The NSK State in Time emerged in 1992, evolving in the context of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the transformation Neue Slowenische Kunst. Existing both as an artwork and a social formation, a state that encompasses all time but holding no territory, the NSK State in Time has for two decades pushed the boundaries of artistic and political practice. This volume collects together, for the first time, analyses of the NSK State in Time including its relationship with the changing context of Eastern Europe, the connection between aesthetics and the state, the rise of NSK folk art, and documents the First NSK Citizen’s Congress in 2010.
Includes essays by Inke Arns, Huang Chien-Hung, Eda Cufer, Marina Grzinic, Irwin, Tomaz Mastnak, Viktor Misiano, Alexei Monroe, Ian Parker, Avi Pitchon, Stevphen Shukaitis, Slavoj Žižek, and Jonah Westerman.
IRWIN is a collective of artists including Dusan Mandic, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek and Borut Vogelnik. IRWIN was founded in 1983 in Slovenia and is one of the core groups within the artists’ collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) founded in 1984. In 1992 IRWIN co-founded NSK State in Time. The members of the group live and work in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
ARISTOTLE’S ETHICAL WORKS The Magna Moralia and Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy by John M. Cooper Quasi-Mathematical Method in the Eudemian Ethics by D. J. Allan
METHOD Aristotle and the Methods of Ethics by Jonathan Barnes On the Alleged Metaphysical Foundations of Aristotle’s Ethics by Timothy D. Roche
HAPPINESS Two Conceptions of Happiness by Richard Kraut Is Aristotelian Eudaimonia Happiness? by J. C. Dybikowski For Goodness’ Sake: More on Nicomachean Ethics I vii 5 by Troels Engberg-Pedersen Aristotle on the Best Life for a Man by W. F. R. Hardie Intellectualism in Aristotle by David Keyt Aristotle’s Function Argument: A Defense by Jennifer Whiting Aristotle on the Goods of Fortune by John M. Cooper
VIRTUE Some Remarks on Aristotle’s Moral Psychology by John M. Cooper Aristotle and the Emotions by Stephen R. Leighton A False Doctrine of the Mean by Rosalind Hursthouse Aristotle: Ontology and Moral Reasoning by David Charles Aristotle on Choosing Virtue for Itself by Richard Kraut
THE VIRTUES Aristotle on Temperance by Charles M. Young Magnanimity in Aristotle’s Ethics by W. F. R. Hardie Aristotle’s Legacy to Stoic Ethics by A. A. Long The Hellensitic Versions of Aristotle’s Ethics by Julia Annas
Terence Irwin is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics (i.e. the history of Western moral philosophy in ancient, medieval, and modern times).
Since 2007, he has been the Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. From 1975 until 2007, he was at Cornell University, where he has been Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters (from 1995), Professor of Classics (from 1992), and Professor of Philosophy (from 1982). Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University (1972-1975). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
ARGUMENTS FOR FORMS Inquiry by Nicholas P. White Plato’s Heracleiteanism by T. H. Irwin Forms and Sensibles: Phaedo 74B-C by Nicholas P. White Perceptual and Objective Properties in Plato by Nicholas P. White Forms as Causes in the Phaedo by C. C. W. Taylor
KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF, AND FORMS Republic Book V: τά πολλά χαλά etc. by J. Gosling Knowledge and Belief in Republic V by Gail Fine The Contents of the Cave by J. R. S. Wilson The Line and the Cave in Plato’s Republic by J. L. Austin Image and Reality in Plato’s Republic by D. Gallop
PROBLEMS AND DEVELOPMENTS IN THE THEORY OF FORMS A Reasonable Self-Predication Premise for the Third Man Argument by Sandra Peterson Self-Predication and Plato’s Theory of Forms by Alexander Nehamas The Logic of the Third Man by S. Marc Cohen Plato and Aristotle on Form and Substance by G. Fine Being in the Sophist: A Syntactical Enquiry by Lesley Brown Falsehood and Not-Being in Plato’s Sophist by John McDowell
KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF, AND PERCEPTION Conflicting Appearances by M. F. Burnyeat Protagoras and Inconsistency: Theaetetus 171a6-c7 by Sarah Waterlow Broadie Plato on Sense-Perception and Knowledge (Theaetetus 184-186) John M. Cooper Observations on Perception in Plato’s Later Dialogues by Michael Frede Plato and Talk of a World in Flux: Timaeus 49a6-50b5 by Donald J. Zeyl
Terence Irwin is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics (i.e. the history of Western moral philosophy in ancient, medieval, and modern times).
Since 2007, he has been the Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. From 1975 until 2007, he was at Cornell University, where he has been Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters (from 1995), Professor of Classics (from 1992), and Professor of Philosophy (from 1982). Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University (1972-1975). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This exceptional book examines and explains Plato’s answer to the normative question, “How ought we to live?” It discusses Plato’s conception of the virtues; his views about the connection between the virtues and happiness; and the account of reason, desire, and motivation that underlies his arguments about the virtues. Plato’s answer to the epistemological question, “How can we know how we ought to live?” is also discussed. His views on knowledge, belief, and inquiry, and his theory of Forms, are examined, insofar as they are relevant to his ethical view.
Terence Irwin traces the development of Plato’s moral philosophy, from the Socratic dialogues to its fullest exposition in the Republic. Plato’s Ethics discusses Plato’s reasons for abandoning or modifying some aspects of Socratic ethics, and for believing that he preserves Socrates’ essential insights. A brief and selective discussion of the Statesmen, Philebus, and Laws is included. Replacing Irwin’s earlier Plato’s Moral Theory (Oxford, 1977), this book gives a clearer and fuller account of the main questions and discusses some recent controversies in the interpretation of Plato’s ethics. It does not presuppose any knowledge of Greek or any extensive knowledge of Plato.
Table of Contents
GENERAL The Unity of Plato’s Thought: Ethics by Paul Shorey
PLATO’S QUESTIONS Plato’s Republic: The Argument with Thrasymachus by H. W. B. Joseph Glaucon’s Challenge by Christopher A. Kirwan Plato’s Utilitarianism by Henry Sidgwick and John Grote The Classification of Goods in Plato’s Republic by Nicholas White
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation by John M. Cooper Plato’s Division of the Soul by Michael Woods Plato and Davidson: Parts of the Soul and Weakness of the Will by Terrence M. Penner
JUSTICE Plato and Common Morality by Julia Annas Reason and Justice in Plato’s Republic by Richard Kraut The Psychology of Justice in Plato by John M. Cooper Some Implications of a Passage in Plato’s Republic by M. B. Foster The Rulers’ Choice by Nicholas White Egoism, Love, and Political Office in Plato by Richard Kraut The Good of Others in Plato’s Republic by Sarah Waterlow
POLITICAL THEORY The Theory of Social Justice in the Polis in Plato’s Republic by Gregory Vlastos Was Plato a Feminist? by Gregory Vlastos
THE LATER DIALOGUES Plato’s Theory of Human Good in the Philebus by John M. Cooper The Demiurge in Politics: The Timaeus and the Laws by Glenn R. Morrow The Socratic Paradoxes in Plato’s Laws by Trevor J. Saunders Plato on the Causes of Wrongdoing in the Laws by Jean Roberts
Terence Irwin is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics (i.e. the history of Western moral philosophy in ancient, medieval, and modern times).
Since 2007, he has been the Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. From 1975 until 2007, he was at Cornell University, where he has been Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters (from 1995), Professor of Classics (from 1992), and Professor of Philosophy (from 1982). Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University (1972-1975). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
THE SOPHISTS: GENERAL The Drama—Rhetoric and Dialectics—The Sophists by George Grote The Sophists by H. Sidgwick
THE SOPHISTS, SOCRATES AND PLATO On the Implicit Ethics and Psychology of Thucydides by Paul Shorey The Moral and Political Doctrines of Antiphon the Sophist: A Reconsideration by G. B. Kerferd Plato’s Account of the Relativism of Protagoras by G. B. Kerferd The Sophists and Relativism by Richard Bett
SOCRATES: GENERAL The President’s Address: The Problem of Socrates by W. D. Ross Socrates by Gregory Vlastos Modern Philosophy and Platonic Ethics by Michael O’Brien The Death of Socrates by Christopher Gill The Pseudo-Platonic Socrates by Dorothy Tarrant Socrates and Plato in Post-Aristotelian Tradition by G. C. Field
SOCRATIC METHOD Examples in Epistemology: Socrates, Theaetetus and G.E. Moore by M.F. Burnyeat The Priority of Definition and the Socratic Elenchus by Hugh H. Benson Euthyphro 9d-11b : Analysis and Definition in Plato and Others by Richard Sharvy The Unity of Virtue and the Objects of Socratic Inquiry by Michael T. Ferejohn
SOCRATIC ETHICS Plato’s Methodology in the Laches by Charles H. Kahn Socrates on Acrasia by Gregory Vlastos Socrates on Virtue and Motivation by Terry Penner The End of the Euthyphro by C. C. W. Taylor Socratic Virtue and Happiness by Donald Zeyl Rational Prudence in Plato’s Gorgias by Nicholas P. White
Terence Irwin is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics (i.e. the history of Western moral philosophy in ancient, medieval, and modern times).
Since 2007, he has been the Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. From 1975 until 2007, he was at Cornell University, where he has been Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters (from 1995), Professor of Classics (from 1992), and Professor of Philosophy (from 1982). Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University (1972-1975). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
SOURCES Introduction to the Doxography by Charles H. Kahn Hippolytus Retractatus by Ian Mueller Ancient Forms of Philosophic Discourse by Harold Cherniss
GENERAL ISSUES The Presocratic World-Picture by W. K. C. Guthrie Sense and Common-Sense in the Development of Greek Philosophy by G. S. Kirk Popper versus Kirk: A Controversy in the Interpretation of Greek Science by G. E. R. Lloyd The Early History of the Concept of Soul by D. J. Furley Philosophy and Medicine: Some Early Interactions by James Longrigg The Greek Verb “To Be” and the Concept of Being by Charles H. Kahn
HERACLEITUS Heracleitus and Stoicism by A. A. Long ΨYΧΗ in Heracleitus by Martha C. Nussbaum Epistemology and Meaning in Heraclitus by Edward Hussey
THE ELEATICS Elements of Eleatic Ontology by Montgomery Furth Xenophanes’ Scepticism by James H. Lesher Eleatic Conventionalism and Philolaus on the Conditions of Thought by Martha Craven Nussbaum Did Parmemides Discover Eternity? by Malcolm Schofield A Note on Zeno’s Arrow by Jonathan Lear
ATOMISM Pleasure, Knowledge and Sensation in Democritus by C. C. W. Taylor οῦ μάλλον and the Antecedents of Ancient Scepticism by Philip DeLacy Democritus and the Cynics by Zeph Stewart Thucydidean History and Democritean Theory by Edward Hussey On the Pre-history in Diodorus by Gregory Vlastos
Terence Irwin is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics (i.e. the history of Western moral philosophy in ancient, medieval, and modern times).
Since 2007, he has been the Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. From 1975 until 2007, he was at Cornell University, where he has been Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters (from 1995), Professor of Classics (from 1992), and Professor of Philosophy (from 1982). Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University (1972-1975). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Recording of an interview Slavoj Žižek had with Stephen Sackur titled 20th Century Communism for the British BBC show called HARDtalk on 4th November 2009.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, The Day After the Revolution, Heaven in Disorder and Reading Hegel.
‘Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst!’ is a 1996 German documentary film about the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek. Born in 1949 in Ljubljana, psychoanalyst and professor of philosophy, started early on a group of theoreticians who sharpened their thinking of the theses of Jacques Lacan. The Slovene Lacanian School began as a spiritual resistance nest in orthodox ex-Yugoslavia, and Žižek emerged as a globally operating philosopher-entertainer.
Slavoj Žižek is now a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include ‘Pandemic!’ & ‘Pandemic! 2’, ‘Hegel in a Wired Brain’, ‘Sex and the Failed Absolute’, ‘Like A Thief In Broad Daylight’, ‘Reading Marx’, ‘Incontinence of the Void’, ‘The Day After the Revolution’, ‘Heaven in Disorder’ and ‘Reading Hegel’.
Weeks ago, the Ukrainian President Zelensky addressed Russian soldiers in Russian, promising them safety and decent treatment if they were captured or surrendered to the Ukrainian army. In stark contrast to this stance were the news from Russia Today (which were summed up by big Western media and appear to be true):
“Gennadiy Druzenko, 49, the owner of a war zone mobile hospital in Eastern Ukraine, said he instructed his medical staff to ‘castrate captured Russian soldiers’ because they are ‘cockroaches, not people,’ Russian news agency RT reports. ‘Trust me, Putin’s military hardware burns well. The corpses of ‘Putinoids’ may stink, but they become unthreatening,’ he said, according to RT. Druzenko, a constitutional lawyer-turned-volunteer frontline medic, apologized for his words after receiving death threats. In a short Facebook post, Druzenko took back his words and added a screenshot that appears to be a threat addressed to him. He said his hospital ‘does not castrate anyone and is not going to. Those were the emotions. I’m sorry. We are saving lives. Period.’”
The immediate reaction to this news should be: is this how Ukraine defends Europe? Even the apology is ambiguous: Druzenko apologized after receiving death threats, as if doing it just to protect his life, not because he sincerely changed his mind and became aware of the horror of what he said. Such ideas should be unequivocally condemned, any comparative “understanding” (in the style of “this is a minor incident comparing to a mass murder Russian army is doing”) is obscene. We should also look closely at what is going on on the Ukrainian side, because here we get hints of what Ukraine will be if – as we all hope – it will retain its independence.
For example, back in 2019, Ukraine’s State Committee on Television and Radio Broadcasting banned the translation of The Book of Thieves written the Swedish historian Anders Rydell. In quite a Putinesque way, the decree claimed the book’s appearance would be “inciting ethnic, racial and religious hatred.” How? The ban is due to Rydell’s critical analysis of the actions of Symon Petliura, a nationalist whose troops murdered countless Jews in pogroms. Plus, there are other dark signs, like the prohibitive measures applied on the Ukrainian Left, as if it is automatically pro-Putin.
Such critiques should in no way undermine or limit our commitment to Ukrainian freedom. It would be easy to find dozens of similar obscene statements and acts on the Russian side. Suffice it to mention how Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s court philosopher, explained why. According to him, Putin should have intervened much earlier, at least after the Maidan events, and the fact that he missed the opportunity “is the sign of profound, profound hatred by our president of the violence … he hates the war … Putin is a liberal democrat, he is very Western in his opinion, he is very careful about global rules… that means he has no other solution in his very liberal democratic, globalist almost, vision of the world.” With “liberal democrats” like this, who needs neo-Nazis?
