Wednesday, December 14, 2011
CITY ARTS & LECTURES, 23 April, 2012
http://cityarts.net/event/slavoj-zizek-boris-gunjevic/
CITY ARTS & LECTURES
LIVE AND ON PUBLIC RADIO
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK & BORIS GUNJEVIC
In Conversation with Roy Eisenhardt
Venue:
Series: Social Studies
Buy Tickets: 415.392.4400
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. His books include Living in the End Times, In Defense of Lost Causes, and four volumes of the Essential Žižek. The forthcoming God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse is a brilliant dissection and reconstruction of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism where, along with co-author Boris Gunjévic, Žižek employs Hegelian and Lacanian analysis to show how each faith understands humanity and divinity — and how the differences between them may be far stranger than they may at first seem. Last summer, the Marxist theorist even managed to bridge the gap between intellectual discourse and the gossip of the New York Post’s “Page Six” when it was reported that he and Lady Gaga spent time discussing feminism and collective human creativity. The rumors were false, but Žižek’s popularity outside traditional academic circles is undeniable thanks to his interest in contemporary issues and keen sense of humor. He is a professor at the
The Croatian Theologian Boris Gunjevic serves as a lecturer in ethics at the Biblijski Institut in
The Paradox of Liberalism
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/11/22/3373316.htm
“Liberalism as Politics for a Race of Devils,” Slavoj Žižek
For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the desire to subject people to an ethical ideal - which is regarded as universal and thus universally binding - is the mother of all crimes, "the crime which contains all crimes," for it amounts to the brutal imposition of one's own view onto others, and is thus the root cause of civil disorder.
This is why, liberals claim, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first pre-condition is to get rid of any moral temptation: politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered "realistic," taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not on moral exhortations.
The paradigm here, in many ways, is the way that the market operates: human nature is egotistic and there is no way to change it, so what is needed is a mechanism that would make private vices work for common good. In his famous essay on "Perpetual Peace," Immanuel Kant provided a precise formulation of this key mechanism:
"Many say a republic would have to be a nation of angels, because men with their selfish inclinations are not capable of a constitution of such sublime form. But precisely with these inclinations nature comes to the aid of the general will established on reason, which is revered even though impotent in practice. Thus it is only a question of a good organization of the state (which does lie in man's power), whereby the powers of each selfish inclination are so arranged in opposition that one moderates or destroys the ruinous effect of the other. The consequence for reason is the same as if none of them existed, and man is forced to be a good citizen even if not a morally good person.
The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The problem is: 'Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.'
A problem like this must be capable of solution; it does not require that we know how to attain the moral improvement of men but only that we should know the mechanism of nature in order to use it on men, organizing the conflict of the hostile intentions present in a people in such a way that they must compel themselves to submit to coercive laws. Thus a state of peace is established in which laws have force."
One should follow Kant's line of thought to its conclusion: a fully self-conscious liberal should intentionally limit his altruistic readiness to sacrifice his own good for the good of others, aware that the most efficient way to act for the common good is to follow his private egotism. Here we have the logical obverse of the motto "private vices, public benefits" - namely, "private goodness, public disaster."
There is in liberalism, from its very beginning, a tension between individual freedom and the objective mechanisms which regulate the behaviour of a crowd, as was already observed by Benjamin Constant who clearly formulated this tension: everything is moral in individuals, but everything is physical in crowds; everybody is free as individual, but a cog in a machine in a crowd.
The inner tension of this project is discernible in two aspects of liberalism: market liberalism and political liberalism. As Jean-Claude Michea has brilliantly argued, these two aspects of liberalism are linked to two political meanings of "Right": the political Right insists on market economy, the politically-correct Left insists on the defence of human rights - often its sole remaining raison d'etre.
Although the tension between these two aspects of liberalism is irreducible, they are nonetheless inextricably linked, like the two sides of the same coin.
And so, today, the meaning of "liberalism" swings between the two poles of economic liberalism (free market individualism, opposition to strong state regulation, and so on) and political liberalism or libertarianism (with the accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, and so on).
