Hegel’s idealism is generally perceived as a system of rational sublation (Aufhebung) of all empirical contingencies: nothing resists notional mediation which, in a movement of negation of negation, establishes a rational totality. Already Schelling opposed to this complete sublation an “indivisible remainder” of empirical contingency. However, a close reading of Hegel makes it clear that the concluding moment of a dialectical movement of sublation is an empirical remainder which totalizes it, like the body of Christ in Christianity. And the same (...) goes for the process of “negation of negation”: it concludes with a failure of negation, and its ultimate form is a failed suicide where the subject survives as a living dead. Such a reading of Hegel makes him a thinker of our time which is the time of a failed negation: most of us live as survivors of our death, with life dragging on in depressive apathy. (shrink)

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of an in-between stance which he calls the “parallaxview”: when confronted with an antinomic stance, in the precise Kantian sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other. One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the (...) irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus “to see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference .” What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it first rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated—reconciled. And, according to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of the “classical” political economy and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance, accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treatedthis opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate outside circulation, in production, and in circulation. (shrink)

In this new book, Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly engage in a series of entertaining conversations which illustrate the originality of Žižek’s thinking on psychoanalysis, philosophy, multiculturalism, popular/cyber culture, totalitarianism, ethics and politics. An excellent introduction to one of the most engaging and controversial cultural theorists writing today. Žižek is a Slovenian sociologist who trained as a Lacanian and uses Lacan to analyse popular culture and politics. Illustrates the originality of Žižek’s thinking on psychoanalysis, philosophy, multi-culturalism, popular/cyber culture, totalitarianism, ethics (...) and politics. Provides a unique glimpse of Žižek’s humour and character and offers new material and fresh perspectives which will be of interest to followers of Žižek’s writings. (shrink)

In this new book, Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly engage in a series of entertaining conversations which illustrate the originality of Žižek’s thinking on psychoanalysis, philosophy, multiculturalism, popular/cyber culture, totalitarianism, ethics and politics. An excellent introduction to one of the most engaging and controversial cultural theorists writing today. Žižek is a Slovenian sociologist who trained as a Lacanian and uses Lacan to analyse popular culture and politics. Illustrates the originality of Žižek’s thinking on psychoanalysis, philosophy, multi-culturalism, popular/cyber culture, totalitarianism, ethics (...) and politics. Provides a unique glimpse of Žižek’s humour and character and offers new material and fresh perspectives which will be of interest to followers of Žižek’s writings. (shrink)

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of an in-between stance which he calls the “parallaxview”: when confronted with an antinomic stance, in the precise Kantian sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other. One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the (...) irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus “to see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference (parallax).” What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it first rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation (“finitude”) of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated—reconciled. And, according to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of the “classical” political economy and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance, accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treatedthis opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate outside circulation, in production, and in circulation. (shrink)

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of an in-between stance which he calls the “parallaxview”: when confronted with an antinomic stance, in the precise Kantian sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other. One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the (...) irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus “to see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference (parallax).” What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it first rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation (“finitude”) of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated—reconciled. And, according to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of the “classical” political economy and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance, accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treatedthis opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate outside circulation, in production, and in circulation. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems (...) even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. (shrink)

One of our most daring intellectuals offers a Lacanian interpretation of religion, finding that early Christianity was the first revolutionary collective. Slavoj Žižek has been called "an academic rock star" and "the wild man of theory"; his writing mixes astonishing erudition and references to pop culture in order to dissect current intellectual pieties. In The Puppet and the Dwarf he offers a close reading of today's religious constellation from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He critically confronts both predominant versions of (...) today's spirituality—New Age gnosticism and deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism—and then tries to redeem the "materialist" kernel of Christianity. His reading of Christianity is explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline community of believers the first version of a revolutionary collective. Since today even advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to ground our ethical and political stance in a "postsecular" age, this book—with a stance that is clearly materialist and at the same time indebted to the core of the Christian legacy—is certain to stir controversy. (shrink)

An essay by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, with an English translation of Schelling's beautiful and evocative "Ages of the World, " second draft.