But the reason I mentioned the incident with the Ukrainian medic is that a friend drew my attention to an interview on the Sputnik site where the pro-Putin Serb movie director Emir Kusturica – believe it or not – denounces ME as the inspiration of the Ukrainian medic’s threat. Here are his exact words: “We saw how the other day a Slovene philosopher inspired the Ukrainian doctor and said that all prisoners should be castrated … that the imprisoned Russians should be castrated.”[1] Let’s clarify this accusation. In my first reaction to the Russian invasion, I effectively mentioned castration and rape, but my source is Putin himself. Back in 2002, Putin replied to a Western journalist’s question with: “If you want to become a complete Islamic radical and are ready to undergo circumcision, then I invite you to Moscow. We are a multidenominational country. We have specialists in this question. I will recommend that they carry out the operation in such a way so that afterward, nothing else will grow.” It was a rather vulgar threat of castration. And rape? The source is Putin again, and here is a quote from my text:
“At a press conference on February 7 2022, Putin noted that the Ukraine government does not like the Minsk agreement and then added: ‘Like it or not, it’s your duty, my beauty.’ The saying has well-known sexual connotations: Putin appeared to be quoting from ‘Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin’ by the Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mold: ‘Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.’ Although the Kremlin press representative claimed that Putin referred to an old folkloric expression, reference to Ukraine as an object of necrophilia and rape is clear.”
And I concluded my comment with: “So we should recommend that the international community carries out on Russia (and, up to a point, the US) a castrative operation – ignoring and marginalizing them as much as possible, treating them as embarrassing obscenities, like a guy whom you see defecating in public on a street, making it sure that afterwards, nothing else will grow of their global authority.”
One can debate if my metaphors are too provocative, but three things are clear from the quoted fragments. I took the topic of castration and rape from Putin. I do not propose a castration but a “castrative operation” the meaning of which I clearly specify (“ignoring and marginalizing them as much as possible…”). And I include the US in the list, blaming them to some degree for the situation in Ukraine. How we come from all this to the proposal to castrate Russian prisoners is something that is logical only to the cheapest Putin propagandist.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE MISSING ORBAN IN KYIV
The only true moment in these accusations is that I fully support Ukrainian resistance, and this partisan view makes me attentive to how, unfortunately, many on the Left try to sit on two chairs with regard to the Ukrainian war, (mostly, at least) condemning the Russian aggression and simultaneously blaming the US for it. For example, the Democratic Socialists of America reacted to the war by “calling for the dissolution of NATO‘s Western alliance and blaming the United States’ ‘imperialist expansionism’ for Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. The DSA, which boasts high-profile members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, released a Saturday night statement condemning Russia’s invasion and calling for Vladimir Putin to immediately recall his troops.” The DSA is not ready to admit that, despite all the complexity of the situation and dispersed responsibility, Ukrainians are offering a fully justified and heroic resistance to the Russian attack, a resistance that should be unconditionally supported. Instead of this, one hears “Socialist” voices telling the Ukrainian workers that they should self-organize against Russian occupiers outside the corrupt government and oligarchs’ army… At the end of this road, there is a Leftist conspiracy theory: “The US had its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate world condemnation, and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to overthrow its government.”
In an almost symmetric way, the liberal Right also doubts that the Left can fully support Ukrainian resistance; although Putin is definitely not a Leftist, he is nonetheless perceived as an ally of some Leftist regimes. No wonder that, as in Lacan’s formula of communication in which I get from the other my own message in its inverted and true form, the developed West is getting its own message back from the Third World: countries from Latin America to South Africa are not ready to unanimously condemn Russia for war crimes in Ukraine, remembering much worse crimes committed by the West around the world. That’s why their reaction to “defending Europe” is: why should we defend the power which was doing to us what it now condemns in Ukraine?
And, in some sense, they are right. Europe is also sitting on two chairs. On March 15, 2022, four European leaders made a long, hazardous journey by rail from Poland to Kyiv in a show of support as the city came under further Russian attack: the prime ministers of Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Hungary met President Zelensky on Tuesday evening as a curfew began in Kyiv. Afterwards, Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki tweeted that Ukraine was reminding Europe what courage was: it was time for “sluggish and decayed” Europe to reawaken and “break through her wall of indifference and give Ukraine hope”, he said… Those who remember the news noticed a factual mistake in my brief report. Viktor Orban of Hungary was not one of the four; the fourth place was occupied by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of Poland’s ruling party and the de facto ruler of Poland.
We all know the famous dialogue from “Silver Blaze” between Scotland Yard detective Gregory and Sherlock Holmes about the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time”: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident.” It is easy to paraphrase these lines with Orban replacing the dog: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of Viktor Orban on the train to Kyiv.” “But Orban was not on that train.” “That was the curious incident.” This substitution (Kaczynski taking the place of the absent Orban) offers the key to the entire affair. The case was not just that of sitting on two chairs at the same time, it was much worse: one person replacing another on the same chair.
Both Orban and Kaczynski embody the basic stance of some key members of what is commonly referred as the Visegrad group at its purest: post-Communist East European countries which are members of the EU but oppose the predominant EU stance of stronger European unity and cooperation, as well as the cultural values of feminism, multiculturalism, anti-racism and religious neutrality. Poland and Hungary were until recently under a strong pressure from Brussels to abandon their anti-abortion and anti-gay politics, as well as their drift towards authoritarianism (state control of the judiciary branch, of culture and public media). The EU even threatens to retract the financial support these states are getting if they do not comply with EU rules. Against this pressure, “illiberal democrats” (like Orban) want to put a stronger emphasis on national identity and Christian tradition. Both Poland and Hungary now use the burden of the Ukrainian war (taking care of the refugees, etc.) to alleviate the EU critique of the two states due to their violation of human rights; they now demand even more financial support from the EU. At a more general level, we should never forget that the ongoing conflicts, wars included, are never just a matter of culture and geopolitics; they are moments of inner tensions in the global circulation of the capital. Some signs indicate even the glorious Maidan event, an authentic student and popular uprising, was (partially, at least) overdetermined by the struggle between two groups of Ukrainian oligarchs and their foreign masters, the pro-Russian clique and the pro-Western clique. The “clash of civilizations” is a truth, but not the whole truth, by far.
However, the crux of the matter resides elsewhere. Whichever way you turn it, united Europe does stand for some kind of social democracy, which is why in a recent interview Viktor Orban went so far as to proclaim that Western liberal hegemony “is gradually becoming Marxist”: “Sooner or later we’ll have to face up to the fact that, opposing the Christian democratic camp, we’re no longer dealing with a group espousing liberal ideology, but with a group that’s essentially Marxist with liberal remnants. This is what we have in America today. For the time being the conservative side is at a disadvantage in relation to the Marxist, liberal camp.”
So, why did Orban not participate in the trip to Ukraine? Because of Hungary’s (not only) economic links with Putin’s Russia, which compelled him to proclaim neutrality in the ongoing Ukrainian war. Poland and Hungary, thus, decided to play a double game. Two Polish anti-Russian hardliners went to Kyiv pretending to be there as special envoys of the EU – no wonder their “mission” caused embarrassment in Brussels since no EU body authorized them to do it. Still, the actual aim of their mission was not to act in Kyiv on behalf of Europe, but to signal a clear division in Europe. It was a mission directed AGAINST united Europe. Their message to Ukraine was: we are your only true allies; only we truly and fully support your struggle against the Russian invasion, not the “sluggish and decayed” liberal Western Europe.
All the militant measures advocated by some members of the mission in Kyiv (imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, etc.) barely concealed their true aim, namely to woo Ukraine into their nationalist-illiberal Europe, to strengthen it against the (still hegemonic) social-democratic Europe. Their mind is focused on the big question: where will Ukraine be when the war comes to a close (and progress in negotiations indicates that some kind of peace is on the horizon). In this sense, although Orban was not in Kyiv, his key message was delivered there. And this is why the Slovene PM Janez Janša, a partisan of radical militancy against Russia, defended Orban against Ukrainian critique. The visitors knew well that their militant proposals will have no consequences: their battle was not against Putin’s Russia but against the social-democratic (“Marxist,” for Orban) Europe.
In a recent public address, President Zelensky directly criticized Hungary for its neutrality: “You (Hungarians) must decide whom to side with.” He got a cynical answer from Orban: in his victory speech, Orban said: “We never had so many opponents: Brussels bureaucrats… the international mainstream media, and the Ukrainian president.” His mention of Zelensky was accompanied by merry laughter… Now, it is Zelensky and Ukraine who must decide whom to side with: which Europe THEY want to be part of.
IS SOLIDARITY ANTI-SEMITIC?
The Europe worth defending is the Europe of universal solidarity, not just the Europe of selective solidarity with those who “are like us.” On January 3, 2022 Emma Watson, the star best known as Hermione in the “Harry Potter” films, posted on Instagram an image of a pro-Palestinian rally overlaid with the words “Solidarity is a verb,” and a quotation from Sara Ahmed on the meaning of solidarity (which does not mention Jews or Palestinians): “Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.” Immediately her Instagram sparked accusations of anti-Semitism from Israeli politicians, so that even the big media had to admit that in this case the accusations go too far.
This incident makes palpable the lie of the official stance, according to which a critique of Israeli policy is OK but not anti-Semitism. No matter how innocent and neutral a critique of Israel may sound, the defenders of Israel and its politics always find some metaphoric or metonymic link with anti-Semitism, up to the claim that a critique of capitalism as such is today anti-Semitic, because Jews are identified with financial wealth… So, the truth of the distinction between a critique of Israeli policy and anti-Semitism is that there is none: every critique, de facto, echoes anti-Semitism. An acceptable critique of Israel is an empty set. With the case of Watson, this logic is brought to the extreme: we don’t have to look for anything behind or beneath it; the mere mention of solidarity, when applied to what the State of Israel is doing to Palestinians, becomes anti-Semitic. However, the same accusation could and should also be made against the reactions to Watson’s Instagram. They proclaim anti-Semitic a mere call for solidarity, pushing us towards the conclusion that, if solidarity is in itself anti-Semitic, then it designates something that is foreign to Jewish people…
The problem here is the asymmetry implied by the partisans of Israeli politics: they can practice the wildest hermeneutics of suspicion, discovering traces of anti-Semitism everywhere, but the sympathizers of the West Bank Palestinians are not allowed to bring out the de facto apartheid and oppression at work in “neutral” Israeli security measures. Yes, one should be horrified at Iran’s project to destroy the State of Israel, but one should be no less horrified at what Israel is doing in the West Bank with the Palestinian population.
The title of a recent dialogue on anti-Semitism and BDS in Der Spiegel was: “Wer Antisemit ist, bestimmt der Jude und nicht der potenzielle Antisemit” (“Who an anti-Semite is determines the Jew and not the potential anti-Semite”). OK, sounds logical: the victim should decide regarding its victim status, so in the same sense that this holds for a woman who claims she was raped it should hold also for Jews. But there are two problems here: (1) Should then not the same also hold for Palestinians in the West Bank who should determine who is stealing their land and depriving them of their elementary rights? (2) Who is “the Jew” who determines who is anti-Semitic? What about the numerous Jews who support BDS or who, at least, have doubts about the politics of the State of Israel in the West Bank? Is not the implication of the quoted stance that, although empirically Jews, they are in some “deeper” sense not Jews, that they betrayed their Jewish identity?
THE FIFTH RIDER
One of the implications of true global solidarity is that it should not be limited to its Western secular-liberal multicultural form. What does this mean, concretely?
In late March 2022, in the midst of the Ukrainian war, Aleksandr Dugin gave a long interview to the tabloid Moskovskij Komsomolets, Russia’s daily with the highest circulation. When asked if Putin reads his work, he said “I think we read the same letters written in gold in the sky of Russian history,” and then he went on to quote some of these golden letters:
“We are waging an eschatological military operation, a special operation between Light and Darkness in the situation of the end of times. Truth and God are on our side. We are fighting the absolute evil embodied in Western civilization, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony, in Ukrainian Nazism…”[2]
My counter-point is not just that I, for obvious reasons, don’t trust people who read “letters written in gold in the sky”; there are other details which deserve our attention in the quoted lines, especially the jump from Western liberalism to Nazism. For instance, the term “liberal-totalitarian hegemony” is a worthy inheritor of the Nazi term “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”… Why is the enemy Ukrainian Nazism? Because Putin replaced the October Revolution with the Soviet Union’s victory in the WWII (and the sacrifices of winning the war, 25 million dead) as the new founding myth of Russia’s greatness. That’s why Stalin’s images have been displayed in military parades over the past years: he is celebrated as the supreme commander, not as a Communist. But since today’s (and traditional) enemy of Russia is Western liberalism, Nazism has to appear as the ultimate offspring of liberalism…
What is clearly discernible in the quoted passage from Dugin’s interview are two further important features. First, the military-religious link: a limited military operation is directly characterized in the terms that belong to theology, as a fight between Truth/God and absolute Evil that is not a simple historical event but takes place in the situation of the end of times. Even the most radical Muslim fundamentalists do not talk like that. Second, Dugin here violates his own postmodern relativism, according to which “every so-called truth is a matter of believing. So, we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And that is the only way to define the truth. So, we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept.” In the quoted interview, he doesn’t talk about “Russian Truth” versus “European Truth,” but about Light and Darkness, God versus absolute Evil.
However, is it enough to oppose to such militarized religion the everyday peaceful life of secular liberalism tolerating different ways of life? Today, when we are de facto already living in an emergency state, mobilization IS needed, and why should we forfeit religious references to neo-Fascists? Is it not a fact that the multiple crises and apocalyptic prospects we are facing at present seem to evoke more and more ominously the four riders of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelations: plague, war, hunger, death?
— Plague: at the end of 2019, Covid exploded and changed our lives forever. It is still here and we can expect new waves as well as other viral pandemics.
— War: with the Russian attack on Ukraine, we got a true hot war in Europe – a sobering reminder that nobody can afford to observe war from a safe distance. Even if some kind of truce is enforced, war forcefully asserted itself as a general condition of our lives and positioned peace as a temporary exception. Whichever way we turn, WWIII is on the horizon, and what is needed is not just or even primarily the strength to counter the aggressors, but a radical change of the entire global system.
— Hunger: it is also on the horizon; here are some of the recent big media headlines: “The War in Ukraine Is Creating the Greatest Global Food Crisis Since WWII”, or “War in Ukraine could lead to food riots in poor countries.”
— Death is in itself (up until full biogenetic control over our lives, at least) a part of life itself. Suffice it to recall a deeply true Polish graffiti offering a definition of life as the disease transmitted by sex, which always ends with death. But we are talking here about excessive deaths caused by the other three riders.[3]
We have to be very precise here: the four riders cannot be simply dismissed as figures of evil. Trevor Hancock pointed out that they are “remarkably close to what we might call the four horsemen of ecology that regulate population size in nature.” Referring to Charles Elton, he suggests that the “four riders” play a positive role in preventing over-population: “increases in numbers are held in check by predators, pathogens, parasites and food supply.” The problem is that, in the long term, this regulatory function didn’t seem to work for us, humans:
“The human population has more than tripled in the past 70 years, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.8 billion today. So, what happened to Elton’s four ecological horsemen? Why we are not controlled? Is there a fifth horseman that will cause our populations to crash at some point, as lemmings do?”
Until fairly recently, humanity has been able to hold in check the four riders through medicine, science and technology. However, now we are threatened by “massive and rapid global ecological changes we have triggered. So, although of course an asteroid strike or super-volcano eruption could wipe us out, the greatest threat to the human population, the ‘fifth horseman’ if you like, is us.” What this means is that we (humanity) are now facing a key decision: we are the “fifth horseman” who can cause our destruction or save us. Although global awareness of the threat is growing, it is not followed by adequate activity, so the four raiders are galloping faster and faster.
