Sunday, November 13, 2011
Saturday, November 12, 2011
“Lacanian Axioms: Psychoanalysis and Politics”
Starts: Feb 09, 2012 06:00 PM
Finishes: Mar 15, 2012 08:30 PM
Location: Birkbeck, University of London
Event description
World renowned scholar, Slavoj Žižek, teaches for the first time in the Department of Psychosocial Studies. His module, Lacanian Axioms: Psychoanalysis and Politics, is open to students on the MA Psychosocial Studies and the MA Psychoanalysis, History and Culture.
The Silent Voice of a New Beginning
Event Date: 20 November 2011
Clore Lecture Theatre B01
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX
Slavoj Žižek
The Silent Voice of a New Beginning
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Birkbeck, Summer 2012
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/activities/lcts
London Critical Theory Summer School 2012
11th June - 22nd June
The 2012 London Critical Theory Summer School will take place at Birkbeck from 11th June - 22nd June. This unique opportunity is for graduate students and academics to follow a course of study and to foster exchange and debate. It will consist of at least 6 modules over the two weeks, each convened by one of the participating academics. This course does not offer transfer of credits.
Participating Academics will include:
Etienne Balibar
Wendy Brown
Drucilla Cornell
Costas Douzinas
Stephen Frosh
Esther Leslie
Gayatri Spivak
Slavoj Žižek
The Conversation: Slavoj Žižek
Posted by Smiley and West on November 4, 2011 at 10:03am in The Conversation
Audio of interview:
http://smileyandwest.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=6295872%3ATopic%3A223054
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
From the Afterword to Platonov's Soul and Other Stories
Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman
New York Review Books
From the Afterword, by John Berger
from p. 310: "The poor are collectively unseizable. They are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere and the smallest event speaks of them. This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls--walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens."
from p. 312: "The world today is suffering from another form of modern poverty. No need to quote the figures; they are widely known and repeating them only makes another wall of statistics. More than half the world population live with less than $2 a day. Local cultures, with their partial remedies--both physical and spiritual--for some of life's afflictions, are being systematically destroyed or attacked. The new technology and means of communication, the free-market economy, productive abundance, parliamentary democracy, are failing, so far as the poor are concerned, to keep any of their promises beyond that of the supply of certain cheap consumerist goods, which the poor can buy when they steal."
from p. 313: "Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity."
from p. 317: "The multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed, and they have the capacity to outlive the walls.
The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: Democracy, Liberty, Productivity, etc.
With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a process of questioning. Soon? Within a generation.
Meanwhile, the answers abound in the multitudes; multiple ingenuities for getting by, their refusal of frontiers, their search for holes in the walls, their adoration of children, their readiness when necessary to become martyrs, their belief in continuity, their recurring acknowledgment that life's gifts are small and priceless."