Beyond Fukuyama. Where do we stand today? Gerald A. Cohen enumerated the four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class: it constitutes the majority of society; it produces the wealth of society; it consists of the exploited members of society; its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two further features: the working class has nothing to lose from revolution; it can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of (...) society. None of the first four features applies to today's working class, which is why features and cannot be generated. that open up the site of resistance. (shrink)

In his wonderful short text ‘Notes of a Publicist’—written in February 1922 when the Bolsheviks, after winning the Civil War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private property—Lenin uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak to describe what retreat means in a revolutionary process, and how it can be done without opportunistically betraying (...) the cause: Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible. In these circumstances, Lenin writes: He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveller than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with an alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit. It would only be natural for a climber who found himself in such a position to have ‘moments of despondency’. In all probability these moments would be more numerous and harder to bear if he could hear the voices of those below, who ‘through a telescope and from a safe distance, are watching his dangerous descent’: ‘The voices from below ring with malicious joy. They do not conceal it; they chuckle gleefully and shout: “He’ll fall in a minute! Serve him right, the lunatic!”.’ Others try to conceal their malicious glee, behaving ‘more like Judas Golovlyov’, the notoriously hypocritical landowner in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel, The Golovlyov Family: They moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! But did not we, who have spent all our lives working out a judicious plan for scaling this mountain, demand that the ascent be postponed until our plan was complete? And if we so vehemently protested against taking this path, which this lunatic is now abandoning, if we so fervently censured this lunatic and warned everybody against imitating and helping him, we did so entirely because of our devotion to the great plan to scale this mountain, and in order to prevent this great plan from being generally discredited!’ Happily, Lenin continues, our imaginary traveller cannot hear the voices of these people who are ‘true friends’ of the idea of ascent; if he did, ‘they would probably nauseate him’—‘And nausea, it is said, does not help one to keep a clear head and a firm step, particularly at high altitudes.’ Of course, a metaphor does not amount to proof: ‘every analogy is lame’. (shrink)

Responding to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’, the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis.

There are not only true or false solutions, there are also false questions. The task of philosophy is not to provide answers or solutions, but to submit to critical analysis the questions themselves, to make us see how the very way we perceive a problem is an obstacle to its solution. This holds especially for today’s public debates on ecological threats, on lack of faith, on democracy and the “war on terror”, in which the “unknown knowns”, the silent presuppositions we (...) are not aware of, determine our acts. (shrink)

In this exclusive article to IJŽS Žižek provides a critical account of Badiou's notion of the event.

When the threat posed by the digitalization of our lives is debated in our media, the focus is usually on the new phase of capitalism called “surveillance capitalism”: a total digital control over our lives exerted by state agencies and private corporations. However, important as this “surveillance capitalism” is, it is not yet the true game changer; there is a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface (“wired brain”). First, when our brain (...) is connected to digital machines, we can cause things to happen in reality just by thinking about them; then, my brain is directly connercted to another brain, so that another individual can directly share my experience). Extrapolated to its extreme, wired brain opens up the prospect of what Ray Kurzweil called Singularity, the divine-like global space of shared awareness … Whatever the (dubious, for the time being) scientific status of this idea, it is clear that its realization will affect the basic features of humans as thinking/speaking beings: the eventual rise of Singularity will be apocalyptic in the complex meaning of the term: it will imply the encounter with a truth hidden in our ordinary human existence, i.e., the entrance into a new post-human dimension, which cannot but be experienced as catastrophic, as the end of our world. But will we still be here to experience our immersion into Singularity in any human sense of the term? (shrink)

