Thursday, October 4, 2012

Žižek at Toronto City Hall



by Benjamin Bruneau, ARTINFO Canada


An island of enraptured silence floated amidst the sea of noise, crowds, and Scotiabank Nuit Blanche revelry at Toronto City Hall, Saturday night, as the Council Chambers played host to international superstar theorist Slavoj Žižek.

Nominally part of curators Janine Marchessault and Michael Prokopow’s "Museum for the End of the World," Žižek and co-presenters Arthur Kroker and Brenda Longfellow spoke about technology, biology, politics, and capital, as the world as we know it surely pushes towards some kind of termination.

Žižek was in absolute top form, rhapsodizing at length -- nearly two-and-a-half hours -- to a rapturous, mostly young audience, which nearly rioted when city officials tried to oust members from the aisles and stairways. Bemusedly, Žižek admonished their squeaky-wheel tactics: “If I were you, I’d have agreed and said, ‘Yes, it’s terrible, people shouldn’t make themselves a fire hazard’. And then I’d have stayed put.”

His wide-ranging talk moved from prohibited activities to ethnic cleansing, the cynicism of authority, Facebook and the invasion of the public by the private, internet hard-core pornography, and Casablanca, all in his trademark blend of candor, pop culture, and critical theory.

In keeping with the apocalyptic thematic, he concluded that we are entering a new epoch in humanity, and that, “effectively, the very basic dimension of what it is to be human is changing. In this sense, it’s the end of the world as we know it.” Not one to give-in to despair -- but not one to be overly optimistic, either -- Zizek said that the new human is “radically open to possibility,” but that “if we let things change the way they are, automatically, we are approaching a new, perverse, permissively authoritarian society, which will be authoritarian but in a new way.”

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