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Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses Slavoj Zizek - Tilton Gallery, November 28 2007 Introduction by Josefina Ayerza - Part I

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-11T14:58:12-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part II

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-10T15:04:23-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part III

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-09T15:06:13-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part IV

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-08T15:08:52-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part V

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-07T19:26:08-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part VI

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-06T19:30:19-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part VII

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-05T19:33:25-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part VIII

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-04T19:37:38-04:00

Alain Badiou - Philosophy as Biography Introduction by Josefina Ayerza Miguel Abreu Gallery, NYC, 11/13/07

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-04T18:22:49-04:00

Click To Play

Jacques-Alain Miller - Pétition Alerte Rouge communiqué du 11 juillet 2008

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-04T12:29:40-04:00

Après m’avoir consulté à ce sujet, mon ami Roland Gori a pris l’initiative de rédiger et faire circuler la “Pétition Alerte Rouge”. C’est un appel général à s’unir contre le projet d’arrêté que j’ai critiqué dans ma tribune du Point la semaine dernière. J’ai signé cette pétition, et j’invite les adhérents et amis du Champ freudien à faire de même. L’heure n’est pas aux “petites différences”, mais au rassemblement. Le texte incriminé vise à casser les reins au mouvement psychanalytique, en créant subrepticement une nouvelle profession de soi-disants “psychothérapeutes”, formés au rabais (et qui seront aussi employés au rabais) sur des bases exclusivement cognitivistes. Cette politique de ravalement et déqualification, déjà entrée en vigueur en Grande-Bretagne, fait courir au public des dangers manifestes; elle a conduit dans ce pays à la marginalisation des psychanalystes. La fuite qui m’a permis de connaître ce texte, et l’alerte donnée dans les médias, ont déjà permis de percer à jour le guet-apens, prémédité pour le mois d’août. Il s’agit maintenant de faire nombre. Je prépare la sortie d’un numéro spécial de LNA pour cet été. Il sera aussitôt diffusé aux médias et à la classe politique, puis, au public dés le début septembre. Avant d’autres initiatives. Jacques-Alain MILLER Signer la pétition http://sauvons-la-clinique.org/petition2/index.php? petition=3&signe=oui

Jacques-Alain Miller Debate: Death to the Shrinks Le Point - The London Society of the New Lacanian School

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-07-03T14:42:49-04:00

The techno-shrink won’t have the function of accommodating each person in accordance with the singularity of his or her desire: what a waste of time! What a bad cost/profit ratio! And then, curing with words, that’s witchcraft! No, the techno-shrink doesn’t listen. He counts, he calibrates, he compares. He observes types of behaviour. He evaluates disorders. He pinpoints deficits. Zero autonomy: he obeys protocols, does what he’s told, gathers data and passes it on to research teams. The State apparatuses are present right from the first steps of his training, and he will remain subordinate to them throughout by way of periodic evaluation. The truth is, the techno-shrink isn’t a shrink: he’s an agent of total social control, himself under constant surveillance. I know, it sounds like science fiction. Even Stalin didn’t dare that. It’s even stronger than the Stasi: they used to plant microphones, now you’re going to have a technician wired up directly to your brain. This is nevertheless the main thrust of the text of the decree that a conclave of civil servants from the Health and Higher Education Ministry are boasting they’ll be making their ministers sign in muggy August.

Jacques-Alain Miller Towards PIPOL 4 International Programme of Studies on Applied Psychoanalysis in the Lacanian Orientation

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-06-05T13:54:18-04:00

This is the key to the shock of civilizations. What we thus name is essentially the opposition, the incompatibility, between the religious civilization and the merchant civilization, between the civilization dominated by the ideal ego and the one that the superego strictly speaking dominates, the superego whose imperative can be formulated jouis, between the civilization of respect and ours, which is that of greediness. The merchant civilization stigmatizes as fanaticism that of the ideal ego, and it is in turn stigmatized as perversion, corruption, immorality, Jouissance-pride. [5] We find between the two an enigmatic mix, today’s China, where we can observe both an authoritarian control of the Ideal and an extraordinary disinhibition of consummation.

LNA - Le Nouvel Âne 8

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-02-28T14:51:14-05:00

Au lecteur - Jacques-Alain Miller

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part I Introduction by Josefina Ayerza

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-02-15T09:48:27-05:00

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part II

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-02-14T03:25:50-05:00

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part III

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-02-13T03:04:41-05:00

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part IV

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-02-12T02:39:40-05:00

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part V

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-02-11T18:51:30-05:00

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part VI

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-02-10T18:51:41-05:00

Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses - Part I

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-02-02T17:40:19-03:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution - why? Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies the trust into the objectivized/"reified" mechanism of the market's "invisible hand" which, as a kind of Cunning of Reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. go to article

Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses - Part II

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-02-01T17:34:56-03:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK The horror of the Chernobyl accident resides in the fact that when one visits the site, with the exception of the sarcophagus, things look exactly the same as before, life seems to have deserted the site, leaving everything the way it is, and nonetheless we are aware that something is terribly wrong. The change is not at the level of the visible reality itself, it is a more fundamental one, it affects the very texture of reality. No wonder there are some lone farmers around the Chernobyl site who continued to lead their lives as before - they simply ignore all the incomprehensible talk about radiations. go to article

The Liberal Utopia - sec 1: Against the Politics of Jouissance

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-08T15:21:40-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK For Lacan, on the contrary, objet a is a(nother) name for the Freudian "partial object," which is why it cannot be reduced to its role in fantasy which sustains desire; it is for this reason that, as Lacan emphasizes, one should distinguish its role in desire and in drive. Following Jacques-Alain Miller, a distinction has to be introduced here between two types of lack, the lack proper and hole: lack is spatial, designating a void WITHIN a space, while hole is more radical, it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the "black hole" in physics). go to article

The Liberal Utopia - sec 2: The Market Mechanism for the Race of Devils

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-08T03:27:35-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK As every close observer of the deadlocks of Political Correctness knows, the separation of legal Justice from moral Goodness - which should be relativized-historicized - ends up in a stifling oppressive moralism full of resentment. Without any "organic" social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly referred to as "common decency" (all such standards are dismissed as subordinating individual freedom to proto-Fascist organic social forms), the minimalist program of laws which should just prevent individuals to encroach upon each other (to annoy or "harass" each other) reverts into an explosion of legal and moral rules, into an endless process of legalization/moralization called "the fight against all forms of discrimination." If there are no shared mores that are allowed to influence the law, only the fact of "harassing" other subjects, who - in the absence of such mores - will decide what counts as "harassment"? go to article

Ideology I: No Man is an Island...

