archive › Zizek
Who is Utopian Today?
…Those who manage to convince themselves that the order of the Other is here to stay, that the statist power of the present is firmly grounded and basically secure, are the ones clinging to a shaky arrangement with quiet desperation. Those who roll the dice betting on act/event-level transformations are, contrary to senseless common sense and vulgar popular opinion, sober realists; today’s self-declared “realists” (i.e., those banking on the indefinitely enduring continuity of current circumstances) are the ideologically intoxicated utopian idealists enthralled by dreams of a nonexistent, unattainable stability.
—Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, p. 54.
The Art of Shrinking Heads
Jodi Dean over at I cite has put together a brief review of Dany-Robert Dufour’s The Art of Shrinking Heads, a Lacanian critique of late capitalism and the rise of the “postmodern subject.” I haven’t read Dufour’s book yet, but going off of Dean’s review, it seems to significantly overlap with Zizek’s similarly-themed politico-philosophical project, which would be one reason among others to take some interest in reading it (or her post(s) on it, at the very least).
The Symptom 9: Universalism vs. Globalization
I haven’t really been following its publication recently, but there looks to be a bunch of interesting pieces in here, including J.-A. Miller’s essay, “Extimity,” Zizek’s essay on the Lacanian Real and television, and several of Heidegger’s political tracts from the early 1930s. (Via Larval Subjects.)