In my opinion, Slavoj Zizek is one of the great thinkers of our time. A new kind of "intellectual", coming from Slovenia (though now he is everywhere in the world).
The fact that he has become very famous, and that he has many lectures on line where he express himself in a very pecular way, the fact also that he likes to comment things and themes of popular culture and everyday life, should not hide the deep thought that he has developped in an amazing way (a new book for 2008 is already announced: "Violence (Big Ideas)", Paperback: 224 pages, Profile Books Ltd (10 Jan 2008)
ISBN-10: 1846680174
ISBN-13: 978-1846680175). This is fantastic!
The fact that he has become very famous, and that he has many lectures on line where he express himself in a very pecular way, the fact also that he likes to comment things and themes of popular culture and everyday life, should not hide the deep thought that he has developped in an amazing way (a new book for 2008 is already announced: "Violence (Big Ideas)", Paperback: 224 pages, Profile Books Ltd (10 Jan 2008)
ISBN-10: 1846680174
ISBN-13: 978-1846680175). This is fantastic!
Source of this image above:http://www.amazon.co.uk/
Violence-Big-Ideas-Slavoj-Zizek/
dp/1846680174/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=
books&qid=1199570465&sr=1-1
The parts of Zizek's text quoted below (underlined) in red result from my reading of it.
In my opinion, this is a very subversive and incredible clever text.
It dismythicizes some very common ideas about capitalism, gift, reciprocity, face to face relationships, religion, etc, including an interesting reference to Levinas.
In my opinion, this is a very subversive and incredible clever text.
It dismythicizes some very common ideas about capitalism, gift, reciprocity, face to face relationships, religion, etc, including an interesting reference to Levinas.
(...)
"And would it not be quite logical to envision, along the same lines, the end of class struggle: after long and arduous negotiations, representatives of the working class and of the global capital should reach an agreement on how much the working class should get as compensation for the surplus-value appropriated by capitalists in the course of history? So, if there seems to be a price for everything, why should we not go to the very end and demand from God Himself a payment for botching up the job of creation and thus causing our misery? And what if, perhaps, He already paid this price by sacrificing his only son, Christ? It is a sign of our times that this option was already considered in a work of fiction: in The Man Who Sued God, a new Australian comedy from 2002, Billy Connolly plays the owner of a seaside caravan park whose boat is destroyed in a freak storm; his insurance people tell him it's an act of God and refuse to pay up. Enter a sharp-witted lawyer (Judy Davis) who comes up with a clever argument: If God destroyed his boat, why not sue God in the form of his representatives here on earth - the churches. Such a lawsuit puts the church leaders in a tight spot: if they deny that they are God's representatives on earth, they all lose their jobs; they can't assert that God does not exist because that would also destroy organised religion, and, furthermore, if God does not exist, what happens to the escape route of the "Act of God" clause that lets so many insurance sharks off the hook?
This reductio ad absurdum also makes it clear what is fundamentally wrong with this logic: it is not too radical, but not radical enough. The true task is not to get compensation from those responsible, but to deprive them of the position which makes them responsible. Instead of asking for compensation from God (or the ruling class or…), one should ask the question: do we really need God? What this means is something much more radical than it may appear: there is no one to turn to, to address, to bear witness TO, no one to receive our plea or lament. This position is extremely difficult to sustain: in modern music, only Webern was able to sustain this inexistence of the Other: even Schoenberg was still composing for a future ideal listener, while Webern accepted that there is NO "proper" listener.