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-05T03:13:09-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Deleuze often varies the motif of how, in becoming post-human, we should learn to practice "a perception as it was before men (or after) /.../ released from their human coordinates" (Cinema 1, 122): those who fully endorse the Nietzschean "return of the same" are strong enough to sustain the vision of the "iridescent chaos of a world before man"(ibid. , 81). Although Deleuze resorts here openly to Kant's language, talking about the direct access to "things (the way they are) in themselves," his point is precisely that one should subtract the opposition between phenomena and things-in-themselves, between the phenomenal and the nolumenal level, from its Kantian functioning, where noumena are transcendent things that forever elude our grasp. What Deleuze refers to as "things in themselves" is in a way even more phenomenal then our shared phenomenal reality: it is the impossible phenomenon, the phenomenon that is excluded from our symbolically-constituted reality. go to article

Ideology II: Competition is a Sin

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-04T03:17:21-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK How can an individual stand for the big Other? One should not think primarily of the leader-figures who directly embody/personify their community (king, president, master), but, rather, of the more mysterious figures of protectors of appearances – like a child whom his otherwise corrupted adult parents and relatives desperately try to keep in ignorance about their deprived lives, or, if a leader, then a leader for whom Potemkin’s villages are raised.  go to article

Ideology III: To Read Too Many Books is Harmful

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-03T03:19:52-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK What seems to characterize the Muslim symbolic space is an immediate conflation of possibility and actuality: what is merely possible is treated (reacted against) as if actually took place. At the level of sexual interactions, when a man finds himself alone with a woman, it is assumed that the opportunity was used, that they did it, that the sexual act took place (which is why sometimes, after finding themselves by accident in such a situation - caught in an elevator which broke down, etc. -, the Muslim women commit suicide out of sense of shame). At the level of writing, this is why Muslims are prohibited to use paper at the toilet: it MAY HAVE BEEN that verses of Quran were written or printed on it... go to article

Madness and Habit in German Idealism: Discipline between the Two Freedoms - Part 1

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-01T15:09:50-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK The shift from Aristotle to Kant, to modernity with its subject as pure autonomy: the status of habit changes from organic inner rule to something mechanic, the opposite of human freedom: freedom cannot ever become habit(ual), if it becomes a habit, it is no longer true freedom (which is why Thomas Jefferson wrote that, if people are to remain free, they have to rebel against the government every couple of decades). This eventuality reaches its apogee in Christ, who is "the figure of a pure event, the exact opposite of the habitual". go to article

Madness and Habit in German Idealism: Discipline between the Two Freedoms - Part 2

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-01T15:03:00-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK What "haunts" the subject is his inaccessible noumenal Self, the "Thing that thinks," an object in which the subject would fully "encounter himself." (Hume drew a lot of mileage out of this observation on how, upon introspection, all I perceive in myself are my particular ideas, sensations, emotions, never my "Self" itself.) For Kant, the same goes for every object of my experience which is always phenomenal, i.e., inaccessible in its noumenal dimension; however, with the Self, the impasse is accentuated: all other objects of experience are given to me phenomenally, but, in the case of subject, I cannot even get a phenomenal experience of me – since I am dealing with "myself," in this unique case, phenomenal self-experience would equal noumenal access, i.e., if I were to be able to experience "myself" as a phenomenal object, I would thereby eo ipso experience myself in my noumenal identity, as a Thing. go to article

Only a Suffering God Can Save Us Section 1: Hegel

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-01T10:47:42-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK The key question about religion today is: can all religious experiences and practices effectively be contained within this dimension of the conjunction of truth and meaning? The best starting point for such a line of inquiry is the point at which religion itself faces a trauma, a shock which dissolves the link between truth and meaning, a truth so traumatic that it resists being integrated into the universe of meaning. Every theologian sooner or later faces the problem of how to reconcile the existence of God with the fact of shoah or similar excessive evil: how are we to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent and good God with the terrifying suffering of millions of innocents, like children killed in the gas chambers? Surprisingly (or not), the theological answers build a strange succession of Hegelian triads. go to article

Only a Suffering God Can Save Us Section 2: Kierkegaard

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-01T04:52:48-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK According to an anecdote from the May ’68 period, there was a graffiti on a Paris wall: "God is dead. Nietzsche" Next day, another graffiti appeared below it: "Nietzsche is dead. God" What is wrong with this joke? Why is it so obviously reactionary? It is not only that the reversed statement relies on a moralistic platitude with no inherent truth; its failure is deeper, it concerns the form of reversal itself: what makes the joke a bad joke is the pure symmetry of the reversal – the underlying claim of the first graffiti ("God is dead. Signed by (obviously living) Nietzsche") is turned around into a statement which implies "Nietzsche is dead, while I am still alive. God". go to article

Radical Evil as a Freudian Category

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-01T03:05:14-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Jacques Rancière clearly outlined the "ontological trap" into which the Foucauldian-Agambenian notion of "biopolitics" as the culmination of the entire Western thought ends up getting caught: concentration camps appear as a kind of "ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap." When, in a shift from Foucault, Agamben identifies sovereign power and biopolitics (in today’s generalized state of exception, the two overlap), he thus precludes the very possibility of the emergence of political subjectivity. go to article

Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault and then Lacan

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-01T02:07:55-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK The 'antagonism' of the Kantian notion of freedom (as the most concise expression of the antagonism of freedom in the bourgeois life itself) does not reside where Adorno locates it (the autonomously self-imposed law means that freedom coincides with self-enslavement and self-domination, that the Kantian "spontaneity" is in actu its opposite, utter self-control, thwarting of all spontaneous impetuses), but "much more on the surface": for Kant as for Rousseau, the greatest moral good is to lead a fully autonomous life as a free rational agent, and the worst evil subjection to the will of another; however, Kant has to concede that man does not emerge as a free mature rational agent spontaneously, through his/her natural development, but only through the arduous process of maturation sustained by harsh discipline and education which cannot but be experienced by the subject as imposed on his/her freedom, as an external coercion. go to article

Leninism Today: Zionism and the Jewish Question

perfume@lacan.com — 2008-01-01T01:51:24-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK It is none other than Nietzsche who proposed the correct materialist intervention destined to “traverse the /anti-Semitic/ fantasy”: in No. 251 of Beyond Good and Evil, he proposed, as a way to “breed a new caste that would rule over Europe,” the mixing of the German and the Jewish race, which would combine the German ability of “giving orders and obeying” with the Jewish genius of “money and patience.” go to article

grand meeting pour que vive la psychanalyse 9 et 10 février à la mutualité

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-12-10T16:23:34-05:00

Communiqué n°13 Dear colleagues, many of us who have been harassed in the l'Université by cognitivist commandos, will speak up at the Meeting de la Mutualité, in particular my friend Roland Gori. Besides, I have invited the president of the Fondation Gabriel Péri, Robert Hue, formerly with the PCF. Also present will be the members of the Fondation pour l'innovation politique, among them our friend Catherine Clément, and, I hope, Jean-Didier Vincent. And this is only the beginning. All the best, Jacques-Alain Miller, December 6th 2007.

On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-12-03T14:26:06-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK In Badiou's Logiques des mondes, the shift is from the axis Being-Event to the axis World-Event. What this means is that, in Logiques des mondes, Being, World and Event do not form a triad: we have either the opposition of Being and World (appearance), or the opposition of World and Event. There is an unexpected conclusion to be drawn from this: insofar as (Badiou emphasizes this point again and again) a true Event is not merely a negative gesture, but opens up a positive dimension of the New, an Event IS the imposition of a new world, of a new Master-Signifier (a new Naming, as Badiou puts it, or, what Lacan calls vers un nouveau significant). The true evental change is the passage from the old to the new world. One should even make a step further and introduce the dimension of dialectics here: an Event CAN be accounted for by the tension between the multiplicity of Being and the World, its site is the symptomal torsion of a World, it is generated by the excess of Being over World (of presence over re-presentation). go to article

PHILOSOPHY: Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and ...Badiou!

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-12-02T17:27:49-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK What, already in a first approach, Alain Badiou shares with Gilles Deleuze is that both their philosophies focus on the notion of Event which cannot be reduced to the positive order of Being. We already saw, apropos a series of examples, from Italian neo-Realism to political revolutions, how, for Deleuze, an Event (the emergence of the New) transcends its positive causes; along the same lines, for Badiou, Event introduces a radical break into the order of Being. The difference between them is that, while Deleuze remains a vitalist who asserts the absolute immanence of the Event to Being, the Event as the One-All, the encompassing medium of the thriving differences of Life, Badiou, in a "dualist" fashion, posits Event as radically heterogeneous with regard to Being. go to article

Pragmatics of the Cure: the Transference from objet a

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-12-01T20:46:51-05:00

by ERIC LAURENT "L'Étourdit" and "La Troisième". In these texts, the link between objet a and semblance is interrogated. The link between the real and semblance has been approached in various ways throughout the teachings of Lacan. It is a matter, in these two texts, of his "last teachings." There, Lacan questions the limit to the solution that he had invented in the first period of his teaching.every broad way in which Lacan uses this term in his late teaching.  go to article

Religion between Knowledge and Jouissance

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-12-01T17:00:51-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Is the post-68’ drive to jouissance - to reaching the extreme of forms of sexual pleasures that would dissolve all social links and allow me to find a climax in the solipsism of absolute jouissance - not the very opposite of the consummation of the commodified products promising jouissance? The first (best exemplified by the work of Foucault) stands for a radical, "authentic," subjective position, while the second signals a defeat, a surrender to market forces... Is, however, this opposition effectively so clear? Is it not all too easy to denounce jouissance offered on the market as "false," as providing only the empty package-promise with no substance? Is the hole, the void, in the very heart of our pleasures not the structure of every jouissance? Furthermore, is it, rather, not that the commodified provocations to enjoy which bombard us all the time push us towards, precisely, an autistic-masturbatory, "asocial," jouissance whose supreme case is the addiction to drugs? Are drugs not at the same time the means for the most radical autistic experience of jouissance and a commodity par excellence?  go to article

Do We Still Live in a World?

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-12-01T16:38:11-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan invokes the "point of the apocalypse," the impossible saturation of the Symbolic by the Real of jouissance, the full immersion into massive jouissance. The same point can be made in Nietzschean terms - what is effectively Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same? Does it stand for the factual repetition, for the repetition of the past which should be willed as it was, or for a Benjaminiam repetition, a return-reactualization of that which was lost in the past occurrence, of its virtual excess, of its redemptive potential? There are good reasons to read it as the heroic stance of endorsing factual repetition: recall how Nietzsche emphatically points out that, when faced with every event of my life, even the most painful one, I should gather the strength to joyfully will for it to return eternally. If we read the thought of eternal return in this way, then Giorgio Agamben’s evocation of the holocaust as the conclusive argument against the eternal return retains its full weight: who can will it to return eternally? What, however, if we reject the notion of the eternal return of the same as the repetition of the reality of the past, insofar as it relies on an all too primitive notion of the past, on the reduction of the past to the one-dimensional reality of "what really happened," which erases the virtual dimension of the past? If we read the eternal return of the same as the redemptive repetition of the past virtuality? In this case, applied to the nightmare of the holocaust, the Nietzschean eternal return of the same means precisely that one should will the repetition of the potential which was lost through the reality of the holocaust, the potential whose non-actualization opened up the space for the holocaust to occur.  go to article

