{"id":8978,"date":"2012-05-03T15:16:45","date_gmt":"2012-05-03T20:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8978"},"modified":"2012-05-03T17:14:22","modified_gmt":"2012-05-03T22:14:22","slug":"zizek-april-24-2012-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/05\/03\/zizek-april-24-2012-los-angeles\/","title":{"rendered":"zizek April 24 2012 Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek is in Los Angeles 3 days before I met him in Brockport<\/a><\/p>\n

Why did God have to die on the cross?<\/p>\n

– pay price of our sins , to whom?\u00a0 Another guy, the devil??<\/p>\n

– because justice must be done, this is paganism, God is not really the top, there is some kind of cosmic destiny in which god is subordinated<\/p>\n

– we wouldn’t be grateful to god, like he’s a narcissist, PR, lets make god look good<\/p>\n

Malbranche: god wanted to be admired, w\/o Jesus sacrifice we wouldn’t all be lost, we would be redeemed automaticlly, god through us all into sin so he could save some of us. — a perverse God. There is something a little impenetrable today, which is covered over by the usual dogma today. When Napoleon took the crown and put it himself on the head, the Pope said to Napoleon, you try to ruin the church, but catholics have been trying for 2000 years<\/p>\n

How exactly do you read those statements : I don’t bring peace and love I bring sword and fire, if you don’t love your parents … there is a system of de-traumatizing these statements – don’t read them too seriously, don’t get too attached to earthly objects obei wan kenobi<\/em> philosophy.\u00a0 The best answer: my god, I wasn’t prepared for this question … But you had 2000 years to prepare for this question!<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek solution:\u00a0 when in the bible if you don’t hate your father, mother, it stands for entire power edifice social hierarchy, that is Christian message an egalitarian community outside of the power hierarchy. In Pagan religions you can only attain this in death … Christian an egalitarian collective is the Holy Ghost.<\/p>\n

Book of Job: First great critique of ideology. why?\u00a0 Things go terribly wrong for Job.\u00a0 Each of his friends try to convince Job that there is a deeper meaning to his suffering.\u00a0 The greatnest of Job he doesn’t say I’m innocent, only that these catastrophes have NO MEANING.\u00a0 God comes and agrees with JOB.\u00a0 GK CHESTERTON: Why did all this happen to me??\u00a0 God’s reply is usually read as arrogance of god, the gap that separates us from God. Chesteron turns this around God’s answer: You think you are in trouble, look at the entire universe I created it’s one big mess.\u00a0 God expresses his perplexity at his own creation<\/strong>.\u00a0 This is an incredible ETHICAL REVOLUTION.\u00a0 First step out of Pagan justice means: do your particular duty … this withdrawal culminates in the death of Christ: What dies on the cross: not God’s messenger, what dies on the cross is GOD of BEYOND himself, God as that TRANSCENDENT power that secretly pulls the strings.\u00a0 Precisely god can no longer be conceived as we are in shit, but there’s a guy up there who secretly pulls the strings, NO this is no longer.\u00a0 Something tremedous happens in Christianity.\u00a0 After death of Christ we have not the Father but the HOLY SPIRIT.\u00a0 where there is love between the two of you I AM THERE.<\/p>\n

Paul Claudel:\u00a0 Not we can trust God, but God has to trust us.\u00a0 This is an important message of freedom.\u00a0 In all other religions you have atheists, people who don’t believe in God, only in Christianity, God himself becomes for a moment an atheist.<\/strong>\u00a0 Far from fashionable talk i.e.,\u00a0 we are in neo-pagan era, NO we should stick to this tremendous explosive impact of what Christianity is telling us.<\/p>\n

Not Dennett or Hitchens (DITCHKINS), to be an atheist, this AUTHENTIC atheism<\/strong>, in the sense of experiencing the radical absence of any transcendental guarantee, you have to go through Christianity.<\/p>\n

Only through the Christian experience can you REACH THE ABYSS OF ATHEISM.\u00a0 Ditchkins is some stupid sense there is some truth, but it doesn’t work, there is no insight of how a religion effectively works.\u00a0 A whole dimension is missing in Ditchkins.\u00a0 The status of BELIEF is very mysterious, do we really believe?\u00a0 We don’t live in an era of hedonism, but in strictly controlled hedonism … celebrating sex, explaining it in pragmatic terms, like Dr. Ruth, yes sex, but healthy sex, beer without alcohol\u00a0 The only hedonists today are those who take drugs and those who smoke.\u00a0 This obsession with the danger of smoking … distinguished black guy smoking, “I’m from the South, and when I was young I remember racism, but it isn’t as bad as now as being oppressed for smoking.”<\/p>\n

