Tuesday, May 3, 2011

From: backdoorbroadcasting.net

Slavoj Žižek – Screening Thought: The Media’s Philosophical Problem






Event date: 4 May 2011
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH


Slavoj Žižek

Screening Thought: The Media’s Philosophical Problem


Continental philospher Slavoj Žižek and Paul A. Taylor

(author of Žižek and The Media) explore the difficulty

of conveying philosophical ideas within today’s media.

Increasingly, intelligence is only tolerated in pre-approved

and reassuringly non-challenging forms – deprecatory

humour (Stephen Fry), decaffeinated reasoning

(Alain de Botton), or suspiciously grand narratives

(Simon Schama). Žižek himself is constantly

pigeonholed by such media clichés as

‘the Elvis of cultural theory’ and

‘the Marx Brother’. This event sets out to question

‘what can be done?’ by serious thought in a

culture of sound bites. Is the best that media

philosophers can hope for to ‘Try again, fail again, fail better’?

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