INVENTING A HERO OF OUR TIME
How can we be free today, in such a desperate situation? Let us conclude on a lighter note. One of the answers is provided by the Netflix 2022 miniseries Inventing Anna, created and produced by Shonda Rhimes. The series is inspired by the story of Anna Sorokin and Jessica Pressler’s article “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People” that appeared in New York magazine in 2018, telling the stranger-than-fiction story of a Russian-born twenty-something Anna Sorokin, a con artist who, through rebranding herself as Anna Delvey, a wealthy German heiress, had conned her way into an extravagant lifestyle, rubbing shoulders with the city’s elite. Almost overnight, Sorokin had captured the internet’s imagination, and, even after her prison sentence, she continues to fascinate the public media.
Most of the reviewers expressed their uneasiness at the miniseries: they find the portrayal of Anna unconvincing because it does not depict the real person beneath multiple masks… But what if this IS the truth? What if there is no self-aware manipulating subject pulling the strings? Anna does not just act following a Ponzi scheme, postponing paying debts, covering one debt with another, trying to convince people that the money she owes them is on the way, etc. In a crazy way, her subjective life itself functions as a Ponzi scheme: she does not just deceive others; she as it were borrows from herself, from her own imagined future. This is what makes her stance feminine, in clear contrast to Shimon Hayut, the con artist portrayed in Tinder Swindler (one should note that Tinder Swindler is a documentary and Inventing Anna—a fiction). Hayut travelled around Europe, presenting himself as the son of Russian-Israeli diamond mogul Lev Leviev. He used Tinder to contact women as Simon Leviev, and tricked them into lending him money that he never repaid. He would charm women with lavish gifts and take them to dinners on private jets using money he borrowed from other women he previously conned. He then asked his victims to help him financially due to the breach of ‘security’, allegedly hindering the use of his credit cards and bank accounts. The women would often take out bank loans and new credit cards in order to help. His career ended quite appropriately: in late February 2022, he launched an NFT collection and merchandise with images seen and quotes heard in the film on him…
The obvious parallels between the two stories should not distract us from the crucial difference: Hayut is a swindler who coldly manipulates others, has no project he really identifies with, just abandons a woman he deceived and passes onto another woman, while Anna stays with a permanent circle of collaborators involved in the big plan to launch the Anna Delvey Foundation. What distinguishes her is an unconditional fidelity to appearance: her friends often plead to her just to admit that she lied or cheated, but she never breaks down, nor lets the mask fall. We watch again and again how she finds a way to save her face when she is confronted with the facts that prove her lies.
Anna is immoral but definitely ethical. When her lawyer defends her in his closing speech before the jury by claiming she just lived in her dream world and never came “dangerously close” to real success (getting money for her big project), she feels betrayed and reacts furiously. She prefers to be punished much more heavily if this means that she will be perceived as somebody who almost succeeded, not as a ridiculous small dreamer.
It is this unconditional desire that makes her ethical; she literally obeys Lacan’s formula “do not compromise your desire.” This is why even some of those she swindled and are aware of the fact that she doesn’t care for herself continue to care for her. As Lacan said, “the hero can be betrayed without damage done to him,” Anna remains a hero to the end. That’s why the usual psycho-social explanations fail: even her father is surprised by what she became.
To paraphrase a well-known line from one of the early novels about Hannibal Lecter, nothing happened to her; she happened to the world. Yes, her project is a ridiculous fake, but she nonetheless acts as a sublime figure because she elevated this ridiculous project into a Thing, a Cause for which she is ready to stake her entire life. Whatever she is, she is not cynical but utterly naïve, and we need such naivety today for a precise reason: Anna is FREE in clear contrast to Hayut who just follows his egotist need to manipulate others and profit on them. Freedom does not reside in a hidden core of my Self that eludes the grasp of others, a position from which I manipulate others from a safe distance. Freedom resides in my very unconditional identification with the role I decide to play for others.
That’s why, back to Ukraine, Putin and Orban are manipulating figures like Hayut, while Zelensky, who effectively was an actor, is somebody who plays his role sincerely, fully identified with it. In this (and only in this) respect he is like Anna, although at the highest ethico-political level.
Notes:
[1] Here is the Serb original: “Videli smo da je neki dan jedan slovenački filozof inspirisao ukrajinskog doktora i rekao da treba da se kastriraju svi zarobljeni… da se zarobljeni Rusi kastriraju.”
[2] Quoted from Joanna Szostek on Twitter.
[3] I owe this application of the “four riders of the apocalypse” to today’s condition to Mladen Dolar.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, The Day After the Revolution, Heaven in Disorder and Reading Hegel.
Text as published on Project Syndicate website on 25th March 2022.
In a world shaped by the iron logic of markets and national interests, Vladimir Putin’s atavistic war of conquest has mystified the “deep” strategists of realpolitik. Their mistake was to forget that under global capitalism, cultural, ethnic, and religious conflicts are the only forms of political struggle left.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are entering a new phase of warfare and global politics. Aside from a heightened risk of nuclear catastrophe, we are already in a perfect storm of mutually reinforcing global crises – the pandemic, climate change, biodiversity loss, and food and water shortages. The situation exhibits a basic madness: at a time when humanity’s very survival is jeopardized by ecological (and other) factors, and when addressing those threats should be prioritized over everything else, our primary concern has suddenly shifted – again – to a new political crisis. Just when global cooperation is needed more than ever, the “clash of civilizations” returns with a vengeance.
Why does this happen? As is often the case, a little Hegel can go a long way toward answering such questions. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel famously describes the dialectic of master and servant, two “self-consciousnesses” locked in a life-or-death struggle. If each is ready to risk his own life to win, and if both persist in this, there is no winner: one dies, and the survivor no longer has anyone to recognize his own existence. The implication is that all of history and culture rest on a foundational compromise: in the eye-to-eye confrontation, one side (the future servant) “averts its eyes,” unwilling to go to the end.
But Hegel would hasten to note that there can be no final or lasting compromise between states. Relationships between sovereign nation-states are permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each epoch of peace being nothing more than a temporary armistice. Each state disciplines and educates its own members and guarantees civic peace among them, and this process produces an ethic that ultimately demands acts of heroism – a readiness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s country. The wild, barbarian relations between states thus serve as the foundation of the ethical life within states.
North Korea represents the clearest example of this logic, but there are also signs that China is moving in the same direction. According to friends in China (who must remain unnamed), many authors in Chinese military journals now complain that the Chinese army hasn’t had a real war to test its fighting ability. While the United States is permanently testing its army in places like Iraq, China hasn’t done so since its failed intervention in Vietnam in 1979.
At the same time, Chinese official media have begun to hint more openly that since the prospect of Taiwan’s peaceful integration into China is dwindling, a military “liberation” of the island will be needed. As ideological preparation for this, the Chinese propaganda machine has increasingly urged nationalist patriotism and suspicion toward everything foreign, with frequent accusations that the US is eager to go to war for Taiwan. Last fall, Chinese authorities advised the public to stock up on enough supplies to survive for two months “just in case.” It was a strange warning that many perceived as an announcement of imminent war.
This tendency runs directly against the urgent need to civilize our civilizations and establish a new mode of relating to our environs. We need universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities, but this objective is made far more difficult by the rise of sectarian religious and ethnic “heroic” violence and a readiness to sacrifice oneself (and the world) for one’s specific cause. In 2017, the French philosopher Alain Badiou noted that the contours of a future war are already discernible. He foresaw
“…the United States and their Western-Japanese group on the one side, China and Russia on the other side, atomic arms everywhere. We cannot but recall Lenin’s statement: ‘Either revolution will prevent the war or the war will trigger revolution.’ This is how we can define the maximal ambition of the political work to come: for the first time in history, the first hypothesis – revolution will prevent the war – should realize itself, and not the second one – a war will trigger revolution. It is effectively the second hypothesis which materialized itself in Russia in the context of the First World War, and in China in the context of the second. But at what price! And with what long-term consequences!”
The Limits of Realpolitik
Civilizing our civilizations will require radical social change – a revolution, in fact. But we cannot afford to hope that a new war will trigger it. The far more likely outcome is the end of civilization as we know it, with the survivors (if there are any) organized in small authoritarian groups. We should harbor no illusions: in some basic sense, World War III has already begun, though for now it is still being fought mostly through proxies.
Abstract calls for peace are not enough. “Peace” is not a term that allows us to draw the key political distinction that we need. Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold. Nazi Germany wanted peace in occupied France, Israel wants peace in the occupied West Bank, and Russian President Vladimir Putin wants peace in Ukraine. That is why, as the philosopher Étienne Balibar once put it, “pacifism is not an option.” The only way to prevent another Great War is by avoiding the kind of “peace” that requires constant local wars for its maintenance.
Whom can we rely on under these conditions? Should we place our confidence in artists and thinkers, or in pragmatic practitioners of realpolitik? The problem with artists and thinkers is that they, too, can lay the foundation for war. Recall William Butler Yeats’s apt verse: “I have spread my dreams under your feet, / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” We should apply these lines to poets themselves. When they spread their dreams under our feet, they should spread them carefully because actual people will read them and act upon them. Recall that the same Yeats continuously flirted with Fascism, going so far as to voice his approval of Germany’s anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws in August 1938.
Plato’s reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city. Yet this is rather sensible advice, judging from the experience of recent decades, when the pretext for ethnic cleansing has been prepared by poets and “thinkers” like Putin’s house ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin. There is no longer ethnic cleansing without poetry, because we live in an era that is supposedly post-ideological. Since great secular causes no longer have the force to mobilize people for mass violence, a larger sacred motive is needed. Religion or ethnic belonging serve this role perfectly (pathological atheists who commit mass murder for pleasure are rare exceptions).
Realpolitik is no better guide. It has become a mere alibi for ideology, which often evokes some hidden dimension behind the veil of appearances in order to obscure the crime that is being committed openly. This double mystification is often announced by describing a situation as “complex.” An obvious fact – say, an instance of brutal military aggression – is relativized by evoking a “much more complex background.” The act of aggression is really an act of defense.
This is exactly what is happening today. Russia obviously attacked Ukraine, and is obviously targeting civilians and displacing millions. And yet commentators and pundits are eagerly searching for “complexity” behind it.
There is complexity, of course. But that does not change the basic fact that Russia did it. Our mistake was that we did not interpret Putin’s threats literally enough; we thought he was just playing a game of strategic manipulation and brinkmanship. One is reminded of the famous joke that Sigmund Freud quotes:
“Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you going?’ asked one. ‘To Cracow,’ was the answer. ‘What a liar you are!’ broke out the other. ‘If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?’”
When Putin announced a military intervention, we didn’t take him literally when he said he wanted to pacify and “denazify” Ukraine. Instead, the reproach from disappointed “deep” strategists amounts to: “Why did you tell me you are going to occupy Lviv when you really want to occupy Lviv?”
This double mystification exposes the end of realpolitik. As a rule, realpolitik is opposed to the naivety of binding diplomacy and foreign policy to (one’s version of) moral or political principles. Yet in the current situation, it is realpolitik that is naive. It is naive to suppose that the other side, the enemy, is also aiming at a limited pragmatic deal.
Force and Freedom
During the Cold War, the rules of superpower behavior were clearly delineated by the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Each superpower could be sure that if it decided to launch a nuclear attack, the other side would respond with full destructive force. As a result, neither side started a war with the other.
By contrast, when North Korea’s Kim Jong-un talks about dealing a devastating blow to the US, one cannot but wonder where he sees his own position. He talks as if he is unaware that his country, himself included, would be destroyed. It is as if he is playing an altogether different game called NUTS (Nuclear Utilization Target Selection), whereby the enemy’s nuclear capabilities can be surgically destroyed before it can counterstrike.
Over the past few decades, even the US has oscillated between MAD and NUTS. Though it acts as if it continues to trust the MAD logic in its relations with Russia and China, it has occasionally been tempted to pursue a NUTS strategy vis-à-vis Iran and North Korea. With his hints about possibly launching a tactical nuclear strike, Putin follows the same reasoning. The very fact that two directly contradictory strategies are mobilized simultaneously by the same superpower attests to the fantasy character of it all.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, MADness is passé. Superpowers are increasingly testing each other, experimenting with the use of proxies as they try to impose their own version of global rules. On March 5, Putin called the sanctions imposed on Russia the “equivalent of a declaration of war.” But he has repeatedly stated since then that economic exchange with the West should continue, emphasizing that Russia is keeping its financial commitments and continuing to deliver hydrocarbons to Western Europe.
In other words, Putin is trying to impose a new model of international relations. Rather than cold war, there should be hot peace: a state of permanent hybrid war in which military interventions are declared under the guise of peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.
Hence, on February 15, the Russian Duma (parliament) issued a declaration expressing “its unequivocal and consolidated support for the adequate humanitarian measures aimed at providing support to residents of certain areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine who have expressed a desire to speak and write in Russian language, who want freedom of religion to be respected, and who do not support the actions of the Ukrainian authorities violating their rights and freedoms.”
How often in the past have we heard similar arguments for US-led interventions in Latin America or the Middle East and North Africa? While Russia shells cities and bombs maternity wards in Ukraine, international commerce should continue. Outside of Ukraine, normal life should go on. That is what it means to have a permanent global peace sustained by never-ending peacekeeping interventions in isolated parts of the world.
Can anyone be free in such a predicament? Following Hegel, we should make a distinction between abstract and concrete freedom, which correspond to our notions of freedom and liberty. Abstract freedom is the ability to do what one wants independently of social rules and customs; concrete freedom is the freedom that is conferred and sustained by rules and customs. I can walk freely along a busy street only when I can be reasonably sure that others on the street will behave in a civilized way toward me – that drivers will obey traffic rules, and that other pedestrians will not rob me.
But there are moments of crisis when abstract freedom must intervene. In December 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, and first of all our right to speak. They insulted us to our faces. … And that is why the Resistance was a true democracy; for the soldier, as for his superior, the same danger, the same loneliness, the same responsibility, the same absolute freedom within the discipline.”
Sartre was describing freedom, not liberty. Liberty is what was established when post-war normality returned. In Ukraine today, those who are battling the Russian invasion are free and they are fighting for liberty. But this raises the question of how long the distinction can last. What happens if millions more people decide that they must freely violate the rules in order to protect their liberty? Is this not what drove a Trumpian mob to invade the US Capitol on January 6, 2021?
The not-so-great game
We still lack a proper word for today’s world. For her part, the philosopher Catherine Malabou believes we are witnessing the beginning of capitalism’s “anarchist turn”: “How else are we to describe such phenomena as decentralized currencies, the end of the state’s monopoly, the obsolescence of the mediating role played by banks, and the decentralization of exchanges and transactions?”
Those phenomena may sound appealing, but with the gradual disappearance of the state’s monopoly, state-imposed limits to ruthless exploitation and domination will also disappear. While anarcho-capitalism aims at transparency, it also “simultaneously authorizes the large-scale but opaque use of data, the dark web, and the fabrication of information.”
To prevent this descent into chaos, Malabou observes, policies increasingly follow a path of “Fascist evolution…with the excessive security and military build-up that goes along with it. Such phenomena do not contradict a drive towards anarchism. Rather, they indicate precisely the disappearance of the state, which, once its social function has been removed, expresses the obsolescence of its force through the use of violence. Ultra-nationalism thus signals the death agony of national authority.”