The Concept of Semblant in Lacan’s Teaching

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-12-01T16:10:00-05:00

by RUSSELL GRIGG I do three things in this paper. I give what I think is arguably the best way to understand the concept of a semblant in Lacan's teaching; I reject or at least seriously qualify a second way in which the notion of semblant in Lacan is frequently understood, which is to see it as akin to the phallus; and I finish by criticizing the very, very broad way in which Lacan uses this term in his late teaching.  go to article

How to Read Lacan 1. Introduction - Bibliography

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-16T22:29:54-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Lacan started his “return to Freud” with the linguistic reading of the entire psychoanalytic edifice, encapsulated by what is perhaps his single best known formula: “the unconscious is structured as a language.” The predominant perception of the unconscious is that it is the domain of irrational drives, something opposed to the rational conscious self. For Lacan, this notion of the unconscious belongs to the Romantic Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) and has nothing to do with Freud. Lacan himself conferred on Jacques-Alain Miller the task to edit his seminars for publication, designating him as “the (only) one who knows to read me” - in this, he was right: Miller’s numerous writings and his own seminars are by far the best introduction to Lacan. Miller accomplishes the miracle of rendering an obscure page from ecrits completely transparent, so that one is left wondering “how is it that I did not get it myself?” go to article

How to Read Lacan 2. Empty Gestures and Performatives: Lacan Confronts the CIA Plot

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-15T22:34:31-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK The big Other operates at a symbolic level. What, then, is this symbolic order composed of? When we speak (or listen, for that matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our accepting of and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. First, there are the grammatical rules I have to master blindly and spontaneously: if I were to bear in mind all the time these rules, my speech would come to a halt. Then there is the background of participating in the same life-world which enables me and my partner in conversation to understand each other. The rules that I follow are marked by a deep split: there are rules (and meanings) that I follow blindly, out of custom, but of which, upon reflection, I can become at least partially aware (such as common grammatical rules), and there are rules that I follow, meanings that haunt me, unbeknownst to me (such as unconscious prohibitions). Then there are rules and meanings I am aware of, but have to act on the outside as if I am not aware of them - dirty or obscene innuendos which one passes over in silence in order to maintain the proper appearances. go to article

How to Read Lacan 3. The Interpassive Subject: Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-14T22:37:18-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK What many readers of Lacan fail to notice is how the figure of the subject supposed to know is a secondary phenomenon, an exception, something that emerges against the more fundamental background of the subject supposed to believe, which is the constitutive feature of the symbolic order. According to a well-known anthropological anecdote, the primitives to whom one attributed certain superstitious beliefs (that they descend from a fish or from a bird, for example), when directly asked about these beliefs, answered "Of course not - I'm not that stupid! But I was told that some of our ancestors effectively did believe that...". In short, they transferred their belief onto another. go to article

How to Read Lacan 4. From Che vuoi? to Fantasy: Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-14T03:21:40-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Divinity: is what we call "God" not the big Other personified, addressing us as a larger-than-life person, a subject beyond all subjects? In a similar way, we talk about History asking something of us, of our Cause calling us to make the necessary sacrifice. What we get here is an uncanny subject who is not simply another human being, but the Third, the subject who stands above the interaction of real human individuals - and the terrifying enigma is, of course, what does this impenetrable subject want from us (theology refers to this dimension as that of Deus absconditus). For Lacan, we do not have to evoke God to get a taste of this abyssal dimension; it is present in every human being. go to article

How to Read Lacan 5. Troubles with the Real: Lacan as Viewer of Alien

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-13T14:08:20-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK The conclusion to be drawn is that the Lacanian Real is a much more complex category than the idea of a fixed trans-historical "hard core" that forever eludes symbolization; it has nothing to do with what Immanuel Kant called the "Thing-in-itself," reality the way it is out there, independently of us, prior to being distorted by our perceptions: "/.../ this notion is not at all Kantian. I even insist on this. If there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex and, because of this, incomprehensible, it cannot be comprehended in a way that would make an All out of it." How, then, are we to find our way and to introduce some clarity into this conundrum of the Reals? Let us begin with Freud's dream on Irma's injection, selected by him to open his magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams. go to article

How to Read Lacan 6. Ego Ideal and Superego: Lacan as Viewer of Casablanca

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-12T03:14:38-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK "Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance - Enjoy!" Although jouissance can be translated as "enjoyment," translators of Lacan often leave it in French in order to render palpable its excessive, properly traumatic character: we are not dealing with simple pleasures, but with a violent intrusion that brings more pain than pleasure. This is how we usually perceive the Freudian superego, the cruel and sadistic ethical agency which bombards us with impossible demands and then gleefully observes our failure to meet them. No wonder, then, that Lacan posited an equation between jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one's spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty. go to article

How to Read Lacan 7. "God is Dead, but He Doesn't Know It": Lacan Plays with Bobok

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-11T22:42:28-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented him/her the access to normal sexual satisfaction: if you are not able to "get it," go to the analyst who will enable you to get rid of your inhibitions. Today, however, we are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction "Enjoy!" , from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening. Jouissance today effectively functions as a strange ethical duty: individuals feel guilty not for violating moral inhibitions by way of engaging in illicit pleasures, but for not being able to enjoy. In this situation, psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy - not prohibited to enjoy, but just relieved of the pressure to enjoy. go to article

How to Read Lacan 8. The Perverse Subject of Politics: Lacan as a Reader of Mohammad Bouyeri

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-10T22:45:21-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK For Lacan, a pervert is not defined by the content of what he is doing (his weird sexual practices). Perversion, at its most fundamental, resides in the formal structure of how the pervert relates to truth and speech. The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history to the desire of his partner), so that, dispelling all the ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as the instrument of the big Other's will. In this sense, both Osama bin Laden and President Bush, although politically opponents, share the structures of a pervert. They both act upon the presupposition that their acts are directly ordered and guided by divine will. go to article

Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father or How Not to Misread Lacan's Formulas of Sexuation

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-09T03:32:33-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK The usual way of misreading Lacan's formulas of sexuation 1 is to reduce the difference of the masculine and the feminine side to the two formulas that define the masculine position, as if masculine is the universal phallic function and feminine the exception, the excess, the surplus that eludes the grasp of the phallic function. Such a reading completely misses Lacan's point, which is that this very position of the Woman as exception-say, in the guise of the Lady in courtly love-is a masculine fantasy par excellence. As the exemplary case of the exception constitutive of the phallic function, one usually mentions the fantasmatic, obscene figure of the primordial father-jouisseur who was not encumbered by any prohibition and was as such able fully to enjoy all women. Does, however, the figure of the Lady in courtly love not fully fit these determinations of the primordial father? Is she not also a capricious Master who wants it all, i.e., who, herself not bound by any Law, charges her knight-servant with arbitrary and outrageous ordeals? go to article

Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian?