If the radical moment of the inauguration of modern philosophy is the rise of the Cartesian cogito, where are we today with regard to cogito? Are we really entering a post-Cartesian era, or is it that only now our unique historical constellation enables us to discern all the consequences of the cogito? The paper deals extensively with these questions on topics introduced by Catherine Malabou's Les nouveaux blessés (The New Wounded). Malabou proposed a critical reformulation of psychoanalysis, her starting point (...) being external shocks, brutal unexpected encounters or intrusions, due their properly traumatic impact on the way they touch a pre-existing traumatic "psychic reality". Malabou's basic reproach to Freud is that, when confronted with such cases, he succumbs to the temptation of meaning: he is not ready to accept the direct destructive efficiency of external shocks – they destroy the psyche of the victim (or, at least, wound it in an unredeemable way) without resonating in any inner traumatic truth. These cases of post-traumatic subjects show that if we take the "stories they are telling itself about itself," the narrative symbolic texture, away, something (or, rather nothing, a form of nothing) remains, which is nothing but the pure subject of the death drive. This is an idea of cogito at its purest, its "degree zero," and this is also the reason why today we so adamantly resist the spectre of cogito. (shrink)

The Cartesian cogito—the principle articulated by Descartes that "I think, therefore I am"—is often hailed as the precursor of modern science. At the same time, the cogito's agent, the ego, is sometimes feared as the agency of manipulative domination responsible for all present woes, from patriarchal oppression to ecological catastrophes. Without psychoanalyzing philosophy, _Cogito and the Unconscious_ explores the vicissitudes of the cogito and shows that psychoanalyses can render visible a constitutive madness within modern philosophy, the point at which "I (...) think, therefore I am" becomes obsessional neurosis characterized by "If I stop thinking, I will cease to exist." Noting that for Lacan the Cartesian construct is the same as the Freudian "subject of the unconscious," the contributors follow Lacan's plea for a psychoanalytic return to the cogito. Along the path of this return, they examine the ethical attitude that befits modern subjectivity, the inherent sexualization of modern subjectivity, the impasse in which the Cartesian project becomes involved given the enigmatic status of the human body, and the Cartesian subject's confrontation with its modern critics, including Althusser, Bataille, and Dennett. In a style that has become familiar to Žižek's readers, these essays bring together a strict conceptual analysis and an approach to a wide range of cultural and ideological phenomena—from the sadist paradoxes of Kant's moral philosophy to the universe of Ayn Rand's novels, from the question "Which, if any, is the sex of the cogito?" to the defense of the cogito against the onslaught of cognitive sciences. Challenging us to reconsider fundamental notions of human consciousness and modern subjectivity, this is a book whose very Lacanian orthodoxy makes it irreverently transgressive of predominant theoretical paradigms. _Cogito and the Unconscious_ will appeal to readers interested in philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and theories of ideology. _Contributors. _Miran Bozovic, Mladen Dolar, Alain Grosrichard, Marc de Kessel, Robert Pfaller, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic. (shrink)

Two topics determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness and the obsessive fear of harassment: the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other. The central human right in late-capitalist society, namely the right to be free from all harassment by the Other including the violent imposition of ethical norms, contrasts sharply with the violent imposition of divine Mosaic law – the Decalogue – from which the (...) idea of human rights ultimately derives. The underlying discursive shift can be analyzed with the help of Lacan: the discourse of the Master had been replaced by university discourse. While the Master's decision is per se violent, university discourse is enunciated from the position of neutral Knowledge. The truth of the university discourse is power: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things. (shrink)

In a critical reading of my plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference in 2007, Sara Ahmed challenges my claim that it is an “empirical fact” that liberal multiculturalism is hegemonic. Her first step is to emphasize the distinction between the semblance of hegemony and actual hegemony: Hegemony is not really reducible to facts as it involves semblance, fantasy and illusion, being a question of how things appear and the gap between appearance and how bodies are distributed. To read (...) hegemony we have to distrust how things appear. Indeed, what is striking about Zizek’s retort is how much his reading of ‘political correctness’ and ‘liberal multiculturalism’ involved a certain literalism, as if the prohibition of speech acts that are not based on respecting the other’s difference are ‘really’ what is prohibited, or as if the prohibition is simply real by virtue of being articulated within public culture. So the speech act, ‘we must support the other’s difference’ is read as hegemonic, is taken literally as a sign not only that it is compulsory to support the other’s difference, but we are not allowed to refuse this support. The speech act is read as doing what it says. In order to re-consider the effects of such injunctions and prohibitions, I have introduced a new class of what I call non-performatives: speech acts that do not do what they say, that do not bring into effect that which they name. Could the speech work to create an illusion that we do support the other’s difference, which might work by not bringing such support into existence? (shrink)