Viewed in these terms, the situation in Ukraine is not one nation-state attacking another nation-state. Rather, Ukraine is being attacked as an entity whose very ethnic identity is denied by the aggressor. The invasion is justified in the terms of geopolitical spheres of influence (which often extend well beyond ethnic spheres, as in the case of Syria). Russia refuses to use the word “war” for its “special military operation” not just to downplay the brutality of its intervention but above all to make clear that war in the old sense of an armed conflict between nation-states does not apply.
The Kremlin wants us to believe that it is merely securing “peace” in what it considers its geopolitical sphere of influence. Indeed, it is also already intervening through its proxies in Bosnia and Kosovo. On March 17, the Russian ambassador to Bosnia, Igor Kalabukhov, explained that, “If [Bosnia] decides to be a member of any alliance [such as NATO], that is an internal matter. Our response is a different matter. Ukraine’s example shows what we expect. Should there be any threat, we will respond.”
Moreover, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has gone so far as to suggest that the only comprehensive solution would be to demilitarize all of Europe, with Russia with its army maintaining peace through occasional humanitarian interventions. Similar ideas abound in the Russian press. As the political commentator Dmitry Evstafiev explains in a recent interview with a Croatian publication: “A new Russia is born which lets you know clearly that it doesn’t perceive you, Europe, as a partner. Russia has three partners: USA, China, and India. You are for us a trophy which shall be divided between us and Americans. You didn’t yet get this, although we are coming close to this.”
Dugin, Putin’s court philosopher, grounds the Kremlin’s stance in a weird version of historicist relativism. In 2016, he said:
“Post-modernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of believing. So we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And that is the only way to define the truth. So we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept…. If the United States does not want to start a war, you should recognize that United States is not any more a unique master. And [with] the situation in Syria and Ukraine, Russia says, ‘No you are not any more the boss.’ That is the question of who rules the world. Only war could decide really.”
This raises an obvious question: What about the people of Syria and Ukraine? Can they not also choose their truth and belief, or are they just a playground – or battlefield – of the big “bosses”? The Kremlin would say they don’t count in the big division of power. Within the four spheres of influence, there are only peacekeeping interventions. War proper happens only when the four big bosses cannot agree on the borders of their spheres – as in the case of China’s claims to Taiwan and the South China Sea.
A new non-alignment
But if we can be mobilized only by the threat of war, not by the threat to our environment, the liberty we will get if our side wins may not be worth having. We are faced with an impossible choice: if we make compromises to maintain peace, we are feeding Russian expansionism, which only a “demilitarization” of all of Europe will satisfy. But if we endorse full confrontation, we run the high risk of precipitating a new world war. The only real solution is to change the lens through which we perceive the situation.
While the global liberal-capitalist order is obviously approaching a crisis at many levels, the war in Ukraine is being falsely and dangerously simplified. Global problems like climate change play no role in the hackneyed narrative of a clash between barbaric-totalitarian countries and the civilized, free West. And yet the new wars and great-power conflicts are also reactions to such problems. If the issue is survival on a planet in trouble, one should secure a stronger position than others. Far from being the moment of clarifying truth, and when the basic antagonism is laid bare, the current crisis is a moment of deep deception.2
While we should stand firmly behind Ukraine, we must avoid the fascination with war that has clearly seized the imaginations of those who are pushing for an open confrontation with Russia. Something like a new non-aligned movement is needed, not in the sense that countries should be neutral in the ongoing war, but in the sense that we should question the entire notion of the “clash of civilizations.”1
According to Samuel Huntington, who coined the term, the stage for a clash of civilizations was set at the Cold War’s end, when the “iron curtain of ideology” was replaced by the “velvet curtain of culture.” At first blush, this dark vision may appear to be the very opposite of the end-of-history thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama in response to the collapse of communism in Europe. What could be more different from Fukuyama’s pseudo-Hegelian idea that the best possible social order humanity could devise had at last been revealed to be capitalist liberal democracy?
We can now see that the two visions are fully compatible: the “clash of civilizations” is the politics that comes at the “end of history.” Ethnic and religious conflicts are the form of struggle that fits with global capitalism. In an age of “post-politics” – when politics proper is gradually replaced by expert social administration – the only remaining legitimate sources of conflict are cultural (ethnic, religious). The rise of “irrational” violence follows from the depoliticization of our societies.
Within this limited horizon, it is true that the only alternative to war is a peaceful coexistence of civilizations (of different “truths,” as Dugin put it, or, to use a more popular term today, of different “ways of life”). The implication is that forced marriages, homophobia, or the rape of women who dare to go out in public alone are tolerable if they happen in another country, so long as that country is fully integrated into the global market.
The new non-alignment must broaden the horizon by recognizing that our struggle should be global – and by counseling against Russophobia at all costs. We should offer our support to those within Russia who are protesting the invasion. They are not some abstract coterie of internationalists; they are the true Russian patriots – the people who truly love their country and have become deeply ashamed of it since February 24. There is no more morally repulsive and politically dangerous saying than, “My country, right or wrong.” Unfortunately, the first casualty of the Ukraine war has been universality.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, The Day After the Revolution, Heaven in Disorder and Reading Hegel.
Published by University of Notre Dame Press in 2019.
The Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807, is G. W. F. Hegel’s remarkable philosophical text that examines the dynamics of human experience from its simplest beginnings in consciousness through its development into ever more complex and self-conscious forms. The work explores the inner discovery of reason and its progressive expansion into spirit, a world of intercommunicating and interacting minds reconceiving and re-creating themselves and their reality. The Phenomenology of Spirit is a notoriously challenging and arduous text that students and scholars have been studying ever since its publication.
In this long-awaited translation, Peter Fuss and John Dobbins provide a succinct, highly informative, and readily comprehensible introduction to several key concepts in Hegel’s thinking. This edition includes an extensive conceptual index, which offers easy reference to specific discussions in the text and elucidates the more subtle nuances of Hegel’s concepts and word usage. This modern American English translation employs natural idioms that accurately convey what Hegel means. Throughout the book, the translators adhered to the maxim: if you want to understand Hegel, read him in the English. This book is intended for intellectuals with a vested interest in modern philosophy and history, as well as students of all levels, seeking to access or further engage with this seminal text.
“The translators succeed masterfully in this effort and the result makes a considerable contribution to understanding this formidable text. As I read their introduction, I had the impression that Hegel was suddenly―wonder of wonders―speaking English! Perhaps for the first time, he was saying clearly what he wanted to say to native speakers of American English like myself.”
Contemporary life is defined by excess. There must always be more, there is never enough. We need a surplus to what we need to be able to truly enjoy what we have. Slavoj Žižek’s guide to surplus (and why it’s enjoyable) begins by arguing that what is surplus to our needs is by its very nature unsubstantial and unnecessary. But, perversely, without this surplus, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy, what is substantial and necessary. Indeed, without the surplus we wouldn’t be able to identify what was the perfect amount.
Is there any escape from the vicious cycle of surplus enjoyment or are we forever doomed to simply want more? Žižek argues that recognizing the society of enjoyment we live in for what it is can provide an explanation for the political impasses in which we find ourselves today. And if we begin, even a little bit, to recognize that the nuggets of ‘enjoyment’ we find in excess are as flimsy and futile, might we find a way out?
Jacques Lacan located the origin of his key notion of plus-de-jouir (surplus-enjoyment) in Marx’s notion of surplus-value, and it is worth exploring in detail the homology of the two notions, adding a third one, that of surplus-knowledge, a pseudo-knowledge in the guise of which our ignorance appears (“supreme” knowledge of God and other hidden forces, conspiracy theories, etc.). Such an analysis is crucial for resuscitating Marx’s critique of political economy, as well as for properly understanding today’s global capitalism and its ideological effects, up to fundamentalist violence.
Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Return of the Critique of Political Economy’ in Living in the End of Times. Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious. Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed (Forthcoming at Bloomsbury, 2022)
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, The Day After the Revolution, Heaven in Disorder and Reading Hegel.
Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (1670) is one of the most important philosophical works of the early modern period. In it Spinoza discusses at length the historical circumstances of the composition and transmission of the Bible, demonstrating the fallibility of both its authors and its interpreters. He argues that free enquiry is not only consistent with the security and prosperity of a state but actually essential to them, and that such freedom flourishes best in a democratic and republican state in which individuals are left free while religious organizations are subordinated to the secular power. His Treatise has profoundly influenced the subsequent history of political thought, Enlightenment ‘clandestine’ or radical philosophy, Bible hermeneutics, and textual criticism more generally. It is presented here in a new translation of great clarity and accuracy by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel, with a substantial historical and philosophical introduction by Jonathan Israel.
“Ma présentation d’Aragon se fera à partir de deux objets-causes, le premier politique, le second amoureux, et d’une cause-Idée, de nature esthétique. Trois repères donc, qui organisent le sujet-Aragon comme poète : la politique, l’amour, l’art. Nous accompagnerons Aragon dans ce triple engagement, et nous montrerons comment varie infiniment l’expression de leur traversée subjective. Au terme de leur quête passionnée, s’étendant sur une longue vie très intense et très ductile, les deux objets-causes ont pour nom propre, du côté politique, le Parti communiste français, du côté de l’amour, Elsa Triolet. La cause, elle, l’Idée, n’a cessé d’être la Poésie.”
This is the fourth volume of Models of the History of Philosophy, a collaborative work on the history of the history of philosophy dating from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century. The volume covers the so-called Hegelian age, in which the approach to the past of philosophy is placed at the foundation of “doing philosophy”, up to identifying with the same philosophy.
A philosophy which is however understood in a different way: as dialectical development, as hermeneutics, as organic development, as eclectic option, as a philosophy of experience, as a progressive search for truth through the repetition of errors… The material is divided into four large linguistic and cultural areas: the German, French, Italian and British. It offers the detailed analysis of 10 particularly significant works of the way of conceiving and reconstructing the “general” history of philosophy, from its origins to the contemporary age. This systematic exposure is preceded and accompanied by lengthy introductions on the historical background and references to numerous other works bordering on philosophical historiography.
This is the third volume of Models of the History of Philosophy, a collaborative work on the history of the history of philosophy dating from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century. The volume covers a decisive period in the history of modern thought, from Voltaire and the great “Encyclopédie” of Diderot and d’Alembert to the age of Kant, i.e. from the histoire de l’esprit humain animated by the idea of progress to the a priori history of human thought. The interest of the philosophes and the Kantians (Buhle and Tennemann) in the study and the reconstruction of the philosophies of the past was characterized by a spirit that was highly critical, but at the same time systematic. The material is divided into four large linguistic and cultural areas: the French, Italian, British and German. The detailed analysis of the 35 works which can be considered to be “general” histories of philosophy is preceded and accompanied by lengthy introductions on the historical background and references to numerous other works bordering on philosophical historiography.
Published in English for the first time, this is the translation of “Dall’età cartesiana a Brucker”, the second installment of the monumental multi-volume “Storia delle storie generali della filosofia”. It follows on from the first volume, translated from the Italian by C.W.T. Blackwell and published by Kluwer in 1993, which covered the subject from its origins in the Renaissance to the Historia Philosophica. This volume guides the reader from the Cartesian rejection of the ‘philosophical past’ that found voice in the work of Malebranche, right up to the establishment of a ‘critical’ history of philosophy by 18th century thinkers A.-F Boureau-Deslandes and J.J. Brucker. The latter pair investigated philosophy from its most ancient origins up to the work of their own contemporaries, and in doing so acted as midwives to the birth of the history of philosophy into a genre in its own right. It was a shift in emphasis that spawned dozens of works of critical history which in turn made an immense contribution to the culture of the Enlightenment. Through careful analysis of more than 36 separate works, the authors show how in the span of a single century the theoretical and methodological techniques used to assess the history of philosophy were refined and developed. The period marks the vital transition from a so-called ‘erudite’ historiography to a ‘critical’ or ‘philosophical’ history of philosophy, embodied by Bayle and Heumann respectively. The works examined in detail are either general histories of philosophy, or texts—such as Bayle’s Dictionnaire—which have strongly influenced the development of the genre.
Models of the History of Philosophy: From its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia philosophica’, a translation of a work published in 1981 in Italian, gives a comprehensive description of the various forms and approaches in the literature of the history of philosophy from the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century. Several traditions are described, from the well known ‘prisca theologia’ and `perennis philosophia’ traditions of Marsilio Ficino and Augustino Steuco, which claimed that the Greeks got their philosophy from the East, to the unknown influence of Scepticism on the history of philosophy by the recovery of Sextus Empiricus, and the German Protestant critical attack on Greek philosophy as Atheistic which was the tradition of the history of philosophy out of which Leibniz developed. Each individual historian of philosophy is given a separate entry which includes a biography, a complete bibliography of his works, a description of his history of philosophy and ends with both an assessment of his reputation during his own time and a complete listing of recent literature on him. As a result the substantial variety in the way the history of philosophy was written and, with it, an overview of the way western civilization developed is described in detail for the first time.
For university history of literature, history of culture, history of religion and history of philosophy classes. The book can be used both for undergraduate courses (for specific reading assignments) and as background material for graduate courses. The bibliography provides important aids to many topics which have previously been almost inaccessible.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world’s most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and other philosophers living in a rigid, hierarchical society colored by a deeply hostile theology first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world’s most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and other philosophers living in a rigid, hierarchical society colored by a deeply hostile theology first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness.
With the exception of his lectures on anthropology, The Conflict of the Faculties was the last book Kant published. Although it appeared in the autumn of 1798, its three parts-dealing with the conflict between the “lower” or philosophical faculty on the one hand and the three’ ‘higher” faculties of theology, law, and medicine on the other—were written on different occasions and originally intended to be issued separately. Publication of the first two parts had to be postponed, however, because of the repressive measures of Frederick William II, which Kant refers to in his Preface to this work.
Though it first aroused anger and controversy rather than admiration and acceptance, A Theologico-Political Treatise was a landmark in the analysis of theology (with particular reference to the Bible and its Jewish and Christian interpretations) and its relationship to philosophy and politics. Spinoza’s scholarly analysis, based on careful study, demonstrated that the Bible was composed by many writers over the centuries – and that even the Pentateuch, the first five books, were not the work of Moses, as was generally assumed at the time.
When the treatise appeared in 1670, this was highly controversial, questioning as it did the nature of God and miracles. Further, theology and philosophy, he maintained, should be kept separate. The treatise is also notable for the unequivocally libertarian view Spinoza promulgated: ‘Everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity.’
Baruch Spinoza was born in 1632 into a Sephardic/Portuguese family in Amsterdam but left Judaism, embraced Christianity and died in 1677 a highly learned philosopher. Best known for his Ethics, which, for his own safety, was published posthumously, A Theologico-Political Treatise was published in his lifetime, though anonymously. It underpinned his later reputation as the father of modern metaphysics and moral and political philosophy. Its unmistakable blend of considered scholarly argument with passionate declarations make it lively and relevant listening even in the 21st century.
Read by Leighton Pugh. Translation by Robert Harvey Monro Elwes. Audio edited by Simon Gros.
Immanuel Kant was one of the most influential philosophers in the whole of Europe, who changed Western thought with his examinations of reason and the nature of reality. In these writings he investigates human progress, civilization, morality and why, to be truly enlightened, we must all have the freedom and courage to use our own intellect.
Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, on May 6, 1856; between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna: in 1938 Hitler’s invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud’s life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but also the whole intellectual climate of the twentieth century.
Widely acknowledged to be one of Freud’s greatest cultural works, when Totem and Taboo was first published in 1913, it caused outrage. In it, Freud made what he called a first attempt at explaining problems of racial psychology and addressing neurotic symptoms as mental and emotional maladjustments to experience and environment. He hoped thereby to deepen the understanding of the mind by investigating its manifestations in primitive, noncivilized humans as documented by a range of writers and investigators in the scientific disciplines of sociology, anthropology and psychology.The work consists of four essays. This essential text is an ambitious undertaking because in it Freud seeks to unravel the mysteries of myth and religion by investigating the nature and qualities of sacrifice and the sacred, the primal myth and the parts these play in the generation of prohibitions, transgressions, guilt experience and expiation, as states and processes.
Freud delves into the work of the great minds of his day, engaging with J. G. Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough and Totemism and Exogamy’, Reinach’s ‘Code du Totemisme’, W. Wundt’s ‘Elements of the Psychology of Race’ and a host of others.
Totem and Taboo was translated by A. A. Brill and read by Martyn Swain. Audio edited by Simon Gros.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is remembered as the father of psychoanalysis. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) is one of his key works. In it he considers the conflict between the needs of the individual acting both egotistically and altruistically in the pursuit of happiness and the myriad demands of civilised society and the ensuing tensions this clash of needs and demands generates.
Consequently it remains a key text for anyone wishing to understand the breadth and depth of Freud’s thinking on the human condition. His analysis of the modern human’s situation, forced to repress and sublimate innate natural, sexual drives in order to satisfy society’s seemingly endless requirements, and the conflicts and consequences for mental health inherent in this, make it as relevant today as when it was written.
Civilization and Its Discontents was translated by Joan Riviere and read by Martyn Swain. Audio edited by Simon Gros.
14th November 2016. Brooklyn Public Library, New York.
Today, hundreds of thousands of people, desperate to escape war, violence and poverty, are seeking refuge in Europe. Our response from our European standpoint, argues Slavoj Žižek, offers two versions of ideological blackmail: either we open our doors as widely as possible; or we try to pull up the drawbridge. Both solutions are bad, states Žižek. They merely prolong the problem, rather than tackling it…
…The refugee crisis also presents an opportunity, a unique chance for Europe to redefine itself: but, if we are to do so, we have to start raising unpleasant and difficult questions. We must also acknowledge that large migrations are our future: only then can we commit to a carefully prepared process of change, one founded not on a community that see the excluded as a threat, but one that takes as its basis the shared substance of our social being.
The only way, in other words, to get to the heart of one of the greatest issues confronting Europe today is to insist on the global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed. Maybe such solidarity is a utopia. But, warns Žižek, if we don’t engage in it, then we are really lost. And we will deserve to be lost.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, The Day After the Revolution, Disorder in Heaven and Reading Hegel.
Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru is an English novelist and journalist. He is the author of the novels ‘The Impressionist’, ‘Transmission’, ‘My Revolutions’, ‘Gods Without Men’, ‘White Tears’ and ‘Red Pill’. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
I, the manager of theoryreader.org, just spent a very long month in a hospital, and am very exhausted, making it harder for me to manage this website properly, as it was usually run. Among other chaotic inconveniences I was forced to leave my apartment due to troubles with the neighbors and had to immediately move to a nearby town in my small mother’s apartment. On top of this the digital equipment required and the platform are costing me almost my entire monthly income, and with constant unemployment I have been left without almost any proper income whatsoever, and have to rely solely on my mother’s small budget for the necessary daily fees. I have also endured enormous stress and constant pressure from different state agencies (medical, police, political—elections are soon—even different courts….) based on completely false allegations and character assassination for a long time now.
If you find the work done on this site helpful to you personally, please consider donating any amount to help me get through the day. Currently I’m editing audio of Parallax View and adding chunks of it on the YouTube channel, which will take a very long time to complete due to the length of the book, and the source recording needs constant editing, so just for this single project to be complete, it could take months. War has broken out 1500km away between Ukraine and Russia and is also affecting everything on the continent, including prices and relations between people, just after we have endured a very long Covid lockdown period. Due to my unfortunate personal past I am unemployable and have entered the state of disability retirement, but it will take at least a year before the committee decides if I get those funds and how much. Until then I am basically without any income right now, and am hoping for donations of the visitors of this website for now. It’s a database of over 1400 items, I’m planning to constantly update everything as time passes, but need some basic daily funds to be even able to do this. My personal situation is chaotic with an unpredictable future, my entire library of hundreds of expensive physical books has become endangered along with the loss of my city apartment, some books and equipment have even been stolen as I have moved a few days ago. I have never been in good relations with my mother’s side of the family, and my father and his side of the family, who have been supporting me my entire life, have all suddenly passed away in the last decade, making it impossible for me sometimes to acquire basic food or pay necessary monthly costs. As far as friends go, most of them turned out to be my enemies. Local mayor city management has also made sure the costs of basic needs in the economy have skyrocketed during the short period of the last two, three years, it’s an economic phenomena the entire country recognizes as occurring, with food and other priced doubling or tripling, making the entire city and surrounding area a safe heaven for the rich, but displacing the lower and middle classes. So right now I am left to the good will of visitors and subscribers to get through the day. Every donation will be appreciated.
The Being and Event trilogy is the philosophical basis of Alain Badiou’s entire oeuvre. It is formed of three major texts, which constitute a kind of metaphysical saga: Being and Event (1988). ), Logics of the Worlds (2006) and finally The Immanence of Truths, which he has been working on for 15 years.
The new volume reverses the perspective adopted in Logics of Worlds. Where in that book, Badiou saw fit to analyze how truths, qua events, appear from the perspective of particular worlds that by definition exclude them, in The Immanence of Truths Badiou asks instead how the irruption of truth transforms the worlds within which they by necessity must arise. An emphasis on regularity and continuity has given way to an attempt, one unquestionable in its philosophical power and implications, to formalize rupture and reconfiguration.
The Being and Event trilogy is a unique and ambitious work that reveals how truths can be at once context-specific and universal, situational and eternal.
Table of Contents
List of Symbols Introduction, Kenneth Reinhard (UCLA, USA) Prologue
Section I: The Classic Forms Of Finitude Section II: The Modernity Of Finitude: Covering-Over Section III: The Supremacy Of Infinity Section IV: On The Edge Of The Absolute Section V: Conditions For Defeating Covering-Over Section VI: Parmenides’ Revenge. Section VII: The General Theory Of Works-In-Truth Section VIII: Works Based On The Object: Art, Science Section IX: Works Based On Becoming: Love, Politics
Truth has always been a central philosophical category, occupying different fields of knowledge and practice. In the current moment of fake news and alternative facts, it is mandatory to revisit the various meanings of truth. Departing from various approaches to psychoanalytic theory and practice, the authors gathered in this book offer critical reflections and insights about truth and its effects. In articulations of psychoanalysis with (for instance) philosophy, ethics, and politics, the reader will find discussions about issues such as knowledge, love, and clinical practice, all marked by the matter of truth.
Contributors: Carin Franzén (Stockholm University), Derek Humphreys (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord), Christian Dunker (University of São Paulo), Peter Jansson (Dalarna University), Laurie Laufer (Université Paris Diderot), Patricia Gherovici (Das Unbehagen), Nicolas Evzonas (Université Paris Diderot), Mladen Dolar (University of Ljubljana), Augusto Ismerim (University of São Paulo), Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University), Nelson da Silva Junior(University of São Paulo), Paulo Beer (University of São Paulo), Vladimir Safatle (University of São Paulo), Samo Tomšič (Humboldt University)
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
Philosopher Terry Pinkard revisits Sartre’s later work, illuminating a pivotal stance in Sartre’s understanding of freedom and communal action.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, released to great fanfare in 1960, has since then receded in philosophical visibility. As Sartre’s reputation is now making a comeback, it is time for a reappraisal of his later work. In Practice, Power, and Forms of Life, philosopher Terry Pinkard interprets Sartre’s late work as a fundamental reworking of his earlier ideas, especially in terms of his understanding of the possibility of communal action as genuinely free, which the French philosopher had previously argued was impossible.
Pinkard reveals how Sartre was drawn back to Hegel, a move that was itself incited by Sartre’s newfound interest in Marxism. Pinkard argues that Sartre constructed a novel position on freedom that has yet to be adequately taken up and analyzed within philosophy and political theory. Through Sartre, Pinkard advances an argument that contributes to the history of philosophy as well as key debates on action and freedom.
An Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion examines Hegel’s religious thinking by seeing it against the backdrop of the main religious trends in his own day, specifically the Enlightenment and Romanticism. A basic introduction to Hegel’s lectures, it provides an account of the criticism of religion by key Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Lessing, Hume, and Kant. This is followed by an analysis of how the Romantic thinkers, such as Rousseau, Jacobi and Schleiermacher, responded to these challenges. For Hegel, the views of these thinkers from both the Enlightenment and Romanticism tended to empty religion of its content. The goal that he sets for his own philosophy of religion is to restore this lost content. The book provides a detailed account of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and argues that the basic ideas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism are still present today, and remain an important issue for both academics and non-academics, regardless of their religious orientation.
Read by Matthew Hartford. Audio edited by Simon Gros.
The Parallax View is one of Slavoj Žižek’s most substantial theoretical works; at the time of publishing Žižek himself described it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Žižek is interested in the “parallax gap” separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an “impossible short circuit” of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Žižek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.
Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today’s theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. In The Parallax View, Žižek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today’s brain sciences (according to which “nobody is home” in the skull, just stacks of brain meat—a condition Žižek calls “the unbearable lightness of being no one”); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Žižek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics—including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism.
The Parallax View not only expands Žižek’s Lacanian-Hegelian approach to different domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, The Day After the Revolution and Disorder in Heaven.
I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so. —OSCAR WILDE
If civilized people are expected to have read all important works of literature, and thousands more books are published every year, what are we supposed to do in those awkward social situations in which we’re forced to talk about books we haven’t read? In this delightfully witty, provocative book, a huge hit in France that has drawn huge attention from critics around the world, literature professor and psychoanalyst Bayard argues that it’s actually more important to know a book’s role in our collective library than its details.
Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, and even the movie Groundhog Day, he describes the many varieties of “non-reading” and the horribly sticky social situations that might confront us, and then offers his advice on what to do. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them. It’s the book that readers everywhere will be talking about-and despite themselves, reading-this holiday season.
First written in 1929 and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the most influential works of pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Focusing on the tension between the primitive drives of the individual and the demands of civilization for order and conformity, Freud draws upon his psychoanalytic theories to explain the fundamental structures, conflicts, and consequences of society. Written in the aftermath of World War I, Civilization and Its Discontents advances the idea that humans’ instinctive desires—violent urges and sexual drives—create the need for law and structure, which, when implemented, create constant feelings of discontent. A seminal work in psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents has sparked debate since its publication and continues to be widely read today. This edition is the translation by James Strachey.
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna: in 1938 Hitler’s invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud’s life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but also the whole intellectual climate of the twentieth century.
The Interpretation of Dreams ranks among the most influential books of the twentieth century. Here Freud reflects on his own dreams and those of others to argue powerfully for the first time that all dreams serve simply to provide wish-fulfilment for the unconscious mind. From a child’s simple sleeping fantasy to the bewildering horror of an adult nightmare, all can be understood, through analysis, to symbolize the satisfaction of the repressed desires of childhood. It is not, Freud argues, that dreams are prophetic or meaningless – but that in order to understand them we have to learn a new way of interpreting the complex symbols and tangled language of the unconscious mind.
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna: in 1938 Hitler’s invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud’s life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but also the whole intellectual climate of the twentieth century.
Published by OR Books in 2021. Read by Will Tulin.
“ There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent. ” —Mao Zedong
“One of the most innovative and exciting contemporary thinkers of the left.” —Times Literary Supplement
“The thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard.” —Observer
“Never ceases to dazzle.” —Daily Telegraph
“Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Žižek.” —New York Review of Books
“Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation.” —The New Yorker
“The most dangerous philosopher in the West.” —Adam Kirsch, The New Republic
As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos.
Acknowledging the possibilities for new beginnings at such moments, Mao Zedong famously proclaimed “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.” The contemporary relevance of Mao’s observation depends on whether today’s catastrophes can be a catalyst for progress or have passed over into something terrible and irretrievable. Perhaps the disorder is no longer under, but in heaven itself.
Characteristically rich in paradoxes and reversals that entertain as well as illuminate, Slavoj Žižek’s new book treats with equal analytical depth the lessons of Rammstein and Corbyn, Morales and Orwell, Lenin and Christ. It excavates universal truths from local political sites across Palestine and Chile, France and Kurdistan, and beyond.
Heaven In Disorder looks with fervid dispassion at the fracturing of the Left, the empty promises of liberal democracy, and the tepid compromises offered by the powerful. From the ashes of these failures, Žižek asserts the need for international solidarity, economic transformation, and—above all—an urgent, “wartime” communism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution.
Angesichts der Impfpflicht-Debatte berufen sich viele Impfgegner auf die Unverletzlichkeit ihrer individuellen Freiheit. Doch kann es in einem liberal verfassten Gemeinwesen überhaupt eine individuelle Freiheit der Person und der Entscheidung geben, die nicht abhängig von den Normen eben jener Gemeinschaft ist? Die uneingeschränkte, individuelle Freiheit in liberalen Demokratien ist eine Fiktion, der wir blind folgen – mit dieser Volte provoziert der slowenische Philosoph Slavoj Zizek inmitten der Impfpflichtdebatte. Er hält nicht nur Impfgegner, sondern auch all jene für irre, die meinten, es gebe bei der Frage nach dem Impfen überhaupt eine freie Wahl. Schliesslich habe man in liberalen Gesellschaften nur Optionen, die sich innerhalb des Rahmens grundsätzlicher Normen der Gemeinschaft befinden – ein Individuum unterwerfe sich von vornherein diesen Normen, wenn es nicht die Wahl innerhalb der Koordinaten dieser Gesellschaft selbst verlieren will. Die Paradoxie einer Wahl, die eigentlich keine ist, sei somit konstitutiv für die liberale Demokratie. Bei der Frage, ob man sich Impfen lasse, gebe es daher eigentlich ohnehin nur eine Option – egal ob man das Zwang, Pflicht oder freie Entscheidung nenne. Schliesslich berühre diese Frage die zentrale Aufgabe des Staates, individuelle Freiheit dort einzugrenzen, wo sie andere gefährdet.