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-09T03:27:46-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK It is only after clarifying the relationship between the Hegelian dialectic and the logic of the signifier that one is in the position to situate the 'Hegelianism' in Lacan. Let us take the three successive stages of the progression of the concept of the Symbolic in Lacan.  The first stage, that of 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', places the accent on the intersubjective dimension of speech: speech as the medium of the intersubjective recognition of desire. The predominant themes in this stage are symbolization as historicization and symbolic realization: symptoms, traumas, are the blank, empty, non-historicizable spaces of the subject's symbolic universe. go to article

The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-09T02:40:07-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Let us be precise: it is not a matter of understanding the link between the failure of the act and its symbolization by reducing it to an alleged 'imaginary compensation' ('when the act, the effective intervention into reality, fails, one attempts to make up for this loss by a symbolic compensation, in keeping with the deeper meaning of such events') - for example, when the powerless victim of natural forces divinizes them, understands them as personified spiritual forces ... In such a rapid passage from the act to its 'deeper meaning', we miss the intermediate articulation which is the essence of its symbolization: the very moment of defeat, before it is redeemed by an 'imaginary compensation' and one obtains a 'deeper meaning', becomes in itself a positive gesture, a moment that would be denned by the distinction between the Symbolic in the strict sense and what one calls 'symbolic signification', or simply the symbolic order. go to article

Connections of the Freudian Field to Philosophy and Popular Culture

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-09T01:42:22-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK It's not an accident that (and I'm reasoning in a very naive way here) those political systems that cling to the fantasy in the sense of some harmonious society - for example, in Nazism, of a 'community ; of the people', etc., or, in Stalinism, building 'new men', a new harmonious socialist society - in order to maintain this fantasy, had, at | the same time, to develop to the extreme the other fantasy: obsession with the Jewish blood, obsession with traitors, with what the other is doing, etc. So what is crucial, I think, is that the fantasy is necessarily split in this way. I am tempted to say that with fantasy it is almost the way it is with ideology: there are always two fantasies. go to article

Kant and Sade: the Ideal Couple

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-11-09T00:51:02-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Of all the couples in the history of modern thought (Freud and Lacan, Marx and Lenin...) , Kant and Sade is perhaps the most problematic: the statement "Kant is Sade" is the "infinite judgement" of modern ethics, positing the sign of equation between the two radical opposites, i.e. asserting that the sublime disinterested ethical attitude is somehow identical to, or overlaps with, the unrestrained indulgence in pleasurable violence. A lot-everything, perhaps-is at stake here: is there a line from Kantian formalist ethics to the cold-blooded Auschwitz killing machine? Are concentration camps and killing and genocides as a neutral business the inherent outcome of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of Reason? Is there at least a legitimate lineage from Sade to Fascist torturing, as is implied by Pasolini's film version of Saló, which transposes it into the dark days of Mussolini's Saló republic? Lacan developed this link first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and then in the Écrits "Kant with Sade" of 1963. go to article

STALINISM

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-10-15T14:05:01-04:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK So, although it is clear how Stalinism emerged from the initial conditions of the October Revolution and its immediate aftermath, one should not a priori discount the possibility that, if Lenin were to retain his health for a couple of years and deposed Stalin, something entirely different would have emerged - not, of course, the utopia of "democratic socialism," but nonetheless something substantially different from the Stalinist "socialism in one country," the result of a much more "pragmatic" and improvisatory series of political and economic decisions, fully aware of its own limitations. (Lenin's desperate last struggle against the re-awakened Russian nationalism, his support of Georgian "nationalists," his vision of a much more decentralized federation, etc., were not just tactical compromises: they implied a vision of state and society in their entirety incompatible with the Stalinist one.) go to article

A Pervert's Guide to Family

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-10-09T04:04:48-04:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK When Sophie Fiennes approached me with the idea to do a "pervert's guide" to cinema, our shared goal was to demonstrate how psychoanalytic cinema-criticism is still the best we have, how it can generate insights which compel us to change our entire perspective. The "pervert" from the title is thus not a narrow clinical category; it rather refers to perverting - turning around - our spontaneous perceptions. go to article

Slavoj Zizek - The Pervert's Guide to Cinema 1,2,3

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-10-04T14:54:02-04:00

watch the trailer

Slavoj Zizek - The Liberal Utopia University of Athens

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-10-03T10:20:34-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology Without Nature Panteion University, Athens

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-10-02T22:17:15-04:00

Gorgias, Not Plato Was the Archi-Stalinist

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-09-18T13:59:28-04:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK There are, roughly speaking, two philosophical approaches to an antagonistic constellation of either/or: either one opts for one pole against the other (Good against Evil, freedom against oppression, morality against hedonism, etc.), or one adopts a "deeper" attitude of emphasizing the complicity of the opposites, and of advocating a proper measure or the unity. Although Hegel's dialectic seems a version of the second approach (the "synthesis" of opposites), he opts for an unheard-of THIRD version: the way to resolve the deadlock is neither to engage oneself in fighting for the "good" side against the "bad" one, nor in trying to bring them together in a balanced "synthesis," but in opting for the BAD side of the initial either/or. Of course, this "choice of the worst" fails, but in this failure, it undermines the entire field of the alternative and thus enables us to overcome its terms. (Say, in politics, in the choice between organic unity and destructive terror, the only way to arrive at the truth is to begin with the "wrong" choice.) Therein resides the insurmountable difference between Hegel and the New Age notion of balancing the opposites. go to article

