The Slovenian philosopher, who has applied his inquiries to everything from neoliberalism to Alfred Hitchcock, is answering your questions right now join in the debate below 2.56pm BST jemurphy asks:Is an academic boycott of Israel justified? Do you support a boycott?I do support academic boycott, but only Israel's state institutions. To boycott Israel in the sense of not visiting it, not having contact with people there, I totally reject this. The reason is double. First, there is recently in Europe a new wave of anti-semitism. For example in countries like Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and others. So for a European who remembers the Holocaust, anything to do with boycotting the Jews brings out terrible memories. We are playing with fire here. But nonetheless, the reason why I support a boycott, BDS and all that, is that it is a common project of Palestinians, and Jewish progressive critics of Zionism. This unity is absolutely crucial. The moment we abandon this unity and say oh no, Israel is so bad that we have to be directly against Jews, we all deserve to die. Life is over for me. 2.50pm BST kulusedada asks:Stravinsky or Schoenberg?Of course, this question probably refers to Adorno's book of philosophy on new music. And I agree with it totally. I am against Stravinsky, for Schoenberg. I think that when we get a breakthrough in art, like with Schoenberg, we always get then accompanying it, a figure like Stravinsky. Renormalising the breakthrough. Cutting off the subversive edge of the breakthrough. And I think again the same goes for other arts, for example, in modern painting, it would have been Picasso vs Braque. I think Picasso is Stravinsky in painting, with his eclecticism, while Georges Braque is the thorough modernist ascetism. Even in literature, although the homology is not perfect, I'm tempted to say Joyce vs Beckett. Joyce is I think too bright for his own good. It's too pretentious in this encyclopaedic approach, like using all languages in Finnegan's Wake; the true genius is for me Samuel Beckett. If I were to choose one novel of the 20th century, it's his Unnameable. I think that the three absolute masters of 20th century literature are Beckett, Kafka and the Russian Andrei Platonov. If you put the three of them together, I'm ready to burn, sacrifice all other books just to keep these three. I think even much of high modernist writing is overrated. For example, if I were to choose between Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier, I would immediately choose du Maurier. We shouldn't be afraid to admit this. 2.48pm BST Brandon Jones asks:You seem to be friendly with Peter Sloterdijks ideas about contemporary cynicism. Do you buy his argument about kynicism, more reminiscent of ancient Greek Philosophical Cynicism, as the remedy to contemporary cynicism? If so, what does this look like?Also, how much has Oscar Wildes The Soul of Man Under Socialism influenced your own work? It is my favorite book and I saw that you made direct reference to it in the RSA Animate video First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. I even read your own book of the same name for this reason.I think yes, it has become unhinged from the pursuit of wisdom, and I think it's the best thing that could have happened. Wisdom is basically a conformist stupidity. The best embodiment of wisdom are proverbs, and with them you can justify everything. If you take a risk and then succeed, there is a proverb. If you fail, you have another proverb, like in our language, it is: you cannot urinate against the wind. That's wisdom. The ultimate lesson of wisdom is don't try too much, don't aim too high, at the end everything ends up in dust. But I think for example Christianity, and I define myself as a Christian athiest, Christianity is not wisdom. From a standpoint of wisdom, it is madness. It's the hope that a radical break can happen, we can be redeemed, and so on. So I think that all today's form of wisdom, usually new age wisdom, although they pretend to open up a way, to save us from our crisis, they only deepen the crisis. Wisdom is one of the names of our enemy today. 2.41pm BST Omar Bitar asks:What is the future of philosophy both within academia and in the so-called collective consciousness?I think philosophy will become more important than ever, even for so-called 'ordinary people'. Why? The incredible social dynamics of today's capitalism, as well as scientific and technological breakthroughs, changed our situation so much that old ethical and religious systems no longer function. Think about biogenetic interventions, which may even change your character, how your psyche works. This was no even a possibility considered in traditional ethical systems, which means that we all in a way have to think. We have to make decisions. We cannot rely on old religious and ethical formulas. Like: are you for or against biogenetic interventions? In order to decide, to take a stance, you have somehow implicitly to address questions like: do I have a free will? Am I really responsible for my acts? And so on. So I think that 21st century will be the century of philosophy. 