Brief Zizek Interview

 

 

Žižek: Did you hear the one about Hegel?

Kenneth Baker Chronicle Art Critic

Sunday, September 28, 2008

 

 

Slavoj Žižek’s several dozen books have made him an international celebrity among people who care about ideas. They delve into everything from pornography and the movies of Alfred Hitchcock to the Holocaust and the psychology of belief. His brazen, freewheeling intellectual style and joke-laden writing give him a following far wider than his erudition might suggest.

Matt Taibbi: “Mad Dog Palin”

 

Mad Dog Palin By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com Posted on September 27, 2008, Printed on September 29, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/100551/ I’m standing outside the XCEL ENERGY CENTER in St. Paul Minnesota Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for vice president. If I hadn’t quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I’d be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

The sky is blue black

starlings unfold their wings

quit their pediments 

to write a letter

returned.

The setting sun 

fills teeth with gold.

Like a shred of meat 

I’m lodged in this town.

 

-John Berger

The Horror

Man charged with dumping silicone girlfriend

17 Sep 2008

Breaking up is hard to do, and few know this better than a lifelike sex doll owner who Shizuoka police have charged with illegal dumping.

On August 21, the 60-year-old unemployed resident of Izu (Shizuoka prefecture) wrapped his 1.7-meter tall, 50-kilogram silicone girlfriend in a sleeping bag, drove to a remote wooded area, and dumped her. A nice, clean break, he thought.

But nearly two weeks later, on September 1, a couple alerted police after discovering what appeared to be a corpse while walking their dog. The body had been wrapped in a bag and bound around the neck, waist and ankles. A head of black hair protruded from one end of the bag.

Police retrieved the body and immediately launched a criminal investigation. But several hours later, when forensic pathologists began to unwrap the “corpse” to perform the post-mortem, they realized it was actually a state-of-the-art sex doll. Seeing themselves as victims of a malicious prank, the authorities vowed to track down the perpetrator and charge him with interfering with police business.

The incident quickly captured the attention of the national (and international) press. After seeing the news reports, the culprit realized the trouble he had caused and contacted police on September 6.

According to investigators, the man had lived with the sophisticated doll for several years after his wife passed away, but decided to part with her after making plans to move in with one of his children. “It seems he grew attached to the doll over the years,” said the chief investigator. “He was confused about how to get rid of her. He thought it would be cruel to cut her up into pieces and throw her out with the trash, so he proceeded to dump her illegally.”

The man, who regrets his lifelike doll was mistaken for a corpse, now faces fines for violating Japan’s Waste Management Law.

Bailout=Bullshit

The 700 Billion Dollar Question… THAT THESE ASSHOLES NEED TO FUCKING ANSWER 

THIS IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT!

Using the shock doctrine, Wall Street and Washington’s wrecking crew aim to get the most expensive free lunch in American history

By DAVID SIROTA

             

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson details what he called “a comprehensive approach” to repairing financial markets on Friday, Sept. 19. (Hold on to your wallet.)

TAGS    housing crisis wall street

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If a museum in the next superpower nation ever commemorates the decline of the last great superpower, it will make the two-and-a-half page bill introduced this week the center of the display.

Just as they do today at the National Archives’ Declaration of Independence exhibit, tourists in the future—perhaps in Beijing, perhaps somewhere else—will line up to see a framed draft of this week’s White House legislation demanding Congress surrender its power of the purse, and give an unelected appointee—in this case, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—the power to hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money to “any financial institution,” “without limitation…on such terms and conditions as determined by [him].” In a nation priding itself on separating powers between the branches of government, the bill explicitly states that decisions by Paulson may not even “be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Breaking news: Rich Fat Cats Own The Government!

 

It’s Capitalism, Stupid!

Tuesday, September 23 2008 @ 07:03 PM CDT

Contributed by: Oread Daily

Oh the poor, poor rich.

Resistance to the Wall Street bailout is beginning to increase.

Some are asking, why do the rich get corporate socialism while the rest of us are stuck with the dregs of capitalist system in decay? Why is no one talking about welfare Cadillacs now?

IT’S CAPITALISM STUPID!

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers

 

• 
  

 

From Times Online

September 23, 2008

( Parth Sanyal/Reuters)

Thousands of protesters recently forced Tata to halt work on the plant being used to produce the world’s cheapest car

Rhys Blakely in Bombay

Corporate India is in shock after a mob of sacked workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who had dismissed them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi.

Goldman Sachs Socialism

      

by WILLIAM GREIDER

 

September 23, 2008

 

Wall Street put a gun to the head of the politicians and said, Give us the money–right now–or take the blame for whatever follows. The audacity of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s bailout proposal is reflected in what it refuses to say: no explanations of how the bailout will work, no demands on the bankers in exchange for the public’s money. The Treasury’s opaque, three-page summary of plan includes this chilling statement:

Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind

 

Tuesday , September 23, 2008

By Allison Barrie     

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror.