Contrary to all appearances, this is what happens in psychoanalysis: the treatment is over when the patient assumes the non-existence of the big Other. The ideal addressee of our speech, the ideal listener, is the psychoanalyst, the very opposite of the Master figure which guarantees meaning; what happens at the end of the analysis, with the dissolution of transference, i.e., the fall of the »subject supposed to know,« is that the patient accepts the absence of such a guarantee. No wonder that psychoanalysis subverts the very principle of reimbursement: the price the patient pays for the treatment is by definition capricious, "unjust", with no equivalence possible between it and the services rendered for it. This is also why psychoanalysis is profoundly anti-Levinasian: there is no face-to-face encounter between the patient and the analyst, since the patient lies on the couch and the analyst sits behind him - analysis penetrates the deepest mysteries of the subject by by-passing the face. This avoiding of the face-to-face enables the patient to »lose his face« and blurt out the most embarassing details. In this precise sense, face is a fetish: while it appears to point towards the imperfect vulnerable abyss of the person behind the object-body, it conceals the obscene real core of the subject.
Is, then, Christianity here not the very opposite of psychoanalysis? Does it not stand for this logic of reimbursement brought to its extreme: God himself pays the price for all our sins? Which is why any attempt to paint the Christian God as an undemanding entity of pure mercy whose message is "I don't want anything from you!", miserably fails – one should not forget that these, exactly, are the words used by the Priest to designate the ourt in Kafka's Trial: "The court wants nothing from you." When the falsely innocent Christ-like figure of pure suffering and sacrifice for our good tells us "I don't want anything from you!", we can be sure that this statement conceals a qualification "… expect YOUR SOUL ITSELF." When somebody insists that he wants nothing that we have, it simply means that he has his eyes on what we ARE, on the very core of our being. Or, to go to the more anecdotal level, is it not clear that when, in a lover's quarrel, a woman answers the man's desperate "But what do you want from me?« with »Nothing!", this means its exact opposite, a demand for total surrender beyond any negotiated settlement?[27] "Do not look into the mouth of a horse given to you as a gift" – is this precisely not what one SHOULD do in order to discern if one is dealing with a true gift or with a secretly instrumentalized one? You are given a present, yet a close look quickly tells you that this "free" gift is aimed at putting you in a position of permanent debt – and, perhaps, this holds especially for the notion of gift in the recent theological turn of deconstruction, from Derrida to Marion.
At the very core of Christianity, there is another dimension. When Christ dies, what dies with him is the secret hope discernible in "Father, why have you forsaken me?", the hope that there IS a father who abandoned me. The "Holy Spirit" is the community deprived of its support in the big Other. The point of Christianity as the religion of atheism is not the vulgar humanist one that the becoming-man-of-God reveals that man is the secret of God (Feuerbach et al); it rather attacks the religious hard core which survives even in humanism, up to Stalinism with its believe in the History as the "big Other" which decides on the "objective meaning" of our deeds.
In what is perhaps the highest example of the Hegelian Aufhebung, it is possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the gesture of abandoning the shell of its institutional organization (and, even more, of its specific religious experience). The gap is here irreducible: either one drops the religious form OR maintains the form, but loses the essence. Therein resides the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself, like Christ who had to die so that Christianity emerged. "
"And would it not be quite logical to envision, along the same lines, the end of class struggle: after long and arduous negotiations, representatives of the working class and of the global capital should reach an agreement on how much the working class should get as compensation for the surplus-value appropriated by capitalists in the course of history? So, if there seems to be a price for everything, why should we not go to the very end and demand from God Himself a payment for botching up the job of creation and thus causing our misery? And what if, perhaps, He already paid this price by sacrificing his only son, Christ? It is a sign of our times that this option was already considered in a work of fiction: in The Man Who Sued God, a new Australian comedy from 2002, Billy Connolly plays the owner of a seaside caravan park whose boat is destroyed in a freak storm; his insurance people tell him it's an act of God and refuse to pay up. Enter a sharp-witted lawyer (Judy Davis) who comes up with a clever argument: If God destroyed his boat, why not sue God in the form of his representatives here on earth - the churches. Such a lawsuit puts the church leaders in a tight spot: if they deny that they are God's representatives on earth, they all lose their jobs; they can't assert that God does not exist because that would also destroy organised religion, and, furthermore, if God does not exist, what happens to the escape route of the "Act of God" clause that lets so many insurance sharks off the hook?