The point is that, while one cannot decide through some close analysis which is the "true" liberalism, one also cannot resolve the deadlock by way of trying to propose a kind of "higher" synthesis of the two, much less through some clear distinction between the two senses of the term.
The tension between the two meanings is inherent to the very content that "liberalism" endeavours to designate: it is constitutive of this notion, and so this ambiguity, far from signalling the limits of our understanding, points to the innermost "truth" of the notion of liberalism itself.
Traditionally, each "face" of liberalism necessarily appears as the opposite of the other face: liberal advocates of multiculturalist tolerance, as a rule, fight against economic liberalism and try to protect the vulnerable from the ravages of unencumbered market forces, while free-market liberals, as a rule, advocate conservative family values.
We thus get a kind of double paradox: the traditionalist Right supports the market economy while ferociously fighting the culture and mores it engenders; while its counterpoint, the multiculturalist Left, fights against the market (though less and less these days, as Michea notes) while enthusiastically enforcing the ideology it engenders.
(Today, it should be said, we seem to be entering a new era in which both aspects can be combined: figures like Bill Gates pose as market radicals and as multiculturalist humanitarians.)
Here we encounter the basic paradox of liberalism. An anti-ideological and anti-utopian stance is inscribed into the very heart of the liberal vision: liberalism conceives itself as a "politics of lesser evil," its ambition is to bring about the "least evil society possible," thus preventing greater evil, since it considers any attempt directly to impose a positive Good as the ultimate source of all evil.
Winston Churchill's quip about democracy being the worst of all political systems, with the exception of all the other, holds even better for liberalism. Such a view is sustained by a profound pessimism about human nature: man is egotistic and envious animal, if one builds a political system which appeals to his goodness and altruism, the result will be the worst kind terror (recall that both Jacobins and Stalinists presupposed human virtue).
However, the liberal critique of the "tyranny of the Good" comes at a price: the more its program permeates society, the more it turns into its opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser evil, once asserted as the principle of the new global order, gradually takes on the very features of the enemy it claims to oppose.
In fact, the global liberal order clearly presents itself as the best of all possible worlds: its modest rejection of utopias ends with imposing its own market-liberal utopia which will become reality when we subject ourselves to the mechanisms of the market and universal human rights.
But as every close observer of the deadlocks of political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral goodness - which should be relativised and historicized - ends up in a claustrophobic, oppressive moralism brimming with resentment.
Without any "organic" social substance grounding the standards of what George Orwell approvingly referred to as "common decency" (all such standards are dismissed as subordinating individual freedom to proto-Fascist organic social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended to do little more than prevent individuals from encroaching upon each other (annoying or "harassing" each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process of legalization and moralization, presented as "the fight against all forms of discrimination."
If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, just the bare fact of subjects "harassing" other subjects, then who - in the absence of such mores - will decide what counts as "harassment"?
For instance, in
The problem is here the obvious arbitrariness of the proliferation of these ever-new rules. Take child sexuality, for example: one can argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one can also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest against the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies, worry when someone condemns members of foreign cultures who live among us for doing exactly this (say, Roma preventing children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case of meddling with other "ways of life."
It is thus for necessary structural reasons that this "fight against discrimination" is an endless process endlessly postponing its final point: a society freed of all moral prejudices which, as Jean-Claude Michea puts it, "would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere."
The ideological coordinates of such a liberal multiculturalism are determined by the two features of our "postmodern" zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist historicism (all values and rights are historically specific, any elevation of them into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its most violent) and universalized "hermeneutics of suspicion" (all "high" ethical motifs are generated and sustained by "low" motifs of resentment and envy - say, the call to sacrifice one's life for a higher Cause is either a mask for manipulation by those who need war to sustain their power and wealth, or else a pathological expression of masochism - and this either/or is an inclusive vel, that is, both terms can be true at the same time).
There is a problem with this liberal vision of which every good anthropologist, psychoanalyst, or even perspicuous social critic like Francis Fukuyama, is aware: it cannot stand on its own, it is parasitic upon some preceding form of what is usually referred to as "socialization," which it simultaneously undermines, thereby cutting off the branch on which it is sitting.
