Žižek Penn Humanities Forum 13 Oct. 2010
pure surface, frozen image, positive ethical utopia of eternity, this image is real and at the same time virtual. Plato has to corected, a Platonic ideal is not deeper, just an ethical act when it occurs, this is eternity, this is the Real. The Real as virtual.
I am against the notion of Otherness Universal solidarity of struggle. India I had a wonderful time. I was in a taxi with my friend and the driver asked in his language to Ž’s friend … dirty joke as entry exchange of obscenity as moment of solidarity, we are not politically correct b.s., to have authenticate relation to other you need a surplus enjoyment, and then you can go on to talk seriously. I don’t understand my culture, I don’t understand yours, ditto for you, but we have a common universality of struggle. we are eternal. this is a sublime moment.
Real as virtual
flesh, blood veins, repuslive body of decay, we take recourse in decaying body in order to avoid fascination of the Real.
real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle, this is what we deny when we cut up chickens on stage, directly address the audience etc.
There is nothing transgressive talking about veins, shit underneath, aging bodies, gas, there is nothing sublime going on here.
Ethical Experience and critique of Judith Butler
This dimension of eternity is necessary to supply the big motive of pomo ethics, the precarious fragility of human being
caught in decentred representations, this precarious state of subjectivity which for Butler and Levinas accounts for zero level of all ethics.
The others face makes an unconditional demand on me. The encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, the Real of a violent encounter which throws me off my existence as a simple human animal.
Crux of the difference between Žižek and Butler
Desire is desire of the other.
dimension of ethical in psychoanalytic experience.
In my unconditional responsibility, I assume supremacy over the other (acts of charity, bombard us with images of starving children). Butler explains which faces are worthy of grief and which are not, the pictures dying of napalm, helped end Vietnam war. But Ž says images of sick and starving children, fragility of other staring back at you has the obverse, the moment the other doesn’t want to play this role, we all love this weak other, like Starbucks ads say we can save by buying a capuccino, but the minute they the other organize, they become terrorists. Who cares about computers when kids are starving in Africa says Bill Gates. This is an effort at depoliticization. Forget about politics and ideology, and get together, business and charity and don’t think.
Starbucks is today the example of Levinasian ethical paradigm
This vulnerable precarious other
Žižek goes into the animal that I am. Another gaze excluded by Levinas, the gaze of a wounded suffering animal.
dfas
Monstrosity of the HUMAN
What are we for animals? This is not New Age b.s. If you turn around the perspective and ask simply not what does it mean the gaze of the frightened animal, but what do you see in the animals gaze, you see your own monstrosity, this is what philosophers don’t want to talk about. What? DEATH DRIVE.
Kant: Man is an animal that needs a master, wild irrational excess of violent freedom in man, which animals don’t have, which is why animals don’t need education, it is nature “turned against itself”an excess of wild freedom.
What were the first Christians in the eyes of the Jewish establishment. What kind of monsters were they?
Locate properly our Monstrosity
So called fundamentalists are not egotists, but are ready to sacrifice their lives, same with capitalists, MEME, spreads like a computer virus, it programs its own retransmission, we humans are nonetheless are unwitting victims of a thought contagion. Daniel Dennett too. we are dealing with a parasite that occupies the individual and uses it for its own purposes. An idea can spread even if in the long term it can only bring destruction to its bearers. CAPITAL: like a meme, they use us to reproduce and multiply itself, the productive force, the capitalist process of production is development of productive forces, capitalism is NOT sustained by greed of capitalists, greed is subordinated to impersonal power of capital. What we need is MORE not less EGOTISM. In Lacanian terms, individual greed and striving of capital to expand is difference between DESIRE AND DRIVE. Krugman says most of would still follow the herd even knowing there would be a breakdown. Memetic functioning of capitalist drive.
Fetishist Disavowal
Marx’s key insight remains valid Freedom is not located in political sphere proper, are human rights respected, is there free judiciary etc. The key to freedom for Marx is apolitical network of social relations from market to family, a change in social relations which appear apolitical, a change that can’t be done through elections in narrow sense, we don’t vote about who owns what, about relations in factory. Radical changes in this domain have to be done outside legal sphere. This limitation of legal democratic approach was shown in Obama’s reaction to BP oil spill. Sue them! it is all held within a narrow legalistic frame. The true task is not COMPENSATION, but to change situation so that they won’t be in situation to cause damage
They tell you about global warming and then you go outside and see the sun and the birds chirping and you say “my god can this be true”
Humanity should get ready to live in a more plastic nomadic way. Large population migrations will be necessary, desertification, global warming, large population movements who will organize it. Trans-state global mechanism to do it.
Sometimes the impossible happens: The Act You do something which within the existing ideological universe appears impossible, but while doing it it creates its own possibility, through the act itself it becomes possible. This is what we need.
Future: continuation of the present, full actualization of the tendencies already here.
The ultimate horizon of the future, some ecological breakdown, zero-point, a virtual attractor to which our reality if left to itself tends. We have to break with this through acts, there is no future in future, there is something in avenir.
Avenir: what is to come, a break with the present
We should adopt catastrophe as virtual point. Bring logic of existing system to end, there is ecological breakdown. OK this is our destiny, but we can indefinitely postpone it, and slowly undermine it. Admit the catastrophe as a destiny, but not as natural necessity, but as symbolic destiny, this does not mean it will really arrive, it is a dialectical point, destiny is inevitable, but what we can change is the inevitability of destiny. If everything is predestined why work, why not sit and masterbate, no if there is a concept marxists should take from theology it is predestination. It is predestined, we are not free within this predestiny but we are free to change destiny itself.
Every new work of art changes the entire past. Kafka created his own predecessors.
Commodity Fetishism