Friday 16 March 2012
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/sss/politics/news-and-events/news/ne_166996
Slovenian philosopher and bestselling author Slavoj Žižek visited Brunel University to talk about worldwide revolutions and protests in recent years to a large audience.
As part of the research seminar series Crisis, Transition, Transformation. Revolutionary Thought Today, organised by the Social and Political Thought research group, the seminar discussed events from Occupy to the Arab Spring.
Politics and History Lecturer Dr. Peter Thomas said: “He covered the numerous crises in the contemporary world with particular reference to the different protests and revolutions of the last year."
“Slavoj Žižek talked about the critiques proposed by these movements and the possibility of positive social change, and posed the classic question of revolutionary politics: ‘What is to be done?’”
Around 250 people attended the event, travelling not just from London but also from as far as Brighton to listen to the thoughts of the prominent contemporary philosopher and author.
Žižek’s seminar also coincided with the launch this year of Brunel University’s master's course Modern Political Thought: Violence and Revolution, which focuses on the role of concepts of violence and revolution in political change.
Dr. Peter Thomas said: “We distributed information about the new course and the many other activities of the growing Social and Political Thought research group, which was very favourably received.”
Overall, the Brunel University lecturer was pleased with the event and particularly the attendance, which was so large that the event had to be moved to a bigger venue.
“Slavoj Žižek is in high demand as a speaker as he is very well known as one of the leading voices of contemporary critical thought. It was a pleasure to host him here at Brunel, and we look forward to inviting him back in the future.”
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Ukrainian Art World Gets Political
By GINANNE BROWNELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/arts/24iht-sckiev24.html?_r=1
KIEV — The shutting down of an exhibition in Kiev last month became something of a performance art piece in its own right. The show, “Ukrainian Body,” which opened Feb. 7 at the Visual Culture Research Center at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, aimed to explore corporality in contemporary Ukrainian society. Alongside pieces like Oksana Briukhovetska’s picture book of the elderly and destitute in Kiev and a trident shield (the symbol of Ukraine) hand-carved by Vova Vorotniov were Sasha Kurmaz’s photographs of nude women, a few drawings of naked men by Anatoliy Byelov and a video installation by Mykola Ridnyi that looped contrasting images — one of a vagina and one of the Ukrainian Parliament — and asked viewers which image was more irritating.
The Mystetskyi Arsenal, an arts space set inside a vast former arms depot, will play host to Kiev's first contemporary art biennale in May.
Three days after the exhibition opened, the academy’s president, Serhiy Kvit, visited it. As Vasyl Cherepanyn, the director of the center tells it, a few hours later Mr. Kvit came back to the exhibition, keys in hand, and began shutting down video monitors and turning off the lights. “I asked him what he was doing,” said Mr. Cherepanym, who teaches in the university’s cultural studies department.
“He told me ‘This is not an exhibition,”’ and used an expletive to describe it.
Mr. Kvit later told the media, “The exhibition is not closed, it is just locked.”
The president did not reply to e-mail requests for an explanation of his actions, though the academy provided a link to a page — in Ukrainian — of comments made by Mr. Kvit on the case.
After that, the academy only opened the show to the public when journalists requested entry. The closure prompted major debates over censorship not only among those involved in contemporary arts in Kiev, but also in the mainstream media.
Sympathizers across Ukraine showed solidarity with performances of their own, including one man in Donetsk who stripped naked in the freezing cold and carved the symbolic trident shield into his stomach with a razor. “Ukrainian Body” never reopened and the university closed the exhibition space altogether this month for what it said were “renovations.” According to Mr. Cherepanyn, the space will now be used to house the university's archive.
A petition to protest those actions — signed by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, artists including Artur Zmijewski and Sara Goodman, and academics including Eric Fassin and John-Paul Himka — and calling for the “restoration of academic and artistic freedom” has been circulating across the country.
Despite widespread disappointment at the censorship, however, many see the outraged reaction of the general public as a sign of positive growth in the arts world here.
