Žižek in adbusters.org/magazine

When we were fighting AIDS, hunger, water shortages, global warming, and so on, there always seemed to be time to reflect, to postpone decisions (recall how the main conclusion of the last meeting of world leaders in Bali, hailed as a success, was that they would meet again in two years to continue their talks ...). But with the financial meltdown, the urgency to act was unconditional; sums of an unimaginable magnitude had to be found immediately. Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, saving AIDS patients and those dying for lack of funds for expensive treatments, saving the starving children ... all this can wait a little bit.

The call to “save the banks!” by contrast, is an unconditional imperative that must be met with immediate action. The panic was so absolute that a transnational and non-partisan unity was immediately established, all grudges between world leaders being momentarily forgotten in order to avert the catastrophe. But what the much praised “bi-partisan” approach effectively meant was that even democratic procedures were de facto suspended: there was no time to engage in proper debate, and those who opposed the plan in the US Congress were quickly made to fall in with the majority. Bush, McCain and Obama all quickly got together, explaining to confused congressmen and women that there was simply no time for discussion – we were in a state of emergency, and things simply had to be done fast ... And let us also not forget that the sublimely enormous sums of money were spent not on some clear “real” or concrete problem, but essentially in order to restore confidence in the markets, that is, simply to change people’s beliefs!

Do we need any further proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, a Real whose imperatives are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality?

Slavoj Žižek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/96/zizek.html

To be a Revolutionary Today

Joke

So, this guy comes home from work, panting, trying to catch his breath, and plops down at the kitchen table.
His wife says, "Why are you so exhausted?"
The guy says, "Honey, instead of taking the bus home from work today, I ran all the way behind it and saved $2.50!"
His wife says, "You schmuck! Why didn't you run behind a taxi, and save $15?"

Slavoj Žižek: Superstar of the Occupy movement

By Michael Posner
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/slavoj-zizek-superstar-of-the-occupy-movement/article2209984/

Thanks in part to the Occupy Wall Street movement, lefty Slovenian academic Slavoj Žižek has found his moment.

Financier George Soros has conferred his benediction. So have filmmaker Michael Moore, author Chris Hedges, actor Susan Sarandon and other luminaries. But if the burgeoning, still inchoate Occupy Wall Street movement can claim any sort of messiah, it is a bearded, slightly rotund 62-year-old Slovenian academic named Slavoj Žižek.

Never mind al-Qaeda, sovereign debt or the Russian mafia. Mr. Žižek (pronounced Zheezhek) - a veritable rock star of philosophy and cultural theory - may be the modern Western world's most dangerous adversary.

He turned up recently at the OWS epicentre in New York's Zuccotti Park, appropriately clad in a bright red T-shirt. The authorities had banned the use of microphones, lest the protest disturb the neighbourhood's peace (although as he spoke, a raucous Hispanic Day parade was snaking up Fifth Avenue). So Mr. Žižek's speech had to be declaimed, sentence by sentence, then echoed by the standing choir in cascading waves. Idea surfing in the mosh pit of lower Manhattan.

His core message, perfectly calibrated to our distressed zeitgeist, is not new. In fact, it is the same subversive sermon Mr. Žižek has been preaching for two decades, disseminated in more than 50 books, several documentary films and scores of personal appearances. Its essence is this: Global, liberal, democratic capitalism as we know it is experiencing its death spiral, choking on its own excess. The only serious question is what will ensue.

"They tell you we are dreamers," he declared in New York, reminiscent of Vladimir Lenin addressing socialist comrades in Berne, 1916. "The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. We're not destroying anything. We're watching the system destroy itself."

From dissident to superstar

What's disarming about Mr. Žižek, however, is the current of cold realism that courses through his work. He freely acknowledges that communism, wherever practised and under any name, has been a near-total disaster. He watched the train wreck unfold, growing up in Ljubljana under Kremlin rule. Identified early as a dissident, he spent several years in socialist limbo, functionally unemployed.

He knows, too, how easy it is to surrender to the euphoric esprit of revolution. "Carnivals come cheap," he told the protesters. "What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. ... There is a long road ahead. ... We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism?"

