?<br />
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We instinctively feel that by destroying the Amazon rainforests, Brazilians are killing “the lungs of our Earth”. However, if we want to confront seriously threats to our environment, what we should avoid are precisely such quick extrapolations which fascinate our imagination.<br />
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Two or three decades ago, everyone in Europe was talking about Waldsterben, the dying of forests. The topic was on the covers of all popular weeklies, and there were calculations of how in half a century Europe will be without forests. Now there are more forests in Europe than at any point in the 20th century, and we are becoming aware of other dangers – of what happens in the depth of the oceans, for example. <br />
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While we should take ecological threats extremely seriously, we should also be fully aware of how uncertain analyses and projections are in this domain – we will know for sure what is going on only when it is too late. Fast extrapolations only hand arguments to climate change deniers. We should avoid at all costs the trap of an “ecology of fear”, a hasty, morbid fascination with looming catastrophe. <br />
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This ecology of fear has the hallmarks of a developing, predominant form of ideology in global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion. It takes over the old religion’s fundamental function, that of installing an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. <br />
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The lesson hammered into us is that of our own finitude: we are just one species on our Earth embedded in a biosphere which reaches far beyond our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources, we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our Earth with respect, as something ultimately sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, that should and will forever remain a mystery, a power we should trust, not dominate. <br />
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While we cannot gain full mastery over our biosphere, it is, unfortunately, in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will run amok, swiping us away in the process. This is why, although ecologists are all the time demanding that we make radical changes to our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite: a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress. Every radical change can have the unintended consequence of catastrophe.<br />
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Things get even more difficult here. Even when we profess the readiness to assume responsibility for ecological catastrophes, this can be a tricky stratagem to avoid facing the true scale of the threat. There is something deceptively reassuring in this readiness to assume the guilt for threats to our environment: we like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, then it all depends on us, we pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. <br />
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What is really difficult for us (at least for us in the west) to accept is that we might be reduced to a purely passive role of impotent observers who can only sit and watch our fate. To avoid this, we are prone to engage in frantic activity, we recycle old paper, buy organic food, whatever, just so that we can be sure we are doing something, making our contribution.<br />
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We are like a soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in a superstitious belief that this will somehow influence the outcome.<br />
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It is true that the typical form of fetishist disavowal around ecology is: “I know very well (that we are all threatened), but I don’t really believe it (so I am not ready to do anything really important like changing my way of life).” <br />
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But there is also the opposite form of disavowal: “I know very well that I cannot really influence the process which can lead to my ruin (like a volcanic outburst), but it is nonetheless too traumatic for me to accept this, so I cannot resist the urge to do something, even if I know it is ultimately meaningless.” <br />
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Is it not for that reason we buy organic food? Who really believes that the half-rotten and expensive “organic” apples are really healthier? The point is that, by way of buying them, we do not just buy and consume a product – we simultaneously do something meaningful, show our care and global awareness, we participate in a large collective project.<br />
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The predominant ecological ideology treats us as a priori guilty, indebted to Mother Nature, under the constant pressure of the ecological superego agency which addresses us in our individuality: “What did you do today to repay your debt to nature? Did you put all your newspapers into a proper recycling bin? And all the bottles of beer or cans of Coke? Did you use your bike or public transport instead of your car? Did you open the windows wide rather than firing up the air conditioning?”<br />
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The ideological stakes of such individualisation are easy to see: I get lost in my own self-examination instead of raising much more pertinent global questions about our entire industrial civilization.<br />
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Ecology thus lends itself easily to ideological mystification. It can be a pretext for New Age obscuration (the praising of the pre-modern etc), or for neocolonialism (developed world complaints of the threat of rapid growth in developing countries such as Brazil or China), or as a cause to honour “green capitalists” (buy green and recycle, as if taking into account ecology justifies capitalist exploitation). All of these tensions exploded in our reactions to the recent Amazon fires. <br />
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There are five main strategies to distract from the true dimensions of the ecological threat. First there is simple ignorance: it’s a marginal phenomenon, not worthy of our preoccupation, life goes on, nature will take care of itself.<br />
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Second, there is the belief that science and technology can save us. Third, that we should leave the solution to the market (with higher taxation of polluters, etc). Fourth, we resort to the superego pressure on personal responsibility instead of large systemic measures (each of us should do what we can – recycle, consume less, etc).<br />
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And fifth, perhaps the worst, is the advocating of a return to natural balance, to a more modest, traditional life by means of which we renounce human hubris and become again respectful children of our Mother Nature. <br />
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This whole paradigm of Mother Nature derailed by our hubris is wrong. The fact that our main sources of energy (oil, coal) are remnants of past catastrophes which occurred prior to the advent of humanity is a clear reminder that Mother Nature is cold and cruel.<br />
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This, of course, in no way means that we should relax and trust our future: the fact that it is not clear what is going on makes the situation even more dangerous. Plus, as it is fast becoming evident, migrations (and walls meant to prevent them) are getting more and more intertwined with ecological disturbances like global warming. The ecological apocalypse and the refugees apocalypse are more and more overlapping in what Philip Alston, a UN special rapporteur, described entirely accurately: <br />
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“We risk a ‘climate apartheid’ scenario,” he said, “where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.” <br />
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Those least responsible for global emissions also have the least capacity to protect themselves.<br />
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So, the Leninist question: what is to be done? We are in a deep mess: there is no simple “democratic” solution here. The idea that people themselves (not just governments and corporations) should decide sounds deep, but it begs an important question: even if their comprehension is not distorted by corporate interests, what qualifies them to pass judgement in such a delicate matter? <br />
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What we can do is at least set the priorities straight and admit the absurdity of our geopolitical war games when the very planet for which wars are fought is under threat. <br />
