Žižek Oct 2 2011 in Australia in this talk Ž updates on Hegelian totality, Lubitsch, ideological critical glasses, Starbucks, organic apples, Fukuyama, Breivik and anti-semitism
A scene from Ninotchka 1939 by Ernst Lubitsch said again in Greece August 2012
Can I have a coffee without cream. Sorry we have run out of cream, we only have milk, so can I bring you a coffee without milk?
– We have to ask here a simple question: why do we add to coffee milk or cream? Because there is something missing in coffee alone and we try to fill in this void. There is no full self-identical plain coffee, every simple plain coffee is a coffee without.
– The Hegelian lesson: coffee can be just coffee, and it can be coffee without milk, and it can be coffee without cream, although they appear positively the same they are not the same.
This logic is important not only politically but also sexually.
In the movie Brassed Off: “Would like to come in for a coffee. I would love to but there is a problem I don’t drink coffee. No problem, I don’t have any.”
Through a double negation she pronounces an embarrassing direct sexual invitation without ever mentioning sex. She invites a guy in for coffee and then admits she has no coffee. She doesn’t cancel her invitation, she makes it clear her first invitation for a coffee was a pre-text was simply a pre-text for sex.
Can you imagine a more erotic invitation. Something is offered and it is negated but the result is not zero. The result is the most erotic tension you can imagine.
what is said and what is not said, which un-said is implied in what is said. do we get coffee without cream or coffee without milk.
Kinder Surprise: after you unwrap the egg, and crack the shell you find a small plastic toy, is this toy not objet (a) the small object filling in the central void of our desire.
This structure of determining absence is crucial for how ideology functions today.
People dancing on street momentary obliterating class differences, worker dancing or rich farmer, they are both in the street, while the worker is dancing without milk, and the farmer without cream.
Pure Feel Good Ideology
– recycling
– Starbucks
London riot: Zygmut Bauman was on right track when he said riots were disaffected and disqualified consumerism, post-ideological protest.
Anti-semitism today
pro-Palestinian, critical of politics of state of Israel, but precisely out of my great love of Jewish people. Breivik crazy guy. his manifesto, he is literally an anti-semitic pro-Zionist. He claims there are too many Jews in USA, but at the same time pro-Zionist.
when American Christian conservatives started to support Israel. Fox news, pro-Zionist, Glen Beck was becoming more openly anti-semitic, we have a paradox. We have those Zionists and old fashion Euro-American anti-semites. If you allow us to grab West Bank, we’ll allow you immigrant-fear thing in your country
Biggest threat to Europe is not immigrants or muslims, but homophobes and racists:Left need progressive radical Euro-centrism: democracy, egalitarian spirit, human rights, French Revolution
Žižek is claiming in Europe there was attacks on gay parade, but in Turkey there was a gay parade with no incident.
What is effectively happening here?
Fredric Jameson: One should re-read Capital focusing on notion of unemployment. It’s inseparable from accumulation and expansion. The idea today, more and more, with incessant technological revolution, unemployment is becoming a key feature. today’s world market, and labour, whole nations massive populations have been excluded from the modernizing projects, Ethiopa Somalia, failed states, ethnic hatred… The category of unemployed should be expanded, through temp unemployed, to no longer employable, up to people living in slums and ghettos and those areas excluded from global capitalist system.
It is with its expansion, producing more and more inherent exclusions. Whole areas are being left out of history. I tis not just some ‘primitive’ countries left out. Wait a minute, Afghanistan was maybe the most tolerant predominantly muslim country with a strong commie party and multi-religious tolerance. How did it become fundamental, it is precisely through Afghanistan became fundamentalized.
The second thing. this new structural unemployment should be concived as a form of exploitation. Exploited are those who are structurally prevented from getting employment.
To be exploited today is to be structurally excluded from capitalism.
Students finishing studies without a chance for employment.
The only original leftist idea of last decades, basic citizen’s income. Save capitalism by enabling those unemployed to get basic rent, survive and still be consumers.
We should shift from DOMINATION to Exploitation, the former is too liberal, Marx’s point still holds, the paradox of capitalism is that even when you have no domination, exploitation is still here. We have to rehabilitate explitation with reference to the productive process of capitalism.