He often invokes Winston Churchill's coy aphorism, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms," yet points out that the most efficient form of capitalism is today practised by regimes that are neither liberal nor democratic - namely, China and Singapore.

Now a visiting professor at New York University and other American campuses, Mr. Žižek spends half the year at the University of Ljubljana, lectures each summer at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and is international director of the University of London's Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

As an A-list invitee to Big Think academic conferences, his life has become an intellectual concert tour, complete with autograph hounds. If he wanted, he could sell Žižek mugs and T-shirts, though it would make him complicit in buttressing the very capitalist scaffolding he reviles.

It's not hard to fathom his appeal on the academic circuit: earthy language, scatological humour, a rare ability to connect abstruse meta-theory to contemporary culture in digestible sound bites, and a subversive delight in offending everyone, even his erstwhile comrades on the left. With his dishevelled look and strictly proletarian garb, he resembles nothing more than a superannuated grad student.

Mr. Žižek is at once court jester and provocateur, entertaining crowds with clever conceits and detonating counterintuitive verbal bombs. On one occasion, he described love as evil, an act that upsets the cosmic balance.

His voluminous writings testify to the catholic range of Mr. Žižek's scholarship - dense tomes devoted to his ideological mentors, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan, as well as more accessible books on Alfred Hitchcock, fantasy, terror and a dozen other subjects. The Žižekian archive of articles is equally vast, encompassing the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, the Pope, Hollywood films, even the hit TV series 24. His latest book, Living in the End Times, devotes five pages to analyzing the animated children's film Kung Fu Panda through a Lacanian lens.

There is scarcely a subject on which Mr. Žižek has no considered opinion - even if, as with James Cameron's Avatar, he has not yet seen the film. "I like what Oscar Wilde said about book reviewing," he explains. "Better to not read the book beforehand. It will only cloud your judgment."

A sit-down session with Mr. Žižek, who is functional in eight languages, is more audience than interview. Forever tugging at his beard or nose, he stirs restlessly in his chair, ideas exploding from his brain, volcanically. In a single minute, he migrates from Samuel Beckett ("my hero") to psychoanalytic theory to natural science to ideology to Wagner.

Although he once ran for president in Slovenia under a Liberal Democratic banner, he insists he was simply seeking to impede the ascent of right-wing nationalists - the very kind, he laments, who are now gaining power in several former Soviet republics.

British psychoanalyst Ian Parker, author of a key study of Mr. Žižek's writings, calls him "a radical force in the academic world, mobilizing a new generation against capitalism. For all of my criticisms, his work has been progressive and useful."

'Some of my worst enemies are also Jews'

But his critics, including American Adam Kirsch, have come close to calling Mr. Žižek an anti-Semite. The allegation infuriates him. Mr. Kirsch, he complains, had quoted selectively. "I mean, my God, if you read my book, it's unambiguously clear that I'm describing the line of argumentation of my opponent. Are people aware? They are basically accusing me of demanding another Holocaust. It's madness."

Then another joke: "I don't mean to say some of my best friends are Jews. I tell you, practically all of them are. At the same time, some of my worst enemies are also Jews." While in New York, Mr. Žižek stays with the family of Udi Aloni, the left-wing Jewish activist and filmmaker.

What people ought to be more concerned about, he says, are people like evangelical Christian broadcaster Glenn Beck and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik - both, he notes, are pro-Zionist, yet simultaneously guilty of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. "The most anti-Semitic people these days," he says in another inversion, "are Zionists."

Mr. Kirsch, reviewing two Žižek books, Violence and In Defence of Lost Causes, also labels him a not-so-crypto fascist, referencing his now infamous line that "the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough."

Again, he demurs. "I am not celebrating violence. On the contrary," Mahatma Gandhi, the maharishi of civil disobedience, was actually more violent than Adolf Hitler, he says, because his goal was to sabotage Britain's colonial state. Hitler, on the other hand, wanted to change nothing systemically. "He wanted the German state to function more efficiently. He was afraid of real change. That's the best definition of fascism."