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In the Amazon, we see the ridiculous game of Europe blaming Brazil and Brazil blaming Europe. It has to stop. Ecological threats make it clear that the era of sovereign nation states is approaching its end – a strong global agency is needed with the power to coordinate the necessary measures. And does such the need for such an agency point in the direction of what we once called “communism”?<br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/amazon-fires-rainforest-capitalism-bolsonaro-climate-crisis-zizek-a9091966.html">Yes, it is a climate crisis. And your tiny human efforts have never seemed so meagre</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-35136152322061597102019-11-20T07:35:00.003-08:002019-11-20T07:36:05.944-08:00Owen Jones meets Slavoj Žižek | 'Hillary Clinton is the problem, not Donald Trump'"Slavoj Žižek's new book, <i><a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Like-Thief-Broad-Daylight-Slavoj-Zizek/9780241364291/?a_aid=dbk">Like a Thief in Broad Daylight</a></i>, examines the rapid changes to the world triggered by big-tech and the dangers and radical possibilities those transformations offer up. I went to meet him to discuss some lighthearted topics like the changing face of capitalism, why the liberal consensus has collapsed, whether we are truly free, if Jeremy Corbyn's Labour project is an example of populism or whether Bernie Sanders could exist without Donald Trump."<br />
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lnI6E7WiHNE" width="560"></iframe><br /></div>
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-35291016524946671922019-11-19T23:37:00.000-08:002019-11-19T23:37:13.928-08:00Slavoj Zizek: European leftists are rejecting the Kurds over their reliance on the US. It is just another disgusting betrayalMust they sacrifice themselves on the altar of anti-imperialist solidarity? While the sovereign states around them are gradually sinking into a new barbarism, Kurds are the only glimmer of hope<br />
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Well over a hundred years ago, Karl May wrote a bestseller, Through Wild Kurdistan, about the adventures of a German hero, Kara Ben Nemsi. This immensely popular book established the perception of Kurdistan in central Europe: a place of brutal tribal warfare, naïve honesty and sense of honour, but also superstition, betrayal, and permanent cruel warfare. It was almost a caricature of the barbaric Other in European civilization. <br />
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If we look at today’s Kurds, we cannot but be surprised by the contrast to this cliché – in Turkey, where I know the situation relatively well, I have noticed that the Kurdish minority is the most modern and secular part of society, at a distance from every religious fundamentalism, with developed feminism, etc. (Let me just mention a detail that I learned in Istanbul: restaurants owned by Kurds have no tolerance for any sign of superstition…) <br />
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The stable genius (Trump’s self-designation) justified his recent betrayal of Kurds (he effectively condoned the Turkish attack on the Kurdish enclave in northern Syria) by noting that “Kurds are no angels”. Of course, since, for him, the only angels in that region are Israel (especially on the West Bank) and Saudi Arabia (especially in Yemen). However, in some senses, the Kurds ARE the only angels in that part of the world. <br />
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The fate of the Kurds makes them the exemplary victim of the geopolitical colonial games: spread along the borderline of four neighboring states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran), their (more than deserved) full autonomy was in nobody’s interest, and they paid the full price for it.<br />
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Do we still remember Saddam’s mass bombing and gas-poisoning of Kurds in the north of Iraq in the late 1980s? More recently, for years, Turkey has played a well-planned military-political game, officially fighting Isis but effectively bombing Kurds who are really fighting Isis.<br />
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In the last decades, the ability of the Kurds to organize their communal life was tested in almost ideal experimental conditions: the moment they were given a space to breathe freely outside the conflicts of the states around them, they surprised the world. <br />
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After Saddam’s fall the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq develop into the only safe part of Iraq with well-functioning institutions and even regular flights to Europe. In northern Syria, the Kurdish enclave centered in Rojava was a unique place in today’s geopolitical mess: when Kurds were given a respite from their big neighbors who otherwise threatened them all the time, they quickly built a society that one cannot but designate as an actually-existing and well-functioning utopia. <br />
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From my own professional interest, I noticed the thriving intellectual community in Rojava where they repeatedly invited me to give lectures – these plans were brutally interrupted by military tensions in the area. <br />
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But what especially saddened me was the reaction of some of my “Leftist” colleagues who were bothered by the fact that Kurds also had to rely on the US military protection. <br />
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What should they have done, caught in the tensions between Turkey, Syrian civil war, the Iraqi mess and Iran? Did they have any other choice? Should they sacrifice themselves on the altar of anti-imperialist solidarity? <br />
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This “Leftist” critical distance was no less disgusting than the same distance towards Macedonia. A couple of months ago, the discussion was around how to resolve the problem of the name “Macedonia”.<br />
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The solution proposed was to change the name to “North Macedonia,” but this was instantly attacked by radicals in both countries. Greek opponents insisted that “Macedonia” is an old Greek name, and Macedonian opponents felt humiliated by being reduced to a “Northern” province since they are the only people who call themselves “Macedonians.” <br />
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Imperfect as it was, this solution offered a glimpse of an end to a long and meaningless struggle with a reasonable compromise. But it was caught in another “contradiction”: the struggle between big powers (the US and EU on the one side, Russia on the other). <br />
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The West put pressure on both sides to accept the compromise so that Macedonia could quickly join the EU and NATO, while, for exactly the same reason (seeing in it the danger of its loss of influence in the Balkans), Russia opposed it, supporting rabid conservative nationalist forces in both countries. <br />
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So which side should we take here? I think we should decidedly take the side of the compromise, for the simple reason that it is the only realist solution to the problem – Russia opposed it simply because of its geopolitical interests, without offering another solution, so supporting Russia here would have meant sacrificing the reasonable solution of the singular problem of Macedonian and Greek relations to international geopolitical interests. (Now that France has vetoed the fast-track inclusion of North Macedonia into the EU, will they be responsible for an unpredictable catastrophe in that part of Balkans?) Will the Kurds be dealt the same blow from our anti-imperialist “Leftists”? <br />
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That’s why it is our duty to fully support the resistance of the Kurds to the Turkish invasion, and to rigorously denounce the dirty games Western powers play with them.<br />
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While the sovereign states around them are gradually sinking into a new barbarism, Kurds are the only glimmer of hope. And it’s not only about Kurds that this struggle is fought, it’s about ourselves, it’s about what kind of global new order is emerging.<br />
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If Kurds will be abandoned, it will be a new order in which there will be no place for the most precious part of the European legacy of emancipation. If Europe turns its eyes away from the Kurds, it will betray itself. The Europe which betrays Kurds will be the true Europastan! <br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/kurds-syria-trump-turkey-rojava-macedonia-greece-zizek-a9166206.html">European leftists are rejecting the Kurds over their reliance on the US. It is just another disgusting betrayal</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-38481507562464212802019-11-19T08:06:00.000-08:002019-11-19T08:06:01.584-08:00Slavoj Zizek: Morales proved in Bolivia that democratic socialism can work – but the people cannot be ignored<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The country's citizens rose up having been forced into becoming the silent majority, officials in Bolivia are in danger of letting history repeat itself</i></div>
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Although I am for over a decade a staunch supporter of Evo Morales, I must admit that, after reading about the confusion after Morales’ disputed electoral victory, I was beset by doubts: did he also succumb to the authoritarian temptation, as it happened to so many radical Leftists in power? However, after a day or two, things became clear.<br />
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Brandishing a giant leather-bound bible and declaring herself Bolivia’s interim president, Jeanine Añez, the second-vice president of the country’s Senate, declared: “The Bible has returned to the government palace.” She added: “We want to be a democratic tool of inclusion and unity” – and the transitional cabinet sworn into office did not include a single indigenous person. <br />