A Letter Which Did Not Reach its Destination (and thereby saved the world)

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-09-17T13:51:10-04:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Kennedy's stroke of genius which was crucial for the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, was to pretend that a key letter did NOT arrive at its destination, to act as if this letter didn't exist - a stratagem which, of course, only worked because the sender (Khrushchev) participated in it. On Friday, October 26 1962, a letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy confirms the offer previously made through intermediaries: the missiles will be removed if the US issues a pledge not to invade Cuba. On Saturday, October 27, before a US answer, another, harsher and more demanding, letter from Khrushchev arrives, adding the removal of missiles from Turkey as a condition, and signalling a possible political coup in the Soviet Union. At 8:05 PM the same day, Kennedy sends a response to Khrushchev, informing him that he is accepting his October 26 proposal, i.e., acting as if the October 27 letter doesn't exist. On Sunday, October 28, Kennedy receives a letter from Khrushchev in which he agrees to the deal... The lesson of this is that in such moments of crisis where the fate of everything hangs in the air, saving the appearances, politeness, the awareness of "playing a game," matters more than ever. go to article

Shostakovich in Casablanca

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-09-16T13:01:24-04:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK So what if we read Shostakovich's popular symphonies along the lines of how one is to read great Hollywood classics? In the well-known brief scene three quarters into Casablanca, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) comes to Rick Blaine's (Humphrey Bogart's) room to try to obtain the letters of transit that will allow her and her Resistance leader husband Victor Laszlo to escape Casablanca to Portugal and then to America. After Rick refuses to hand them over, she pulls a gun and threatens him. He tells her, "Go ahead and shoot, you'll be doing me a favor." She breaks down and tearfully starts to tell him the story of why she left him in Paris. By the time she says, "If you knew how much I loved you, how much I still love you," they are embracing in close-up. The movie dissolves to 3 1/2 second shot of the airport tower at night, its searchlight circling, and then dissolves back to a shot from outside the window of Rick's room, where he is standing, looking out, and smoking a cigarette. He turns into the room, and says, "And then?" go to article

Lacan's Nightingale

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-08-18T01:33:35-03:00

by JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

Lacan, in truth, had only one style of teaching: his Seminar. Probably the existence during thirty years of Lacan’s Seminar, contributed to making this concept part of the French language. In the classic Latin, seminarium is a kitchen garden. Seminare comes from semen. The modern use of the work Seminar has its origins in the Counter-Reformation (or, better stated, a place, a religious institution where the young are trained to receive religious orders). The modern meaning of Seminarium is born with the Council of Trent, in the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church sought out mechanisms for reconquering Christendom.

go to article

Frank Gehry's "Ship of Glass in Chelsea Waterfront" -

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-08-17T19:14:15-03:00

Gérard Wajcman casts new light, for our annotated bibliography, on the way in which Lacan foresaw that objects would "rise to the summit", that is, the way in which their rise and fall are linked together in modern sublimation. Climate and hypermarket resonate therein, providing a touch of the supplementary global real, in their search for the O.L.* [object-that-is-lacking]. ...The object from below  ...In 1960, for Lacan, the elevation of the object constitutes the act of sublimation.1 In 1970, the rise of the object seems to take us back to another matter, as the general rise of the object in society. In fact, the indication of a new potential rise of the object unveils a new class of sublimation. In ten years there was a shift from sublimation’s traditional and aristocratic view, the cathartic power of beauty in the hands of some chosen souls, to a GSS, a generalized social sublimation, an industrial, anonymous, desacralized sublimation, where the emptiness of the Thing is drowned under the deluge of the object series. This demands an examination of the nuance between the object’s elevation and its rise. To integrate Duchamp’s hypothesis that any object can serve, the thought of its elevation maintains Lacan along the lines of Freud’s transcendent view of sublimation. That is, sublimation supposes, implicates and summons the highest and unattainable ideals. It elevates to the highest level. While, the rise, can be perfectly considered from below, from very low, as in the rise of waters. In one case the highest level is reached, whereas in the other, one wades through. For example, nobody will ever say that Christ rises: He elevates. "the time has already come in which the Son of Man ascends up to glory." [John, 12, 23] And to the elevation of the Passion of Crucifixion, the elevation of the sublime Ascension will follow - the Virgin’s Assumption will be an angelically assisted Ascension. This kind of elevation describes a sublimation in the sense of asceticism, the distillation of matter vaporized in spirit or, and at the heart of our Platonic cavern, the route from darkness to light. In Lacanian, sublime elevation takes the real to the symbolic. But when one measures the religious weight of the idea of elevation- well beyond the erection image – in our region, there is some suspicion that all idea of elevation is more or less perfumed with Christian essence, and that Freudian sublimation does not escape more than alpinism. So, for Lacan, the rise gives the object its material weight again and brings it back to the field of terrestrial gravity. The rise carries no object’s passion, no asceticism, no Metaphysical flight, no sacralization. The rise of the object is a fork-lift truck assisted Ascension. A crucial feature takes shape here: the object is equal to itself from below upwards. It is not an object that dematerializes. It remains exactly as it is: a product, a waste. The secret is that it simply changes levels. This new kind of sublimation consists of putting dirt in the suitable place, [to echo Lord Palmerston’s quotation mentioned by Freud in "Character and Anal Erotism": dirt is matter in a wrong place ]. Nevertheless, it remains that Lacan himself sent that object off to the summit. It could be regarded as an invitation to raise the eyes to the sky. But it is just about a social summit . That is to say, when the term summit names elevation’s highest degree, there is nothing that forbids to place the social summit at the level of the supermarket’s top shelves. Sublime elevation was supposed to organize "the inaccessibility of the object as object of jouissance” ; the object’s social rise puts it within reach in the shop windows display of all the world stores. In Prague’s springtime, when Lacan announces a human faced sublimation, hyper-modern time sublimation – one immediately hears: the supermarket. ... One: the rise of the object really describes its fall. The sublime Parnassus’ wheel is sent to the bazaar, to fatally finish in the rubbish dump. Therefore, it is urgent to forget the Pseudo Longin, Kant with Freud, to give sublimation its modern definition. It is what Lacan does in 1972: as “the highest point of what lies below”. The time for the sublime from below has come. Everything is upside down at the time of the king-object. Two: the rise of the object is a sober way to name the Tsunami of commodities. And in this flood of objects, there is one which gains all its weight, it can be called the O.L.* [object-that-is-lacking]. When society is in consonance with satiety, dissatisfaction becomes a Bataillien’s luxury. Anorexia is prepared to be the symptom of a world that is dreamt of as a horn of plenty, where hunger seems to be the scourge of another era. Nothingness is a value in rise. In the time of jouisance on all levels, it is necessary to lie in wait for an hysteric’s sublimation, in their search of a missing and unsatisfactory object. Finally, collections could be the art of our time - the culture of the object-that-is-lacking* in the universal market of civilization. ...Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. ...English in the original ...The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. ...Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX, Encore, 1972-1973. ...English in the original