In the market - and, more generally, in the social exchange based on the market - individuals encounter each other as free rational subjects, but such subjects are the result of a complex previous process which concerns symbolic debt, authority and, above all, trust.
In other words, the domain of exchanges is never purely symmetrical: it is an a priori condition for each of the participants to give something without return so that he can participate in the game of give-and-take. For market exchange to take place, there has to be subject here who participate in the basic symbolic pact and display a fundamental trust.
Of course, market is the domain of egotist cheating and lying; however, as Jacques Lacan taught us, in order for a lie to function, it has to present itself and be taken as truth - which is to say, the dimension of Truth has to be already established.
Kant missed the necessity of unwritten, disavowed, but necessary rules for every legal edifice or set of social rules - it is only such rules that provide the "substance" on which laws can thrive, or properly function. The exemplary case of the efficiency of such unwritten rules is the famed "potlatch."
In market exchange, the two complementary acts occur simultaneously (I pay and I get what I paid for), so that the act of exchange does not lead to a permanent social bond, but just a momentary exchange between atomized individuals who, immediately afterwards, return to their solitude.
In potlatch, on the contrary, the time elapsed between my giving a gift and the other side returning it to me creates a social link which lasts (for a time, at least): we are all linked together with bonds of debt. From this standpoint, money can be defined as the means which enable us to have contacts with others without entering in proper relations with them.
This atomized society in which we have contact with others without entering into proper relations with them, is the presupposition of liberalism. The problem of organizing a state thus cannot be solved "even for a race of devils," as Kant put it - the idea that it can be is the key moment of the liberal utopia.
One should link this Kantian reference to "a race of devils" to another aspect of his ethical thinking. According to Kant, if one finds oneself alone on the sea with another survivor of a sunken ship near a floating piece of wood which can keep only one person afloat, moral considerations are no longer valid - there is no moral law preventing me from fighting to the death with the other survivor for the place on the raft; I can engage in it with moral impunity.
It is here, perhaps, that one encounters the limit of Kantian ethics: what about someone who would willingly sacrifice himself in order to give the other person a chance to survive - and, furthermore, is willing to do it for non-pathological reasons? Since there is no moral law commanding me to do this, does this mean that such an act has no ethical status?
Does this strange exception not demonstrate that ruthless egotism, the care for personal survival and gain, is the silent "pathological" presupposition of Kantian ethics - namely, that the Kantian ethical edifice can only maintain itself if we silently presuppose the "pathological" image of man as a ruthless utilitarian egotist?
In exactly the same way, the Kantian political edifice, his notion of ideal legal power, can only maintain itself if we silently presuppose the "pathological" image of the subjects of this power as "a race of devils."
According to Kant, as I have already mentioned, the mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of individuals as well as of their merits: "The guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature (natura daedala rerum). In her mechanical course we see that her aim is to produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their discord."
And this is ideology at its purest. One can claim that the notion of ideology only became possible in the liberal universe, with its founding distinction between ordinary people immersed in their worlds of meaning - of (what appears from the properly modern perspective) the confusion between facts and values - and the cold, rational observers who are able to perceive the world the way it is, without moralistic prejudices, as a mechanism regulated by laws (of passions) like any other natural mechanism.
It is only in this modern universe that society appears as an object of a possible experiment, as a chaotic field on which one can (and should) apply a value-free theory or science given in advance - a political "geometry of passions," or economy, or racist science.
Only this modern position of a value-free scientist approaching society in the same way as a natural scientist approaches nature, is ideology proper, not the spontaneous attitude of the meaningful experience of life dismissed by the scientist as a set of superstitious prejudices - it is ideology because it imitates the form of natural sciences without really being one.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
US-China Trade Policy and the Class War in the US
http://www.truth-out.org/economic-conflicts-china-and-class-war-united-states/1323700465
12 December 2011
by: Dean Baker
The Commerce Department's release of trade figures last week showed another large deficit with China for October, albeit slightly lower than the record hit the previous month. This figure will renew the calls for stronger action against China.