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/arts/24iht-sckiev24.html?_r=1
KIEV — The shutting down of an exhibition in Kiev last month became something of a performance art piece in its own right. The show, “Ukrainian Body,” which opened Feb. 7 at the Visual Culture Research Center at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, aimed to explore corporality in contemporary Ukrainian society. Alongside pieces like Oksana Briukhovetska’s picture book of the elderly and destitute in Kiev and a trident shield (the symbol of Ukraine) hand-carved by Vova Vorotniov were Sasha Kurmaz’s photographs of nude women, a few drawings of naked men by Anatoliy Byelov and a video installation by Mykola Ridnyi that looped contrasting images — one of a vagina and one of the Ukrainian Parliament — and asked viewers which image was more irritating.
The Mystetskyi Arsenal, an arts space set inside a vast former arms depot, will play host to Kiev's first contemporary art biennale in May.
Three days after the exhibition opened, the academy’s president, Serhiy Kvit, visited it. As Vasyl Cherepanyn, the director of the center tells it, a few hours later Mr. Kvit came back to the exhibition, keys in hand, and began shutting down video monitors and turning off the lights. “I asked him what he was doing,” said Mr. Cherepanym, who teaches in the university’s cultural studies department.
“He told me ‘This is not an exhibition,”’ and used an expletive to describe it.
Mr. Kvit later told the media, “The exhibition is not closed, it is just locked.”
The president did not reply to e-mail requests for an explanation of his actions, though the academy provided a link to a page — in Ukrainian — of comments made by Mr. Kvit on the case.
After that, the academy only opened the show to the public when journalists requested entry. The closure prompted major debates over censorship not only among those involved in contemporary arts in Kiev, but also in the mainstream media.
Sympathizers across Ukraine showed solidarity with performances of their own, including one man in Donetsk who stripped naked in the freezing cold and carved the symbolic trident shield into his stomach with a razor. “Ukrainian Body” never reopened and the university closed the exhibition space altogether this month for what it said were “renovations.” According to Mr. Cherepanyn, the space will now be used to house the university's archive.
A petition to protest those actions — signed by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, artists including Artur Zmijewski and Sara Goodman, and academics including Eric Fassin and John-Paul Himka — and calling for the “restoration of academic and artistic freedom” has been circulating across the country.
Despite widespread disappointment at the censorship, however, many see the outraged reaction of the general public as a sign of positive growth in the arts world here.
[...]
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
March 21, Happy Birthday Professor Žižek!
http://continuumphilosophy.typepad.com/continuum_philosophy/2012/03/happy-birthday-for-tomorrow-slavoj-%C5%BEi%C5%BEek.html
March 20, 2012
Happy birthday (for tomorrow...) Slavoj Žižek!
Dubbed 'the world's hippest philosopher' by The Telegraph, 'philosophy's answer to Bob Dylan' by The Guardian and an 'intellectual rock star' by The Times Literary Supplement, Slavoj Žižek turns 63 tomorrow (21st March) and so we felt it was only right to celebrate with some of our popular books by and about the man himself.
Whether you're just dipping your toe into his writing or are well-versed and looking for something new to read, we're guaranteed to have something to interest you.
[...]
March 20, 2012
Happy birthday (for tomorrow...) Slavoj Žižek!
Dubbed 'the world's hippest philosopher' by The Telegraph, 'philosophy's answer to Bob Dylan' by The Guardian and an 'intellectual rock star' by The Times Literary Supplement, Slavoj Žižek turns 63 tomorrow (21st March) and so we felt it was only right to celebrate with some of our popular books by and about the man himself.
Whether you're just dipping your toe into his writing or are well-versed and looking for something new to read, we're guaranteed to have something to interest you.
[...]
Rethinking Marxism
From Rethinking Marxism, No. ¾, 2001
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-empire.htm
“Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?”
By Slavoj Žižek
[...]
