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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Introducing...
- Sprache: Englisch
Charting his meteoric rise in popularity, Christopher Kul-Want and Piero explore Zizek's timely analyses of today's global crises concerning ecology, mounting poverty, war, civil unrest and revolution. Covering topics from philosophy and ethics, politics and ideology, religion and art, to literature, cinema, corporate marketing, quantum physics and virtual reality, Introducing Slavoj Zizek deftly explains Zizek's virtuoso ability to transform apparently outworn ideologies – Communism, Marxism and psychoanalysis – into a new theory of freedom and enjoyment.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Published by Icon Books Ltd., Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-184831-776-5
Text and illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd
The author and artist have asserted their moral rights.
Edited by Duncan Heath
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The most dangerous philosopher…
The oratorical approach
Psychoanalysis, the suspect science
The Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis
Political engagement
The larger-than-life super brain
The idea of truth
Power relations
Understanding ideology
Defending psychoanalysis
Against deconstruction
Crude thinking
Žižek the communist
The historical struggle for the commons
Collective change
Repressive ideologies
Ecology, the new opium of the people
Liberal ecology
Nature the destroyer
Facing up to radical contingency
An empty universe
Žižek’s manifesto for the earth
Poverty, the media, and “fair trade”
Buying into anti-capitalism
Redemption for the consumer
The disease of charity
McWorld versus Jihad
The truth about the Taliban
The paranoia of 9/11
Ideology and repression
The symbolic order
The Trojan horse
Meaning and the symbolic order
The big Other
The emperor’s new clothes
Lack
A universal system of exchange
They do not know it…
Freud and the super-ego
Doing the right thing …
… for the wrong reason
In-built transgression
The night of the world
Hitchcock and the obscene
Kafka and the obscenity of the law
The Trial
Modern or postmodern?
Postmodernism and presence
Perversity of the Church
The Church never existed
The Nazis’ dirty secret
The contrast with Stalinism
An excess of irrationality
The death of God
The myth of the permissive society
Paternal authority figures
Killing the father
Enjoy!
The ever-present object of desire
Simulated enjoyment
Be true to yourself
The ideologies of advertising
Doing “good”
The removal of risk
Confronting the fictional subject
Losing reality
Cogito ergo sum?
From S to $
The fiction of language
Optical illusions
Anamorphosis
Buñuel and the desire for meaning
Immoral ethics
Desire above the law
Refusal of dialogue
Immoral ethics in Don Giovanni…
… and Carmen
Revolutionary ethics
Terror as virtue
A decision made in solitude
Beyond good and evil
Change at any cost
Re-evaluating Stalin
Violence and impotence
No compromise with the big Other
Duty and the categorical imperative
There is no big Other
The big Other and the Bible
The trials of Job
God the blasphemer
The failure of God
Quantum uncertainty
Digital reality
The freedom of an unfinished reality
Further Reading
Author’s acknowledgements
Index
The most dangerous philosopher …
Dubbed by the American neo-conservative magazine New Republic as “the most dangerous philosopher in the west” and by the British Observer newspaper as “the superstar messiah of the new left”, Slavoj Žižek is a radical intellectual and an outspoken public figure.
Žižek has gained his reputation as a polemicist. As the title to one of his recent books – Living in the End Times (2010) – indicates, his philosophical concern is with the widespread sense of impending world catastrophe and its underlying ideological causes. His work addresses the present political, economic and environmental global crisis.
The subject of several television documentaries, Žižek maintains a demanding schedule of sell-out public appearances and lectures across both Europe and the US that receive hundreds of thousands of YouTube views. With his work now translated into over twenty languages, no other contemporary philosopher can touch him for sheer popularity – even though his ideas are often complex and demanding.
What are the reasons for this popularity? Many people are eager to listen to a philosopher, such as Žižek, who has thought deeply about global problems of poverty, ecology and political repression.
The oratorical approach
Žižek has published numerous articles in journals and on the web, and over 50 books – at a rate sometimes of one book a year. Unlike many philosophers, Žižek’s writing springs essentially from an oratorical approach to thinking and discourse, and this is part of his appeal both in hearing him talk and in reading his writing.
Žižek’s process of writing is highly indicative of his direct approach to communicating ideas.
This method of writing has the added advantage of preserving the spontaneity of his thoughts, and it reflects his enjoyment in expounding ideas.
A native and lifelong resident of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek was born in 1949, when the small Alpine capital was part of Communist Yugoslavia. An only child, he grew up in the household of professional parents.