Der Begriff der individuellen Freiheit ist eng mit der Entstehung moderner Staatlichkeit verbunden. Das Subjekt geht eine Art Gesellschaftsvertrag ein. erhält im Gegenzug Freiheitsrechte, überlässt es aber dem Staat über allgemeine Normen und damit über die Grenzen eben jener Freiheit zu entscheiden. Freiheit ist somit nicht naturgegeben, sondern ein Produkt des Zusammenspiels zwischen Individuum und den Normen einer Gemeinschaft – sie bleibt stets relativ, paradox und ambivalent. Und doch ist die Rede von der uneingeschränkten individuellen Freiheit heute zum Fetisch geworden, zum demokratischen Mythos, der diese Paradoxien ausser Acht lässt – das sagt die österreichische Philosophin Isolde Charim. In der Pandemie habe sich erstmals für viele offenbart, welche Entscheidungsgewalt beim Staat liegt. Und wie wenig in einer Krisensituation vom Mythos individueller Freiheit in der Demokratie bleibt. Die Wut auf den demokratischen Staat wachse, wohl auch weil in der Pandemie ureigene Fiktionen individueller Freiheit in liberalen Demokratien bröckeln und klar wird, was demokratische Praxis im Kern bedeutet. Woher kommt der Mythos individueller Freiheit? Welche Rolle spielt dabei die Entwicklung des Subjektbegriffs in der Philosophiegeschichte? Und brauchen wir einen neuen, realistischeren Blick auf den Begriff der Freiheit in liberalen Gesellschaften?
Slavoj Žižek, Todd McGowan, and Russ Sbriglia explore the points of greatest strength and greatest weakness in the thought of Jacques Lacan. They focus on the notion of surplus enjoyment, the formulas of sexuation, and the four discourses. They frame this discussion with analysis of the current Russian aggression against Ukraine, which they look at in psychoanalytic terms.
Are there “good” and “bad” refugees? Those who are like us and those who are not? The credibility of Europe and the geopolitical future of the world could well be at stake on this question of humanity, explains the Slovenian philosopher.
As the Ukrainian president invites the pope to mediate between Kiev and Moscow, we republish this collective appeal. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Ukrainian poet-cult Serhiy Zhadan, former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski, and Anglican theologian John Milbank call for “peace emissaries” to go to Ukraine to “stop the bombing.”
The very first book dedicated to Slavoj Žižek’s theoretical treatment of law, this book gathers widely recognized Žižek scholars as well as legal theorists to offer a sustained analysis of the place of law in Žižek’s work. Whether it is with reference to symbolic law, psychoanalytical law, religious law, positive law, human rights, to Lacan’s, Hegel’s, or Kant’s philosophies of law, or even to Jewish or Buddhist law, Žižek returns again and again to law.
And what his work offers, this volume demonstrates, is a radically new approach to law, and a rethinking of its role within the framework of radical politics. With the help of Žižek himself – who here, and for the first time, directly engages with the topic of law – this collection provides an authoritative account of ‘Žižek and law’. It will be invaluable resource for researchers and students in the fields of law, legal theory, legal philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, theology, and cultural studies.
Laurent de Sutter (born December 24, 1977 in Brussels), is a French-speaking Belgian philosopher. He is a professor of law theory at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He also directs the Perspectives critiques collection at the Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) and the Theory Redux collection at Polity Press in London. He is also a member of the Scientific Council of the International College of Philosophy.
This short masterwork in twentieth-century philosophy provides both a major reinterpretation of Hegel and insight into the evolution of Adorno’s critical theory.
The first study focuses on the relationship of reason, the individual, and society in Hegel, defending him against the criticism that he was merely an apologist for bourgeois society. The second examines the experiential content of Hegel’s idealism, considering the notion of experience in relation to immediacy, empirical reality, science, and society. The third study, Skoteinos, is an unusual and fascinating essay in which Adorno lays out his thoughts on understanding Hegel.
In his reflections, which spring from his experience of teaching at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, questions of textual and philosophical interpretation are intertwined.
Recordings of a paper delivered by Slavoj Žižek on the last day of the Marxism Festival, which took place from on 2-7th July 2009, located at Friends Meeting House, Euston Road, central London to an audience of over a thousand people gathered from all across the globe. The event happened at a time of one of the biggest economic and ideological crises that capitalism has ever seen.
Other speakers included Tony Benn, Gary Younge, David Harvey, Bernadette McAliskey, Alex Callinicos, Gareth Peirce, Tariq Ali, Mark Serwotka, Haifa Zangana, Luigi Fiori, Ghada Karmi, Eamonn McCann, Terry Eagleton, John Bellamy Foster, Sheila Rowbotham, Weyman Bennett, Michael Billington, Nick Broomfield, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Danny Dorling, Lindsey German, Liz Fekete and Paul Gilroy.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, The Day After the Revolution and Disorder in Heaven.
The outbreak of full-fledged war with the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a deep turning point in the world order. As such it cannot be ignored by the geographers assembled (alas by zoom) at our annual meeting, I therefore offer some non-expert comments as a basis for discussion.
There is myth that the world has been at peace since 1945 and that the world order constructed under the hegemony of the United States has largely worked to contain the war-like proclivities of capitalist states in competition with each other. The inter-state competition in Europe that produced two world wars has largely been contained, and West Germany and Japan were peaceably re-incorporated into the capitalist world system after 1945 (in part to combat the threat of Soviet communism). Institutions of collaboration were set up in Europe (the common market, the European Union, NATO, the euro). Meanwhile, “hot” wars (both civil and inter-state) have been waged in abundance since 1945, beginning with the Korean and Vietnam wars followed by the Yugoslav wars and the NATO bombing of Serbia, two wars against Iraq (one of which was justified by patent lies by the US about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction), the wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria.
Up until 1991, the Cold War provided a fairly constant background to the functioning of the world order. It was often manipulated to their economic advantage by those US corporations that constitute what Eisenhower long ago referred to as the military industrial complex. Cultivating fear (both fake and real) of the Soviets and Communism was instrumental to this politics The economic consequence has been wave after wave of technological and organizational innovation in military hardware. Much of this spawned widespread civilian uses, such as aviation, the internet and nuclear technologies, thus contributing in a major way to the support for endless capital accumulation and the increasing centralization of capitalist power in relation to a captive market.
Furthermore, resort to “military Keynesianism” became a favoured exception in times of difficulty to the neoliberal austerity regimes otherwise periodically administered to the populations of even the advanced capitalist countries after 1970 or so. Reagan’s resort to military Keynesianism to orchestrate an arms race against the Soviet Union played a contributory role in the end of the Cold War at the same time as it distorted the economies of both countries. Before Reagan the top tax rate in the US never fell below 70 percent while since Reagan the rate has never exceeded forty percent, thus disproving the right wing’s insistence that high taxes inhibit growth. The increasing militarization of the US economy after 1945 also went hand in hand with the production of greater economic inequality and the formation of a ruling oligarchy within the USA as well as elsewhere (even in Russia).
The difficulty Western policy elites face in situations of the current sort in the Ukraine is that short-run and immediate problems need to be addressed in ways that do not exacerbate the underlying roots of conflicts. Insecure people often react violently, for example, but we cannot confront someone coming at us with a knife with soothing words to assuage their insecurities. They need to be disarmed preferably in ways that do not add to their insecurities. The aim should be to lay the basis for a more peaceful, collaborative and de-militarized world order, while at the same time urgently limiting the terror, the destruction and the needless loss of life that this invasion entails.
What we are witnessing in the Ukraine conflict is in many respects a product of the processes that dissolved the power of actually existing communism and of the Soviet Regime. With the end of the Cold War Russians were promised a rosy future as the benefits of capitalist dynamism and a free market economy would supposedly spread by trickle down across the country. Boris Kagarlitsky described the reality this way. With the end of the cold war Russians believed they were headed on a jet plane to Paris only to be told in mid-flight “welcome to Burkino Faso.”
There was no attempt to incorporate the Russian people and economy into the global system as happened In 1945 with Japan and West Germany and the advice from the IMF and leading Western economists (like Jeffrey Sachs) was to embrace neoliberal “shock therapy” as the magic potion for the transition. When that plainly did not work, Western elites deployed the neoliberal game of blaming the victims for not developing their human capital appropriately and not dismantling the many barriers to individual entrepreneurialism (hence tacitly blaming the rise of the oligarchs on the Russians themselves). The internal results for Russia were horrendous. GDP collapsed, the ruble was not viable (money was measured in bottles of vodka), life expectancy declined precipitously, the position of women was debased, there was a total collapse of social welfare and government institutions, the rise of mafia politics around oligarchic power, capped by a debt crisis in 1998 to which there seemed to be no path for an off-ramp other than begging for some crumbs from the rich folks’ table and submitting to the dictatorship of the IMF. The economic humiliation was total, except for the oligarchs. To top it all, the Soviet Union was dismembered into independent republics without much popular consultation.
In two or three years, Russia underwent a shrinkage of its population and economy along with the destruction of its industrial base proportionally more than that experienced through deindustrialization in the older regions of the United States over the preceding forty years. The social, political and economic consequences of deindustrialization in Pennsylvania, Ohio and throughout the Mid-West have been far-reaching (embracing everything from an opioid epidemic to the rise of noxious political tendencies supporting white supremacism and Donald Trump). The impact of “shock therapy” upon Russian political, cultural and economic life was predictably far worse. The West failed to do anything other than gloat at the supposed “end of history” on Western terms.
Then there is the issue of NATO. Originally conceived as both defensive and collaborative it became a primary war-like military force set up to contain the spread of communism and to prevent inter-state competition in Europe taking a military turn. By and large it helped marginally as a collaborative organizational device mitigating inter-state competition in Europe (though Greece and Turkey have never worked out their differences over Cyprus). The European Union was in practice much more helpful. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union NATO’s primary purpose disappeared. The threat to the military industrial complex of the US population realizing a “peace dividend” by sharp cuts in the defense budget was real. Perhaps as a result, NATO’s aggressive content (always there) was actively asserted in the Clinton years very much in violation of the verbal promises made to Gorbachev in the early days of perestroika. The US led NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999 is an obvious example (when the Chinese Embassy was hit, though whether by accident or design is not clear).
The US bombing of Serbia and other US interventions violating the sovereignty of smaller nation states is evoked by Putin as precedent for his actions. The expansion of NATO (in the absence of any clear military threat) up to Russia’s border during these years was strongly questioned even in the US, with Donald Trump attacking the logic of NATO’S very existence. Even Tom Friedman, a conservative commentator writing recently in the New York Times, evokes US culpability for recent events through its aggressive and provocative approach to Russia by way of NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe. In the 1990s it appeared as if NATO was a military alliance in search of an enemy. Putin has now been provoked enough to oblige, obviously angered by the humiliations of Russia’s economic treatment as a basket case and Western dismissive arrogance as to Russia’s place in the global order.
Political elites in the US and the West should have understood that humiliation is a disastrous tool in foreign affairs with often lasting and catastrophic effects. The humiliation of Germany at Versailles played an important role in fomenting World War Two. Political elites avoided repetition of that with respect to West Germany and Japan after 1945 by way of the Marshall Plan only to repeat the catastrophe of humiliating Russia (both actively and inadvertently) after the end of the Cold War. Russia needed and deserved a Marshall Plan rather than lectures on the probity of neoliberal solutions in the 1990s. The century and a half of China’s humiliation by Western Imperialism (extending to that of Japanese occupations and the infamous “rape of Nanjing” in the 1930s) is playing a significant role in contemporary geopolitical struggles. The lesson is simple: humiliate at your peril. It will come back to haunt if not bite you.
None of this justifies Putin’s actions, any more than forty years of deindustrialization and neoliberal labor suppression justifies the actions or positions of Donald Trump. But neither do these actions in the Ukraine justify the resurrection of the institutions of global militarism (such as NATO) that have contributed so much to the creation of the problem. In the same way that the inter-state competition within Europe needed to be demilitarized after 1945, so inter power-bloc armaments races need to be dismantled today and supplanted by strong institutions of collaboration and cooperation. Submitting to the coercive laws of competition both between capitalist corporations and between power blocs is the recipe for future disasters, even as it is still regrettably seen by big capital as the supportive pathway for endless capital accumulation in the future.
The danger at a time like this is that the smallest error of judgment on either side can easily escalate into a major confrontation between nuclear powers in which Russia can hold its own against hitherto overwhelming US military power. The unipolar world US elites inhabited in the 1990s is already now superseded by a bi-polar world. But much else is in flux.
On January 15th 2003, millions of people all around the world took to the streets to protest against the threat of war in what even the New York Times conceded was a startling expression of global public opinion. Lamentably they failed, leading into two decades of wasteful and destructive wars all around the world. It is clear that the people of the Ukraine do not want war, the people of Russia do not want war, the European people do not want war, the peoples of North America do not want yet another war. The popular movement for peace needs to be rekindled, to reassert itself. Peoples everywhere need to assert their right to participate in the creation of the new world order, based in peace, cooperation and collaboration rather than competition, coercion and bitter conflict.
Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno’s theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought.
In recent years, techno-scientific progress has started to utterly transform our world – changing it almost beyond recognition. In this new work, philosopher Slavoj Žižek turns to look at the brave new world of Big Tech, revealing how, with each new wave of innovation, we find ourselves moving closer and closer to a bizarrely literal realization of Marx’s prediction that ‘all that is solid melts into air.’
With the automation of work, the virtualization of money, the dissipation of class communities and the rise of immaterial, intellectual labor, the global capitalist edifice is beginning to crumble, more quickly than ever before-and it is now on the verge of vanishing entirely. But what will come next? Against a backdrop of constant socio-technological upheaval, how could any kind of authentic change take place? In such a context, Žižek argues, there can be no great social triumph—because lasting revolution has already come into the scene, like a thief in broad daylight, stealing into sight right before our ever eyes. What we must do now is wake up and see it.
Urgent as ever, ‘Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity’ illuminates the new dangers as well as the radical possibilities thrown up by today’s technological and scientific advances, and their electrifying implications for us all. Read by Jamie East.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
BERLINER ZEOTUNG—Slavoj Žižek, 27. februar 2022 – 09:10 Uhr
Russland zieht in den Kampf der Großmächte. Die Linke hat das nicht kommen sehen. Um zu gewinnen, sollte Europa mit der Dritten Welt zusammenarbeiten.
Nach dem russischen Angriff auf die Ukraine schämte ich mich wieder einmal dafür, ein slowenischer Staatsbürger zu sein. Die slowenische Regierung verkündete sogleich, dass sie bereit sei, Tausende ukrainische Flüchtlinge aufzunehmen, die vor der russischen Besatzung fliehen. Okay, aber als Afghanistan von den Taliban erobert wurde, verkündete dieselbe Regierung, dass Slowenien nicht bereit sei, irgendwelche Flüchtlinge von dort aufzunehmen. Die Rechtfertigung war, dass die Menschen, anstatt zu fliehen, dort bleiben und die Taliban mit Waffen bekämpfen sollten.
Als vor einigen Monaten Tausende von Flüchtlingen aus Asien versuchten, über Belarus nach Polen zu gelangen, bot die slowenische Regierung Polen militärische Hilfe an und behauptete, Europa werde dort angegriffen. Es gibt also offensichtlich zwei Arten von Flüchtlingen: „unsere“ (europäische), d. h. „echte Flüchtlinge“, und solche aus der Dritten Welt, die unsere Gastfreundschaft nicht verdienen.
Die slowenische Regierung veröffentlichte am 25. Februar einen Tweet, in dem sie diese Unterscheidung deutlich machte: „Die Flüchtlinge aus der Ukraine kommen aus einem Umfeld, das sich kulturell, religiös und historisch völlig von dem Umfeld unterscheidet, aus dem die Flüchtlinge aus Afghanistan kommen.“ Nach dem Aufschrei, den dieser Tweet auslöste, wurde er bald wieder zurückgezogen – aber der Geist der obszönen Wahrheit verließ für einen kurzen Moment die Flasche.