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This tells it all: although the majority of the population of Bolivia are indigenous or mixed, they were till the rise of Morales de facto excluded from political life, reduced to the silent majority. What happened with Morales was the political awakening of this silent majority which did not fit in the network of capitalist relations.<br />
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They were not yet proletarian in the modern sense, they remained locked into their premodern tribal social identities – here is how Alvaro Garcia Linera, Morales’ vice-president, described their lot: “In Bolivia, food was produced by Indigenous farmers, buildings and houses were built by Indigenous workers, streets were cleaned by Indigenous people, and the elite and the middle classes entrusted the care of their children to them. Yet the traditional left seemed oblivious to this and occupied itself only with workers in large-scale industry, paying no attention to their ethnic identity.” <br />
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To understand them, we should bring into picture the entire historical weight of their predicament: they are the survivors of perhaps the greatest holocaust in the history of humanity, the obliteration of the indigenous communities by the Spanish and English colonisation of the Americas.<br />
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The religious expression of their premodern status is the unique combination of Catholicism and belief in the Pachamama or Mother Earth figure. This is why, although Morales stated that he is a Catholic, in the current Bolivian Constitution (enacted in 2009) the Roman Catholic church lost its official status – its article 4 states: “The State respects and guarantees the freedom of religion and spiritual beliefs, in accordance to every individual’s world view. The State is independent from religion.”<br />
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And it is against this affirmation of indigenous culture that Anez’s display of the bible is directed – the message is clear: an open assertion of white religious supremacism, and a no less open attempt to put the silent majority back to their proper subordinate place. From his Mexican exile, Morales already appealed to Pope to intervene, and the Pope’s reaction will tell us a lot. Will Francis react as a true Christian and unambiguously reject the enforced re-Catholisation of Bolivia as what it is, as a political power-play which betrays the emancipatory core of Christianity?<br />
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If we leave aside any possible role of lithium in the coup (Bolivia has big reserves of lithium which is needed for batteries in electric cars and it has featured in a number of theories about what brought down Morales), the big question is: why is for overt a decade Bolivia such a thorn in the flesh of Western liberal establishment? The reason is a very peculiar one: the surprising fact that the political awakening of premodern tribalism in Bolivia did not result in a new version of the Sendero Luminoso or Khmer Rouge horror show. The reign of Morales was not the usual story of the radical Left in power which screws things up, economically and politically, generating poverty and trying to maintain its power through authoritarian measures. A proof of the non-authoritarian character of the Morales reign is that he didn’t purge army and police of his opponents (which is why they turned against him).<br />
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Morales and his followers were, of course, not perfect, they made mistakes, there were conflicts of interests in his movement. However, the overall balance is an outstanding one. Morales not Chavez, he did not have not oil money to quell problems, so his government has to engage in a hard and patient work of solving problems in the poorest country in Latin America. The result was nothing short of a miracle: economy thrived, poverty rate fell, healthcare improved, while all the democratic institutions so dear to liberals continued to function. The Morales government maintained a delicate balance between indigenous forms of communal activity and modern politics, fighting simultaneously for tradition and women rights, <br />
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To tell the entire story of the coup – and I am in no doubt it is a coup – in Bolivia, we need a new Assange who will bring out the relevant secret documents. What we can see now is that Morales, Linera and their followers were such a thorn in the flesh of the liberal establishment precisely because they succeeded: for over a decade radical Left was in power and Bolivia did not turn into Cuba or Venezuela. Democratic socialism is possible. <br />
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<b>Source:</b> <i><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/bolivia-protests-coup-evo-morales-socialism-election-religion-a9208871.html">Morales proved in Bolivia that democratic socialism can work – but the people cannot be ignored</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-81713366483915869052019-11-15T09:40:00.000-08:002019-11-15T09:40:36.566-08:00Slavoj Žižek 2019 interview: Why I like Greta ThunbergSlavoj Žižek, once called "the most dangerous philosopher in the West", talks to JOE about the collapse of civility in British political discourse, how Jeremy Corbyn could beat Boris Johnson and the appropriate response to climate change.<br />
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IaF2_rDOLw8" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-56857769950059662612019-11-12T08:04:00.001-08:002019-11-12T08:04:54.281-08:00Slavoj Žižek: More on Joker 🤡<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: x-large;">From Apolitical Nihilism to a New Left, or Why Trump is no Joker</span></i></div>
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See also: <i><b><a href="https://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2019/11/zizek-on-joker.html">Žižek on Joker</a></b></i> (part one)</div>
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One should begin by expressing admiration for a Hollywood, in which it is possible to make a film like Todd Phillips’ <i>Joker</i>, and for the public that turned it into a mega blockbuster. However, the reason for the film’s popularity resides in its meta-fictional dimension: it provides the dark genesis of the Batman story, a genesis that has to remain invisible for the Batman myth to function. Let’s try to imagine <i>Joker</i> without this reference to the Batman myth, just as the story of a victimized kid who adopts the mask of a clown to survive his predicament. It simply wouldn’t work, as it would have been just another realist drama. Recall, also, that <i>Time Out</i> characterized <i>Joker</i> as “a truly nightmarish vision of late-era capitalism,” and categorized it as a “social horror film.” That is something unimaginable till recently: a combination of two genres perceived as totally disparate, the realist depiction of social misery and fantasized horror, the combination which, of course, only works when social reality acquires the dimensions of horror fiction.[1]<br />
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The three main stances towards the film in our media perfectly mirror the tripartite division of our political space. Conservatives worry that it may incite viewers to acts of violence. Politically Correct liberals discerned in it racist and other clichés (already in the opening scene, a group of boys who beat Arthur appear black), plus also an ambiguous fascination with blind violence. Leftists celebrate it for faithfully rendering the conditions of the rise of violence in our societies. But does <i>Joker</i> really incite spectators to imitate Arthur’s acts in real life? Emphatically <i>no</i>, for the simple reason that Arthur-Joker is not presented as a figure of identification. In fact, the whole film works on the premise that it is impossible for us, viewers, to identify with him. He remains a stranger up to the end.<br />
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Before <i>Joker</i> was released, media already warned the public that it may incite violence. The FBI itself specifically warned that the film may inspire violence from Clowncels, an Incel subgroup obsessed with clowns such as Pennywise from <i>It</i> and <i>Joker</i>. (There were no reports of violence inspired by the film.) After the film was released, critics were not sure how to categorize it. Is <i>Joker</i> just a piece entertainment (as is the entire Batman series), an in-depth study of the genesis of pathological violence, or an exercise in social criticism? From his radical Leftist standpoint, <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2019/10/joker-michael-moore-1202179054/">Michael Moore</a> found <i>Joker</i> to be “a timely piece of social criticism and a perfect illustration of the consequences of America’s current social ills.” When it explores how Arthur Fleck became Joker, it brings out the role of bankers, the collapse of healthcare, and the divide between rich and poor. Moore is therefore right to mock those who feared the film’s release: “Our country is in deep despair, our constitution is in shreds, a rogue maniac from Queens has access to the nuclear codes — but for some reason, it’s a movie we should be afraid of. /…/ The greater danger to society may be if you DON’T go see this movie. /…/ This movie is not about Trump. It’s about the America that gave us Trump — the America which feels no need to help the outcast, the destitute.” Consequently, “the fear and outcry over Joker is a ruse. It’s a distraction so that we don’t look at the real violence tearing up our fellow human beings — 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance is an act of violence. Millions of abused women and children living in fear is an act of violence.”<br />