Although most of us probably do not agree with Jurgen Habermas, we do live in an era that could be designated by his term neue Undurchsichtlichkeit, the new opacity. More than ever, our daily experience is mystifying. Modernization generates new obscurantisms; the reduction of freedom is presented to us as the arrival of new freedoms. In these circumstances one should be especially careful not to confuse the ruling ideology with ideology that seems to dominate. More than ever, one should bear in mind Walter Benjamin's reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) declares itself to stay with regard to social struggles; one should also ask how it effectively functions in these struggles. In sex, the effectively hegemonic attitude is not patriarchal repression but free promiscuity; in art, provocations in the style of the notorious "Sensation" exhibitions are the norm, the example of the art fully integrated into the establishment.
One is therefore tempted to turn round Marx's eleventh thesis. The first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against global capital?"). Rather, the task is to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates, or, as Brecht put it in his Me Ti, "Thought is something which precedes action and follows experience." If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space; it will be an act within the hegemonic ideological coordinates. Those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins Sans Frontieres, Greenpeace, and feminist and antiracist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media; even if they seemingly enter economic territory (say, by denouncing and boycotting companies that do not respect ecological conditions or that use child labor). They are tolerated and supported so long as they do not get close to a certain limit. Let us take two predominant topics of today's radical American academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, "postcolonial studies" tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing experience of the power mechanisms that repress "otherness" so that, at the end of the day, we learn the root of postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance toward the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance toward the "Stranger in Ourselves", in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves. The politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas. The true corruption of American academia is not primarily financial-it is not only that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included, up to a point)-but conceptual: notions of "European" critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of cultural studies chic. With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast with pseudo-radical academic leftists who adopt toward the Third Way an attitude of utter disdain while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture that obliges no one to anything determinate.
Lenin is for us not the nostalgic name for old, dogmatic certainty-quite the contrary. To put it in Kierkegaard's terms, the Lenin we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism-recall his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem: "About this, Marx and Engels said not a word." The idea is not to return to Lenin but to repeat him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today's constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically reenacting the "good old revolutionary times" nor at the opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old program to "new conditions", but at repeating, in the present, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism-more precisely, after the politico-ideological collapse of the long era of progressism in the catastrophe of 1914. Eric Hobsbawn defined the concept of the twentieth century as the time between 1914, the end of the long, peaceful expansion of capitalism, and 1990, the emergence of the new form of global capitalism after the collapse of really existing socialism. What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for1990. "Lenin" stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale, existing (post)ideological coordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot in which we live; it simply means that we are allowed to think again.
[...]
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-empire.htm
“Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?”
By Slavoj Žižek
[...]
Although most of us probably do not agree with Jurgen Habermas, we do live in an era that could be designated by his term neue Undurchsichtlichkeit, the new opacity. More than ever, our daily experience is mystifying. Modernization generates new obscurantisms; the reduction of freedom is presented to us as the arrival of new freedoms. In these circumstances one should be especially careful not to confuse the ruling ideology with ideology that seems to dominate. More than ever, one should bear in mind Walter Benjamin's reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) declares itself to stay with regard to social struggles; one should also ask how it effectively functions in these struggles. In sex, the effectively hegemonic attitude is not patriarchal repression but free promiscuity; in art, provocations in the style of the notorious "Sensation" exhibitions are the norm, the example of the art fully integrated into the establishment.
One is therefore tempted to turn round Marx's eleventh thesis. The first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against global capital?"). Rather, the task is to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates, or, as Brecht put it in his Me Ti, "Thought is something which precedes action and follows experience." If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space; it will be an act within the hegemonic ideological coordinates. Those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins Sans Frontieres, Greenpeace, and feminist and antiracist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media; even if they seemingly enter economic territory (say, by denouncing and boycotting companies that do not respect ecological conditions or that use child labor). They are tolerated and supported so long as they do not get close to a certain limit. Let us take two predominant topics of today's radical American academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, "postcolonial studies" tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing experience of the power mechanisms that repress "otherness" so that, at the end of the day, we learn the root of postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance toward the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance toward the "Stranger in Ourselves", in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves. The politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas. The true corruption of American academia is not primarily financial-it is not only that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included, up to a point)-but conceptual: notions of "European" critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of cultural studies chic. With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast with pseudo-radical academic leftists who adopt toward the Third Way an attitude of utter disdain while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture that obliges no one to anything determinate.
