Buy, buy, lullabye...

Who Will Buy? (from Oliver)

ROSE-SELLER
Who will buy my sweet red roses? Two blooms for a penny. (Repeat 4 times.)

MILKMAID
Will you buy any milk today mistress? Any milk today mistress?

ROSE-SELLER
Who will buy my sweet red roses?

MILKMAID
Any milk today mistress?

ROSE-SELLER
Two blooms for a penny.

STRAWBERRY-SELLER
Ripe, strawberries ripe! Ripe, strawberries ripe!

MILKMAID & STRAWBERRY-SELLER (At same time)
MILKMAID: Any milk today mistress?
STRAWBERRY-SELLER: Ripe, strawberries ripe!

ROSE-SELLER
Will you buy my sweet red roses?

STRAWBERRY-SELLER
Ripe, strawberries ripe!

MILKMAID & KNIFE GRINDER (At same time)
MILKMAID: Any milk today mistress?
KNIFE GRINDER: Knives, knives to grind!

ROSE-SELLER
Who will buy?

KNIFE GRINDER
Any knives to grind?

STRAWBERRY-SELLER
Ripe, strawberries ripe!

ROSE-SELLER & MILKMAID (At same time)
ROSE-SELLER: Who will buy my sweet red roses?
MILKMAID: Any milk today mistress?

KNIFE GRINDER & STRAWBERRY-SELLER (At same time)
KNIFE GRINDER: Knives, knives to grind!
STRAWBERRY-SELLER: Ripe, strawberries ripe!

ROSE-SELLER, KNIFEGRINDER, MILKMAID, & STRAWBERRY-SELLER
R.S.: Who will buy my sweet red roses?
KG: Any knives to grind?
MM: Any milk today mistress?
SS: Ripe, strawberries ripe!

KNIFEGRINDER
Who will buy?

STRAWBERRY-SELLER
Who will buy?

MILKMAID
Who will buy?

ROSE-SELLER
Who will buy?

OLIVER
Who will buy this wonderful morning?
Such a sky you never did see!

ROSE-SELLER
Who will buy my sweet red roses?

OLIVER
Who will tie it up with a ribbon, and put it in a box for me?

STRAWBERRY-SELLER
Ripe, strawberries ripe!

OLIVER
So I could see it at my leisure,
Whenever things go wrong,
And I would keep it as a treasure,
To last my whole life long.

MILKMAID
Any milk today?

OLIVER
Who will buy this wonderful feeling?
I'm so high, I swear I could fly.

KNIFEGRINDER
Knives, knives to grind!

STRAWBERRY-SELLER
Ripe, strawberries ripe!

OLIVER
Me, oh my! I don't want to lose it.
So what am I to do
To keep a sky so blue?
There must be someone who will buy...

STRAWBERRY-SELLER
Who will buy?

KNIFEGRINDER
Who will buy?

MILKMAID
Who will buy?

ROSE-SELLER
Who will buy?

ALL
Who will buy?

ALL:
Who will buy this wonderful morning?
Such a sky you never did see!
Who will tie it up with a ribbon,
And put it in a box for me?

They'll never be a day so sunny,
It could not happen twice.
Where is the man with all the money?
It's cheap at half the price!

Who will buy this wonderful feeling?
I'm so high I swear I could fly.
Me, oh my! I don't want to lose it
So what am I to do
To keep a sky so blue?
There must be someone who will buy...

WASHING WOMEN

They'll never be a day so sunny,
It could not happen twice.
Where is the man with all the money?
It's cheap at half the price!

INSTRUMENTAL

ALL
Who will buy this wonderful feeling?
I'm so high I swear I could fly.
Me, oh my! I don't want to lose it
So what am I to do?
To keep a sky so blue?
There must be someone who will buy...
Buy!
BUY!

Žižek to present seminar series and symposium at Princeton

March 31 through April 16, 2014, 4:30 p.m. · various venues

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S39/58/55M66/index.xml?section=announcements

Cultural critic and Princeton Global Scholar Slavoj Žižek will present a seminar series "Philosophy Through Psychoanalysis" at 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 31, in McCosh Hall, Room 28; and Wednesdays, April 2 and 16, and Mondays, April 7 and 14, in McCosh Hall, Room 46.

In addition he has organized a symposium "Varieties of Materialism Today," with Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupancic, to be held at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 9, in McCosh Hall, Room 46.

Rules and Metarules

The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, pp. 56-58:

As to the form of subjectivity that fits this constellation, we might begin with “The Stranger,” the famous prose poem by Baudelaire:

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,

Your mother, your sister, or your brother?

I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.

Your friends?

Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.

Your country?

I do not know in what latitude it lies.

Beauty?

I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.

Gold?

I hate it as you hate God.

Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?

I love the clouds ... the clouds ... that pass ... up there ... up there

... the wonderful clouds!

[Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varese, New York: New Directions 1970, p.l.]

Does this “enigmatical man” not provide the portrait of an internet geek? Alone in front of the screen, he has neither father nor mother, neither country nor god—all he needs is a digital cloud to which his internet device is linked. The final outcome of such a position is, of course, that the subject itself turns into “a cloud in pants,” avoiding sexual contact as too intrusive. In 1915, Vladimir Mayakovsky entered a train carriage in which the only other occupant was a young woman; to put her at ease he introduced himself by saying, “I am not a man but a cloud in pants.” As the words left his lips he realized the phrase was perfect for a poem and went on to write his first masterpiece, “A Cloud in Pants”:

No longer a man with a mission,

something wet

and tender

— a cloud in pants.

