Listen to Slavoj Žižek’s RSA lecture ‘Against Charity’

Listen to a short interview with Slavoj Žižek on virtual philosopher with Nigel Warburton, philosopher and producer of the Philosophy Bites podcast series

Joe Kennedy reviews Slavoj Žižek’s latest book  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce for 3: AM

Zižek’s proposal here is absolutely straightforward: that the War on Terror (the ‘tragedy’ of his title) and the subsequentfinancial crisis and bank bailouts (the ‘farce’) cannot be addressed adequately by the liberalism which nominates itself as the last remaining well-intentioned politics after the Cold War. Reading the present-day left’s conspicuous dilemmas as an outcome of its neutralisation by and within the structures of a (superficially) ‘soft’ capitalism, he insists forcefully that, irrespective of the last decade’s exposure of the shoddy utopianism of End of History narratives, ‘most people today are [still] Fukuyamean’.

This idea is at least implicit in all of Žižek’s recent writing, but the real strength of First As Tragedy, Then As Farce is to present the problem in a fashion that uncovers the extent of disinclined complicity in this apparently belated Fukuyamism. Obvious targets are hung out to dry, but the polemic effects a parallel criticism of the way in which the moderate left’s making of Bush, Rumsfeld et al into straw men has deflected attention away from the unjustness of the system itself. It isn’t so much the case, Žižek insists, that ‘bad’ politicians embody an isolable malfunction on the part of liberal democracy than that they are symptomatic of its systemic putridity. Critique levelled towards the individual politician, party, avaricious banker, overpaid sportsperson, or undeserving celebrity functions only as carnival in the Roman sense, namely in that it represents an impermanent ‘reordering’ or safety-valve mechanism which is structurally indispensable to the maintenance of the social formation in question.”

Read Joe Kennedy’s complete review for 3: AM here.

Listen to Slavoj Žižek’s LSE lecture arguing that the neoliberalism died twice: first as a political doctrine in the tragedy of the attacks of 9/11; then its farcical collapse as an economic theory when the meltdown at the end of 2008 brought an end to the utopia of global market capitalism. Has this crisis now offered a vital opening for the left to seize the reins of politics and the state?

Lecture recorded by The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Slavoj Žižek on the Al Jazeera English show Empire discussing ’Europe: A fast-track superpower?’ with Timothy Garton Ash and Tariq Ramadan.

Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People has been chosen as The Independent’s Book of the Week.

Stephen Howe remarks that “Sand’s political purpose is (in my view) an admirable one, and many of his historical claims probably more right than wrong. But at least the mixed response this review will convey might help break away from the pattern of reactions the book is receiving: it has already been published in French and Hebrew. They are starkly divided between uncritical enthusiasm and total condemnation. The blogosphere has been buzzing with wild charges and vulgar abuse against Sand’s book – most repeatedly, predictably and depressingly, calling it anti-Semitic.”

Read the full article here

View The Invention of the Jewish People website here.

Ahead of a talk at the London School of Economics, Slavoj Žižek told Reuters “Capitalism as we knew it cannot survive — it is the time for mobilization.” His latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce decrees “our message today should be: do not be afraid, join us, come back! You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it – time to get serious once again!”

See more from The Great Debate here.

Listen to Slavoj Žižek’s lecture ‘Apocalyptic Times’ delivered at Birkbeck on Tuesday 24th November.

In his forthcoming book Living in the End Times, due to be published by Verso in 2010, Žižek continues his analysis of the end of the world at the hands of the ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ identified in his latest book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. He asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to living through the end times?

Slavoj Žižek’s lecture at the RSA last night was entitled ‘Against Charity’, taking a closer look at philanthropic tendencies and neoliberalism to coincide with the launch of his latest book  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. The full mp3 audio file will be available shortly on the RSA website here.