Lenin is for us not the nostalgic name for old, dogmatic certainty-quite the contrary. To put it in Kierkegaard's terms, the Lenin we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism-recall his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem: "About this, Marx and Engels said not a word." The idea is not to return to Lenin but to repeat him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today's constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically reenacting the "good old revolutionary times" nor at the opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old program to "new conditions", but at repeating, in the present, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism-more precisely, after the politico-ideological collapse of the long era of progressism in the catastrophe of 1914. Eric Hobsbawn defined the concept of the twentieth century as the time between 1914, the end of the long, peaceful expansion of capitalism, and 1990, the emergence of the new form of global capitalism after the collapse of really existing socialism. What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for1990. "Lenin" stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale, existing (post)ideological coordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot in which we live; it simply means that we are allowed to think again.
[...]
Russian "Anti-Terror" Troops Arrive in Syria
By KIRIT RADIA and RYM MOMTAZ | ABC News
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-anti-terror-troops-arrive-syria-164035966--abc-news.html
A Russian military unit has arrived in Syria, according to Russian news reports, a development that a United Nations Security Council source told ABC News was "a bomb" certain to have serious repercussions.
Russia, one of President Bashar al-Assad's strongest allies despite international condemnation of the government's violent crackdown on the country's uprising, has repeatedly blocked the United Nations Security Council's attempts to halt the violence, accusing the U.S. and its allies of trying to start another war.
Now the Russian Black Sea fleet's Iman tanker has arrived in the Syrian port of Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea with an anti-terror squad from the Russian Marines aboard according to the Interfax news agency. The Assad government has insisted it is fighting a terrorist insurgency.
The Iman replaced another Russian ship "which had been sent to Syria for demonstrating (sic) the Russian presence in the turbulent region and possible evaluation of Russian citizens," the Black Sea Fleet told Interfax.
RIA Novosti, a news outlet with strong ties to the Kremlin, trumpeted the news in a banner headline that appeared only on its Arabic language website. The Russian embassy to the US and to the UN had no comment, saying they have "no particular information on" the arrival of a Russian anti-terrorism squad to Syria.
Moscow has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Assad regime, to which it sells billions of dollars of weapons. In return Russia has maintained a Navy base at Tartus, which gives it access to the Mediterranean.
Last week Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia had no plans to send troops to Syria.
[...]
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-anti-terror-troops-arrive-syria-164035966--abc-news.html
A Russian military unit has arrived in Syria, according to Russian news reports, a development that a United Nations Security Council source told ABC News was "a bomb" certain to have serious repercussions.
Russia, one of President Bashar al-Assad's strongest allies despite international condemnation of the government's violent crackdown on the country's uprising, has repeatedly blocked the United Nations Security Council's attempts to halt the violence, accusing the U.S. and its allies of trying to start another war.
Now the Russian Black Sea fleet's Iman tanker has arrived in the Syrian port of Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea with an anti-terror squad from the Russian Marines aboard according to the Interfax news agency. The Assad government has insisted it is fighting a terrorist insurgency.
The Iman replaced another Russian ship "which had been sent to Syria for demonstrating (sic) the Russian presence in the turbulent region and possible evaluation of Russian citizens," the Black Sea Fleet told Interfax.
RIA Novosti, a news outlet with strong ties to the Kremlin, trumpeted the news in a banner headline that appeared only on its Arabic language website. The Russian embassy to the US and to the UN had no comment, saying they have "no particular information on" the arrival of a Russian anti-terrorism squad to Syria.
Moscow has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Assad regime, to which it sells billions of dollars of weapons. In return Russia has maintained a Navy base at Tartus, which gives it access to the Mediterranean.
