Sunday, August 12, 2012
Saturday, August 11, 2012
A centralized location for your leftist literature
Slavoj Žižek Compendium
1992, Enjoy Your Symptom!
1995, Mapping Ideology
1997, The Abyss of Freedom
1997, The Plague of Fantasies
1999, The Ticklish Subject
Chto Delat Summer Educational Program, August 20—23, 2012
Monday, August 20
National Center of Contemporary Art
Moscow, Zoologicheskaya, 13
11.00—14.30
– Mladen Dolar, OFFICERS, MAIDS AND CHIMNEY SWEEPERS
– Slavoj Žižek, WHY PSYCHOANALYSIS MATTERS MORE THAN EVER
16.00—18.30 – THE URGENCY OF THOUGHT: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, PSYCHOANALYSIS (panel discussion)
National Center of Contemporary Art
Moscow, Zoologicheskaya, 13
11.00—14.30
– Mladen Dolar, OFFICERS, MAIDS AND CHIMNEY SWEEPERS
– Slavoj Žižek, WHY PSYCHOANALYSIS MATTERS MORE THAN EVER
16.00—18.30 – THE URGENCY OF THOUGHT: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, PSYCHOANALYSIS (panel discussion)
Chinese Pilot Jao Da (Lubyansky proyezd, 25)
22.00 – Concert by the band Arkady Kots
22.00 – Concert by the band Arkady Kots
Tuesday, August 21
Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences
Moscow, Volkhonka, 14
15.00—18.00 – Slavoj Žižek, IS IT STILL POSSIBLE TO BE A HEGELIAN TODAY? (lecture introduced by Mladen Dolar)
Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences
Moscow, Volkhonka, 14
15.00—18.00 – Slavoj Žižek, IS IT STILL POSSIBLE TO BE A HEGELIAN TODAY? (lecture introduced by Mladen Dolar)
Wednesday, August 22
European University in St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Gagarinskaya, 3
17.00—19.00 – Mladen Dolar, WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS AN ATOM?
20.00 – Chto Delat film screening
European University in St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Gagarinskaya, 3
17.00—19.00 – Mladen Dolar, WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS AN ATOM?
20.00 – Chto Delat film screening
Thursday, August 23
European University in St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Gagarinskaya, 3
12.00—14.00 – Slavoj Žižek, WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF POST-IDEOLOGY
16.00—19.00 – IS THERE A REASON IN HISTORY? STATE AND REVOLUTION
European University in St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Gagarinskaya, 3
12.00—14.00 – Slavoj Žižek, WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF POST-IDEOLOGY
16.00—19.00 – IS THERE A REASON IN HISTORY? STATE AND REVOLUTION
TODAY (panel discussion)
* Advance registration required to attend the events at the
European University in St. Petersburg: e-mail sociopol@eu.spb.ru or
phone +7 812 3867633
* Advance registration required to attend the events at
the National Centre of Contemporary Art in Moscow: e-mail pr@ncca.ru or
phone +7 (499) 254 84 92
* For all organizational questions and press inquiries,
phone +7 903 5931935or e-mail oxana_san@yahoo.com
* All events in Moscow (August 20-21) will be accompanied by
translation
* All events in St. Petersburg (August 22-23) will be
conducted in English
Liberal Communists
Excerpt from “The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counter
Culture, and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World by Luke Dormehl – review”
A genial account of the rise of Apple fails to probe the
company's cultural significance
[…]
Slavoj Žižek, in Violence – his analysis of the brutality at the heart of
capitalism – identifies "liberal communists" as
"counter-cultural geeks who take over big corporations". He looks at
the role of the hackers – once subversive and anti-establishment – and how they
were co-opted into the capitalist system through a kind of corporate
doublespeak that allowed them to marry their liberal, egalitarian ideals to the
cold machine of the market economy. He doesn't mention Jobs by name, but the
description of the "liberal communist" fits the Apple founder neatly:
"Liberal communists do not want to be just machines for generating
profits. They want their lives to have a deeper meaning. They are against
old-fashioned religion, but for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation."
Jobs, remember, could fit his legs behind his head. The only book he downloaded
on to his iPad? Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.
Žižek identifies these "liberal communists" with
industrial barons of yesteryear such as Andrew Carnegie, who "employed a
private army brutally to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then
distributed large parts of his wealth to educational, artistic and humanitarian
causes". The "liberal communist" is more threatening than the
sharp-suited Goldman Sachs banker precisely because he is shape-shifting,
slippery, using the language and semiotics of the counter-culture while firmly upholding
the establishment, raking in billions with one hand while getting on
stage with Bono (who,
ridiculously, called Jobs "the Elvis of the kind of hardware-software
dialectic") to lament the world's poor.
