Slavoj Zizek is a leading critical theoretician of our time and author of several works on Jacques Lacan. His latest writing is: Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Introduction:

Issue 19 is taking up on Biology as it breaks in with a story that tells of the stone without a world, of the lizard with something of a world, of man: man has a world because he has the logos. In "The Symptom and the Body Event," after Barbara Fulks' fine translation, Jacques-Alain Miller carries on...

We find here the lizard and the stone as a couple, but the stone has writing... precisely the inscription of the name of a Cesar which had the function of a master signifier. The drama, evoked in a poem, there is also the signifier and the man who wrote the poem. The lizard is eternal, but there is no man of the eternal world... the man has a proper name like the one on the stone... In the present of 1864 Lamartine writes for the future, makes his world endure through the signifier.

With Fran�ois Regnault the certain having of man embarks on the logos at its utmost. Art goes beyond the symbolic... it uses the structure of language even if it doesn't use words.

The experience characterizes the object that has never been lost, even if the case is to search for it. Again this object hasn't been spoken. If it slides between the words and the things it is because of the illusion that words correspond to things. An inflexible illusion withheld by the misunderstanding, the object is forever being re-born.

Alain Badiou's most precise thoughts numerate The Political to infinity, and ordain it in three groups:
- that of the situation;
- that indeterminate of the state of the situation;
- that of the prescription, which interrupts indetermination and permits the State distance."
What singularizes the prescription as political procedure is that it enables the autonomy of the State.
David Ebony's "The Interpretation of Dreams," reviews Andres Serrano's latest show - on June 2001, at the Paula Cooper Gallery... The very signifiers at work, everything is affected by their traditional meaning.
Wim Delvoye, oh well, we talk of Cloaca, and this is a machine he made. The machine reproduces the human metabolic system... So it has to be fed everyday... The machine's product - indeed an object a, the viewer sees, hears, smells... Delvoye's machine is coming to the New Museum next January.
Issue 19 publishes Zizek whom I am delighted to be able to present to you once more... Zizek will not be reading from his article in lacanian ink 19, "The Only Good Neighbor is a Dead Neighbor... " He will instead pick up on the very actual... Against passion of the real in the 20th Century, the 21-century onset opens up to clear discussion.

 

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