Last week Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia had no plans to send troops to Syria.
[...]
Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis
Drug-resistant "white plague" lurks among rich and poor
By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent | Reuters
http://news.yahoo.com/drug-resistant-white-plague-lurks-among-rich-poor-113851688.html
[....]
INTERNATIONAL ALARM
TB is a bacterial infection that destroys patients' lung tissue, making them cough and sneeze, and spread germs through the air. Anyone with active TB can easily infect another 10 to 15 people a year.
In 2010, 8.8 million people had TB, and the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) has predicted that more than 2 million people will contract multi-drug resistant TB by 2015. The worldwide TB death rate currently runs at between two and three people a minute.
Little surprise, then, that the apparently totally untreatable cases in India have raised international alarm.
The WHO has convened a special meeting on Wednesday to discuss whether the emergence of TB strains that seem to be resistant to all known medicines merits a new class definition of "totally drug-resistant TB", or TDR-TB.
If so, it would add a new level to an evolution over the years from normal TB, which is curable with six months of antibiotic treatment, to the emergence of MDR-TB, then extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB).
[...]
Like other bacteria, the TB bug Mycobacterium tuberculosis can evolve to fight its way past antibiotic medicines. The more treatment courses patients are given and fail to complete, the stronger and more widespread the resistance becomes.
"The doctors, the healthcare workers, the nurses, entire healthcare systems have produced MDR-TB. It's not a bug that has come from nature. It's not a spontaneous mutation. It came about because patients were treated badly -- either with poor quality drugs, or not enough drugs, or with insufficient observation so the patient didn't finish the treatment course," said Ditiu.
Ditiu is somewhat reassured that the WHO is meeting to look at recent extreme cases of drug-resistance, which will at least throw a spotlight on this often-forgotten disease. But she says while definitions are central to international guidelines and treatment protocols, they make little difference to sick people.
"What is much more important is the drama and tragedy of the human beings. Whether it's MDR, XDR or TDR TB, it doesn't make much difference to the patients. A lot of them will face a very, very unfortunate fate."
[...]
By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent | Reuters
http://news.yahoo.com/drug-resistant-white-plague-lurks-among-rich-poor-113851688.html
[....]
INTERNATIONAL ALARM
TB is a bacterial infection that destroys patients' lung tissue, making them cough and sneeze, and spread germs through the air. Anyone with active TB can easily infect another 10 to 15 people a year.
In 2010, 8.8 million people had TB, and the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) has predicted that more than 2 million people will contract multi-drug resistant TB by 2015. The worldwide TB death rate currently runs at between two and three people a minute.
Little surprise, then, that the apparently totally untreatable cases in India have raised international alarm.
The WHO has convened a special meeting on Wednesday to discuss whether the emergence of TB strains that seem to be resistant to all known medicines merits a new class definition of "totally drug-resistant TB", or TDR-TB.
If so, it would add a new level to an evolution over the years from normal TB, which is curable with six months of antibiotic treatment, to the emergence of MDR-TB, then extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB).
[...]
Like other bacteria, the TB bug Mycobacterium tuberculosis can evolve to fight its way past antibiotic medicines. The more treatment courses patients are given and fail to complete, the stronger and more widespread the resistance becomes.
"The doctors, the healthcare workers, the nurses, entire healthcare systems have produced MDR-TB. It's not a bug that has come from nature. It's not a spontaneous mutation. It came about because patients were treated badly -- either with poor quality drugs, or not enough drugs, or with insufficient observation so the patient didn't finish the treatment course," said Ditiu.
Ditiu is somewhat reassured that the WHO is meeting to look at recent extreme cases of drug-resistance, which will at least throw a spotlight on this often-forgotten disease. But she says while definitions are central to international guidelines and treatment protocols, they make little difference to sick people.
"What is much more important is the drama and tragedy of the human beings. Whether it's MDR, XDR or TDR TB, it doesn't make much difference to the patients. A lot of them will face a very, very unfortunate fate."
[...]
Monday, March 19, 2012
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