[…]
Letter from the Syrian Border
An on-the-ground report from the growing Syrian refugee
camps in Turkey.
YAYLADAG, Turkey (On the Syrian border)—Yasser Jani huddles
in a tiny sliver of shade. He wants to escape from the heat and crowding and an
uncertain future. But the small patch of trees just outside the camp for Syrian
refugees here didn’t offer one and his face shows it.
“Most of the people here are hopeless,” says the short,
middle-aged Syrian, who taught high school science before fleeing last year
with his wife, two small children, mother and brother. “They lost their homes,
their work, and their money and they don’t know anything about their future,”
he said.
“And I feel the same way,” he flatly adds.
As Syria boils, its diaspora lives in disparate worlds of
faith and despair, of denial and acceptance, and many places in between. The
young bodybuilder whose stomach was plugged with bullets from Syrian soldiers
nurtures old dreams while the husband, whose seventh-month pregnant wife was
killed as they were fleeing, is frozen in shock.
Daily the specter grows of yet another massive population of
uprooted and wounded souls in the Arab world.
Already more than 112,000 refugees are jammed in camps in
Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, with thousands more are surviving on their
own in these countries. Many more Syrians appear ready to join these ranks and
flee their country as the fighting grows fiercer in Syria’s largest cities.
Dr. Moustafa, a Syrian psychiatrist now living in the United
Kingdom who would not give his last name, worries about the indelible scars
that he says will last long beyond any resolution to the crisis. The only
Syrian psychiatrist on hand here, he is forced to flit from camp to camp,
dealing with panic-stricken refugees, dispensing medication and trying to
measure the depth of the problem.
Yasser Jani is one of those refugees living somewhere
between hope and darkness. Despite his frustration about spending the last year
in the small, crowded camp, where he complains about the daily inconveniences,
he has helped out with classes for young children. It’s all he can do, he adds.
Likewise, Ahmed Hassoun, 56, follows the same daily routine,
which gives him meaning in Antakya, a large city in southeastern Turkey, where
many Syrians have gathered. A lawyer from Idlib in northwestern Syria, where
the fighting has been intense, Hassoun puts on a clean shirt and well-pressed
dark pants early in the morning in an almost empty apartment, where he lives
with his children, and heads to an office where he works with another 20 Syrian
refugee lawyers. His wife stayed behind in Syria.
He gets no pay for his work. None of the lawyers do. But
they have gathered daily, meeting with clients and taking careful notes for the
last month and a half. Their goal is to produce an accurate and detailed
account of the abuses suffered by Syrians under the Assad regime. They hope to
turn it over to the International Criminal Court or to a court in Syria when
they return, he explains.
They are also working with attorneys within Syria to compile
their records.
From the handful of refugees, who visit the office daily to
tell their stories or the stories of others who are too ashamed, as is the case
for female rape victims, or too overwhelmed to personally recount the events,
they have catalogued more than 30 kinds of torture, and at least 1,500 rapes,
some of them in groups.
His records show that Syrian torturers use metal and wooden
sticks and often electricity on their victims. They also use acid and it is not
unusual for victims to die of their burns and wounds, he says.
Soldiers caught escaping, “are executed right away by gun or
they slaughter them with knifes,” he says.
As a fellow attorney sitting beside Hassoun coolly recalls
seeing someone beaten to death on the street by Syrian soldiers with a rock,
Hassoun adds softly, “I feel terrible when I hear these stories.”
Many of the tortures that Hassoun has been recording were
suffered by Dr. Mohammed Sheik Ibrahim, 38, a soft-spoken pediatrician, who
didn’t want to leave Syria even after eight months in prison.
“They put me in a small cell for 28 days and they
interrogated me four times a day for an hour or two each time. Or they would
make me stand for hours. They beat me. They used wooden sticks and metal
sticks,” he says. “I heard them raping women and girls in the rooms nearby.”
When Ibrahim came home to Latakia from prison, he continued
to speak out to his clients, colleagues and anyone else about the regime’s
abuses. “I wasn’t afraid,” he explains. Then one day a high-ranking official
warned him that his life was in danger. He fled the next day, nearly nine
months ago.
Ibrahim has since been working with injured fighters in
Turkey from the Free Syrian Army. When thousands of fellow Turkmens from Syria
poured across the border recently, driven by aerial attacks, he rushed to the
camp that Turkish officials quickly set up for them here in Yayladag.