The conclusion drawn was that this failure was due to underestimating the depth of Western Christian spiritual foundations, so the accent of subversive activity shifted from politico-economic struggle to "cultural revolution," to the patient intellectual-cultural work of undermining national pride, family, religion, and spiritual commitments, and the spirit of sacrifice for one's country was dismissed as involving the "authoritarian personality"; marital fidelity was supposed to express pathological sexual repression; following Benjamin's motto on how every document of culture is a document (...) of barbarism, the highest achievements of Western culture were denounced for concealing the practices of racism and genocide, and so on. MacDonald devotes many pages to The Authoritarian Personality, a collective project coordinated by Adorno, the purpose of which was, for MacDonald, to make every group affiliation sound as if it were a sign of mental disorder; everything, from patriotism to religion to family-and race-loyally, is disqualified as a sign of a dangerous and defective "authoritarian personality." In addition to ridiculing patriotism and racial identity, the Frankfurt school glorified promiscuity and bohemian poverty: "Certainly many of the central attitudes of the largely successful 1960s countercultural revolution find expression in The Authoritarian Personality, including idealizing rebellion against parents, low-investment sexual relationships, and scorn for upward social mobility, social status, family pride, the Christian religion, and patriotism". (shrink)

The Cartesian cogito—the principle articulated by Descartes that "I think, therefore I am"—is often hailed as the precursor of modern science. At the same time, the cogito's agent, the ego, is sometimes feared as the agency of manipulative domination responsible for all present woes, from patriarchal oppression to ecological catastrophes. Without psychoanalyzing philosophy, _Cogito and the Unconscious_ explores the vicissitudes of the cogito and shows that psychoanalyses can render visible a constitutive madness within modern philosophy, the point at which "I (...) think, therefore I am" becomes obsessional neurosis characterized by "If I stop thinking, I will cease to exist." Noting that for Lacan the Cartesian construct is the same as the Freudian "subject of the unconscious," the contributors follow Lacan's plea for a psychoanalytic return to the cogito. Along the path of this return, they examine the ethical attitude that befits modern subjectivity, the inherent sexualization of modern subjectivity, the impasse in which the Cartesian project becomes involved given the enigmatic status of the human body, and the Cartesian subject's confrontation with its modern critics, including Althusser, Bataille, and Dennett. In a style that has become familiar to Žižek's readers, these essays bring together a strict conceptual analysis and an approach to a wide range of cultural and ideological phenomena—from the sadist paradoxes of Kant's moral philosophy to the universe of Ayn Rand's novels, from the question "Which, if any, is the sex of the cogito?" to the defense of the cogito against the onslaught of cognitive sciences. Challenging us to reconsider fundamental notions of human consciousness and modern subjectivity, this is a book whose very Lacanian orthodoxy makes it irreverently transgressive of predominant theoretical paradigms. _Cogito and the Unconscious_ will appeal to readers interested in philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and theories of ideology. _Contributors. _Miran Bozovic, Mladen Dolar, Alain Grosrichard, Marc de Kessel, Robert Pfaller, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. “Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it,” he proposed, “as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.” After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and Stalinism, Leviticus 19:18 seems even (...) less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt’s political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In “Miracles Happen,” Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek’s “Neighbors and Other Monsters” reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ has proven to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. This new edition contains a new preface by the authors. (shrink)

The gap that separates Lacan from Heidegger is here clearly discernible precisely on account of their proximity, i.e., of the fact that, in order to designate the symbolic function at its most elementary, Lacan still uses Heidegger’s term “being”: in a human being, desires lose their mooring in biology, they are operative only insofar as they are inscribed within the horizon of Being sustained by language; however, in order for this transposition from the immediate biological reality of the body to (...) the symbolic space to take place, it has to live a mark of torture in the body in the guise of its mutilation. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan coined the term “subjective destitution” to describe the concluding moment of a psychoanalytic treatment. This concept can also usefully be applied to art and to politics. In art, subjective destitution can be defined as a passage from being-towardsdeath to undeadness, in other words to the position of the living dead – this passage takes place between Shostakovich’s 14th symphony and his final symphony, the 15th. In politics, subjective destitution designates the passage of a political subject to a radical (...) de-subjectivization, to becoming an object of a political cause. (shrink)

