I always depend on a molecular assemblage of enunciation that is not given in my conscious mind, any more than it depends solely on my apparent social determinations, which combine many heterogeneous regimes of signs. Speaking in tongues. To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self.
I admit it: Violence is my first book by Slavoj Žižek, the cultural critic, philosopher, and Lacan expert who ironically calls himself a Marxist. Through his psychoanalytic lens, and his endless arsenal of jokes, he penetrates deep into 21st century culture with astoundingly counter-intuitive insights. He is never boring, and he hardly ever relies on the pseudo-scientific jargon that many of his fellow academics so love to use. That said, from his many online articles and interviews, he seems to me like a man who is full of contradictions. At times he vituperates the old communist regimes under which he lived, praises the achievements of post WWII western Europe, even finds a good word or two to say about neocon chearleader Fukayama; at other times he slams the disunited left — who can only agree to disagree — and he ironically praises Stalin and modern monolithic leftist movements like Chavez’s regime in Venezuela. Continue reading ‘Žižek’s Violence’
Tom from thebadrash kind of gave me the idea to do a Hero or Criminal series, but I don’t know how long it will last. I couldn’t help doing this one, though. Muntazer al-Zaidi is the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at president Bush in a fit of enraged passion, shouting, “You dog .. you think you are superior to us. This is what we think!”
HERO. He couldn’t help what he was doing in his irrational state of Dionysian rage, and he was expressing his anger in an essentially harmless way. Had he written an op-ed column it would have been drowned in the sea of information.
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