WE BELIEVE MORE THAN EVER.\u00a0 beliefs in order to function, don’t have to be FIRST person beliefs, you can BELIEVE THROUGH OTHERS.\u00a0 We are Atheists, but in order not to hurt our children we believe, and then you ask the children … you have a belief that no one believes in the FIRST person.\u00a0\u00a0 CANNED LAUGHTER\u00a0 Prayer wheels<\/p>\n

We need to believe that there is someone who believes, even if that someone is hypothetical<\/p>\n

CHRISTIAN GESTURE: ABANDON OBJECTIFIED BELIEF.<\/span>\u00a0 Life is Beautiful movie: to make it a much better film, the father discovers at the end that THE SON KNEW THIS ALL THE TIME HE PRETENDED TO BELIEVE HIS FATHER TO PROTECT HIM. this is the christian reversal.<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42 I don’t see what the difference here is between the Objectifying belief in prayer wheel or canned laughter. Okay. But he goes on to say that equally, belief occurs through 3rd parties, we don’t necessarily believe, as long as somebody believes for us.\u00a0 I don’t really believe in Christmas, I do it for the kids. But he claims that the boy in Life is Beautiful\u00a0 <\/em>in an alternate ending, should all along have pretended to believe his father, rather than sincerely believing in his father’s stories about how it’s just an extended vacation etc.\u00a0 That is, I think he is arguing that instead of disavowal, of claiming we don’t believe but as long as others believe for us, we turn it around, we avow our belief in something, though still pretend.\u00a0 Why did the boy still need to pretend, even though he know his dad was full of crap?\u00a0 It’s the fetishist disavowal.<\/p>\n

fetishist disavowal<\/span>: “I know very well that things are the way I see them \/that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him”. So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes, i.e. I believe in Another Space (the domain of pure symbolic authority) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen.<\/p>\n

The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge – if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. This paradox is what Lacan aims at with his les non-dupes errent<\/em>: those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception\/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most.<\/p>\n

What a cynic who “believes only his eyes” misses is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction<\/strong>, the way this fiction structures our experience of reality. The same gap is at work in our most intimate relationship to our neighbors: we behave AS IF we do not know that they also smell badly, secrete excrement, etc. – a minimum of idealization, of fetishising disavowal<\/span>, is the basis of our co-existence.<\/p>\n

And doesn’t the same disavowal account for the sublime beauty of the idealizing gesture<\/strong> discernible from Anna Frank to American Communists who believed in the Soviet Union? Although we know that Stalinist Communism was an appalling thing, we nonetheless admire the victims of the McCarthy witch hunt who heroically persisted in their belief in Communism and support for the Soviet Union.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42 And \u017di\u017eek says this ending to A Beautiful Life<\/em> is preferable? In what sense?\u00a0 The Christian reversal, is this fetishist disavowal, take it upon ourselves as our belief, know that what we are relying on belief not relying on somebody else to believe for us, we don’t sub-contract our belief, we do it ourselves, we believe in order to believe.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek continues: For me Church is today at a CROSSROADS: it could be authentic liberation, an authentic subjective experience, at the same time it can be terribly misused.<\/p>\n

Good people do bad things: we are relatively decent people, we do need some strong mythopoetic structure to serve as a screen to convince us thta the horrors we do can be transubstantiated into a higher meaning: POETRY. No ethnic cleansing without POETRY. you must be de-sensitized, to rape ethnic cleansing, it is preciesly this ethnic founding mythic, sacred text religions that can do the job.\u00a0 Rwanda massacre, a great poet was laying the foundations for the slaughter.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the MEGA MEGA dilemma, how to find the way here.\u00a0 For me, the message of Christiantity is the opposite of this need for TRANSCENDENCE.\u00a0 Modern world is not a world with too much freedom, I can’t speak dirty, I can’t beat my wife, by becoming ethnic fundamentalists, opens up a space of freedom.\u00a0 I am ethnically cleansing for my country I can rape, I can kill.\u00a0 If there is God, I am an instrument of god, then everything is permitted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek is in Los Angeles 3 days before I met him in Brockport Why did God have to die on the cross? – pay price of our sins , to whom?\u00a0 Another guy, the devil?? – because justice must be done, this is paganism, God is not really the top, there is some kind of … Continue reading “zizek April 24 2012 Los Angeles”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,90,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lacan","category-resistance","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8978"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8980,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8978\/revisions\/8980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}