Today’s predominant mode of politics is the post-political biopolitics an expression which is effectively tautological: “post-politics” designates the reduction of politics to the expert administration of social life. Such a politics is ultimately a politics of fear, a politics focused on the defense against a potential victimization or harassment. Therein resides the true line of separation between radical emancipatory politics and the predominant status quo politics: it is not the difference of two different positive visions, sets of axioms, but, rather, (...) the difference between the politics based on a set of universal axioms and the politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political, since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilizing principle: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive State itself, fear of ecological catastrophes, fear of harassment – such a politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid ochlos – the frightening rallying of frightened men. The zero-level of politics today is the depoliticized expert administration and coordination of interests; the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear. At the level of social objectivity, we have mechanisms and processes to be regulated by expert administrators; the subjective counterpart of it is fear, the basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. This is why the big event not only in Europe in the early 2006 was that the anti-immigration politics “went mainstream”: they finally cut the umbilical link that connected them to the far Right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride at one’s cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that the immigrants “are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – it is “our country, love it or leave it.” This fear is, at its most basic, the fear of the Neighbor. There are two topics which determine today’s liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness, openness towards it, and the obsessive fear of harassment – in short, the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other… In the strict homology with the paradoxical structure of chocolate laxative, tolerance this coincides with its opposite: my duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him, not to intrude into his/her space – in short, that I should respect his/her intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is what is more and more emerging as the central “human right” in late-capitalist society: the right not to be “harassed,” i.e., to be kept at a safe distance from the others. (shrink)

The concept of disparity has long been a topic of obsession and argument for philosophers but Slavoj Žižek would argue that what disparity and negativity could mean, might mean and should mean for us and our lives has never been more hotly debated. Disparities explores contemporary 'negative' philosophies from Catherine Malabou's plasticity, Julia Kristeva's abjection and Robert Pippin's self-consciousness to the God of negative theology, new realisms and post-humanism and draws a radical line under them. Instead of establishing a dialogue (...) with these other ideas of disparity, Slavoj Žižek wants to establish a definite departure, a totally different idea of disparity based on an imaginative dialectical materialism. This notion of rupturing what has gone before is based on a provocative reading of how philosophers can, if they're honest, engage with each other. Slavoj Žižek borrows Alain Badiou's notion that a true idea is the one that divides. Radically departing from previous formulations of negativity and disparity, Žižek employs a new kind of negativity: namely positing that when a philosopher deals with another philosopher, his or her stance is never one of dialogue, but one of division, of drawing a line that separates truth from falsity. (shrink)

My knowledge of architecture is constrained to a coupler of idiosyncratic data: my love for Ayn Rand and her architecture-novel The Fountainhead; my admiration of the Stalinist “wedding-cake” baroque kitsch; my dream of a house composed only of secondary spaces and places of passage – stairs, corridors, toilets, store-rooms, kitchen – with no living room or bedroom. The danger that I am courting is thus that what I will say will oscillate between the two extremes of unfounded speculations and what (...) most is already known for a long time. I would like to begin with the notion of parallax which I took from Kojin Karatani. The common definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. When confronted with such a parallax gap, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other ; the task is, on the contrary, to conceive all possible positions as responses to a certain underlying deadlock or antagonism, as so many attempts to resolve this deadlock… and this already brings us to so-called postmodern architecture which, sometimes, seems to enact the notion of parallax in a directly-palpable way. Think about Liebeskind or Gehry: their work often appears as a desperate attempt to combine two incompatible structuring principles within the same building, as if two principles are locked in a struggle for hegemony. (shrink)

The text focuses on the different roles played by the void with regard to desire and to drive: although, in both cases, the invested object is objet petit a as the primordially lost object, the object which gives body to a void, desire remains caught in the infinite search for the lost object, while drive directly targets the loss as such. The turn from desire to drive is thus the turn from the lost object to the loss itself as "object".