Naomi Klein: Free market ideology is far from finished

 

                     \

Whatever the events of this week mean, nobody should believe the overblown claims that the market crisis signals the death of “free market” ideology. Free market ideology has always been a servant to the interests of capital, and its presence ebbs and flows depending on its usefulness to those interests.

During boom times, it’s profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalization for deep cuts to social programs, and for a renewed push to privatize what is left of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly.

Mike Davis: Welcome to the Anthropocene

 

Living on the Ice Shelf

Humanity’s Meltdown
By Mike Davis

 

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.

Alan Moore on the “Watchmen” movie and his 750,000 word novel.

 

Alan Moore on ‘Watchmen’ movie: ‘I will be spitting venom all over it’

12:48 PM PT, Sep 18 2008

For the record, Alan Moore has not softened his view on Hollywood nor its plan to bring his classic graphic novel “Watchmen” to the screen next March.

“I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying,” Moore told me during an hour-long phone call from his home in England. “It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The ‘Watchmen’ film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can’t we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change.”

GUY DEBORD

 

A remembrance of the author’s friendship with Guy Debord in the late 1950s and early 60s – with some theoretical reflections.

Debord, in the Resounding Cataract of Time

(David Blanchard, 1995)

There are moments in one’s existence that stand out, as if of a more solid texture, drawn in stronger lines contrasting with the uzziness and fathomless ambiguity of the rest of life. And they really are charged with objective meaning, imparted by the movement of a sort of historic overdetermination. Often that special quality only reveals itself retrospectively, but sometimes, too, it is perceived immediately.

Venezuela: Challenges facing the future of 21st Century Socialism

 

George Ciccariello-Maher is a doctoral candidate in political theory at UC Berkeley, who lived in Caracas for over a year. He contributes regularly to Counterpunch and MRzine, and is currently preparing a book entitled: We Created Him: A People’s History of the Bolivarian Revolution. These questions and answers are based on written correspondence between Jeff and George carried out between the end of August and beginning of September, 2008. I thought it might be best to begin the conversation by getting a sense of your personal political trajectory, how you were drawn to Venezuela, some of your most memorable experiences from your time in Caracas, and how all of this has translated into your perspective on revolutionary change. In short, what did Venezuela do to you? I decided to move to Venezuela in an effort to both get to know and to participate in what seemed—at least from afar—to be a unique and exciting political process. What I found was infinitely more complex than anything that I had read about either academically or in the U.S. press. Instead of the successful socialist experiment we hear about from the left or the authoritarian populism decried by both Fox News and some U.S. anarchists, what I found in the Bolivarian Revolution is an instance of political struggle, one composed itself of thousands of micro-instances of struggle. By describing the process as a struggle (and I could equally say “battle), I just mean that the verdict isn’t in yet.

Annoying Vision of The Future

                     More evidence that we got problems.

                     

 

                              Now this is more like it.

Badiou Interview from 1994, skip the intro: Secularization of Infinity, Set Theory, Truth, Philosophy, Situations, Disaster, Love, Emancipation…

 

Being by numbers – interview with artists and philosopher Alain Badiou – Interview

Lauren Sedofsky

Alain Badiou is an anomaly. What he has attempted has all the allure of the obviously impossible. That’s the fascination of the thing. Judge it retrograde or eminently contemporary, aberrant or a stroke of genius, but take it squarely for what it is: the painstaking effort on the part of an Althusserian Marxist, longtime Maoist, and unanalyzed disciple of Lacan to quit the confines that several generations of “limit-makers” have erected around philosophical practice.

The Indomitable Deleuze

DELEUZE / ANTI OEDIPE ET MILLE PLATEAUX

Cours Vincennes – 16/11/1971

 

Capitalism, flows, the decoding of flows, capitalism and schizophrenia, psychoanalysis, Spinoza.

What is it that moves over the body of a society? It is always flows, and a person is always a cutting off [coupure] of a flow. A person is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or, better yet, an interception of many flows.

If a person has hair, this hair can move through many stages: the hairstyle of a young girl is not the same as that of a married woman, it is not the same as that of a widow: there is a whole hairstyle code. A person, insofar as she styles her hair, typically presents herself as an interceptor in relation to flows of hair that exceed her and exceed her case and these flows of hair are themselves coded according to very different codes: widow code, young girl code, married woman code, etc. This is ultimately the essential problem of coding and of the territorialization which is always coding flows with it, as a fundamental means of operation: marking persons (because persons are situated at the interception and at the cutting off [coupure] of flows, they exist at the points where flows are cut off [coupure]).