This reductio ad absurdum also makes it clear what is fundamentally wrong with this logic: it is not too radical, but not radical enough. The true task is not to get compensation from those responsible, but to deprive them of the position which makes them responsible. Instead of asking for compensation from God (or the ruling class or…), one should ask the question: do we really need God? What this means is something much more radical than it may appear: there is no one to turn to, to address, to bear witness TO, no one to receive our plea or lament. This position is extremely difficult to sustain: in modern music, only Webern was able to sustain this inexistence of the Other: even Schoenberg was still composing for a future ideal listener, while Webern accepted that there is NO "proper" listener.
Contrary to all appearances, this is what happens in psychoanalysis: the treatment is over when the patient assumes the non-existence of the big Other. The ideal addressee of our speech, the ideal listener, is the psychoanalyst, the very opposite of the Master figure which guarantees meaning; what happens at the end of the analysis, with the dissolution of transference, i.e., the fall of the »subject supposed to know,« is that the patient accepts the absence of such a guarantee. No wonder that psychoanalysis subverts the very principle of reimbursement: the price the patient pays for the treatment is by definition capricious, "unjust", with no equivalence possible between it and the services rendered for it. This is also why psychoanalysis is profoundly anti-Levinasian: there is no face-to-face encounter between the patient and the analyst, since the patient lies on the couch and the analyst sits behind him - analysis penetrates the deepest mysteries of the subject by by-passing the face. This avoiding of the face-to-face enables the patient to »lose his face« and blurt out the most embarassing details. In this precise sense, face is a fetish: while it appears to point towards the imperfect vulnerable abyss of the person behind the object-body, it conceals the obscene real core of the subject.
Is, then, Christianity here not the very opposite of psychoanalysis? Does it not stand for this logic of reimbursement brought to its extreme: God himself pays the price for all our sins? Which is why any attempt to paint the Christian God as an undemanding entity of pure mercy whose message is "I don't want anything from you!", miserably fails – one should not forget that these, exactly, are the words used by the Priest to designate the ourt in Kafka's Trial: "The court wants nothing from you." When the falsely innocent Christ-like figure of pure suffering and sacrifice for our good tells us "I don't want anything from you!", we can be sure that this statement conceals a qualification "… expect YOUR SOUL ITSELF." When somebody insists that he wants nothing that we have, it simply means that he has his eyes on what we ARE, on the very core of our being. Or, to go to the more anecdotal level, is it not clear that when, in a lover's quarrel, a woman answers the man's desperate "But what do you want from me?« with »Nothing!", this means its exact opposite, a demand for total surrender beyond any negotiated settlement?[27] "Do not look into the mouth of a horse given to you as a gift" – is this precisely not what one SHOULD do in order to discern if one is dealing with a true gift or with a secretly instrumentalized one? You are given a present, yet a close look quickly tells you that this "free" gift is aimed at putting you in a position of permanent debt – and, perhaps, this holds especially for the notion of gift in the recent theological turn of deconstruction, from Derrida to Marion.
At the very core of Christianity, there is another dimension. When Christ dies, what dies with him is the secret hope discernible in "Father, why have you forsaken me?", the hope that there IS a father who abandoned me. The "Holy Spirit" is the community deprived of its support in the big Other. The point of Christianity as the religion of atheism is not the vulgar humanist one that the becoming-man-of-God reveals that man is the secret of God (Feuerbach et al); it rather attacks the religious hard core which survives even in humanism, up to Stalinism with its believe in the History as the "big Other" which decides on the "objective meaning" of our deeds.