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However, <i>Joker</i> does not only depict this America, but it also raises a “discomfiting question”: “What if one day the dispossessed decide to fight back? And I don’t mean with a clipboard registering people to vote. People are worried this movie may be too violent for them. Really? Considering everything we’re living through in real life?” In short, the film tries to “understand why innocent people turn into Jokers after they can no longer keep it together”: rather than felt incited to violence, a spectator “will thank this movie for connecting you to a new desire — not to run to the nearest exit to save your own ass but rather to stand and fight and focus your attention on the nonviolent power you hold in your hands every single day.”[2]<br />
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But does it really work like that? The “new desire” Moore mentions is not Joker’s desire: to see this, one has to introduce here the psychoanalytic distinction between drive and desire. Drive is compulsively-repetitive; in it, we are caught in the loop of turning again and again around the same point, while desire enacts a cut, opening up a new dimension. Joker remains a being of drive: at the film’s end, he is powerless, and his violent outbursts are just impotent explosions of rage, actings-out of his basic powerlessness. In order for the desire described by Moore to arise, one step further is needed. An additional change of subjective stance is to be accomplished if we are to pass from Joker’s outbursts to becoming the one able to “stand and fight and focus your attention on the nonviolent power you hold in your hands every single day.” When you become aware of this power you can renounce brutal bodily violence. The paradox is that you become truly violent, in the sense of posing a threat to the existing system, only when you renounce physical violence.<br />
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This does not mean that Joker’s act is a dead-end to be avoided. It is rather a kind of Malevich-moment, reduction to the zero point of a minimal frame of protest. Malevich’s famous black square on white surface is not some kind of self-destructive abyss we should beware of in order not to be swallowed by it, but a point through which we should pass to gain a new beginning. It is the moment of death-drive, which opens up the space for sublimation. And in the same way that, in his minimalist paintings like <i>Black Square</i>, Malevich reduced a painting to its minimal opposition of frame and background, <i>Joker</i> reduced protest to its minimal content-less self-destructive form. An additional twist is needed to pass from drive to desire, to leave behind the nihilist point of self-destruction, to make this zero-point function as a new beginning. However, the lesson of <i>Joker</i> is that we have to go through this zero-point to get rid of the illusions that pertain to the existing order.<br />
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Among other things, our immersion into the dark world of <i>Joker</i> cures us of Politically Correct illusions and simplifications. In this world, one cannot take seriously the idea that mutual consent to engaging in a sexual relationship makes it… truly consensual: “the ‘consent discourse’ is itself a huge sham. It is a naive effort to overlay a neat-and-tidy intelligible egalitarian language of social justice over the dark, discomforting, relentlessly cruel, traumatic realm of <i>sexuality</i>. People do not know what they want, they are disturbed by what they desire, they desire things that they hate, they hate their fathers but want to fuck their fathers, they hate their mothers but want to fuck their mothers, and so on, for eternity.” One can easily imagine Joker reacting with wild laughter to the claim that “it was consensual, so it was OK” – that’s how his mother ruined his life… And in the same way that Joker (a victim of violence par excellence) would have dismissed consent as a justification, he would have dismissed the idea that it is rape if someone lies about their identity to get someone into bed:<br />
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“Of course, outright fraud is bad, it is bad for people to lie to each other, to exploit each other. But aren’t we all always already lying to ourselves, lying to others, making ourselves out to be people we aren’t, pretending to be ‘real men’ when in fact we are just pathetic worms, lying that we aren’t fantasizing about having sex with someone hotter than our partners, and so on? It would be an exception to actually, for once, tell the ‘truth’ out of the endless swirling vortex of fragmented and incomplete truths that we tell ourselves just to get out of bed every day, just to be able to actually understand each other.”[3]<br />
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In short, sex is the exemplary domain of lies… This zero-point is today’s version of what was once called a proletarian position, the experience of those who have nothing to lose, or, to quote Arthur from the film: “I’ve got nothing left to lose. Nothing can hurt me anymore. My life is nothing but a comedy.” This is where the idea that Trump is a kind of Joker in power finds its limit: Trump definitely did not go through this zero-point. He may be an obscene clown in his own way, but he is not a Joker figure: it’s an insult to Joker to compare him with Trump. In the film, Wayne the father is a “joker” in the simple sense of an agent who displays the obscenity of power.<br />
<br />
Now we can see where M.L. Clark goes ridiculously wrong when he reads my own philosophy as a version of Joker’s nihilist stance: “Žižek’s Hegelian-philosophy-meets-flimsy-pop-science relentlessly insists that the only objective reality is not the Nothingness from which Something was created, but rather the tension between the true nothing-burger underpinning existence, and the moral depravity of our every, inevitable attempt to impose meaning upon it.” In short, for me, the basic ontological fact is the tension between the ultimate meaningless void/crack and our (humanity’s) attempts to impose some universal meaning onto this chaotic crack. Such a position is nothing special: it simply reproduces a certain existential humanism which perceives humans as beings who heroically endeavor to impose some meaning onto the chaos of the world into which we are thrown. However, according to Clark, here I make a step further in the Joker direction: since all attempts to impose meaning onto the primordial chaotic Void obfuscate this void and are thus hypocritical, i.e., since they escape from the basic nonsense of existence, they are acts of moral depravity – or, to bring this point to the extreme, morality itself (attempts to impose a universal meaning onto reality) is a form of moral depravity. The only consequent moral stance is thus the one of full nihilism, of joyfully endorsing the violent destruction of every attempt to impose a moral order onto our chaotic life, of renouncing every universal humanist project that would enable us to surmount our discords:<br />
<br />
“no matter how much we might want to insist that our shared humanity is stronger than our momentary discords and our abiding individual differences /…/ the Jokers and Žižeks are never quite going to be persuaded. Their respective ideological frameworks require them to keep pointing to the social tensions that remain: the chaos that will always be a part of our collective press towards a better-synthesized societal whole.”[4]<br />
<br />
I, of course, consider this stance of radical nihilism not only totally at odds with my clear political engagements but also self-contradictory: it needs its fake-moral opponent to assert itself in its nihilistic destruction and in the unmasking of its hypocrisy. Therein resides the limit of all the desperate attempts to reverse tragedy into triumphant comedy practiced by Incels, Clowncels and Joker himself who, just before shooting Murray, his TV host, tells him: “Have you seen what it’s like out there, Murray? Do you ever actually leave the studio? Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody’s civil anymore! Nobody thinks what it’s like to be the other guy. You think men like Thomas Wayne ever think what it’s like to be someone like me? To be somebody but themselves? They don’t. They think that we’ll just sit down and take it like good little boys! That we won’t werewolf and go wild!” The assertion of joyful destruction remains parasitic on this complaint. Joker doesn’t go “too far” in the destruction of the existing order; he remains stuck in what Hegel called “abstract negativity,” unable as he is to propose its concrete negation.<br />
<br />