VIth Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-08-16T18:25:08-03:00

the objects a in the psychoanalytic experience

Deleuze and the Lacanian Real

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-08-03T01:24:09-03:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Deleuze characterized his reading of philosophers as guided by the tendency "to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery" or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed." Deleuze is here deeply Lacanian: does Lacan not do the same in his reading of "Kant with Sade"? go to article

Deleuze's Platonism: Ideas as Real

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-08-02T01:28:10-03:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Deleuze's most radical anti-Hegelian argument concerns pure difference: Hegel is unable to think pure difference which is outside the horizon of identity/contradiction; Hegel conceives a radicalized difference as contradiction which, then, through its dialectical resolution, is again subsumed under identity. (Here, Deleuze is also opposed to Derrida who, from his perspective, remains caught within the vicious cycle of contradiction/identity, merely postponing resolution indefinitely.) go to article

Slavoj Zizek - Can One Really Tolerate a Neighbor? - Part I A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 11/06 Josefina Ayerza introduced the event

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-04-02T06:44:57-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Can One Really Tolerate a Neighbor? - Part II A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-04-02T06:43:29-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Can One Really Tolerate a Neighbor? - Part III A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC 11/06 - NYC

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-04-02T06:40:21-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - Can One Really Tolerate a Neighbor? - Part IV A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 11/06 - NYC

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-04-02T06:40:03-04:00

Alain Badiou - Art as a Place for Politics - Part I A Lacanian Ink Event - The Pratt Institute, Brooklyn - 11/06 Josefina Ayerza introduced the event

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-04-01T20:45:02-04:00

Alain Badiou - Art as a Place for Politics - Part II A Lacanian Ink Event - The Pratt Institute, Brooklyn - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-04-01T20:44:43-04:00

Alain Badiou - Art as a Place for Politics - Part III A Lacanian Ink Event - The Pratt Institute, Brooklyn - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-04-01T20:41:37-04:00

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part I A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06 Josefina Ayerza introduced the event

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-08T03:55:55-05:00

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part II A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-08T03:54:35-05:00

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part III A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-08T03:53:08-05:00

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part IV A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-07T12:32:13-05:00

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part V A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-07T12:30:56-05:00

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part VI A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-07T12:23:07-05:00

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part VII A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-07T12:17:11-05:00

Alain Badiou - Jacques Lacan's Seminar On Anxiety - Part I A Lacanian Ink Event - The Drawing Center, NYC - 03/06 Josefina Ayerza will introduce the event

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-06T20:37:01-05:00

Alain Badiou - Jacques Lacan's Seminar On Anxiety - Part II A Lacanian Ink Event - The Drawing Center, NYC - 03/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-06T20:30:17-05:00

El otro entre nosostros: Slavoj Zizek

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-03-05T16:25:26-05:00

Jorge Aleman - Slavoj Zizek Circular de Bellas Artes, Spain - March 2007

Alain Badiou - Truth Procedure in Art - Part I A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery - NYC - 11/06 Josefina Ayerza introduced the event

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-02-28T10:33:25-05:00

Alain Badiou - Truth Procedure in Art - Part II A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery - NYC - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-02-28T10:33:11-05:00

Alain Badiou - Truth Procedure in Art - Part III A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery - NYC - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-02-28T10:32:49-05:00

Alain Badiou - Truth Procedure in Art - Part IV A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery - NYC - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-02-28T10:19:02-05:00

Alain Badiou - Truth Procedure in Politics - Part I A Lacanian Ink Event - Miguel Abreu Gallery - NYC - 11/06 Josefina Ayerza introduced the event

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-02-27T15:22:16-05:00

Alain Badiou - Truth Procedure in Politics - Part II A Lacanian Ink Event - Miguel Abreu Gallery - NYC - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-02-27T09:41:12-05:00

Alain Badiou - Truth Procedure in Politics - Part III A Lacanian Ink Event - Miguel Abreu Gallery - NYC - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-02-27T09:31:00-05:00

Alain Badiou - Truth Procedure in Politics - Part IV A Lacanian Ink Event - Miguel Abreu Gallery - NYC - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-02-27T09:20:15-05:00

Alain Badiou - Truth Procedure in Politics - Part V A Lacanian Ink Event - Miguel Abreu Gallery - NYC - 11/06

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-02-27T09:15:12-05:00

Objects a in the Analytic Experience

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-01-16T22:48:12-05:00

by JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER I am going to bring an end to the secret: the title of the next Congress of the WAP. After "The Names-of-the-Father", it will be "The objects a in the Analytic Experience". From One (the Name-of-the-Father) to others (the objects a), this is a good sequence. No less good because it is the flip side of the sequence that is laid at the end of the seminar "L'angoisse" and that goes from the a, in the singular, to "The Names-of-the-Father" in the plural. go to article

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-01-16T22:29:32-05:00

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Robespierre or the "Divine Violence" of Terror