need to confront Taylor’s theory of secularism as fending off Marcel Gauchet’sincisive post-Weberinan reading of Christianity as producing an “exit fromreligion”. Finally, I examine Taylor’s perspectivist history and theory ofsecularism. Ultimately, I argue that Taylor’s perspectivism forsakes aconception of religion as subjective reason for a subjectivism that embracesorder and institutional power in the name of benevolence. By reinforcing hispersonal faith in Catholicism, Taylor inevitably weakens his otherwise solidand important claim to participate in the transformational unfolding ofChristian moral philosophy into a (...) bona fide public philosophy withuniversalist ambitions.O artigo explora dois sentidos diferentes da formulação “o grande outro nãoexiste”: o primeiro, formulado por Lacan, atesta a inexistência real do grandeOutro e seu caráter estritamente simbólico; o segundo, característico dapostura cínica, resulta do descrédito diante da ordem simbólica e apontapara o ressurgimento da figura do grande Outro no Real. A crença no grandeOutro que existe no Real é a mais sucinta definição de paranóia: o sujeitocontemporâneo, ao mesmo tempo em que demonstra um descrédito cínicodiante de toda ideologia pública, entrega-se a fantasias paranóicas sobreconspirações, ameaças e formas excessivas de gozo do Outro. A descrençano grande Outro , a recusa do sujeito de“levar a sério”, repousa sobre a crença de um “Outro do Outro,” um agenteinvisível, secreto, onipotente, que efetivamente “puxa os cordões” por trásdo poder público visível.The aim of this article is to explore two different senses of the statement:“The big Other doesn’t exist”. The first sense, formulated by Lacan, showsthe real inexistence of the big Other and its strictly symbolic character. Thesecond sense, characteristic of a cynical stance, is the outcome of discrediting the symbolic order. It points to the resurgence of the figure of the big Otherin the Real. Now, belief in a big Other that exists, as it were, in the Real, isone of the most succinct definitions of paranoia. The contemporary subjectsurrenders to paranoid fantasies about conspiracies, threats and excessiveforms of the Other’s jouissance precisely when it cynically discredits allpublic ideologies. Disbelief in the big Other ,that is, the subject’s refusal to “take things seriously”, rests on the belief ofan “Other of the Other”: an invisible, secret and omnipotent agent “pullingthe strings” behind the visible side of public power. (shrink)

Lacan: Television – let’s proceed like idiots; let’s take this title literally and ask ourselves a question, not the question, “what can we learn about TV from Lacan’s teaching?” which would get us on the wrong path of so-called applied psychoanalysis, but the inverse question, “what can we learn about Lacan’s teaching from the TV phenomenon?” At first sight, this seems as absurd as the well-known Hegelian proposition defining phrenology, “the spirit is the bone”: the equalization of the most sublime, (...) elusive theory with the vulgar mass-cultural phenomenon. But perhaps, as in the Hegelian proposition, there is a “speculative truth” beneath the obvious banality – perhaps certain peculiarities of the American TV program allow us to grasp the fundamental Lacanian proposition that psychoanalysis is not a psychology: the most intimate beliefs – even the most intimate emotions such as compassion, crying, sorrow, laughter – can be transferred, delegated to others without losing their sincerity. (shrink)

In our Politically Correct times, it is fashionable to discern homosexuality in the musical texture of some classic composers and thus redeem them - there are, for example, totally unconvincing and ridiculous readings of Schubert: he must have been gay, because his music is non-aggressive/penetrative/phallic, full of soft passages... In the case of Eugene Onegin, however, we stand on a much more firm ground. In the Fall of 1876 Tchaikovsky informed his closest family members of his intention to marry—a typical (...) hysterical passage à l’acte, an act of ethical betrayal, of compromising one’s desire, i.e., a desperate attempt to thwart his homosexuality. Half a year later, the eagerly awaited “answer of the Real” came—Antonina Milyukova, his piano student a couple of years before, wrote to him, declaring that she was in love with him ever since. Tchaikovsky tactfully but firmly rejected her, and, at this precise moment, he threw himself into composing Eugene Onegin. As he later admitted, from this moment onwards, fact and fiction became inextricably entangled: he identified with Tatyana’s love for Onegin and was outraged at Onegin’s moralistic rejection, perceiving it as equal to his own rejection of Antonina. Consequently, he contacted Antonina again, telling her bluntly that he doesn’t love her, but is ready to marry her; he then left Antonina to make all the wedding preparations, while he escaped Moscow to a friend’s country estate, where he composed two thirds of the opera in five weeks. What followed is well known: the honeymoon was a nightmare, the desperate Tchaikovsky tried suicide and then quickly left his wife for a long tour of Western Europe. (shrink)

