by Benjamin Bruneau, ARTINFO Canada
An island of enraptured silence floated amidst the sea of
noise, crowds, and Scotiabank
Nuit Blanche revelry at Toronto City Hall, Saturday night, as the Council
Chambers played host to international superstar theorist Slavoj Žižek.
Nominally part of curators Janine Marchessault and Michael
Prokopow’s "Museum
for the End of the World," Žižek and co-presenters Arthur Kroker and Brenda
Longfellow spoke about technology, biology, politics, and capital, as the
world as we know it surely pushes towards some kind of termination.
Žižek was in absolute top form, rhapsodizing at length --
nearly two-and-a-half hours -- to a rapturous, mostly young audience, which
nearly rioted when city officials tried to oust members from the aisles and
stairways. Bemusedly, Žižek admonished their squeaky-wheel tactics: “If I were
you, I’d have agreed and said, ‘Yes, it’s terrible, people shouldn’t make
themselves a fire hazard’. And then I’d have stayed put.”
His wide-ranging talk moved from prohibited activities to
ethnic cleansing, the cynicism of authority, Facebook and the invasion of the
public by the private, internet hard-core pornography, and Casablanca, all in
his trademark blend of candor, pop culture, and critical theory.
In keeping with the apocalyptic thematic, he concluded that
we are entering a new epoch in humanity, and that, “effectively, the very basic
dimension of what it is to be human is changing. In this sense, it’s the end of
the world as we know it.” Not one to give-in to despair -- but not one to be
overly optimistic, either -- Zizek said that the new human is “radically open
to possibility,” but that “if we let things change the way they are,
automatically, we are approaching a new, perverse, permissively authoritarian
society, which will be authoritarian but in a new way.”
