I come not to bring peace, but a sword.

Malabou. Biopolitics as a form of Sovereignty

From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo

http://simongros.com/text/books/slavoj-zizek/english/from-myth-to-symptom/

Slavoj Žižek & Agon Hamza – From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo

I managed to obtain a  very fragmented copy of an upcoming English book written by Slavoj Žižek & Agon Hamza titled From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo, so for now I can at least share the books contents:

Contents

Introduction — Slavoj Žižek & Agon Hamza
NATO as the left hand of God? — Slavoj Žižek

The Impasse of the Left
Human Rights and Their Obverse
The Ideology of Victimisation
The Carnival in the Eye of the Storm
The SECOND Way
The Obscenity of Humanitarian Bio-Politics
The Lie of De-Politicization

Beyond Independence — Agon Hamza

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Slavoj Žižek is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College. His latest publication include Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Living in the End Times, and many more.

Agon Hamza is writing his PhD in philosophy. He is the editor of Për Althusserin [For Althusser], Ese të Zgjedhura [Selected Essays], by Slavoj Žižek (co-editor), both in Albanian. He is a member of KMD, Prishtina.

Book Endorsments

Of what is Kosovo a symptom? Žižek’s initial provocation and Hamza’s relentless continuation will enrage anyone who looks to culture, ethnicity, and neoliberalism to explain the tragedy of the Balkans. Only those willing to confront their own humanitarian fantasies will have the strength necessary to en-counter the truth in these brave, important essays.  – Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon

Thinking about recent Balkan developments – and tragedies – has been dominated, for too long by varieties of nationalist, simplistically anti-imperialist, and ‘realist’ discourses. What has been missing is a critical theoretical discourse that will not only deconstruct these discourses, but also attempt to bring forward how recent political developments, from the NATO bombings in 1999 to the proclamation of Kosova independence, have also been determined by attempts to create conditions favorable to the most aggressive neoliberal politics. The two texts in this volume offer exactly this kind of critical theoretical scrutiny that is most needed than ever, if we want to avoid seeing not only Kosova but the Balkans in general being turned into vast laboratories of neoliberal social engineering.  —Panagiotis Sotiris, Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean

It's No Good (title of good poetry book by Kirill Medvedev)

Why the free market fundamentalists think 2013 will be the best year ever

As communists once did, today's capitalists blame any failures on their system being 'impurely' applied

Slavoj Žižek

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/17/free-market-fundamentalists-think-2013-best

[…]

That's the problem with development and progress: they are always uneven, they give birth to new instabilities and antagonisms, they generate new expectations that cannot be met. In Egypt just prior to the Arab spring, the majority lived a little better than before, but the standards by which they measured their (dis)satisfaction were much higher.

In order not to miss this link between progress and instability, one should always focus on how what first appears as an incomplete realisation of a social project signals its immanent limitation. There is a story (apocryphal, maybe) about the left-Keynesian economist John Galbraith: before a trip to the USSR in the late 1950s, he wrote to his anti-communist friend Sidney Hook: "Don't worry, I will not be seduced by the Soviets and return home claiming they have socialism!" Hook answered him promptly: "But that's what worries me – that you will return claiming USSR is not socialist!" What Hook feared was the naive defence of the purity of the concept: if things go wrong with building a socialist society, this does not invalidate the idea itself, it simply means we didn't implement it properly. Do we not detect the same naivety in today's market fundamentalists?

When, during a recent TV debate in France, the French philosopher and economist Guy Sorman claimed democracy and capitalism necessarily go together, I couldn't resist asking him the obvious question: "But what about China?" He snapped back: "In China there is no capitalism!" For the fanatically pro-capitalist Sorman, if a country is non-democratic, it is not truly capitalist, in exactly the same way that for a democratic communist, Stalinism was simply not an authentic form of communism.

This is how today's apologists for the market, in an unheard-of ideological kidnapping, explain the crisis of 2008: it was not the failure of the free market that caused it, but the excessive state regulation; the fact that our market economy was not a true one, but was instead in the clutches of the welfare state. When we dismiss the failures of market capitalism as accidental mishaps, we end up in a naive "progress-ism" that sees the solution as a more "authentic" and pure application of a notion, and thus tries to put out the fire by pouring oil on it.