Insofar as the Freudian name for this negativity is death-drive, we should thus be careful not to characterize Trump’s self-destructive defense against the attempts to impeach him as manifestations of death-drive.[5] Yes, while Trump rejects the accusations, he simultaneously confirms (and even boasts with) the very crimes he is accused of and breaks the law in his very defense. But does he not thereby just enact (more openly than usual, true) the paradox that is constitutive of the rule of law, i.e., the fact that the very agency that regulates the application of the law has to exempt itself from its reign?<br />
<br />
So, yes, Trump is obscene in acting the way he acts, but in this way he merely brings out the obscenity that is the obverse of the law itself; the “negativity” of his acts is totally subordinated to (his perception of) his ambitions and well-being. He is far from the self-destruction of the existing order enacted by Joker. There is nothing suicidal about Trump’s boasting about his breaking the rules. It is simply part of his message that he is a tough-guy president beset by corrupt elites and boosting the US abroad, and that his transgressions are necessary because only a rule-breaker can crush the power of the Washington swamp. To read this well-planned and very rational strategy in terms of death-drive is yet another example of how it is Left liberals who are really on a suicidal mission, giving rise to the impression that they are engaged in bureaucratic-legal nagging while the President is doing a good job for the country.<br />
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In Christopher Nolan’s <i>The Dark Knight</i>, Joker is the only figure of truth. The goal of his terrorist attacks on Gotham City is made clear: they will stop when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity. What, then, is Joker who wants to disclose the truth beneath the Mask, convinced that this disclosure will destroy the social order? He is not a man without mask, but, on the contrary, a man fully identified with his mask, a man who IS his mask. There is nothing, no “ordinary guy,” beneath his mask. This is why Joker has no back-story and lacks any clear motivation: he tells different people different stories about his scars, mocking the idea that he should have some deep-rooted trauma that drives him. It may appear that Joker aims precisely at providing a kind of socio-psychological genesis of Joker, depicting the traumatic events which made him the figure he is.[6] The problem is that thousands of young boys who grew up in ruined families and were bullied by their peers suffered the same fate, but only one “synthesized” these circumstances into the unique figure of Joker. In other words, Joker is the result of a set of pathogenic circumstances, but these circumstances can be described as the causes of this unique figure only retroactively, once Joker is already here. In one of the early novels about Hannibal Lecter, the claim that Hannibal’s monstrosity is the result of unfortunate circumstances is rejected: “Nothing happened <i>to</i> him. <i>He</i> happened.”<br />
<br />
However, one can (and should) read <i>Joker</i> also in the opposite sense and claim that the act that constitutes the main figure as “Joker” is an autonomous act by means of which he surpasses the objective circumstances of his situation. He identifies with his fate, but this identification is a free act: in it, he posits himself as a unique figure of subjectivity…[7] We can locate this reversal at a precise moment in the film when the hero says: “You know what really makes me laugh? I used to think that my life was a tragedy. But now I realize, it’s a fucking comedy.” Because of this act, Joker may not be moral, but he definitely is ethical. One should take note of the exact moment when Arthur says this: while, standing by the side of his mother’s bed, he takes her pillow and uses it to smother her to death. Who, then, is his mother? Here is how Arthur describes her presence: “She always tells me to smile and put on a happy face. She says I was put here to spread joy and laughter.” Is this not maternal superego at its purest? No wonder she calls him Happy, not Arthur. He gets rid of his mother’s hold (by killing her) through fully identifying with her command to laugh.<br />
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Morality regulates how we relate to others with regard to our shared common Good, while ethics concerns our fidelity to the Cause which defines our desire, the fidelity which reaches beyond the pleasure-principle. Morality in its basic sense is not opposed to social customs; it is an affair of what in ancient Greece was called <i>eumonia</i>, the harmonious well-being of the community. One should recall how, at the beginning of Antigone, the chorus reacts to the news that someone (at this point we don’t yet know who) violated Creon’s prohibition and performed funeral rites on Polynices’ body. It is Antigone herself who is implicitly castigated as the “cityless outcast” engaged in excessive demonic acts that disturb the <i>eumonia</i> of the state, fully reasserted in the last lines of the play: “The most important part of happiness / is therefore wisdom — not to act impiously / towards the gods, for boasts of arrogant men / bring on great blows of punishment / so in old age men can discover wisdom.”<br />
<br />
From the standpoint of <i>eumonia</i>, Antigone is definitely demonic/uncanny. Her defying act expresses a stance of de-measured excessive insistence which disturbs the “beautiful order” of the city; her unconditional ethics violates the harmony of the <i>polis</i> and is as such “beyond human boundary.” The irony is that, while Antigone presents herself as the guardian of the immemorial laws sustaining human order, she acts as a freakish and ruthless abomination. There definitely is something cold and monstrous about her, as is rendered by the contrast between her and her warmly-human sister Ismene. And it is in this same sense that Joker is ethical but not moral.<br />
<br />
One should also take note of Arthur’s family name, Fleck, which in German means stain/spot. Arthur is a disharmonious stain on the social edifice, something with no proper place in it. Yet, what makes him a stain is not just his miserable marginal existence but primarily a feature of his subjectivity, his propensity to compulsive and uncontrollable outbursts of laughter. The status of this laughter is paradoxical: it is quite literally ex-timate (to use Lacan’s neologism), intimate and external. Arthur insists that it forms the very core of his subjectivity: “Remember you used to tell me that my laugh was a condition, that there was something wrong with me? It isn’t. That’s the real me.” But, precisely as such, it is external to him, to his personality, experienced by him as an autonomized partial object that he cannot control and that he ends up fully identifying with – a clear case of what Lacan called “identification with a symptom” (or, rather, “sinthome”: not a bearer of meaning, of a coded message from the unconscious, but a cypher of enjoyment, the elementary formula of subject’s enjoyment). The paradox here is that, in the standard Oedipal scenario, it is the Name-of-the-Father which enables an individual to escape the clutches of maternal desire; with Joker, paternal function is nowhere to be seen, so that the subject can outdo the mother only by over-identifying with her superego command.<br />
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The film provides not only the socio-psychological genesis of Joker, it also implies a condemnation of the society in which a protest can only assume the form of a new tribe led by Joker. There is a subjective act in Joker’s move, but no new political subjectivity arises through it: at the film’s end, we get Joker as a new tribal leader, but with no political program, just an explosion of negativity. In his conversation with Murray, Arthur insists twice that his act is not political. Referring to his clown makeup, Murray asks him: “What’s with the face? I mean, are you part of the protest?” Arthur’s reply: “No, I don’t believe any of that. I don’t believe in anything. I just thought it’d be good for my act.” And, again, later: “I’m not political. I’m just trying to make people laugh.”<br />
<br />
In <i>New York Times</i> A.O Scott misses the point, therefore, when he dismisses <i>Joker</i> as “a story about nothing”: “The look and the sound /…/ connote gravity and depth, but the movie is weightless and shallow.” There effectively is no “gravity and depth” in Joker’s final stance. His revolt is “weightless and shallow,” and that’s the utterly desperate point of the film. There is no militant Left in the film’s universe; it’s just a flat world of globalized violence and corruption. Charity events are depicted as what they are: if a mother Theresa figure were to be there, she would have for sure participated in the charity event organized by Wayne, a humanitarian amusement of the privileged rich. However, it’s difficult to imagine a stupider critique of <i>Joker</i> than the reproach that it doesn’t portray a positive alternative to the Joker revolt. Just imagine a film shot along these lines: an edifying story about how the poor, unemployed, with no healthcare coverage, the victims of street gangs and police brutality, etc., organize non-violent protests and strikes to mobilize public opinion. That would be a new non-racial version of Martin Luther King… and an extremely boring film, lacking the crazy excesses of Joker which make the film so attractive for viewers.<br />
<br />