In what is perhaps the highest example of the Hegelian Aufhebung, it is possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the gesture of abandoning the shell of its institutional organization (and, even more, of its specific religious experience). The gap is here irreducible: either one drops the religious form OR maintains the form, but loses the essence. Therein resides the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself, like Christ who had to die so that Christianity emerged. "
______________
NOTE
"[27] The Polish Wedding, a nice melodrama about love life complications in a Detroit working class Polish family, contains a scene which turns around this formula and thus spills out its truth: when Claire Danes' exasperated boyfriend asks her "What do you want from me?," she answers "I want everything!" and calmly walks away from him."
__________________________________________________
These paragraphs quoted here are part of a text by Slavoj Zizek included in the book
"Empire and Terror. Nationalism/Postnationalism in the New Millenium",
ed. by Begoña Aretxaga, Dennis Dworkin, Joseba Gabilondo and Joseba Zulaika, University of Nevada Press, 2004.
ISBN-10: 1877802484
ISBN-13: 978-1877802485
This book may be obtained for instance through Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Terror-
Nationalism-Postnationalism-Millennium/
dp/1877802484/
ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=
1199569438&sr=1-2
(source of the cover image in top of the message)
5 comentários:
Gostei muito e aguçou-me o apetite e fez-me recordar uma pequena história budista que já não recordo bem, mas passa-se mais ou menos desta forma. Um pequeno sapo vivia calmante no seu lago até que um outro animal passou por lá (não me lembro qual) e lhe disse. "Não queres sair desse pequeno lago e ir conhecer o mar?". O sapo não sabia o que era o mar mas disse que sim e viajou às costas do outro animal até que chegarem ambos ao mar. Quando o sapo chegou ao mar morreu. Morreu porque não conseguia conceber o mar não morreu por doença.
Eu percebo a história mas acredito ter a capacidade de conceber novos conceitos e por isso não acredito que ela se plasme na minha realidade. Não quero acreditar que sou como um sapo que apenas vejo o lago.
Ao ler este texto senti uma profunda tristeza, é claro, é absorvente mas é também triste de ver.
No entanto aprendi já uma coisa desde a primeira vez que me cruzei com a história do sapo, nada é absoluto, autor nenhum por mais brilhante que nos pareça, e o que hoje nos parece certo amanhã já não o é.
Mas sim é um texto fantástico e penso que o livro será uma boa escolha.
ÁS VEZES
Acho-lhe piada e digo-lhe já porquê....
Primeiro porque é uma pessoa diferente do comum, por vários motivos, mas sobretudo pelas suas ideias e visões que saem tão fora dos parâmetros sociais ditos "normais". E pessoalmente gosto disso. O que é "normal" acaba por aborrecer...
Admiro-o pelos seus vastos conhecimentos de tão diversas áreas que o tornam uma pessoa interessante, com conversa interessante e diversificada. Não sofre daquele mal que agarra os arqueólogos à sua área profissional acabando por se esquecer que existe mais além dos vestígios do passado e que esses mesmos vestígios do passado podem ser muito mais do que vestígios do passado (as repetições são intencionais).... Estava a pensar na imagem ou na performance....que já abordámos.
Mas também é engraçado porque o professor todos os dias ou todas as semanas sobrevoa um tema ou um autor diferente. E é possível perceber em que "voo" se encontra ao falar consigo. Pelo menos eu noto as suas "ondas" também porque estou a par do seu blog e do que vai introduzindo e que acaba por ser um pouco do que pensa ou do que está a estudar de momento...
Já vi o "The Man Who Sued God" e é de facto um filme com uma perspectiva bastante interessante, à parte do seu teor cómico que, claro, com esta temática não poderia faltar...
Obrigado aos anónimos...
____________
Não encontrei esse filme no You tube... encontrou? Está no circuito comercial em video? Também não consegui encontrar no You tube o The Polish Wedding a que se refere o Zizek na nota 27. Só vi uma série de rituais ridículos ao extremo da gargalhada de casamentos.
Gostei do seu blog. Eu quero fazer um grupo de discusões aqui no algarve sobre esse tema. Pode visitar os meus blogs...
Enviar um comentário