He is committed, he says, to work with the fighters and
follow them into Syria when they launch a large battle. His father has asked
him not to go, fearing for his life, but he remains determined to go with the
fighters, he says.
He explains that he is a doctor treating one wound after
another with no end in sight.
“When I am fixing them (the soldiers), I tell myself that
Bashar Assad is the man with the knife and he is the one causing all of these
wounds,” he says intensely, moving his arms, and raising his voice.
Like Ibrahim, Dr. Khaula Sawah knows much about the
refugees’ medical needs, because she has been organizing the help coming from
expatriate Syrians medical experts like herself. The expats arrive here in
waves from across Europe, the United States and the Arab world. They stay
several weeks and leave. Many return.
Sawah also works on finding medical supplies needed inside
of Syria. A clinical pharmacist at a Cincinnati hospital, she has come to
southeastern Turkey five times this year so far for this kind of work. This
time she brought her two sons along with her.
Born in St. Louis, Sawah moved as a child to Syria with her
Syrian-born parents. When her father was put in prison by the government, the
family waited 12 years in Syria until he was released.
Now vice-president of the Turkish branch of the Union of
Syrian Medical Relief Organizations, Sawah has lately been filling up a small
warehouse with medicine and then finding safe ways to smuggle it into Syria.
“The needs are humungous,” she says. “We’ll pitch in
$100,000 worth of medicine (in Syria) and it is gone in a few days.”
At the warehouse—the basement of a nearby apartment house in
Reyhanli—people are unpacking a new delivery of blood absorbing bandages.
A U.S. manufacturer had donated the supplies, worth nearly $500,000, Sawah
says.
From visits to the Turkish-run camps as well as clinics that
the Syrian physicians have set up, she is familiar with the refugees’ frustration.
It’s been especially difficult, she says, for those
who didn’t want to live in the camps because of their stark conditions or
isolation. As a result, they struck out on their own, renting apartments and
often doubling up with other families. In many places, rents doubled with the
refugees’ arrival, the refugees say.
“They are all illegal and they don’t have any rights,” she
explains. Soon they run out money and then discover that can’t get help at the
Turkish hospitals because they are not registered. “I just got a call from a
woman who went to the state hospital and said they wouldn’t check up her
child.”
But the greatest discontent, she says, is felt by those who
have been in the camps the longest. It wells up into squabbles between groups
and complaints about conditions. Indeed, there have been three disturbances in
refugee camps by Syrians asking for refrigerators, or water and food. Turkish
security forces used tear gas and fired bullets into the air to calm an
uprising at one camp.
But Sawah has also seen the way the refugees have struggled
to accommodate each other and adjust to a future on hold. Some have set up
small stores in the camps to earn money and make life more hospitable. And at
overcrowded clinics, older patients have given up their beds and slept on the
floor to make room for new arrivals.
At the Yayladag camp, where a recent fire took the lives of
a newlywed couple who had arrived only a few days earlier, Yasser Jani worries
about the young children who he says need more food and clothing, and the
teenagers who need a school. He worries too about the women who have to put up
with a lack of privacy and other difficulties.
After the fire at the camp, an old factory warehouse minutes
from the Syrian border, Turkish officials talked of moving the refugees to
another camp. But overcome by the arrival of as many as 1,000 refugees a day
and the need to open at least two more camps, the camp here has stayed open.
Privately, Jani worries about not having money and what’s
ahead. But on another day in the low 100s, he worries about just catching his
breath. Most nights he cannot sleep because of the heat.
“But I’m trying to make my life better,” he adds.
Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others
by Juan Cole
1. White terrorists are
called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun?
Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other terrorists are called, like,
“terrorists.”
2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists
are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are
obviously troubled loners.
3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the
Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined
by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a
guaranteed promotion.
4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as
they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost
never interviewed.
5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists
are apparently mainstream.
6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other
terrorists are long-running conspiracies.
7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other
terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.
8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white
people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.
9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill.
Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.
Voter ID laws: the Republican ruse to disenfranchise 5 million Americans
Under the guise of fighting nonexistent voter fraud, the GOP
is attempting the greatest election-stealing conspiracy in US history
By Alex Slater
In Washington, conventional wisdom is everything. It's the
driver of perceptions, and often of self-fulfilling political prophecies.
That's why you might notice a guarded confidence amongst the Obama campaign
these past few weeks: generally speaking, most realistic experts predict a
victory for the president in this November's election.
This perception is reinforced by current polling, some of
the most recent being published by Quinnipiac University, the New York Times
and CBS News, giving
President Obama an edge over Romney in key states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Certainly, it will be
a tight race, but by any realistic standard, the money is on Obama to pull out
a victory, even narrowly.