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-01-12T01:17:12-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK When, in 1953, Chou En Lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him what does he think about the French Revolution; Chou replied: "It is still too early to tell." In a way, he was right: with the disintegration of the "people's democracies" in the late 1990s, the struggle for the historical place of the French Revolution flared up again. The liberal revisionists tried to impose the notion that the demise of Communism in 1989 occurred at exactly the right moment: it marked the end of the era which began in 1789, the final failure of the statist-revolutionary model which first entered the scene with the Jacobins. go to article

Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-01-09T01:02:30-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK One of the most devious traps which lurk for Marxist theorists is the search for the moment of the Fall, when things took the wrong turn in the history of Marxism: was it already the late Engels with his more positivist-evolutionary understanding of historical materialism? Was it the revisionism AND the orthodoxy of the Second International? Was it Lenin? Or was it Marx himself in his late work, after he abandoned his youthful humanism (as some "humanist Marxists" claimed decades ago)? This entire topic has to be rejected: there is no opposition here, the Fall is to be inscribed into the very origins. (To put it even more pointedly, such a search for the intruder who infected the original model and set in motionm its degeneration cannot but reproduce the logic of anti-Semitism.) What this means is that, even if - or, rather, especially if - one submits the Marxist past to a ruthless critique, one has first to acknowledge it as "one's own", taking full responsibility for it, not to comfortably get rid of the "bad" turn of the things by way of attributing it to a foreign intruder (the "bad" Engels who was too stupid to understand Marx's dialectics, the "bad" Lenin who didn't get the core of Marx's theory, the "bad" Stalin who spoils the noble plans of the "good" Lenin, etc.).  go to article

The Uses of the Word "Jew"

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-01-06T01:40:35-05:00

Tilton Gallery - New York, NY - 11/17/2006 by ALAIN BADIOU For the last couple of decades, the intellectual situation in France has been marked by countless discussions about the status to be accorded to the word "Jew" within the divisions of thought. Undoubtedly, this has to do with the suspicion, based on some indubitable facts and some contrived ones, that anti-Semitism has made a 'return'. But had it ever disappeared? Or is it not rather crucial to see that a considerable change has taken place in the nature of anti-Semitism's forms, criteria and inscription in discourse over the last thirty years? go to article

Against the Populist Temptation

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-01-06T01:22:15-05:00

Tilton Gallery - New York, NY - 11/20/2006 by SLAVOJ ZIZEK The general conclusion is that, although the topic of populism is emerging as crucial in today's political scenery, it cannot be used as the ground for the renewal of the emancipatory politics. The first thing to note is that today's populism is different from the traditional version - what distinguishes it is the opponent against which it mobilizes the people: the rise of "post-politics," the growing reduction of politics proper to the rational administration of the conflicting interests. In the highly developed countries of the US and Western Europe, at least, "populism" is emerging as the inherent shadowy double of the institutionalized post-politics, one is almost tempted to say: as its supplement in the Derridean sense, as the arena in which political demands that do not fit the institutionalized space can be articulated. In this sense, there is a constitutive "mystification" that pertains to populism: its basic gesture is to refuse to confront the complexity of the situation, to reduce it to a clear struggle with a pseudo-concrete "enemy" figure (from "Brussels bureaucracy" to illegal immigrants). "Populism" is thus by definition a negative phenomenon, a phenomenon grounded in a refusal, even an implicit admission of impotence. go to article

Bodies, Languages Truths

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-01-05T23:52:04-05:00

Pratt Institute - Brooklyn, NY - 11/16/2006 by ALAIN BADIOU Our question will be: What is the dominant ideology today? Or, if you want, what is, in our countries, the natural belief? There is the free market, the technology, the money, the job, the blog, the reelections, the free sexuality, and so on. But I think that all that can be concentrated in a single statement: There are only bodies and languages. This statement is the axiom of contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism. Why? go to article

Five Years After: the Fire in the Minds of Men

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-01-05T23:12:49-05:00

by SLAVOJ ZIZEK Two Hollywood productions were released to mark the 5th anniversary of the 9/11: Paul Greengrass's United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. The first thing that strikes the eye is that both try to be as anti-Hollywood as possible: both focus on the courage of ordinary people, with no glamorous stars, no special effects, no grandiloquent heroic gestures, just a terse realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is undoubtedly a touch of authenticity in the films - recall how the large majority of critics unanimously praised the film's avoiding of sensationalism, its sober and restrained style. It is this very touch of authenticity that should make us suspicious - we should immediately ask ourselves what ideological purposes it serves. go to article

zizek article from new york times

perfume@lacan.com — 2007-01-05T19:36:26-05:00

Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth By SLAVOJ ZIZEK Published: January 5, 2007 The United States is continuing, through other means, the greatest crime of Saddam Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple the Iranian government. Go to the article

lacan.com blog

Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses<br>Slavoj Zizek - Tilton Gallery, November 28 2007<br>Introduction by Josefina Ayerza - Part I

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part II

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part III

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part IV

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part V

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part VI

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part VII

Slavoj Zizek - Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses - Part VIII

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Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp<br>Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part I<br>Introduction by Josefina Ayerza

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp<br>Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part II

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp<br>Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part III

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp<br>Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part IV

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp<br>Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part V

Alain Badiou - Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp<br>Tilton Gallery, NYC, 11/16/07 - Part VI

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STALINISM

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Frank Gehry's "Ship of Glass in Chelsea Waterfront" -

VIth Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis

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Slavoj Zizek - Can One Really Tolerate a Neighbor? - Part II<br> A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 11/06

Slavoj Zizek - Can One Really Tolerate a Neighbor? - Part III<br> A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC 11/06 - NYC

Slavoj Zizek - Can One Really Tolerate a Neighbor? - Part IV<br> A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 11/06 - NYC

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Alain Badiou - Art as a Place for Politics - Part III<br> A Lacanian Ink Event - The Pratt Institute, Brooklyn - 11/06

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part I<br> A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06<br><br>Josefina Ayerza introduced the event

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part II <br> A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part III<br> A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part IV<br> A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

Slavoj Zizek - The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason - Part V<br> A Lacanian Ink Event - Tilton Gallery, NYC - 05/06

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