We should think further than Marx, we are returning from profit to rent. How did he become the richest in the world. It is rent that made Microsoft a billion dollar thing. Here Marx is wrong, General Intellect, the moment this happens capitalism no longer can function. What he couldn’t see is that General Intellect, the shared collective field of knowledge gets privatized and those who privatize it get rent, not profit.
Gates isn’t earning a profit, we are paying him a rent just so that we can communicate with each other.
Why communism? Why still use the name communism? I claim that the only true question today is Fukuyama or not. Aren’t we all silently Fukuyamaists? Even radicals, more gay rights etc. But nobody questions the liberal – capitalist framework. The problem we are confronting today can it be solved within this frame? In the long run NO When you have serious disturbances, melting ice cap, Fukushima, intellectual property, the greatest revenge of ex-communists, 40 years ago Deng-Xao Ping thought only capitalism can save China, not its the capitalist countries that think China can save them.
Capitalist and Democracy: this marriage is now over. Capitalism following its inner necessity, will change democracy into an empty form.
Biogenetics and new forms of apartheid. Let me be very clear, I’m not saying back to Lenin’s communism, that is over the 20th century is over. Unfortunately the problems we face today are precisely at the most fundamental the problem of the commons
commons of nature, intellectual property, biogenetics, new forms of apartheid, new walls irony is that commodities circulate freely but new walls everywhere
There is no guarantee that something will happen. Nonetheless when I hear the word “impossible” What is possible and what is impossible.
domain of private pleasures: technology and sexuality, immortality, cloning organs, everything is possible here, travel to Mars
Raise taxes 1% to get better health care, this is IMPOSSIBLE. this is very strange. The triumph of ideoogy today. Chinese gov’t has prohibited in theatres etc. stories which deal with time travel and alternate history. Such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters. Those in power still see this as a danger. We in the west automatically assume it is not possible.
Communism is a name of a problem of commons in all its dimension: the commons as universal space of humanity to which more and more are excluded. biogenetics, intellectual property, ecology, new walls.
the utopia today is that with small changes things can go on as they do. this is utopian thinkinig.
a refusal to believe, on the one hand we refuse to take ecological crisis seriously, at the same time there is alot of magical thinking going on in the way we deal with ecology: magical thinking: support your team in front of tv, as if in some magical way you can influence the outcome. Everyday low-level personal ecology, buying organic fruit, recycling is pretty close to sitting at home shouting for your soccer team in front of the tv.
I don’t think we can offer solutions. What we can do is to see how when we are confronting a problem, the very way we formulate a problem is part of the problem. As important as the art of finding solutions, is the art of formulating problems in the right way. Of course, I’m against sexism, racism, but I’m deeply suspicious of translating these problems as problems of tolerance. Martin Luther King, “I want from white people more tolerance” that is humiliating. So why do we translate racism and sexism into problems of tolerance. A problem that is economic, legal, becomes a cultural problem. Why do I hate the other? In hating the other do I hate something deep in me? When we meet tolerance, there should not be harrasment, but harrasment is a problematic : the aversion towards the proximity of the other as an actual desiring being, harassment means don’t come too close, your over-proximity bothers me. Liberals I like blacks, chinese, but I don’t like their food, smell, this over-proximity. Don’t come too close to me, that’s tolerance. In our narcissitic times ideology functions ini everyday life.
Quantum of Solace James Bond movie is politically very progressive but first Bond film where there is no sex. Dan Brown DaVinci code — no sex. X-files, Darian Leader why do those things happen out there, to mask over the fact that sex doesn’t happen here. Angels and Demons, sex in novel, no sex in film, now Hollywood is deleting sex. Something very sad. Badiou noted a french ad for marital agencies, we will enable you to be in love without falling. the idea is a very sad, being inlove means falling, risking yourself, now our narcissitic age, we want to be in love but without the fall. we are returning to old primitive strategies of arranged marriages, who has time for slow flirting who can risk opening up to the other, just tell an agency and you will be informed who to fall in love with …
coffee with caffeine, sausage without fat, chocloate without calories, beer without alcohol. multicultualism, this other is a de-caffenated other, multicult is a form of racism