Here we touch the crux of the matter: since it seems obvious to a Leftist that such non-violent protests and strikes are the only way to proceed, i.e., to exert an efficient pressure onto those in power, are we dealing with a simple gap between political logic and narrative efficiency (to put it bluntly, brutal outbursts like those of Joker are politically a deadlock but they make a story interesting). Or is there also an immanent political necessity in the self-destructive stance embodied by Joker? My hypothesis is that one has to go through the self-destructive zero-level for which Joker stands. Not actually, but one has to experience it as a threat, as a possibility. Only in this way can one break out of the coordinates of the existing system and envisage something really new. Joker’s stance is a blind alley, a total deadlock, superfluous and non-productive, but the paradox is that one has to go through it to perceive its superfluous character. There is no direct way from the existing misery to its constructive overcoming.<br />
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In his interpretation of the fall of East European Communism, Habermas proved to be the ultimate Left Fukuyamaist, silently accepting that the existing liberal-democratic order is the best possible, and that, while we should strive to make it more just, etc., we should not challenge its basic premises. This is why he welcomed precisely what many Leftists saw as the big deficiency of the anti-Communist protests in Eastern Europe: the fact that these protests were not motivated by any new visions of the post-Communist future. As he put it, Central and East European revolutions were just what he called “rectifying” or “catch-up” revolutions: their aim was to enable these societies to gain what Western Europeans already possessed, i.e., to rejoin the West’s European normality. However, although the Hong Kong protests may appear to fit this frame, the ongoing wave of protests in different parts of the world tends to question this very frame – and this is why figures like “jokers” accompany them. When a movement questions the fundamentals of the existing order, its basic normative foundations, it is almost impossible to get just peaceful protests without violent excesses.<br />
<br />
And, to conclude with a reference to the film, the elegance of <i>Joker</i> resides in how the crucial move from a self-destructive drive to a “new desire” (Moore) for an emancipatory political project is absent from the film’s storyline: we, the spectators, are asked to fill in this absence.<br />
<br />
P.S. Fragments of this text are already circulating on the web. I am grateful to LARB’s “The Philosophical Salon” for its readiness to publish the integral version which dispels many confusions that the fragments which circulate gave rise to.<br />
<br />
Notes:<br />
<br />
[1] It is obvious that Joker is also a case of meta-fiction: it provides the genesis of the Batman story, a genesis that has to remain invisible for the Batman myth to function – but we’ll ignore this aspect here.<br />
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[2] Quoted from https://www.good.is/the-five-most-powerful-lines-from-michael-moores-masterful-joker-review.<br />
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[3] Mike Crumplar, personal communication.<br />
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[4] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anotherwhiteatheistincolombia/2019/10/tribelessness-secular-zizek-joker/.<br />
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[5] See https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n20/judith-butler/genius-or-suicide.<br />
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[6] Before seeing the movie and knowing just critical reactions to it, I thought it provides the social genesis of the figure of Joker; now, after seeing it, I must admit, in the spirit of Communist self-criticism, that I was wrong: the passage from passive victimhood to a new form of subjectivity is the pivotal moment of the film.<br />
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[7] Clowncels are also not just determined by their circumstances: even more than incels in general, they enact a symbolic gesture of turning their suffering into a form of enjoyment – they obviously enjoy their predicament, parading it proudly, and are therefore responsible for it, not just victims of unfortunate circumstances.<br />
<br />
Source:<i> <a href="https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/more-on-joker-from-apolitical-nihilism-to-a-new-left-or-why-trump-is-no-joker/">More on Joker</a></i><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">See also: <i><b><a href="https://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2019/11/zizek-on-joker.html">Žižek on Joker</a></b></i> (part one)</span></div>
<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "times new roman", times, freeserif, serif; font-size: 38px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: right;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 38px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: right;">
<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-53044458694340759652019-11-12T07:24:00.000-08:002019-11-12T07:24:07.068-08:00Qing's Interview With Slavoj Žižek (齐泽克) <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YTCiVDwmZ6U" width="560"></iframe><br />
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"In 2019 June, I went to Slovenia to interview Slavoj Žižek (齐泽克) - a prominent but controversial public figure, sometimes called "the most dangerous philosopher in the West". We had a two-hour long discussion on various topics including Marxism, consumerism, political correctness, White Left(白左), the fall of the Berlin wall, happiness, marriage and even open relationships."<br />
<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "times new roman", times, freeserif, serif; font-size: 38px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: right;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 38px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: right;">
<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-50085577946875909482019-11-10T12:28:00.000-08:002019-11-12T07:45:09.777-08:00Slavoj Zizek on Chile's political crisisHe estado conversando con Slavoj Zizek sobre la situación política de Chile. <br />
<br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_Ue8B88RBLc" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "times new roman", times, freeserif, serif; font-size: 38px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: right;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 38px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: right;">
<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-74725107209594260042019-11-04T05:17:00.001-08:002019-11-12T07:44:56.952-08:00Žižek on Joker<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>'System deadlock': Joker artistically diagnoses modern world's ills</i> – Zizek</b></div>
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<b>Daily life has become a horror movie</b><br />
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We should congratulate Hollywood and the viewers on two things: that such a film that, let's face it, gives a very dark image of highly developed capitalism, a nightmarish image which led some critics to designate it a 'social horror film', came out. Usually, we have social films, which depict social problems, and then we have horror films. To bring these two genres together, it is only possible when many phenomena in our ordinary social life become phenomena which belong to horror films.<br />
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It is even more interesting to see how reactions to the film provide a whole specter of political cohesions in the US. On the one hand, conservatives were afraid that this film would incite violence. It was an absurd claim. No violence was triggered by this film. On the contrary, the film depicts violence and awakens you to the danger of violence.<br />
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As it is always the case, some politically correct people feared that the film used racist clichés and celebrates violence. It is also unfair. One of the most interesting positions was that of Michael Moore, a leftist documentarist, who celebrated the film as an honest depiction of reality of those poor, excluded and not covered by healthcare in the US.<br />
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His idea is that the film explains how figures like Joker can arise. It is a critical portrayal of reality in the US, which can give birth to people like Joker. I agree with him but I would also like to go a bit further.<br />
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<b>'Deadlock of nihilism'</b><br />
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I think what is important is that the figure of Joker in the end, when he identifies with his mask, is a figure of extreme nihilism, self-destructive violence and a crazy laughter at others' despair. There is not positive political project.<br />
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The way we should read 'Joker' is that it very wisely abstains from providing a positive image. A leftist critique of 'Joker' could have been: "Yes, it is a good portrayal of reality in the poor slums of the US but where is the positive force? Where are democratic socialists, where are ordinary people organizing themselves?" In this case, it would have been a totally different and a pretty boring film.<br />
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The logic of this film is that it leaves it to the spectators to do this. The movie shows sad social reality and a deadlock of the nihilist reaction. In the end, Joker is not free. He is only free in a sense of arriving at a point of total nihilism.<br />