Violence that actually kills people, he says, quoting his friend, French philosopher Alain Badiou, "is meant to keep things the way they are." The violence of the Wall Street protesters, on the other hand, is purely ideological. "We want to change the order. That is the violence I am for - real change."

Communism: A New Beginning?

Occupy political change. Report from Communism: A New Beginning? conference in NYC

BY AARON LEONARD | OCTOBER 21, 2011

Please see the full report at:

http://rabble.ca/news/2011/10/occupy-political-change-report-communism-new-beginning-conference-nyc

[....]

If it seems surreal for there to be such a symposium 20 years after the official obituary of communism was written, it has been brought back to earth by the swirl of events surrounding Occupy Wall Street, Tahir Square in Egypt, riots in London, and heroic protests in Syria. Once again, the matter of "can the world be different", is a pressing question.

The event was held in New York's Cooper Union, with the 200 available tickets selling out almost immediately. There were attendees -- and virtual participants via a live feed -- from all over the world. Most of them are avid readers of the works of conference participants, who along with Dean included; Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Morss, Frank Ruda, Étienne Balibar and Slavoj Žižek. French philosopher Alain Badiou, who was ill, was not able to attend but had his statement read to the conference.

The conference was illuminating and provocative, though there were parts that were challenging and even a bit dense. That is the nature of the beast. Unfortunately, too often the major questions on how to realize a radically new society resides with the intelligentsia, especially those in academia. In this, some work harder than others to make difficult stuff popular. That said to even try is commendable -- an expression of a certain commitment toward breaking through. In that respect a story Žižek -- the Slovenia philosopher who is among the most important thinkers around today -- told of how the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn once gave a talk to a group of workers. In a self-deprecating style he said, "I'm not hear to lecture, I'm here to learn from you." Žižek noted their response. "Fuck off, you are making fun of us -- you have the duty to tell us what you know!" There is a need for such intellectual work.

What is striking is how young the audience is for this thinking. While there was a sprinkling of older people, most -- a mix of men and women, though men predominated -- ranged from their 20s to their early 40s.

Why they came is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. The sense of changing terrain and perhaps opportunity is deeply felt. As the conference convened last Friday, the ongoing Occupy Wall Street actions in Lower Manhattan were threatened with eviction. When the session began Saturday morning, OWS was marching from Wall Street through Washington Square Park, with the NYPD riding them along the way. By day's end OWS had reached Time Square at which point many in the conference joined them.

As a result, on Sunday the comments and presentation were full of cross-referencing with the movement out in the street, with an emphasis on the need and role of theorists. Žižek pointedly noted that when Bill Clinton goes on television attempting to embrace such actions, watch out. "We have to learn not to dialog with some people." In his provocative style he meant people need to break away from the dominant ruling framework in forging a new path. These were similar to statements he made to the Occupy assembly in Zuccotti Park just days before.

The conference invoked the word "communism" critically -- though realizing a world held in common stood as the question seeking answer. In its (historically) short life this theory (and its multitude of interpretations) has been problematic, even horrific. Yet as speakers pointed out, that doesn't mean capitalism -- the dominant world system -- is good. Put another way just because you do not have a ready solution does not mean you don't have a problem.

Despite fantastic scenarios of a world functioning without labor it remains the case that the fruit on our tables comes from hands muddied and bloodied in the fields, the chips in our computers are powered by minerals extracted by miners toiling and dying way beyond an early age in the Congo, and the call centre operators in Bangalore are lucrative because of the unemployed multitudes in Delhi. This is a world in which the socioeconomic system has developed the ability to do great things, yet is incapable -- and violently resistant to -- do so in any manner that is not profitable, regardless of the consequences. There is a need for something else.

Coming home from the Occupy Time Square demonstration -- this reporter boarded a subway. Before the doors could close six or eight members of a brass marching band, that had also taken part in the demonstration, got on. They were fully equipped and decided to strike up the band. There was trombone, flute, flugelhorn, saxophone and drums playing an evocative mix; maybe a gypsy dance or some East European melody. The passengers, in New York this means people from everywhere, and band members were fused and elevated in the moment -- music has this effect. The episode captured something of the wild mix of the weekend's events, the actions in the street and the intellectual imagining. In the words of Badiou, "The world can be otherwise."