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran (...) crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now? There are many versions of last month’s events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western ‘reform movement’, something along the lines of the colour-coded revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. They support the protests as a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution, as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic Iran freed from Muslim fundamentalism. They are countered by sceptics who think that Ahmadinejad actually won, that he is the voice of the majority, while Mousavi’s support comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. Let’s face facts, they say: in Ahmadinejad, Iran has the president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the clerical establishment whose differences from Ahmadinejad are merely cosmetic. He too wants to continue with the atomic energy programme, is against recognising Israel, and when he was prime minister in the repressive years of the war with Iraq enjoyed the full support of Khomeini. Finally, and saddest of all, are the leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad. What is at stake for them is Iranian freedom from imperialism. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed corruption among the elite and used Iran’s oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority. This, we are told, is the true Ahmadinejad: the Holocaust-denying fanatic is a creation of the Western media. In this view, what’s been happening in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a coup, financed by the West, against the legitimate premier. This not only ignores the facts, it also assumes, patronisingly, that Ahmadinejad is good enough for the backward Iranians: they aren’t yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular left. Opposed to one another though they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests as a conflict between Islamic hardliners and pro-Western liberal reformists. That is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants to increase people’s freedom and introduce a market economy, or a member of the clerical establishment whose victory wouldn’t significantly change the nature of the regime? Either way, the true nature of the protests is being missed. (shrink)

The reactions to my Lenin-book for the most part move between the standard liberal anti-Communism – how do I dare to rehabilitate a mass murderer, etc. – and an apparently more friendly, but, with regard to its consequences, much more dangerous “friendly” reception, which performs a domestification of my theory, its transformation into “provocations” which are not really “meant seriously,” but aim at awakening us from the democratic-dogmatic slumber and thus contribute to the revitalization of democracy… This is how the (...) establishment likes “subversive” theorists to be: turned into harmless gadflies who bite us and thus awaken us to inconsistencies and imperfection of our democratic enterprise – God forbid us to take their project seriously and try to LIVE them. Both reactions are totally predictable and, as such, not very interesting. When, as a reply to my thesis on Lenin’s missed chances, I read: “Sure, he could have murdered whole Russian nation along with some neighbors”; when one reacts to my commentary on Lenin with “We could just as easy comment in such a way Mein Kampf”; then such style of critique cannot but remind me of my youth in Socialist Yugoslavia where I was unemployed for years and never allowed to teach, and where my reference to Freud and Lacan was greeted by exactly the same words as those of one of my critics: “It would be embarrassingly funny if it wasn’t dangerous.” All I can say to this is that I sincerely welcome the rejection of my book by people who are able to write such slanderous lies: if they were to display even a minimum of sympathy for my work, I would be morally deeply ashamed. (shrink)