Hamid Karzai: “The Gucci Guerilla” on the US role in the rise of Islamic extremism

 

Afghan president blames “the West” for Islamic extremism

By James Cogan
8 September 2008

The propaganda used to justify the US-led occupation in Afghanistan typically leaves out any explanation of the origins of tendencies such as Al Qaeda, the Taliban movement and other Islamist groups resisting American and NATO troops. The spin merchants of the so-called “war on terror” would have people believe that the US and its allies are fighting religious fanatics who have no support in the country and are motivated by an inexplicable and irrational hatred of Western civilisation.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic essay on bullshit

 

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

 

---

THE sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialisation, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.

Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.

Giorgio Agamben: The City, The Plague, Foucault, Ungovernableness, etc…

 

 

Metropolis

Giorgio Agamben*

Many years ago I was having a conversation with Guy (Debord) which I believed to be about political philosophy, until at some point Guy interrupted me and said: ‘Look, I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist’. This statement struck me because I used to see him as a philosopher as I saw myself as one, but I think that what he meant to say was that every thought, however ‘pure’, general or abstract it tries to be, is always marked by historical and temporal signs and thus captured and somehow engaged in a strategy and urgency. I say this because my reflections will clearly be general and I won’t enter into the specific theme of conflicts but I hope that they will bear the marks of a strategy.

Alain Badiou: Elections, The State, Sarkozy, Communism, and Courage

new left review 49 jan feb 2008 29 

Alain Badiou

THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS 

There was a tangible sense of depression in the air in France 

in the aftermath of Sarkozy’s victory.1 It is often said that 

unexpected blows are the worst, but expected ones some- 

times prove debilitating in a different way. It can be oddly 

dispiriting when an election is won by the candidate who has led in the 

opinion polls from the start, just as when the favourite horse wins the 

race; anyone with the slightest feeling for a wager, a risk, an exception or 

a rupture would rather see an outsider upset the odds. Yet it could hardly 

have been the bare fact of Nicolas Sarkozy as President that seemed to 

come as such a disorientating blow to the French left in the aftermath 

of May 2007. Something else was at stake—some complex of factors for 

which ‘Sarkozy’ is merely a name. How should it be understood? 

An initial factor was the way in which the outcome affirmed the mani- 

fest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within 

the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive man- 

ner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes 

any embodiments of dissenting political will.

Karl Marx: Critique of the Gotha Programme

Karl Marx 1875

Critique of the Gotha Programme

 Karl Marx 
Critique of the Gotha Programme

 Foreword

The manuscript published here — the covering letter to Bracke as well as the critique of the draft programme — was sent in 1875, shortly before the Gotha Unity Congress, to Bracke for communication to Geib, Auer, Bebel [1], and Liebknecht and subsequent return to Marx. Since the Halle Party Congress has put the discussion of the Gotha Programme on the agenda of the Party, I think I would be guilty of suppression if I any longer withheld from publicity this important — perhaps the most important — document relevant to this discussion.

Celebrity Economist Ben Stein Hates Cell Phones, And So Do I.

 

Connected, Yes, but Hermetically Sealed

By BEN STEIN

“MAN is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

What would Rousseau have made of the modern-day balls and chains with which we shackle ourselves? They are not made of steel or iron, but of silicon and plastic and digits and electrons and waves zooming through the air. These are the chains of all kinds of devices, like the BlackBerry, the iPhone and the Voyager. These are the chains with which we have bound ourselves, losing much of our solitude and our ability to see the world around and inside us.

The Madness of Thomas Kincade

             

A Critical Review of Thomas Kincade

an excerpt:

Upon close examination, Kinkade’s rural dystopias appear to possess the following common themes:

 1) Hellish glow seen emanating from every closed window to every sealed-up cottage, clocktower, inn, horse barn, church, etc. All of Kinkade’s structures seem consumed from within by raging infernos. What might be laughed off as artistic excess suddenly trickles icily down your spine when you realize that Kinkade’s rustic incinerators are operating at full tilt regardless of the time of day, prevailing weather conditions, and the particular season depicted in the painting!

 2) All of his structures bear multiple chimneys that are exhaling thin, vertically-stretched spires of exhaust smoke which are indicative of extremely hot fires within, and of virtually no air movement without. Again, these chimneys are operating in all seasons and weather conditions. Why are the fires burning so hotly all the time? What’s cooking? You don’t want to know!

 3) There is an inexplicable absence of people, despite the presence of livestock, abandoned agricultural implements, raging chimney fires, what have you. In Kinkade’s peaceful landscapes, it seems as if a sort of aestheticically-directed neutron bomb had detonated, leaving standing only the charming buildings, bucolic beasts and majestic landscape

Zizek on Obama

 

 SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

The Audacity of Rhetoric

 

By Slavoj Zizek

Measured by the low standards of conventional wisdom, the old saying ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ is one of the most stupid things one can say.

In January, when the United States remembered the tragic death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an urban history professor at the University of Buffalo named Henry Louis Taylor Jr., bitterly remarked: “All we know is that this guy had a dream. We don’t know what that dream was.”