Fatalism, Utopia and the big Other

Somewhere Zizek quips that Hollywood has an element of the soft left in it. I think two recent examples are The International with Clive Owen and Peter Jackson’s latest offering District 9. Both suffer from liberal individualism. In The International this translates into fatalism and in District 9 this translates into an escape into the “big Other.” In the former, Clive Owen confronts a once-idealistic East-German Communist about his aiding and abetting a global bank that directly invests in war mongering. (Another weakness of the film is that in it capital’s evils are reduced to its military investments and actions, rather than seeing that the system itself is exploitation and destruction.) The communist momentarily revives his past idealism and tells Owen that he will help him bring down the bank, but that he (Owen) will have to step outside legal limits in order to make real change.

As if you didn’t have enough to do…

http://mariborchan.wordpress.com/category/audio/

http://mariborchan.wordpress.com/category/lacan/

Reading Ideas

I was wondering if anyone would be up for going back to basics and reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason this year.  I think that this is an important text that we should all be up on.  Perhaps we could follow with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic (an ambitious venture for sure)…  and then, maybe even Heidegger’s Being and Time.  For anyone interested in Lukacs, the latter should definitely be of interest since Heidegger wrote his book as a response to History and Class Consciousness.  Does this sound interesting to anyone else?

Historical Materialism – Time for a conference ?

This may not be to people’s tastes, but what about putting together a panel for the upcoming Historical Materialism conference in NYC on Zizek, Marx and Method?

The conference is more or less about the resurgence of interest in Marx, so I think a panel on Zizek would be pertinent.

It would also give some focus to the next few rounds of readings…

P.s. What would Marx have thought of having his face on money??

Psychoanalysis and wealth

Psychoanalysis and wealth

Old interview…

Here is a link to a couple of papers on Zizek, and his reponse to those papers.

It’s from around the time of the publishing of The Ticklish Subject. One of the papers (the long one by McLaren) claims that the “Act” comes from a void. I never got that impression. What do people think?

G