China wird die Taiwan-Frage lösen wollen.
Ich erwähne dies nicht aus moralischen Gründen, sondern weil ich glaube, dass eine solche „Verteidigung Europas“ für Westeuropa im laufenden globalen Kampf um geopolitischen Einfluss katastrophal sein wird. Unsere Medien konzentrieren sich derzeit auf den Konflikt zwischen der „liberalen“ Sphäre des Westens und der „eurasischen“ Sphäre Russlands, wobei jede Seite die andere beschuldigt, eine Bedrohung darzustellen: Der Westen schürt „farbige Revolutionen“ im Osten und kesselt Russland mit der Nato-Erweiterung ein; Russland versucht brutal, seine Kontrolle über das gesamte ehemalige sowjetische Gebiet wiederherzustellen, und niemand weiß, wo es aufhören wird.
Russland hat bereits deutlich gemacht, dass es nicht tatenlos zusehen wird, wenn Bosnien und Herzegowina sich der Nato annähert (was wahrscheinlich bedeutet, dass es die Abtrennung des serbischen Teils von Bosnien unterstützen wird). All dies ist Teil eines größeren geopolitischen Spiels – man denke nur an die russische Militärpräsenz in Syrien, die das Assad-Regime gerettet hat. Was der Westen weitgehend ignoriert, ist die dritte, viel größere Gruppe von Ländern, die den Konflikt meist nur beobachten: die Dritte Welt, von Lateinamerika bis zum Nahen Osten, von Afrika bis Südostasien – selbst China ist nicht bereit, Russland vollständig zu unterstützen, obwohl es seine eigenen Pläne hat. Am 25. Februar erklärte Xi Jinping in einer Botschaft an Kim Jong Un, China sei bereit, mit der koreanischen Seite zusammenzuarbeiten, um die Beziehungen zwischen China und Nordkorea in Freundschaft und Zusammenarbeit „in einer neuen Situation“ weiterzuentwickeln – eine verschlüsselte Anspielung auf den Krieg in der Ukraine. Es besteht die Befürchtung, dass China die „neue Situation“ nutzen wird, um Taiwan zu „befreien“.
Deshalb reicht es nicht aus, Dinge zu wiederholen, die für uns offensichtlich sind. Es ist wahr, dass bereits die von Putin verwendete Sprache alles verrät. Am 25. Februar 2022 rief Putin das ukrainische Militär dazu auf, die Macht in ihrem Land zu übernehmen und Präsident Zelensky zu stürzen, da es „für uns einfacher sei, mit dem ukrainischen Militär einen Deal zu machen“ als mit „dieser Bande von Drogensüchtigen und Neonazis“ (der ukrainischen Regierung), die „das gesamte ukrainische Volk als Geisel genommen“ habe.
Bemerkenswert ist auch, wie Russland jede Gegenmaßnahme sofort militarisiert: Als westliche Staaten die Möglichkeit in Betracht zogen, Russland aus dem SWIFT-System auszuschließen, antwortete Russland, dies käme einem kriegerischen Akt gleich – als ob Russland nicht bereits einen groß angelegten tatsächlichen Krieg begonnen hätte. Ein weiterer abschreckender Fall: „An alle, die in Erwägung ziehen, sich von außen einzumischen: Wenn ihr das tut, werdet ihr mit Konsequenzen konfrontiert, die größer sein werden als alle anderen in der Geschichte“, sagte Putin am 24. Februar 2022, als er die Militärintervention in der Ukraine ankündigte.
Versuchen wir doch einmal, diese Aussage ernst zu nehmen: „Einmischung von außen“ kann vieles bedeuten, einschließlich der Entsendung von militärischem Verteidigungsgerät in die Ukraine; „Konsequenzen, die größer sind als alle, mit denen ihr in der Geschichte konfrontiert wurdet“? Die europäischen Länder haben zwei Weltkriege mit Millionen von Toten hinter sich, also kann eine „größere“ Konsequenz nur eine nukleare Zerstörung sein. Diese (nicht nur rhetorische) Radikalisierung ist es, die uns beunruhigen sollte: Die meisten von uns haben erwartet, dass Russland lediglich die beiden von russischen Separatisten kontrollierten „Republiken“ oder im äußersten Fall das gesamte Donbass-Gebiet besetzen würde. Niemand hat wirklich mit einer totalen Invasion der Ukraine gerechnet.
Diejenigen, die Russland unterstützen oder zumindest ein gewisses „Verständnis“ für seine Handlungen aufbringen, sind jedoch eine Gruppe von seltsamen Bettgenossen. Der vielleicht traurigste Teil der Geschichte ist, dass nicht wenige in der liberalen Linken die Krise für einen Bluff gehalten haben, da beide Seiten wussten, dass sie sich einen totalen Krieg nicht leisten können. Die Botschaft war der liberalen Linken war: „Bleibt ruhig, verliert nicht die Nerven, und es wird nichts passieren.“
Leider müssen wir zugeben, dass Biden Recht hatte, als er vor 10 Tagen sagte, dass Putin eine Entscheidung zum Einmarsch getroffen hat. Nach der russischen Aggression schieben einige „Linke“ (ich kann das Wort hier nicht ohne Anführungszeichen verwenden) die Schuld auf den Westen – die Geschichte ist bekannt: Die Nato erwürgte und destabilisierte Russland langsam, kreiste es militärisch ein, schürte Revolutionen und ignorierte die durchaus berechtigten Ängste Russlands. Man erinnere sich nur daran, dass Russland im letzten Jahrhundert zweimal vom Westen aus angegriffen wurde…
Daran ist natürlich etwas Wahres dran. Aber dieses Narrativ als Rechtfertigung für den Krieg zu verwenden, ist so, als würde man Hitler rechtfertigen, indem man die Schuld auf den ungerechten Versailler Vertrag schiebt, der die deutsche Wirtschaft vernichtete. Und es bedeutet auch, dass die Großmächte das Recht haben, ihre eigenen Einflusssphären zu kontrollieren und die Autonomie der kleinen Nationen auf dem Altar der globalen Stabilität zu opfern.
Putin hat immer wieder behauptet, dass er gezwungen war, militärisch zu intervenieren, weil es keine andere Wahl gab. Auf seine Weise ist das wahr, aber wir müssen hier die Schlüsselfrage aufwerfen: Die militärische Intervention erscheint nur dann als Putins einzige Wahl („Es gibt keine Alternative“), wenn wir seine globale Vision der Politik als Kampf der Großmächte um die Verteidigung und Ausweitung ihrer Einflusssphäre im Voraus akzeptieren.
Und was ist mit Putins Vorwürfen, die Ukraine sei faschistisch? (Es ist ja etwas seltsam, Zelensky, einen Juden, der viele seiner Familienvorfahren im Holocaust verloren hat, als Neonazi zu bezeichnen…) Wir sollten die Frage lieber umdrehen und sie an Putin selbst richten: Alle, die sich über Putin Illusionen machen, sollten zur Kenntnis nehmen, dass er Iwan Iljin, einen russischen politischen Theologen, in den Rang eines offiziellen Philosophen erhoben hat, der, nachdem er Anfang der 1920er Jahre auf dem berühmten „Philosophendampfer“ aus der Sowjetunion ausgewiesen worden war, gegen den Bolschewismus und den westlichen Liberalismus seine eigene Version des russischen Faschismus vertrat: den Staat als organische Gemeinschaft, die von einem väterlichen Monarchen geführt wird.
Für Iljin ist das soziale System wie ein Körper, in dem jeder von uns seinen Platz hat, und Freiheit bedeutet, seinen Platz zu kennen. Dementsprechend ist für Iljin die Demokratie ein Ritual: „Wir wählen nur, um unsere kollektive Unterstützung für unseren Führer zu bekräftigen. Der Führer wird nicht durch unsere Stimmen legitimiert oder durch unsere Stimmen gewählt.“ Ist das nicht die Art und Weise, wie russische Wahlen in den letzten Jahrzehnten de facto abgelaufen sind? Kein Wunder, dass Iljins Werke jetzt in Russland massenhaft nachgedruckt und kostenlos an Staatsapparatschiks und Wehrpflichtige verteilt werden.
Aleksander Dugin, Putins Hofphilosoph, tritt ganz in Iljins Fußstapfen und fügt lediglich eine postmoderne Variante des historistischen Relativismus hinzu: „Die Postmoderne zeigt, dass jede so genannte Wahrheit eine Frage des Glaubens ist. Wir glauben also an das, was wir tun, wir glauben an das, was wir sagen. Und das ist die einzige Möglichkeit, die Wahrheit zu definieren. Wir haben also unsere spezielle russische Wahrheit, die Sie akzeptieren müssen. Wenn die Vereinigten Staaten keinen Krieg beginnen wollen, sollten Sie erkennen, dass die Vereinigten Staaten nicht mehr der einzige Herrscher sind. Und [mit] der Situation in Syrien und der Ukraine sagt Russland: ‚Nein, ihr seid nicht mehr der Boss‘. Das ist die Frage, wer die Welt beherrscht. Nur ein Krieg kann das wirklich entscheiden.“
Putin agiert als Kopie des westlichen imperialistischen Expansionismus.
Die Frage, die sich hier sofort stellt, ist: Was ist mit den Menschen in Syrien und in der Ukraine? Können auch sie ihre Wahrheit/Glauben wählen oder sind sie nur eine Spielwiese der großen „Bosse“ und ihres Kampfes? Die Vorstellung, dass jede „Lebensform“ ihre eigene Wahrheit hat, macht Putin bei der neuen populistischen Rechten so beliebt. Kein Wunder, dass seine militärische Intervention in der Ukraine von Trump und anderen als „genial“ begrüßt wurde… Wenn Putin also von „Entnazifizierung“ spricht, sollten wir uns daran erinnern, dass es derselbe Putin ist, der Marine le Pen in Frankreich, die Lega in Italien und andere neofaschistische Bewegungen unterstützt hat.
Aber das alles ist nicht überraschend: Vergessen Sie die „russische Wahrheit“, das ist nur ein bequemer Mythos, um die eigene Macht zu rechtfertigen. Putin agiert jetzt als eine verspätete Kopie des westlichen imperialistischen Expansionismus. Um ihm also wirklich etwas entgegenzusetzen, sollten wir Brücken zu den Ländern der Dritten Welt bauen, von denen viele eine lange Liste völlig berechtigter Beschwerden gegen die westliche Kolonialisierung und Ausbeutung haben. Es reicht nicht aus, „Europa zu verteidigen“: Unsere eigentliche Aufgabe besteht darin, die Länder der Dritten Welt davon zu überzeugen, dass wir ihnen angesichts unserer globalen Probleme eine bessere Wahl als Russland oder China bieten können. Und die einzige Möglichkeit, dies zu erreichen, besteht darin, uns weit über den politisch korrekten Postkolonialismus hinaus zu verändern und Formen des Neokolonialismus rücksichtslos auszurotten, selbst wenn sie sich als humanitäre Hilfe tarnen. Wenn wir das nicht tun, werden wir uns nur wundern, warum die Menschen in der Dritten Welt nicht sehen, dass wir bei der Verteidigung Europas auch für ihre Freiheit kämpfen. Sie sehen es nicht, weil wir es nicht wirklich tun. Sind wir bereit, es zu tun? Ich bezweifle es.
Der slowenische Denker und Essayist verweist auf Putins Begeisterung für rechtsextreme Philosophen, für die “Wahrheiten” nur eine “Frage des Glaubens” seien. Der Westen müsse sich sehr viel mehr um die Unterstützung der ärmeren Länder bemühen.
Slavoj Žižek wurde am 21. März 1949 in Ljubljana, SR Slowenien, Jugoslawien, geboren. Er ist ein slowenischer Philosoph, Forscher am Institut für Philosophie der Universität Ljubljana und internationaler Direktor des Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities der Universität London. Er ist außerdem Professor für Philosophie und Psychoanalyse an der European Graduate School und Global Distinguished Professor für Germanistik an der New York University und arbeitet zu Themen wie Kontinentalphilosophie, Psychoanalyse, Politischer Theorie, Kulturwissenschaft, Kunstkritik, Filmkritik, Marxismus, Hegelianismus und Theologie. Er gehört zu den bekanntesten lebenden Philosophen der Welt.
AL-JAZEERA ENGLISH, 26th February 2022—The Polish government says 100,000 people have crossed the border into Poland from Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began on Thursday.
“From the onset of warfare in Ukraine through today, along the entire border with Ukraine, 100,000 people have crossed the border from Ukraine into Poland,” Deputy Interior Minister Pawel Szefernaker told reporters on Saturday in the border village of Medyka, southeastern Poland.
Everybody knows T. S. Eliot’s famous essay Notes towards the definition of culture. This masterclass analyses phenomena of modern thought and culture with the intention to discern elements of possible Communist culture. It moves at two levels: first, it interprets some cultural phenomena (from today’s architecture to classic literary works like Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise) as failures to imagine or enact a Communist culture; second, it explores attempts at imagining how a Communist culture could look, from Wagner’s Ring to Kafka’s and Beckett’s short stories and contemporary science fiction novels.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution, Heaven in Disorder and Reading Hegel.
In 1794, French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre produced the world’s first defense of “state terror” – claiming that the road to virtue lay through political violence. This film combines drama, archive and documentary interviews to examine Robespierre’s year in charge of the Committee of Public Safety – the powerful state machine at the heart of Revolutionary France.
Contesting Robespierre’s legacy are Slavoj Žižek, who argues that terror in the cause of virtue is justifiable, and Simon Schama, who believes the road from Robespierre ran straight to the gulag and the 20th-century concentration camp.
The drama, based on original sources, follows the life-and-death politics of the Committee during “Year Two” of the new Republic. It was a year which gave birth to key features of the modern age: the thought crime; the belief that calculated acts of violence can perfect humanity; the notion that the interests of “mankind” can be placed above those of “man”; the use of policemen to enforce morals; and the use of denunciation as a political tool.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
“Ukraine is an independent country; Ukraine is not Russia,” says Ukrainian Member of Parliament, Lesia Vasylenko, speaking to Marc Lamont Hill from the capital, Kyiv.
As Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine continues and Russian troops push on with their advance on Kyiv, Vasylenko says she, like most Ukrainians, is preparing for the worst. “I have learned in these eight years to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, as did many other Ukrainians. But to be honest, nothing can prepare you for full-on war with the biggest military power in Europe, the third-biggest military power in the world.” Vasylenko says, in her view, it is obvious that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not want an independent Ukraine.
“Putin wants Ukraine inside of Russia,” she says, adding that the Russian leader’s “master plan is to eradicate an independent Ukraine from the face of the earth”. On UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill speaks with Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko and asks why she believes President Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and whether the international community is doing enough to support Ukraine.
As published on ‘Spectator World’, February 24, 2022 | 8:11 am
Putin has used sexually violent language to refer to Ukraine for some time.
In a press conference earlier this month, Vladimir Putin noted that the Ukrainian government does not like the Minsk agreement and then added: “Like it or not, it’s your duty, my beauty.”
The saying has well-known sexual connotations: Putin appeared to be quoting from “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin” by the Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mold: “Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.”