But it's exactly the likely closeness of the race that may
turn Washington's conventional wisdom on its head on election day. That's
because, until relatively recently, political experts and journalists have been
oblivious to a widespread and pernicious phenomenon occurring in many critical
swing states – one that, unless checked, could erase Obama's electoral edge.
This phenomenon takes the form of a spate
of new voter laws: efforts by Republican governors and
Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass restrictive new voting rules
just in time for election day. As a result, at least 5 million Americans could
essentially lose their right to vote, according to the non-partisan Brennan
Center in New York.
It's no surprise that these laws are almost uniformly
designed to disenfranchise young people and minorities – the very demographics
that make up part of Obama's base. And 5 million votes flagrantly stolen from
the Democrats, especially in the
swing states where Obama currently has the edge, could easily spell a Romney
victory.
The Republican strategy here is simply too blatant to be
believed, hence the relatively muted press coverage on the issue. Indeed, while
Republican lawmakers have been busy undermining the basic rights of Americans
for months now, it was not until recent weeks that the
New York Times and Washington Post started paying attention.
As well they should, because it's no exaggeration to say
that the results of these partisan tactics could make the Floridian
recount of 2000 look like a minor political spat. We're looking at an
election doomsday scenario that could eclipse any political scandal in American
history.
Hyperbole? Not when you examine the new laws more closely.
The legislation being passed by Republicans across the
country takes various forms, all designed to stop likely Obama voters casting
ballots.
The most common tactic is to heavily restrict the types of
identification required at polling stations. In Pennsylvania, for example, that
means requiring all voters to presentvery
limited types of ID only available from the state's department of
transportation. Since many inner-city voters don't drive, or many young voters
have out-of-state driver's licenses, these likely Obama voters will all be
stopped dead in their tracks before they reach the polling booth. The problem
is so severe that the state of Pennsylvania itself has admitted that nearly 10%
of voters do not have the required identification. In Philadelphia, an Obama stronghold,
that figure is closer to 20%. Attorney
General Eric Holder summed it up perfectly when he called these voter
ID measures the equivalent of a "poll tax", at the NAACP summit in
July.
In Florida, where history proves that less than 1,000 votes
can swing a national election, the efforts to stop minorities and the poor from
voting are not just limited to new voter identification laws. In fact, voter
registration drives have been banned, and early voting, thought to favor
Democrats, has been significantly curtailed. Even more worrying is Governor
Rick Scott's attempt simply to remove Obama voters from the election rolls. In
May, Scott ordered a purge of his state's voter lists, based on drivers'
license records, which he acknowledged to be deeply flawed.
As a result, the state's division of elections initially
found a mind-boggling 180,000 "ineligible voters" by performing a
search of a computer database with inaccurate information. Yet, the purge goes
on: the Miami Herald found that 58% of the people in a sample of 2,700
"ineligible" voters were Hispanic, and 14% were black. Whites and
Republicans were least likely to be barred from voting. Even a second world war
veteran was told he was not a citizen and so
to stay away from the voting booth.
Of course, Republicans justify their efforts to suppress the
vote by arguing that they're simply preventing illegal voting. That sounds
entirely fair – until you consider that the proven occurrence of voter fraud is
almost non-existent. In fact, not a single person has ever been prosecuted for
voting illegally. Yet, the public seems ambivalent about voter ID laws, which
is why similar dirty tricks continue, taking various forms in other competitive
states such as Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
Luckily, progressive groups and the federal government are
pushing back. In
Pennsylvania, groups like the Advancement Project and the
ACLU have filed suit on behalf of 38 plaintiffs, challenging the
constitutionality of the new laws in state courts. The Advancement Project is
also intervening in Wisconsin, fighting the fact that 78% of young
African-American men lack the appropriate ID to vote, for example. The US
department of justice is also intervening in Pennsylvania and other
states, questioning whether new laws disproportionately discriminate against
minorities. And the Obama campaign is acutely aware of the danger, with dozens
of staffers in the campaign headquarters and out in the field monitoring daily
developments in every critical state.
These counter-efforts are critical, yet the fear among
Democrats is that they may not be sufficient to stop the new laws taking effect
before the election. That is a significant danger, not only to the legitimacy
of the results of the presidential race, but for the very core of America's
democratic process. And, of course, it highlights the need for uniform
standards across the country that guarantee free and fair elections.
That's a battle for a later date. For now, we can only hope
that voters will get wise to the Republican tactics and make every effort to make their voices heard on 6 November.
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