2.40pm BST ID4857742 asks:Professor iek:What is your opinion of this weeks controversy and discussion in the US about the nature of the Islamic threat to Western societies and whether the threat is not only from the radical jihadists, but also includes most--if not all--of moderate Islam, which tacitly supports Jihadists or at least does not oppose their beliefs and intentions, and which supports the subjugation of women in their societies, including genital mutilation. The Quran and most of Islam seems to support censorship and execution of Danish cartoonists and the death penalty for apostasy. First as to the threat to Europe. The real threat to Europe is not an external one. Islamists or other external enemies, it comes from within. It's the anti-immigrant populism which on behalf of defending Europe rejects precisely what is worth fighting for in the European legacy. As for Islam, I think it's basically the same as with other religions, all religions are opportunistic. Their founder usually said some great things about love and tolerance, but then just to make it safe, he added something about the right to kill those who don't believe. Like Christ said, love your neighbour, but then also said I don't bring peace, I bring war. So to be very clear, I do totally oppose today's Muslim fundamentalism. But with a couple of additions: first, we should be aware that we also have in our highly developed societies, our own Christian fundamentalism which can also be violent. According to the FBI, they have 2 million Americans under observation, as potential Christian fundamentalists. So the problem is what is it in today's capitalism that generates fundamentalism? 2.36pm BST DamienEngine asks:Why did you get it so wrong about the UK riots? Why cant the rioters control of the streets and the shops for a night be seen as political? Maybe not to your schema, but nonetheless...?The question asks: why can't the rioters control the streets at least for a night? That's precisely the problem for me. I think it's easy to have this ecstatic carnival-like uprisings, which last for a short time, and then a little bit later things return to normal. The measure of a successful revolution or revolt, is what happens a day after. How do ordinary people feel the difference, when things return to normal? That's why I don't like carnivals. I like order and discipline. I like changes in everyday life, I don't like big ecstatic moments that we then afterwards remember fondly when we return to our everyday corruption. So this is what I was missing in the UK riots. Even a minimal positive vision. To put it in an even more brutal way, if I were to be a member of some secret capitalist organisation, trying to discredit the left, I would have organised and financed precisely such riots. 2.28pm BST BatesBasement asks:Dear Slavoj, How is your recapitulation of Lacans point that desires principal aim is to reproduce itself different from Schopenhauers Will, a philosopher largely absent from your oeuvre? I don't see any continuity between Schopenhaeur and Lacan. I think Schopenhauer is at the origins of the rationalist philosophy of life which has nothing to do with the Freudian unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is rational, articulated, structured like language. Schopenhaeurian drive is life drive, while the Freudian drive is death drive. And in the opposition between life and death, I'm for death. That's why I love Von Trier's Melancholia - all life on Earth disappears, so I think it's a film with a happy ending. 2.25pm BST Vivieen Sanchbraj asks:Is happiness important these days? How can we be happy? What steps do you suggest?Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. We all remember Gordon Gekko, the role played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street. What he says, breakfast is for wimps, or if you need a friend buy yourself a dog, I think we should say something similar about happiness. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves. 2.24pm BST ChrisPrendergast87 asks:What do you think we can learn from cats, if anything?Nothing. I like to search for class struggle in strange domains. For example it is clear that in classical Hollywood, the couple of vampires and zombies designates class struggle. Vampires are rich, they live among us. Zombies are the poor, living dead, ugly, stupid, attacking from outside. And it's the same with cats and dogs. Cats are lazy, evil, exploitative, dogs are faithful, they work hard, so if I were to be in government, I would tax having a cat, tax it really heavy. 2.23pm BST Reality14 asks:I am interested in how you would characterise boredom. When large proportions of the population declare themselves bored by, or bored with, or express other forms of ambivalence about politics (that is, liberal democracy - it being all we have), is this suggestive of something other than cynicism (however you might define that)?I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. Kierkegaard, one of my favourite thinkers, wrote that it is out of boredom, boredom of being alone, that God created the world. Then Adam was bored, so God created Eve. Then lonely people got bored, they created communities. Then we, Europeans, got bored, we engaged in colonialism. Now we are bored on our Earth, we want to travel into space. Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are. 2.22pm BST Igor Stojanov asks:Do you think that the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, especially her ideas on ethical egoism and laissez-faire capitalism should be more widely accepted in the western world?I must say I appreciate Ayn Rand. Of course I totally disagree with her. But what I like about her is what I call over orthodoxy, every ruling ideology can only function if it doesn't say it all. Like no capitalist today will openly say: egotism is good. They try to cover up the position as ethical for the good of community but Ayn Rand goes to the end. She plays the same role with regard to capitalism as for example Malebranche does with regard to Catholicism, or Kleist does with regard to German militarism. They are all an embarrassment for the ruling ideology. Precisely by bringing out its secret perverse core. 2.16pm BST rhythmic88 asks:Thank you Prof. Zizek for taking the time to do this interview.Q: What is it like to be you?I don't know because I am not myself. I do all my work to escape myself. I don't believe in looking into yourself. If you do this, you just discover a lot of shit. I think what we should do is throw ourselves out of ourselves. The truth is not deep in ourselves. The truth is outside.Regarding Zen, this is also the cause of my ethical disagreement with Zen Buddhism. The way Zen Buddhism is perceived today is as telling ourselves we must not throw ourselves fully into reality, that we must not attach ourselves too much to earthly objects. Since external reality is just a flow of appearances. I believe on the contrary, that we should fully attach ourselves to earthly objects. If you write a book, forget about everything else, throw yourself into it. If you are in love, go to the end, sacrifice everything for the object of love. This is why we today no longer want to fall in love. We want it controlled, like safe sex. But what I like in love is precisely the fall. I feel alive only when I fall. And this goes up to the beginning: I think Hegel already knew that Adam's fall was the greatest achievement, the greatest event in history. 2.15pm BST bhanuk asks:Dear Mr. Zizek, is poetry dead? If so, what killed it? If so, what might revive it? In this formulation, poetry becomes a zombie on wheels. Not good. What might reverse the death that poetry knows is coming? Bhanu KapilIt's not dead, but it's heavily wounded and it's its own guilt and responsibility. The more I look at the genesis of modern cases of ethnic cleansing, the more I discover that there always is a poet who did the preparatory work: in Bosnia, Rwanda and so on. Stephen Weinberg said that you need something like religion to make good people do evil things. I think poetry can also do this, with its strong ecstatic vision it can blind you for the horrors of what you are actually doing. So I think when Plato banned poets from the city, he had a point. 2.14pm BST MrSvejk asks:The online battle for the control of news is being fought and won by state and corporate power elites, so that this becomes the accepted historical account of todays reality. How important is wiki leaks and other whistle-blowers in restoring peoples trust that a truthful version of reality can exist? I think that the latest Wikileaks revelations, of so called Disa secret agreement, are crucial here. They show how while we experience ourselves as free, you read what you want, your love life is your own, you can invest your money how you want, but all this free choices take place within a framework which is more and more obscure and out of control. I think that the more we are free as individuals, the more the complex social network controls us. And here is the the role of whistleblowers. Now let me be precise: I am well aware that we suspected what we learned from them, basically we didn't learn many new things, more or less. But in our daily life, we preferred somehow to ignore this knowledge. I want it out of my sight. The greatest achievement of Wikileaks, is that we ordinary people are no longer allowed to pretend that we don't know. 2.09pm BST Slavok iek is here and has started answering your questions. BoldSammy asks:Hi Slavoj. I very much enjoyed your talk on liberty in the West last night. I know you prefer to talk about global themes, but there was one very real opportunity for change recently here in the UK - the Scottish referendum. It may have been change for better or for worse, but people were at least able to imagine the impossible: a radical, if undefined, alternative to neoliberalism. From a post-Yugoslavian perspective, do you think that the lefts willingness to rely on civic nationalism is liberating (as it felt to many of us) or a constraint? You repeated last night that the problems with capital are global. Do you think the solution is global or local?I know there is a division here between leftist thinking that we need local points of resistance, and those who think the solution also has to be global. I unambiguously side with the second option. The solution has to be even more global. Resisting local cultures perfectly feeds global capitalism, they just help local populations to fit better global capitalism. An example: the new PM of India, Modi, he wants India to embrace more radically global capitalism, and he is a Hindu nationalist. That's the paradox we should get. 4.24pm BST Pop philosophy has a whiff of shallowness about it, but Slavoj iek is one of the few thinkers who has broken out of the library without sacrificing his academic and political credibility. For iek, stasis is the enemy. Ideas, and indeed our entire way of being, must instead be batted around until they gradually become sleeker, rather than staying stock still in moral absolutism. In his new book Absolute Recoil, the Slovenian philosopher directs this approach towards Hegel and Marx, wondering if the foundations of their progressive thought which has underpinned his own throughout his career could be rebuilt, or at least updated for an age of fresh sexual and societal problems. In other books, he applies these ways of thinking to film directors like Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch; he also frequently wades into the cut and thrust of everyday society, be it considering the Occupy movement or the sexual abuse cases in Rotherham. Continue reading...
 |
| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com |