Unfortunately, the debate over China is often buried in confusion, leading to a situation that is not conducive to effective action. A major reason for this confusion is that there is not a common US interest against China. The interests of the 99 percent differ greatly from the interests of the 1 percent. Until this fact is recognized more generally, there is no possibility that our economic relations with China will change in a way that benefits the vast majority of working people in the United States.
The central issue with China is the fact that the dollar is overvalued against the Chinese currency. This overvaluation is the result of the explicit Chinese policy of pegging its currency against the dollar.
The peg is often referred to as "manipulation," but it doesn't really fit the bill for two reasons. First, it is an official policy. China targets the value of its currency quite openly; it is not doing it in the middle of the night when no one is looking.
The second reason is that China's mechanism for targeting the value of its currency is something that on alternate days our Treasury actually requests. They buy up US government debt.
If this seems absurd, it should be, because it is. The way in which China keeps its currency down against the dollar (or keeps the dollar up against its currency) is by buying huge amounts of US government bonds.
The media often tells us that we need China to buy our debt. This is not true. There are plenty of other potential investors, including the Federal Reserve Board. However, we cannot both want China to buy US government debt and then complain about China's currency manipulation. This is how they "manipulate" their currency.
But the currency issue is only one of many complaints that routinely appear in the list of grievances against China. The longer list includes complaints that China doesn't respect the patents and copyrights of companies like Pfizer and Disney, they don't grant full access to financial giants like Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs and they put up barriers to retail chains like Wal-Mart that want to open up stores across China. These sorts of items are often lumped together with the undervaluation of the Chinese yuan to make a sort of economic indictment against the Chinese government.
One can argue the merits of each of these issues, but that doesn't have anything to do with the real world. There is no court where we are going to prosecute China for its economic wrongdoing. China is a huge, powerful country. Its gross domestic product (GDP) is nearly 80 percent of US GDP. By comparison, at its peak, the GDP of the Soviet Union may have been half as large as the GDP of the United States.
We are not ever going to be in a situation to dictate to China what it can and cannot do. We are going to have to negotiate with them as the equal that they are. This means that in order to get some concessions from China's government on issues that we care about, we will have to give up on other issues.
From this standpoint, the interests of those yelling about China's "pirating" of Pfizer and Disney's intellectual property are 180 degrees at odds with those concerned about the undervaluation of the yuan. If China gives up some ground in agreeing to stronger enforcement of US patents and copyrights, then it is going to give up less ground in agreeing to raise the value of its currency. Similarly, if China agrees to give Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs more access to its financial sector, it will be at the cost of progress on revaluing its currency.
The point is, that in pushing various demands in its negotiations with China, the Obama administration will be favoring certain interests to the detriment of others. The bulk of the working population has a clear interest in having a lower valued dollar.
If the dollar falls by 20 percent relative to the yuan, this would have roughly the same impact as imposing a 20 percent tariff on importing Chinese goods and giving out a 20 percent subsidy on exports to subsidy. Since the dollar is likely to fall against other currencies as well, this could go far toward bringing down the trade deficit, creating millions of relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs.
By contrast, Pfizer and Disney will see higher profits if China increases enforcement of their patents and copyrights, but this will provide little benefit to workers in the United States. Similarly, Goldman Sach's increased access to China's financial markets is not going to create jobs for workers in the United States.
In short, there is a very clear class divide in US negotiations with China. The 1 percent have their laundry list of special concerns that will make them even richer. The 99 percent care about a lower-valued currency to create millions of manufacturing jobs. We will see which side the Obama administration is on.
Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations
http://indecentbazaar.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/badiou-zizek-and-political-transformations/
The current political conjecture, after a long-running string of defeats for the Left, conveys an oppressive, immobilizing pessimism. According to Adrian Johnson in Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, the innovative experiments in emancipatory politics of the 20th century have not fared well. Given this scenario, “the era of revolutionary politics certainly looks to be over” (p. xiv). It is therefore difficult not to see capitalism nowadays as the only game in town; “the sole viable option available for organizing humanity’s multiple forms of group coexistence” (p. xxvii). How likely is it then that today’s political circumstances will remain imperious to abrupt ruptures and turns in history?