The opposition between Kant and Rorty with regard to the distinction of public and private is rarely noted, but nonetheless crucial: they both sharply distinguish between the two domains, but in the opposite sense. For Rorty, the great contemporary liberal if there ever was one, private is the space of our idiosyncrasies where creativity and wild imagination rule, and moral considerations are suspended, while public is the space of social interaction where we should obey the rules so that we do (...) not hurt others; in other words, the private is the space of irony, while the public is the space of solidarity. For Kant, however, the public space of the “world-civil-society” designates the paradox of the universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, by-passing the mediation of the particular, directly participates in the Universal. This is what Kant, in the famous passage of his “What is Enlightenment?”, means by “public” as opposed to “private”: “private” is not individual as opposed to one’s communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification, while “public” is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason. The paradox of the underlying formula “Think freely, but obey!” is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the “public” sphere precisely as singular individual extracted from or even opposed to one’s substantial communal identification—one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities. It is Kant who should be read here as the critic of Rorty: in his vision of the public space of the unconstrained free exercise of Reason, he asserts the dimension of emancipatory universality OUTSIDE the confines of one’s social identity, of one’s position within the order of being—the dimension missing in Rorty. (shrink)

A radical new take on a perennial question in philosophy - can we ever be free? - by one of the world's most famous living philosophers.

How are we to locate Josef Fritzl, the Austrian monster who had her daughter imprisoned for a quarter of century and, after thousands of rapes, had many children with her? Hegel was fully aware of how the weight of an event provided by its symbolic inscription “sublates” its immediate reality – in his Philosophy of History, he provided a wonderful characterization of Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian war: “In the Peloponnesian War, the struggle was essentially between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides (...) has left us the history of the greater part of it, and his immortal work is the absolute gain which humanity has derived from that contest.” One should read this judgment in all its naivety: in a way, from the standpoint of the world history, the Peloponnesian war took place so that Thucydides could write a book on it. The term “absolute” should be given here all its weight: from the relative point of our finite human interests, the numerous real tragedies of the Peloponnesian war are, of course, infinitely more important than a book, but from the standpoint of the Absolute, it is the book that matters. (shrink)

The predominance of religiously justified violence can be accounted for by the very fact that we live in an era that perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes can no longer be used to incite mass violence, that is, since our hegemonic ideology calls on us to enjoy life and to realise our Selves, it is difficult for the majority to overcome their revulsion at torturing and killing another human being. The majority would need to be 'anaesthetised' against their (...) elementary sensitivity to the suffering of others in order to do this. Religious ideologists usually claim that religion makes some otherwise bad people do some good things; from today's experience, one should give more weight to Steven Weinreich's claim that, while without religion good people would do good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. (shrink)

In his review of Badiou's Ethics, Terry Eagleton wrote: There is a paradox in the idea of transformation. If a transformation is deep-seated enough, it might also transform the very criteria by which we could identify it, thus making it unintelligible to us. But if it is intelligible, it might be because the transformation was not radical enough. If we can talk about the change then it is not full-blooded enough; but if it is full-blooded enough, it threatens to fall (...) outside our comprehension. Change must presuppose continuity - a subject to whom the alteration occurs - if we are not to be left merely with two incommensurable states; but how can such continuity be compatible with revolutionary upheaval? [1] The properly Hegelian solution to this dilemma is that a truly radical change is self-relating: it changes the very coordinates by means of which we measure change. In other words, a true change sets its own standards: it can only be measured by criteria that result from it. (shrink)

The measure of the true love for a philosopher is that one recognizes traces of his concepts all around in one's daily experience. Recently, while watching again Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, I noticed a wonderful detail in the coronation scene at the beginning of the first part: when the two closest friends of Ivan pour golden coins from the large plates onto his newly anointed head, this veritable rain of gold cannot but surprise the spectator by its magically excessive (...) character - even after we see the two plates almost empty, we cut to Ivan's head on which golden coins "nonrealistically" continue to pour in a continuing flow. Is this excess not very "Deleuzian"? Is it not the excess of the pure flow of becoming over its corporeal cause, of the virtual over the actual? (shrink)

The Return of the Political Economy. If value, as the abstraction of use value, as real abstraction, is at the very beginning of conceptual thought, it implies an idealistic representation of society. Hegel’s logic is not however that of Marx’s Capital. It is rather a mystifying expression of the real inversion, between man and thing, of a subjectivity that is immerged in a substantial totality and which is to be understood in materialistic terms : Spirit is a substance that subsists (...) only through the activity of the subjects engaged in it. Such is the process of capital. Communism emerges only through its failures to actualize itself fully. This is the starting point for a consideration of material labor and rent. (shrink)