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I designated the figure of Joker in a kind of Kazimir Malevich, the Russian avangardist, position when he did this famous painting of the Black Square. It is a kind of minimal protest – a reduction to nothing. Joker simply mocks every authority. It is destructive but lacks a positive project. We have to go through this path of despair.<br />
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It is not enough to play the game of those in power. That is the message of 'Joker'. The fact that they could be charitable like Bruce Wayne's father in this latest movie is just a part of the game. You have to get rid of all these liberal stupidities that obfuscate the despair of the situation.<br />
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Yet, it is not the final step but a zero level of clearing the table to open up the space for something new. This is how I read the film. It is not a final decadent vision. We have to go through this hell. Now, it is up to us to go further.<br />
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<br />
<b>Social alarm clock</b><br />
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The danger of explaining just the backstory is to give a kind of a rational explanation that we should understand the figure of Joker. But Joker does not need this. Joker is a creative person in some sense. The crucial moment in the film for his subjective change is when he says: "I used to think my life was a tragedy. But now I realize, it's a comedy."<br />
<br />
Comedy means for me that at that point he accepts himself in all his despair as a comical figure and gets rid of the last constraints of the old world. That is what he does for us. He is not a figure to imitate. It is wrong to think that what we see towards the end of the film – Joker celebrated by others – is the beginning of some new emancipatory movement. No, it is an ultimate deadlock of the existing system; a society bent on its self-destruction.<br />
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The elegance of the film is that it leaves the next step of building a positive alternative to it to us. It is a dark nihilist image meant to awaken us.<br />
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<b>Are we ready to face reality?</b><br />
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The leftists who are disturbed by 'Joker' are 'Fukuyama leftists'; those who think that the liberal democratic order is the best possible order and we should just make it more tolerant. In this sense, everyone is a socialist today. Bill Gates says he is for socialism, Mark Zuckerberg says he is for socialism.<br />
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The lesson of 'Joker' is that a more radical change is needed; that this is not enough. And that is what all those democratic leftists are not aware of. This dissatisfaction that grows up today is a serious one. The system cannot deal with it with gradual reforms, more tolerance or better healthcare.<br />
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These are signs of the need for more radical change.<br />
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The true problem is whether we are ready to really experience the hopelessness of our situation. As Joker himself said at a certain moment in the film: "I laugh because I have nothing to lose, I am nobody."<br />
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There is also a clever name game here. Joker's real family name is Fleck. In German, fleck is a stain, a meaningless stain. It is like anamorphosis. We need to take a different look to see a new perspective.<br />
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I do not trust all those leftist critics who are afraid of its potential. As Moore put it very nicely, you are afraid of violence here, not of real violence in our daily life. To be shocked by violence depicted in the film is just an escape from real violence.<br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/472541-joker-movie-horror-violence-zizek/">'System deadlock': Joker artistically diagnoses modern world's ills – Zizek</a></i><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">See also: </span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2019/05/slavoj-zizek-game-of-thrones-tapped.html">Slavoj Žižek: Game of Thrones tapped into fears of revolution and political women – and left us no better off than before</a></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-22317106907565713532019-07-09T08:06:00.001-07:002019-07-09T08:06:27.581-07:00Slavoj Žižek: I believed in Syriza, but their election defeat was secured the moment they caved in to the forces of capitalismI naively thought thought the party had a plan to defeat the EU elite. But they did the authoritarian job of implementing austerity policies while right populists around the world are now enacting welfare measures. The left must learn lessons from the party’s defeat<br />
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The sad fate of Syriza is emblematic of the new situation of the European left.<br />
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In capitalism as we knew it, when a severe economic crisis made impossible the system’s normal reproduction, some kind of authoritarian rule (usually a military dictatorship) was imposed for a decade or so till the economic situation was re-normalised enough so that a return to democracy could be tolerated again – recall the cases of Chile, Argentina, South Korea.<br />
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The unique role of Syriza is that it was allowed to play this role usually reserved for right wing dictatorships. It took power in a time of deep upheaval and crisis, it fulfilled its task of enacting tough austerity measures, and now it left the stage, replaced by a party called New Democracy, the same party which brought Greece to the crisis in the first place. <br />
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The achievements of Syriza government are mixed. It did some good things (which could have been done also by a reasonable centrist government, like the agreement with Macedonia on the change of its name), but overall the result is a double catastrophe. Not only did it do the job of enacting austerity measures – the very task its entire program was opposed to. But the perverse genius of EU bureaucrats was to allow a purportedly radical left party, Syriza, to own it. In this way protests against austerity were minimised. A government of the right would not have gotten away with it so easily.<br />
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Even worse, by enacting the austerity measures, Syriza de facto destroyed its own social base, the rich texture of civil society groups out of which it emerged as a political party. Syriza is now a political party just like the others.<br />
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When Syriza took over and engaged in negotiations with the EU, it was clear that the moment the only choice was austerity or Grexit, the battle was lost. Accepting austerity measures meant betraying the basic tenet of its program, and Grexit would have caused a further 30 per cent drop in the standard of living and a collapse of social life (lack of medicines, of food etc.) leading to an emergency state. We now know that Grexit was quite acceptable to the European financial elite: Yanis Varoufakis reports that when he mentioned Grexit as a threat to Wolfgang Schauble (at that time the German finance minister), Schauble immediately offered billions of help for Greece to do it.<br />
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What was intolerable for the EU elite was not Grexit but Greece remaining in the EU and mounting a counter-offensive there. From Schauble’s reaction, the idea was clear: the collapse caused by Grexit would have served as a good lesson to all leftists not to play with any radical economic measures. The establishment likes a more radical left to take power every two to three decades, just to warn the people what dangers lie ahead along this path. <br />
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So everything hinged on avoiding this choice and finding a third way. Naively, we who supported Syriza thought they had a plan. In all the debates I had with them I was assured they knew what they were doing. Yet in spite of all the leftist critique of the brutality of EU pressure on Greece, the EU did nothing unexpected, the Brussels administrators acted precisely as we thought they would – and Syriza was left helpless. So what precipitated the double U-turn in July 2015?<br />
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The extraordinary reversal of one extreme into its opposite would bedazzle even the most speculative Hegelian philosopher. Tired of the endless negotiations with the EU executives in which one humiliation followed another, the Syriza referendum on Sunday 5 July asked the Greek people if they supported or rejected the EU proposal of new austerity measures.<br />
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Although the government itself clearly stated that it supported “No”, or “Oxi”, the result surprised them: an overwhelming majority of 61 per cent said no to European blackmail. Rumours began to circulate that the result – victory for the government – was a bad surprise for Tsipras himself who secretly hoped that the government would lose, so that a defeat would allow him to save face in surrendering to the EU demands (“we have to respect the voters’ voice”).<br />