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Will You See This Movie? | Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Zizek Revisit “The Pervert’s Guide,” by Devin Lee Fuller

Please see the full essay at

http://www.indiewire.com/article/2011/10/21/will_you_see_this_movie_sophie_fiennes_and_slavoj_zizek_revisit_the_pervert

[....]

The theories of Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek might not be the first subject you’d think could be easily translated into a documentary, but in her 2006 film “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,” Sophie Fiennes accomplished just that. The film inserts Zizek into footage of classic movies like “The Birds,” “Blue Velvet” and “City Lights,” creating the illusion that he is speaking from within each film. With this technique, Fiennes strived to create a deeper connection between his words and cinema.

“Slavoj is kind of like a mind-altering substance,” said Fiennes. “That’s what’s exciting about it. He’s a catalyst. It’s a kind of intervention into how you see and think.”

Now, Fiennes, director of “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” and sister of actors Ralph and Joseph, is working on a follow-up titled “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.” The documentary will feature even more recreations of films including scenes from “Jaws,” “The Sound of Music” and “A Clockwork Orange.”

The film examines what movies say about ideology and how it influences present day life.

“Ideology is really a kind of agreement, sometimes consciously complicit, but a lot of times unconsciously we’re complicit in living and breathing in ideological narratives,” said Fiennes. “It’s not just Islamic fundamentalists, not just these extremists. We’re all participating in it in our daily lives.”

Fiennes chose to feature films that are reflective of Zizek’s theories and also strike a chord with audiences.

“The familiarity of the films is an immediate gateway into people’s consciousness because they’ve lived and breathed emotionally in the way the film manipulates us,” Fiennes said. “It’s quite intimate really when you take these scenes apart because people have quite strong attachments to them already.”

In order to recreate the scenes, Fiennes both traveled to original locations and recreated sets in Ardmore Studios in Ireland. She likened the experience to “an archaeology of film.”

“What’s funny is seeing six movie sets in one room,” said Fiennes. “Here’s a fragment from ‘The Dark Knight’ opposite a fragment from the Mother Superior’s office in ‘The Sound of Music.’ And then obviously that is the toilets from ‘Full Metal Jacket.’ So it’s a very absorbing world, Slavoj’s world.”

Zizek himself has been in the news recently, having appeared at Occupy Wall Street in New York on October 9.

“Funny enough I recognized a lot of the material from the finale from the film,” said Fiennes abut Zizek’s involvement in the movement. “This film is more about the present moment than the last film in a way. It’s hard for [Zizek] not to respond to that because as he would say, ‘we’re living in apocalyptic times.’”

The film was co-financed by the BFI (British Film Institute) Film Fund, Film4, Channel 4, Irish Film Board, and a new London-based financier/producer called Rooks Nest, although Fiennes admits it was originally difficult to get funding.

“We’ve been trying to make this film for five years, and it was really hard to get the finance together because people always stumbled on the word ‘ideology’ like it was something that no one knew what it meant,” said Fiennes. “But I think the events in the world in the last five years are such that the financiers realized there’d been a change in the world where the word ‘ideology’ was something that people would want to explore.”

Fiennes says she is used to working 24/7 on her projects, but has to take more time now that she has a 14-month-old child. She hopes to be finished with the film around September 2012.

“[The film] is an opportunity to really stretch your thinking,” said Fiennes. “It’s like a kind of ‘mind gym.’ I hope that people will come away seeing things in a completely altered way. I hope they come out in an altered state.”

“The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”

Director/Writer: Sophie Fiennes (“Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow”)
Producers: James Wilson (“Attack the Block”), Martin Rosenbaum (“The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”), Katie Holly (“One Hundred Mornings”), Sophie Fiennes
Executive Producers: Shani Hinton, Katherine Butler (Film4), Tabitha Jackson (Channel 4), Michael Sackler, Julia Godzinskaya (Rooks Nest Entertainment)
Director of Photography: Remko Schnorr (“Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow”)
Editor: Ethel Shepherd
Cast: Slavoj Zizek (“The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”)