[Quoted from http://cloud-in-trousers.blogspot.com.]

How, then, does such a “cloud in pants” have sex? An ad in the United Airlines in-flight magazine begins with a suggestion: “Maybe it’s time to outsource ... your dating life.” It goes on: “People hire professionals to handle so many aspects of their lives, so why not use a professional to help you find someone special? We are matchmaking professionals—this is what we do day in and day out.”

[United Airlines, Hemispheres magazine, July 2011, p. 135.]

After outsourcing manual work (and much of the pollution) to Third World countries, after outsourcing (most) torture to dictatorships (whose torturers were probably trained by US or Chinese specialists), after outsourcing our political life to administrative experts (who are obviously less and less up to the task—see the morons who compete in Republican Party primaries)—why not take this process to its logical conclusion and consider outsourcing sex itself? Why burden ourselves with the effort of seduction with all its potential embarrassments? After a woman and I agree to have sex, each of us need only designate a younger stand-in, so that while they make love (or, more precisely, while the two of us make love through them), we can have a quiet drink and conversation and then retire to our own quarters to rest or to read a good book. After such disengagement, the only way to reconnect with reality is, of course, through raw violence.

[...]

Happy Birthday to Slavoj Žižek

March 21st, 2012 at 2:10 pm

http://www.cupblog.org/?p=5695

Today, March 21, is the birthday of perhaps the most talked-about figure in academia today, Slavoj Žižek. Žižek, born in Slovenia and now a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana (among many other positions), is famous for his incisive and often biting cultural critiques as well as his rambling, insightful, endlessly entertaining writing and speaking style. Columbia University Press publishes theInsurrections series, which is edited by Žižek, along with Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Jeffrey W. Robbins. On the occasion of Žižek’s birthday, we wanted to take a quick look at the questions of religion, politics, and culture that he has found so fascinating.

Žižek himself is known for his use of Lacan’s psychoanalysis in interpreting German idealism and Marxist political thought, and for his application of this interpretation to modern cultural phenomena. Of particular interest to him has been the role that religion plays in the private lives of individuals and the public sphere. Žižek has been one of the leading academic voices bringing attention to the ways in which ostensibly secular aspects of the modern world are incorporating religious ideas.

In the Insurrections series, Žižek and his coeditors seek to understand the modern “turn to religion” in political philosophy, modern politics, and modern culture. The series contains a necessarily wide range of books that trace the turn to religion using a variety of approaches . 

Theoretical works of political philosophy such as Radical Democracy and Political Theology and Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, by series coeditors Jeffrey W. Robbins and Clayton Crockett respectively, provide a picture of how the political and the religious have become increasingly intertwined. Works like Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Strange Wonder and Richard Kearney’s Anatheism take a more philosophical approach to modern religion. And translations of classic works like Stanislas Breton’s A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul and the forthcoming play by Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch, help readers trace the modern religious turn in continental philosophy to its roots.

However, the two works to which Žižek himself contributed may serve as the best encapsulation of the mission of the Insurrection series as well as representing Žižek’s own diverse interests. 

The first, Hegel and the Infinite, is a collection of essays (edited by Žižek, Crockett, and Creston Davis) attempting to apply Hegelian thought to modern philosophical issues, an effort that Žižek has been making his entire career as an intellectual. In his preface to the collection, Žižek acknowledges the difficulties to Hegelian thought posed by the post-Hegelian break, the rejection of metaphysics that created the popular conception of Hegel as the last of the idealist metaphysicians (and often as the “absolute idealist”). However, he also claims that the chaotic history of the twentieth century demands a Hegelian reading, and ends with the dramatic statement (Žižek undeniably has a gift for the dramatic statement) that “the time of Hegel still lies ahead—Hegel’s century will be the twenty-first.”

With essays ranging from a contemplation of the perverse in Hegel to a comparison of madness in the work of Hegel and Van Gogh, Hegel and the Infinite is a perfect representation of Žižek’s love of applying traditional philosophical thought to oft-overlooked aspects of culture. Žižek’s own essay, the last in the collection, is entitled “Hegel and Shitting,” and argues against what he calls “the pseudo-Freudian dismissal of Hegel” as a thinker whose Idea is a “voracious eater that ‘swallows’ every object upon which it stumbles” by looking at excreting, the opposite process of consumption, in Hegelian thought. The use of such universal but taboo subjects in coming to terms with complex theoretical models is one of Žižek’s most effective explanatory techniques.

While Hegel and the Infinite is an excellent example of Žižek’s academic thought applied to culture, his contribution to Udi Aloni’s What Does a Jew Want? shows his application of religious thought to political issues through the medium of culture. In his essay “The Jew is Within You, But You, You Are in the Jew,” Žižek places quotes from movies and political officials side by side in an attempt to understand how popular conceptions of what it means to be a Jew inform the political actions taken historically against Jews in Europe and currently by Jews in Israel. There can be no doubt when one reads What Does a Jew Want? that he is perfectly at home working with the filmmaker Aloni; Žižek seems to take particular delight in extracting Marxist and Hegelian insights from Aloni’s film Forgiveness. In its essence, though, his message in his essays in Aloni’s book is quite serious, and is much the same as the theme of the Insurrections series. Modernization does not simply involve a “phasing out” of religion from society; instead, many of the most important aspects of religion have been adopted by parts of society that are commonly seen to be wholly secular. Žižek’s concluding sentence to his introduction of What Does a Jew Want? could well apply to his own sizeable collection of works: “So, if you want to dwell in your blessed secular ignorance, then do not read this book—at your own risk!”