Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
  
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RE: virus: The Mirror Sage
« on: 2005-11-17 03:16:03 » |
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[Blunderov] Zizek sounds like a great party guest but don't expect to depart
before dawn - "today it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on
earth than a much more modest change in capitalism."
I hadn't thought of it quite that way before.
Best Regards.
<snip>
The Mirror Sage
The subject of a new documentary, Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues
for self-mockery as the ultimate form of seriousness
by Joshua Clover
November 14th, 2005 7:15 PM
Theory itself: Slavoj Zizek
photo: Kate Milford
See also:
Doc Takes World Tour With a Rock Star Academic
by Michael Atkinson
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0546,atkinson,70034,20.html
The exclamation point marks a broad joke about cheesy biopix, or perhaps a
more specific anxiety about the film's own place in the millennial raft of
theoryporn, including the Pierre Bourdieu epic Sociology Is a Combat Sport
and not one but two Derrida flicks. Or maybe it's just about subject Slavoj
Zizek's tendency to take things to extremes, sometimes at high volume. "I
try to go a little bit over the edge," he tells me on the phone from his
home in Ljubljana, Slovenia. "I try to be funny blah blah, but then, you
know, a little bit too much in being tasteless or telling a joke without a
point, that doesn't fit."
And he is funny blah blah: the least you could ask from a revered and
reviled intellectual, a "card-carrying Lacanian" who speaks more excitedly
about politics than Jacques Lacan's revolutionary psychoanalytic ideas. "I
am a mastodon," he says. "I still believe in the big theories popular back
in the '70s. This distrust in big universal theory is the most dangerous
ideology today. Look at all totalitarians, the really bad guys, Hitler,
Stalin. Sorry, but none of them believed in big theory. Hitler was a
historicist-relativist and so was Stalin! Often a reference to some absolute
truth is necessary to resist totalitarian political power, so you can not
lose hope."
Insight, nonsense, provocation? Zizek! director Astra Taylor frames the film
as an attempt to bring the passion of ideas themselves into the public
sphere. "I'm not a Zizekian, whatever that would be," she says. "I'm 26. Him
attacking cynicism and apathy, these things I saw all around me, as
ideological-I found his critique compelling, addressing things that seemed
very palpable in everyday life. Whether Zizek's ideas are useful or not
doesn't matter to me as a filmmaker. It does matter to me as a human being,
but I think Zizek truly doesn't care."
Perhaps. On one hand, Zizek feels bedeviled by his own waxing fame (the film
shows him speaking to huge audiences in various countries, always a bit
uncomfortably). He looks a little like Castro, though the story climaxes,
like so many tales of immigrants and rock stars, with a voyage to America):
"Making me popular is a resistance to taking me seriously," he says. And
yet, here he is basking in the lens glare, admitting his fear that "if I
stopped talking, the whole spectacular appearance would disintegrate."
Zizek, theory itself, approaches and withdraws, a dialectical drama
suggestive both of the child's "fort-da" game that entranced Freud and
Lacan, and of the endless motion of history. "The politics of multiple
identity, each of us telling our story," he says, turning on the gospel of
multiculturalism, "is precisely how global capitalism functions at the level
of ideology. I totally disagree with everyone who says that global
capitalism is culturally uniforming. No! Global capitalism is strictly,
infinitely multicultural. It's niche markets." In the film, noting public
fascination with apocalyptic scenarios, he suggests bluntly that "today it's
much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest
change in capitalism."
The movie is an attempt to disseminate serious social philosophy, haunted by
the threat one might be selling it out. Jokes mask ambitious investigations;
serious gestures withdraw into self-negation; the specter of historical
violence is omnipresent (he refers to his critical confreres as "a cell, the
theoretical Al Qaeda"). Zizek, who finished fifth in Slovenia's 1990
election of a four-person presidency, says he was offered various
governmental positions: "Minister of education, health, I almost died
laughing. There are only two posts I want: minister of interior, or secret
police." The certainty that he's both making fun and utterly serious
crackles through the international phone line. "The only way to signal you
are serious is, at the level of form, to make fun of yourself. This
pseudo-Heideggerian jargon, we live in fateful times, the destiny of
humanity is threatened blah blah blah-I think you cannot talk like that."
So how can you talk; what is philosophy for? "It's not to provide answers,
it's to correct the questions," says Zizek. "Terrorism, freedom, democracy:
The duty of philosophy is not to explain what would be true democracy, how
to beat terrorism, but to ask, is this truly the question? This is the only
thing a philosopher can do. Other questions are for politicians-I mean, what
do I know? Fuck it, who am I, what do I know how to fight terrorism? Every
secret policeman, I give him moral right to know more than me." </snip>
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