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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