In the meantime, listen to Žižek’s response to the question ‘What is Philosophy?’ posed by the chair Nigel Warburton, philosopher and producer of the Philosophy Bites podcast series.

Judith Butler and many other members of University of California at Berkeley faculty signed an Open Letter From Concerned Members of the Faculty to Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau. The letter protested the use of unwarranted police violence against students at a demonstration, in some cases against “defenseless people who had already been pushed to the ground”:

“Instances of unprovoked police brutality would be appalling and objectionable anywhere, but we find it most painful for these events to have taken place on the UC Berkeley campus, given the important tradition of protecting free speech that you, Chancellor Birgeneau, have only very recently defended. Hence we regard with dismay and astonishment your euphemistic reference to these Friday’s violence: “a few members of our campus community may have found themselves in conflict with law enforcement officers.” There is no doubt that our students and colleagues did find themselves subject to unwarranted and illegal police brutality. It is therefore incumbent on the Chancellor of UC Berkeley to condemn such actions unequivocally and to make sure that such actions are subject to comprehensive review and disciplinary action…

We want to underscore how important it is for the campus for you to convene an investigation and to take administrative responsibility for protecting the safety of students as well as their rights of assembly and expression. Friday’s failure to do so is a most painful public display of how far UC Berkeley has strayed from its historical responsibility as a national and international institution pledged to rights of free speech and assembly and to the ideals of social justice. It is surely difficult enough to see our reputation as an excellent and affordable university jeopardized through budget cuts and fee hikes. Must we see as well the dissolution of the ideal of protecting free speech for students for whom the very future of their education is at stake?”

Butler has publicly spoken out against UC Berkeley before.

In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of state violence, building on her work in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence which critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to the experience of loss in post-9/11 America.

Listen to Butler, with Simon Critchley and Jacques Rancière, discuss the importance of critical theory to social movements today here. Marking the release of a new set of titles in the acclaimed Radical Thinkers series, as well as publication of their own key texts, three of Verso’s most respected and influential writers met on Friday 23 for the Philosophy Department Thursday Night Workshop Series at the New School in New York

Simon Critchley will be speaking on radical thinking and art at the London launch of set 4 of the Radical Thinkers project at  the Tate Britain on November 26th: DON’T LOOK BACK: RADICAL THINKERS AND THE ARTS SINCE 1909.

Slavoj Žižek’s sold out talk the Myth of Natural Balance at the ICA on Monday 23 November focussed on one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse examined in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – the threat of ecological catastrophe. James Burgess reports for the New Statesman:

Žižek warned of the dangers of “naturalising” nature, positing the natural world as some utopia to which we can return inbalanced harmony. Nature, he says, is itself is not a balanced system, insofar as it is a set of contingent systems adapting to survive amidst various catastrophes and changing circumstances. That is not to say that we should disregard the dangers of climate change. On the contrary, despite the fact that the current global climate crisis has been caused by the structure of the particular economic system of one subset of one species, the crisis has the potential to affect the very basis of life on earth for the majority of species. Humans have become, for the first time, a geological force capable of changing the global temperatures that sustain life on Earth…

Žižek insists that we cannot look on the bright side of climate change for new opportunities to adapt. He argues that we must resist the normalisation of climate change, whereby what is first experienced as impossible and unthinkable becomes real and is accepted as part of every day life (for example, the re-emergence of the far right in mainstream politics, or the normalisation of torture in Guantanamo). In the case of the environment, damaging consequences of climate change have first been denied by governments and businesses, then accepted as part of business as usual…

As such, Žižek offers great insight to the those on the left who may feel dismayed at the co-opting of the environmental agenda by diverse conservative political (and corporate) forces. Žižek rightly identifies the global economic capitalist framework as responsible for both the financial and the climate crises, and poses a choice: we can put aside political differences to attempt to tackle impending climatic doom (with the inevitable resurgence of capitalist crisis under business as usual), or we can face the driving force of the crisis head on.

Read the full article here.