Well, all right. We all wish Obama had a stiffer backbone. And no right-thinking person could object to the public beheading of, say, Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson. But what is this “new order” we heroically ruthless revolutionaries are supposed to impose on our fellow citizens and the rest of humanity? You know, we’d like to see the plans.
Žižek is utterly, exasperatingly vague on this score. Jouissance (bliss) is the goal; capitalism is the obstacle; liberal democracy is a sham — that’s all we get, along with many misty invocations of Heidegger and frequent hints that Mao’s Cultural Revolution was perhaps only a little too much of a basically good thing. It sounds as if the ’60s had just arrived in Slovenia.
Related:
Concentration, Zizek!, Perversion, introversion, More 
- Concentration
This show has a subtle but relentless energy that emerges slowly.
- Zizek!
“I never thought I’d have so much fun talking about this!” exclaims Barry Nolan at the end of a broadcast of CN8’s Nightbeat .
- Perversion, introversion
Slavoj Zizek, the fuzzy-bearded Slovenian philosopher, seems a fun guy.
- Philm
On January 24, SPACE Gallery kicks off a series of four films and follow-up dialogues exploring contemporary philosophy.
- Oral arguments
Was there a more maligned work at Cannes 2005 than Carlos Reygadas’s Batalla en el cielo|Battle in Heaven ?
- Time pieces
What a place in St. Petersburg: 1000 palatial rooms and 3,000,000 art objects, paradise on earth.
- My Chomsky
Had Groucho Marx been a Marxist and stopped in the middle of A Night at the Opera to praise Karl Marx, the effect might have been a little like that which greeted Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez after he lauded Noam Chomsky at the UN General Assembly last week. The Phoenix interviews Noam Chomsky (1999) Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky
- Flashbacks: June 9, 2006
These selections, culled from our back files, were compiled by Chris Brook and Sam MacLaughlin.
- Living theoria
This spare spiral that Constantin Brancusi traced to capture the likeness of writer James Joyce describes the sort of journey involved in what Joyce called the “sedentary trade”: using one’s life as the material for one’s work, each working and wandering into and out of the other.
- Cooking with two Russians
Yulia Converse welcomed me into her kitchen in Maine to learn from her mother, Alla Zagoruyko, how to make authentic Russian borsht.
- Wall jumpers
In the center section of Frederick Taylor’s book about the Berlin Wall, there’s a November 1989 photograph of rows of Berliners straddling the high cement barrier.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Barack Obama, Culture and Lifestyle, Communism, More
, Barack Obama, Culture and Lifestyle, Communism, Dick Cheney, New York University, Pat Robertson, Plato, Slavoj Zizek, Martin Heidegger, Philosophy, Less