Although the Kremlin press representative claimed that Putin referred to an old folkloric expression, reference to Ukraine as an object of necrophilia and rape is clear. Back in 2002, Putin replied to a Western’s journalist’s question with: “If you want to become a complete Islamic radical and are ready to undergo circumcision, then I invite you to Moscow. We are a multidenominational country. We have specialists in this question [circumcision]. I will recommend that they carry out the operation in such a way so that afterward, nothing else will grow” — a rather vulgar threat of castration.
No wonder Putin and Trump were buddies in vulgarities. The counterargument you often hear here is that at least politicians like Putin and Trump openly say what they mean and avoid hypocrisy. Here however, I am wholeheartedly on the side of hypocrisy: the form (of hypocrisy) is never just a form, it is part of the content, so that when we drop the form, the content itself gets brutalized.
Putin’s obscene remark should be read against the background of the Ukrainian crisis which is presented in our media as the threat of the “rape of a fair country.” This crisis is not without its comical aspects — a proof, in today’s topsy-turvy world, that the crisis is serious. The Slovene political analyst Boris Čibej pointed out the comical character of the tensions around Ukraine at the beginning of 2022: “Those who are expected to attack /i.e., Russia/ claim they have no intention to do it, and those who act as if they want to calm down the situation insist that the fight is inevitable.”
We can go on here: in the past few weeks, the US, protector of Ukraine, was warning that war could explode at any moment while the president of Ukraine, the expected victim of the Russian attack, warned against war hysteria and called for calm.
It is easy to translate this situation into that of a rape. Russia, which is ready to rape Ukraine, claims it doesn’t want to do it — but between the lines it’s making it clear that, if it doesn’t get consent for sex from Ukraine, it is ready to commit rape (recall Putin’s vulgar reply). Russia also accuses Ukraine of provoking it to commit rape.
The US, which wants to protect Ukraine from being raped, rings the alarm bells about the imminent threat of rape so that it can assert itself as the protector of post-Soviet states. This protectiveness cannot but remind us of a local mobster who offers stores and restaurants in his domain “protection” against robbery, with a veiled threat that, if they reject his protection, something may happen to them…
Ukraine, the target of the threat of rape, tries to keep calm, nervous also at US alarm bells, aware that the uproar about rape can push Russia to actually commit rape.
So what lies behind this conflict with all its unpredictable dangers? What if this conflict is so dangerous not because it reflects the growing strength of the two ex-superpowers but, on the contrary, proves that they are not able to accept the fact that they are no longer true global powers?
When at the height of the Cold War, Mao Zedong said that the US is, with all its weapons, a paper tiger, he forgot to add that paper tigers could be more dangerous that self-confident real tigers.
The Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco was just the last in a series of blows to the US supremacy — and Russia’s effort to reconstruct the Soviet empire is nothing but a desperate attempt to cover up the fact that Russia is now a weak state in decay. As is also the case with actual rapists, rapes signal the impotence of the aggressor.
This impotence is palpable now that that the act of rape has begun with the first direct penetration of Russian military into Ukraine — first, that is, if we discount the obscene role of the Wagner group, a Private Military Company whose contractors have taken part in various conflicts, including operations in the Syrian civil war, Crimea, central Africa and Republika Srpska in Bosnia. This group of anonymous mercenaries, an arms-length unit of the Russian Ministry of Defense used by the Russian government in conflicts where deniability is required, has for years operated in Donbas, organizing the “spontaneous” resistance to Ukraine (as they already did in Crimea).
All of us from countries which have to witness the sad affair of Ukraine’s rape should be aware that only a real castration prevents rape. So we should recommend that the international community carries out a castrative operation on Russia — ignoring and marginalizing them as much as possible, making it sure that afterwards, nothing else will grow of their global authority.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
“In our Unconscious, each of us believes themselves to be immortal.”
—Sigmund Freud, Wir und der Tod
During the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking the fundamental question: What can be done to liberate humanity from the menace of war? The psychoanalyst replied at length and their exchange of letters (reproduced here) was published in March 1933 under the title Why War?. The book would be included in the book burnings in Berlin on 10th of May that year. Why War? is important in Freud’s work because in it he develops a fundamental idea that leads him to conclude that the life and death drives are linked – a thought that he had already entertained in works such as Death and Us (1915), which is also included here. In a terrible irony, Freud dedicated a copy of Why War? to Mussolini, who nonetheless instituted a police investigation of its author. The contributors to this volume explore the reasons underlying the dedication, as well as giving their own reflections on the genesis of war.
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic). Between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna; in 1938 Hitler’s invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology, and another ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) saw the birth of his creation, psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general, whether sick or healthy. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud’s life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but the whole intellectual climate of the last half century.
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics.
Today, hundreds of thousands of people, desperate to escape war, violence and poverty, are crossing the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. Our response from our protected European standpoint, argues Slavoj Žižek, offers two versions of ideological blackmail: either we open our doors as widely as possible; or we try to pull up the drawbridge. Both solutions are bad, states Žižek. They merely prolong the problem, rather than tackling it…
…The refugee crisis also presents an opportunity, a unique chance for Europe to redefine itself: but, if we are to do so, we have to start raising unpleasant and difficult questions. We must also acknowledge that large migrations are our future: only then can we commit to a carefully prepared process of change, one founded not on a community that see the excluded as a threat, but one that takes as its basis the shared substance of our social being.
The only way, in other words, to get to the heart of one of the greatest issues confronting Europe today is to insist on the global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed. Maybe such solidarity is a utopia. But, warns Žižek, if we don’t engage in it, then we are really lost. And we will deserve to be lost.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Žižek’s first book is a provocative and original work looking at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. In a thrilling tour de force that made his name, he explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
In the first part Žižek analyses how we live in a moment during the pandemic where the greatest act of love is to stay distant from the object of your affection. When governments renowned for ruthless cuts in public spending can suddenly conjure up trillions, when toilet paper becomes a commodity as precious as diamonds, and when a new form of communism may be the only way of averting a descent into global barbarism. With his customary brio and love of analogies in popular culture (Quentin Tarantino and H.G. Wells sit next to Hegel and Marx in these pages), he provides a concise and provocative snapshot of the crisis as it widens, engulfing us all.
In the second part Žižek delves into some of the more surprising dimensions of lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing—and the increasingly unruly opposition to them by “response fatigued” publics around the planet. Here, Žižek examines the ripple effects on the food supply of harvest failures caused by labor shortages and the hyper-exploitation of the global class of care workers, without whose labor daily life would be impossible. Through such examples he pinpoints the inability of contemporary capitalism to effectively safeguard the public in times of crisis.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Janez Janša® is a trademark owned by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, registered at the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) on February 17, 2017 under the trademark number 016384364.
In the summer of 2007 three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša,” the name of the right-wing Prime Minister at that time. Since then, the artists have presented their works as performances, exhibitions and a film documentary, and have continued with their investigation of “What’s in a name?”
Starting from this famous Shakespearian question, four eminent European philosophers – Austrian Robert Pfaller and Slovenians Mladen Dolar, Jela Krečič and Slavoj Žižek – confront the implications of the Janšas’ name change and its consequences in four essays. Ten years of artistic and real life activity, here illustrated by a photographic insert, presents an opportunity for them to discuss the symbolic power of the name, the ways it affects the subject and subjectivity, and how playing with names can lead to a radical critique of our late capitalist civilization.
My name is Janez Janša is a documentary film about names and name changes, focusing on one particular and rather unique name change that took place in 2007, when three artists officially changed their names into the name of the then Prime Minister of the Republic of Slovenia, Janez Janša.
Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous.
On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression.
Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.
Recordings from the ‘Sex and the Failed Absolute’ three-day masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek delivered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London in November 2018.
The masterclass tackled straight on the old metaphysical topic: is it possible for us, finite and mortal humans, to achieve some kind of contact with the Absolute? After a brief overview of the traditional and modern answers (ecstatic religious union with the Absolute, immersion into the primordial Void, identification with the destructiveness of nature, intellectual intuition, transcendental-historical reflection, etc.), it proposes the Lacanian answer: sexuality is our primordial brush with the Absolute – sexuality as our basic experience of failure, of impossibility. This becomes palpably clear in our historical moment when this status of sexuality is under threat. In deploying this thesis, the masterclass passes through many particular topic: Beckett’s art of abstraction; neurotheology; sex-bots; fake news; quantum physics; post-humanity.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
By a detailed investigation of the universal phenomenon of dreaming, Freud discovered a radical new way of exploring the unconscious and recognized that dreams are a conflict and compromise between conscious and unconscious impulses. Through his insights about dreams, Freud was able to revise his methods of treatment for neurotic patients and develop, largely through this remarkable work, his revolutionary theories of the Oedipus Complex and of the profound importance of infantile life and sexuality for the development of adults.
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic). Between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna; in 1938 Hitler’s invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology, and another ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) saw the birth of his creation, psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general, whether sick or healthy. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud’s life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but the whole intellectual climate of the last half century.
A recording of the introductory text written by Slavoj Žižek to the ‘Terrorism and Communism’ book by Leon Trotsky, read out on audio by Sean Barrett.
Written in the white heat of revolutionary Russia’s Civil War, Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism is one of the most potent defenses of revolutionary dictatorship. In his provocative commentary the philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that Trotsky’s attack on the illusions of liberal democracy has a vital relevance today.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Ukrainian-Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism which has become known as Trotskyism.
Recording from a paper presentation delivered on the ninth and final day of Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction four-week masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek titled Language and Violence delivered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London on 21st June 2006.
The course focused on the singular question: Is psychoanalysis outdated? It appears that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of human mind seems to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which “repress” individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
It contrast to these “evident” truths, the aim of the course was to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet – it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud’s key insights gain their full value – on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his “return to Freud” which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was “in Freud more than himself”, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course followed the fundamental rule of excluding the clinic. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinical details permeate everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical—this is the true test of its central place.
The four weeks course thus provided a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today’s “fundamentalism”); theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch and Lars von Trier). The overall aim of the course was to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Recording from a paper presentation delivered on the eight day of Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction four-week masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek titled The Euthanasia of Pure Reason delivered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London on 20th June 2006.
The course focused on the singular question: Is psychoanalysis outdated? It appears that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of human mind seems to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which “repress” individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
It contrast to these “evident” truths, the aim of the course was to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet – it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud’s key insights gain their full value – on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his “return to Freud” which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was “in Freud more than himself”, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course followed the fundamental rule of excluding the clinic. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinical details permeate everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical—this is the true test of its central place.
The four weeks course thus provided a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today’s “fundamentalism”); theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch and Lars von Trier). The overall aim of the course was to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Recording from a paper presentation delivered on the seventh day of Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction four-week masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek titled Nominalism and Ontology delivered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London on 15th June 2006.
The course focused on the singular question: Is psychoanalysis outdated? It appears that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of human mind seems to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which “repress” individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
It contrast to these “evident” truths, the aim of the course was to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet – it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud’s key insights gain their full value – on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his “return to Freud” which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was “in Freud more than himself”, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course followed the fundamental rule of excluding the clinic. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinical details permeate everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical—this is the true test of its central place.
The four weeks course thus provided a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today’s “fundamentalism”); theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch and Lars von Trier). The overall aim of the course was to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Recording from a paper presentation delivered on the sixth day of Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction four-week masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek titled Platonic Diaresis, or, Gorgias as a Stalinist at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London University on 13th June 2006.
The course focused on the singular question: Is psychoanalysis outdated? It appears that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of human mind seems to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which “repress” individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
It contrast to these “evident” truths, the aim of the course was to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet – it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud’s key insights gain their full value – on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his “return to Freud” which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was “in Freud more than himself”, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course followed the fundamental rule of excluding the clinic. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinical details permeate everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical—this is the true test of its central place.
The four weeks course thus provided a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today’s “fundamentalism”); theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch and Lars von Trier). The overall aim of the course was to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Recording from a paper presentation delivered on the fifth day of Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction four-week masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek titled The Hollywood Sinthome delivered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London on 8th June 2006.
The course focused on the singular question: Is psychoanalysis outdated? It appears that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of human mind seems to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which “repress” individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
It contrast to these “evident” truths, the aim of the course was to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet – it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud’s key insights gain their full value – on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his “return to Freud” which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was “in Freud more than himself”, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course followed the fundamental rule of excluding the clinic. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinical details permeate everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical—this is the true test of its central place.
The four weeks course thus provided a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today’s “fundamentalism”); theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch and Lars von Trier). The overall aim of the course was to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Recording from a paper presentation delivered on the fourth day of Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction four-week masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek titled Cinema, Ideology and Philosophy delivered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London on 6th June 2006.
The course focused on the singular question: Is psychoanalysis outdated? It appears that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of human mind seems to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which “repress” individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
It contrast to these “evident” truths, the aim of the course was to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet – it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud’s key insights gain their full value – on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his “return to Freud” which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was “in Freud more than himself”, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course followed the fundamental rule of excluding the clinic. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinical details permeate everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical—this is the true test of its central place.
The four weeks course thus provided a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today’s “fundamentalism”); theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch and Lars von Trier). The overall aim of the course was to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Recording from a paper presentation delivered on the third day of Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction four-week masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek titled Hitchcock as a Hegelian Agent delivered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London on 1st June 2006.
The course focused on the singular question: Is psychoanalysis outdated? It appears that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of human mind seems to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which “repress” individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
It contrast to these “evident” truths, the aim of the course was to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet – it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud’s key insights gain their full value – on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his “return to Freud” which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was “in Freud more than himself”, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course followed the fundamental rule of excluding the clinic. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinical details permeate everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical—this is the true test of its central place.
The four weeks course thus provided a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today’s “fundamentalism”); theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch and Lars von Trier). The overall aim of the course was to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Recording from a paper presentation delivered on the second day of Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction four-week masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek titled Ethics of the Other delivered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London on 30th May 2006.
The course focused on the singular question: Is psychoanalysis outdated? It appears that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of human mind seems to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which “repress” individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
It contrast to these “evident” truths, the aim of the course was to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet – it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud’s key insights gain their full value – on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his “return to Freud” which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was “in Freud more than himself”, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course followed the fundamental rule of excluding the clinic. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinical details permeate everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical—this is the true test of its central place.
The four weeks course thus provided a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today’s “fundamentalism”); theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch and Lars von Trier). The overall aim of the course was to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
Recording from a paper presentation delivered on the first day of Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction four-week masterclass course by Slavoj Žižek titled The Real as Virtual Prosopopeia delivered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London on 25th May 2006.
The course focused on the singular question: Is psychoanalysis outdated? It appears that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of human mind seems to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which “repress” individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
It contrast to these “evident” truths, the aim of the course was to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet – it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud’s key insights gain their full value – on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his “return to Freud” which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was “in Freud more than himself”, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course followed the fundamental rule of excluding the clinic. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinical details permeate everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical—this is the true test of its central place.
The four weeks course thus provided a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today’s “fundamentalism”); theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch and Lars von Trier). The overall aim of the course was to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2, Hegel in a Wired Brain, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight, Reading Marx, Incontinence of the Void, and The Day After the Revolution and Heaven in Disorder.
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