Given the established run of capitalism, Johnson detects two pitfalls to the present-day political situation: complacent quietism and hubristic utopianism. The first danger is overconfidence or the belief in historical teleologies proffering guarantees “to the effect that socialism can’t fail eventually to succeed” (p. xvi). In the view of economism, “the flow of sociohistorical trends inevitably will carry one effortlessly to the shores of a post-capitalist paradise” (p. xv). The dialectics of history, in other words, unambiguously point to a utopian society beyond capitalism.
This tall tale messianism, the sanguine faith in historical eventualism, however, has been steadily discredited by the lengthy string of losses suffered by the Left. The alternative response, what Johnson describes as the cheap-and-easy option, is underconfidence; that is, lapsing into total cynical despair and weariness given the ongoing series of disheartening defeats. The temptation of comfortable discouragement “fundamentally accepts that the partnership of liberal democratic state apparatuses and poorly regulated free markets indeed is here to stay” (p. xvi). The representatives of underconfidence therefore urge people to passively accept the unsurpassable enveloping limit of what remains historically possible and “resign themselves to refining what merely exists as already established” (p. xvi).
The third alternative to overconfident economic determinism and immobilizing despair is revolutionary ruptures, what Badiou calls an “event” and Žižek an “act”. For Badiou and Žižek global capitalism is not an inescapable enclosure. They plead for this acknowledgment on the basis that “the apparently impossible happened in the past [and] it will occur again in incalculable, unforeseeable forms in the future too” (p. xvii). Such reality-shattering shifts cannot however be anticipated by diagnosing already-present socioeconomic tensions, as traditional Marxist analysis would have it. On the contrary, they irrupt unexpectedly and rewrite the rules of what is and isn’t possible. Acts of insurrection, Johnson argues, are “untimely interventions that appear possible only after the fact of actually transpiring—and before which such interventions are impossible qua unimaginable in the eyes of the popular political imagination” (p. xviii).
Insomuch as Žižek delineates this untimely development of accidents avec Hegel, it is a quite new, heterodox understanding of the dialectic. The alternative use of the notion of dialectics posits history as a series of unexpected upheavals and twists, rather than a zigzagging but ultimately linear progress: “Žižek’s Hegelian Geist is an illusion of perspective floating atop a volatile historical-material mixture of contingencies and retroactions” (p. xix). To the lay mind there is much in the long-running cadence of variables and accidents that must appear miraculous, but the momentous abrupt turns of history are the non-miraculous outcomes of “unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignment of forces” unfolding throughout time (p. xix).
One can be excused for thinking that such explosive, subversive events that break away from and shatter the slow-moving inertia of status quo realities is altogether unrealistic and utopian, but it remains the case that buying into the notion that today’s established run of things is impervious to incalculable factors and unforeseen occurrences to come is the most utopian sentiment of all. In short, the conviction that the surprises around which historical times take shape are not exhausted is less naïve than the belief that our given situated reality is here to stay permanently.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Left Forum 2012
http://marx21.com/2011/11/17/left-forum-2012/
17 novembro, 2011
Pace University,
“Occupy The System: Confronting Global Capitalism”
Continuing a tradition begun in the 1960’s, Left Forum convenes the largest annual conference in the
Beginning with the celebrated Arab Spring and the explosive revolts in
Although it has been a long time coming, the
Against this inspiring background, the Left Forum will host its annual conference at
Once a year, the Left Forum creates a space to analyze the great political questions of our times. Activists, intellectuals, trade unionists, movement-builders and others come together to identify new strategies for broadening the anti-corporate capitalist movement. In the wake of a persistent crisis of the international economic and political system, a new left politics in the
leftforum.org | leftforum@leftforum.org
Early registration discounts are available for a limited time (e.g., students: $10)
For information on panel submissions go to “www.leftforum.org“, click “submit panels button.”
To see panels from last year’s conference go to “www.leftforum.org“, click “past events” and choose a particular conference year
Please forward far and wide!