Much of his knowledge of Hollywood cinema – a subject he has written about extensively – was acquired during his teenage years, when he spent a lot of time at an auditorium that specialized in showing foreign films.
Psychoanalysis, the suspect science
As an undergraduate at the University of Ljubljana, Žižek did not support Communist orthodoxy and came into conflict with the authorities. Not sticking to approved course lists, he immersed himself in the works of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and other philosophers, mostly French, whose writings had found little favour in socialist circles.
Žižek’s eventual philosophical project became about reconciling psychoanalysis with collectivist politics.
Žižek earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and sociology in 1971, and then pursued a master’s degree, also at the University of Ljubljana, writing his master’s thesis on the French philosophers whose ideas he had been studying. His research stirred up interest among the university’s philosophy faculty, but its ideologically suspect qualities were more troublesome.
Although Žižek had been promised a job at the university, it was given to another candidate whose ideas were closer to the party line.
This opened up government speech-writing jobs, as well as the chance to take a job as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in 1979. Žižek retained that position for the next several decades, even after gaining international renown.
The Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis
In the 1970s, Žižek became part of a significant group of Slovenian scholars working on the theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–81), and together they founded the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana. This society, among whose best-known members are Mladen Dolar (b. 1951) and Žižek’s second wife Renata Salecl (b. 1962), established editorial control over a journal called Problem!.
Žižek himself points out that the popularity of psychoanalysis in Slovenia owed to the fact that, in contrast to the other countries in the former Yugoslavia, there was no established psychoanalytic community to hamper or mitigate their interest in the usually controversial subject.
In 1981 Žižek left for Paris, where he studied with Lacan’s son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller (b. 1944). Miller conducted open discussions about Lacan in Paris but he also ran a more exclusive 30-student seminar at the École de la Cause Freudienne in which he studied in depth the works of Lacan. Both Žižek and Dolar were invited to join this seminar, and it is there that Žižek developed his understanding of the later works of Lacan that still informs his thinking today. Miller also procured a teaching fellowship for Žižek and became his psychoanalyst.
Political engagement
Žižek took an active part in politics during the 1980s, a period during which Yugoslavia’s Communist central government gradually began to lose control over the country’s cultural life. He penned a popular newspaper column, and in 1990, when Slovenia was on the brink of independence from Yugoslavia (achieving it after a ten-day war in 1991), he ran for president of the Republic of Slovenia (a seat on the four-member collective Slovenian presidency).
It was at this time that Žižek’s productivity blossomed, beginning with his first book published in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).
Presently Žižek holds a number of academic posts: at Ljubljana University, at Birkbeck College, University of London, and at the European Graduate Centre in Switzerland. Žižek maintains his right as an academic to pursue his research and his writing. This need to hold on to his intellectual freedom is a hangover from the Communist system, in which intellectuals were considered an important part of the theoretical underpinning of the state, and were thus financially supported if they were seen to be making useful contributions. Žižek cherished this freedom.
As Žižek’s fame grew, he was frequently offered teaching positions in the United States, where he garnered a strong following in university cultural studies departments. He turned them all down, although he accepted visiting scholar appointments and often spent much of the year travelling from one academic centre to another.
The larger-than-life super brain
As a public persona, Žižek embraces provocation that is offset by a highly engaging and affable personality. He believes that the West has too readily dismissed the Communist era and speaks to Western audiences from an assumed position of inside knowledge on this subject.
Žižek’s provocative side is counter-balanced by an astonishing knowledge of philosophy and politics and by an effective presentation of himself as a larger-than-life super-brainy intellectual exploding with ideas. While Žižek engages in polemics he sometimes intentionally evades open argument or dispute, a tactic designed to create a space in which the audience or interlocutor has to make up their own minds about their political and personal responsibilities.
Žižek’s writings are primarily concerned with politics, but he often explores this issue through a wide range of topical subjects and interests. Just a few of Žižek’s many interests about which he has written are:
Hollywood films (from silent comedies, especially those of Charlie Chaplin, through to some of today’s popular box-office movies: Žižek is especially interested in the Terminator, Matrix and Alien series of films; Alfred Hitchcock’s and David Lynch’s films are also particular favourites).
Popular fiction (including Stephen King, Patricia Highsmith, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell).
“High” literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Kafka, Henry James, among others).
18th-and 19th-century opera (especially Mozart, Bizet and Wagner).
Biogenetics, neuroscience, and quantum physics.
The idea of truth
Unlike many philosophers and intellectuals today, Žižek is not afraid of the idea of truth