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However, literally the morning after, Tsipras announced that Greece was ready to resume the negotiations, and days later Greece negotiated a EU proposal which was basically the same as what the voters rejected (in some details even harsher) – in short, he acted as if the government had lost, not won, the referendum.<br />
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Here we encounter the truth of populism: its failure to confront the real of capital. The supreme populist moment (referendum victory) immediately reverted into capitulation, into a confession of impotence with regard to the capitalist order – there is no simple betrayal in this reversal but the expression of a deep necessity. It is all too easy to speak of “treason” here, but we are dealing with a much deeper crisis of the left.<br />
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I remember how, in the debates around that election in 2015, I warned against the fascination with great public events – all the fuss about “one million of us at Syntagma square, we were all clapping and singing together”. What really matters is what happens the morning after when the drunkenness of the collective trance is over and the enthusiasm has to be translated into concrete measures.<br />
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I often mockingly evoked a group of participants who, once a year, meet in a cafeteria at the anniversary of past demonstrations and sentimentally remember the bygone moments of ecstatic unity… but then a cell phone rings and they have to run back to their boring jobs. We can easily imagine such a scene today: members of Syriza meet in a cafeteria fondly remembering the unique spirit of their 2015 mass protests, and then a phone rings, and they have to run back to their office to pursue the job of austerity.<br />
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This is our world today, a world in which right wing populists enact welfare-state measures and the radical left does the authoritarian job of imposing austerity. Will a new left find a way out of this deadlock? <br />
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<b>Source: </b><i><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syriza-greece-election-tsipras-new-democracy-troika-austerity-varoufakis-a8993811.html">Slavoj Žižek: I believed in Syriza, but their election defeat was secured the moment they caved in to the forces of capitalism</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4998445566092075592.post-20493570193626089212019-07-01T01:52:00.000-07:002019-07-01T01:52:32.260-07:00Slavoj Žižek: Was I right to back Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton? AbsolutelyTrump’s unexpected victory triggered a process of radicalisation within the Democratic Party – and this process is now our only hope<br />
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In the last couple of years, I have been often asked by friends (and by “friends”) whether I still stand by my preference for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, or would I now admit that I was terribly wrong. My answer is easy to guess: not only do I stand by what I said, but I think last year’s events fully confirmed my choice. Why?<br />
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As Yuval Harari noted, in his Homo Deus, people feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don’t understand my feelings and don’t care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by 100 to one, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. Democratic elections are a method to settle disagreements between people who already agree on the basics. When this agreement on basics falters, the only procedures at our disposal are negotiations or (civil) war. That’s why the Middle East conflict cannot be solved by elections but only by war or negotiations.<br />
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So how does this apply to the growing lack of the agreement on the basics in the US politics? What complicates the situation is that the disagreement that exploded is double: first, Trump broke the established order from the side of the populist right, and then the Democrats (Sanders and others) broke it from the left. These two ruptures are not symmetrical. The struggle between Trump and the liberal establishment is a cultural-ideological struggle within the same space of global capitalism, while the left began to question this global capitalist order itself.<br />
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This is why the only true struggle going on today is taking place within the Democratic Party itself. <br />
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Liberals who are panicked by Trump dismiss the idea that the president’s victory can start a process out of which an authentic left would emerge. Their counterargument is basically a comparison with Hitler’s rise to power. Many German communists welcomed the Nazi takeover as a new chance for the radical left (“now the situation is clear, democratic illusions have vanished, we are confronted by the true enemy”) – but, as we know, their appreciation was a catastrophic mistake.<br />
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The question is: are things the same with Trump? Is Trump a danger which should bring together a broad front akin to anti-fascist popular fronts, a front where decent conservatives will fight together with mainstream liberal progressives and (whatever remains of) the radical left?<br />
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I think such a broad front against Trump is a dangerous illusion: it would amount to the capitulation of the new left, to its surrender to the liberal establishment. The fear that a Trump victory would turn the US into a fascist state is a ridiculous exaggeration: the US has a rich enough texture of divergent civic and political institutions so that their direct fascist Gleichshaltung cannot be enacted (in contrast to, say, France where the victory of Le Pen would have been much more dangerous).<br />
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What happened in the US is that the Trump victory triggered a process of radicalisation in the Democratic Party – and this process is our only hope.<br />
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Saritha Prabhu’s opinion piece recently published in the Tennessean deserves to be quoted at length. It moved me almost to tears with its description of a simple truth:<br />
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“Brace yourself; there is a civil war coming soon in the Democratic Party. At the heart of today’s Democratic Party is an identity crisis and an ideological struggle. For starters, is the Democratic Party a party of the rich or a party of the little guy? For many years, they’ve been the party of the rich playing a good game of pretending to be for the little guy. And the Democratic establishment does it in insidious ways that are too clever by half: they are for the marginalised guy or gal in the race, gender, and sexuality issues because, hey, that doesn’t hurt their and their affluent constituents’ pocketbook much.<br />
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“But in the economic issues that matter, they often sock it to the average Democratic working-class voter: in the global trade deals that’ve offshored jobs and have decimated the American manufacturing base; in their looking the other way as illegal immigrants depress the wages of working-class Americans, and more. But as long as they talk and talk and talk some more – about abortion and transgender rights and racism (not that these aren’t relevant issues), they can have their cake and eat it too. But all this worked until 2016, but can’t be pulled off anymore. The Democratic establishment wing is still either clueless or stubborn, but they want good ol’ Joe Biden to come to the rescue and Make Oligarchic America Great Again.<br />
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“When you rip off their mask, what is revealed is troubling: the Party of Davos masquerading as the Party of Scranton, Pennsylvania, that essentially hoodwinks much of the electorate.”<br />
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Let’s make it clear: it was the rise of Trump which triggered the “civil war” in the Democratic Party – and, by the way, the proper name of this “civil war” is class struggle. So let’s not lose nerve, let’s rather use the opportunity inadvertently opened up by Trump.<br />
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The only way to really defeat Trump is for the left to win that civil war.<br />
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Source: <i><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-hillary-clinton-populist-right-left-democratic-party-civil-war-a8975121.html">Slavoj Žižek: Was I right to back Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton? Absolutely</a></i><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/zizek-calendar.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Zizek Calendar</span></a></span></h3>
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<a href="http://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/p/reading-zizek-where-to-start.html" style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: cyan;">Reading Žižek – Where to Start?</span></a></h3>
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