The best Marxist analyses are always of a failure.
This is the most important tumblr of 2012. It’s like someone peeled back the snark and stared straight into my soul and said “yes, Christina, you SHALL have Ke$ha and Zizek mashups and not have to make them yourself.”
“he fidgeted maniacally like some sort of homeless intellectual on cocaine”
An Amazon reviewer describing Zizek’s public speaking skills. Straight up guffawed at this for 10 minutes because it’s true.
A Letter from Zizek to the members of Pussy Riot.
They wrote back. The exchange can be found here.
LeXo, a Paris based electronic band, and I have spent the better part of 8 weeks ‘remixing’ and re-situating Slavoj Zizek’s Occupy Wall Street speech as an electronic music track. We are currently working on a more in depth write-up of our process working across countries, continents, DAWs as two strangers who have never met but connected in the realms of musical taste and political ideology. Expect a more formal post about that in the next week or so. In the meantime, enjoy the Zizek remix. Spread the word and share feedback. This is our attempt to reimagine how something like the Zizek speech can experienced and shared.
#occupychristmas
P.S. I drew the cover art/portrait of Zizek in case you’re interested.
Click through for more information about LeXo’s work or my own.
In Which I sample Zizek’s discussion of love from “Examined Life” in a minimal, dub inspired electronic instrumental.
I’ve been joking about dropping some Zizek in an instrumental. Something about a little minimal, dub/darkwave synth heavy instrumental seemed like an appropriate sonic take on Slavoj. Can’t say it’s finished but it’s amusing enough to share. I think this moves me into an entirely new echelon of pretension. Oh well, at least I’ve ACTUALLY read Zizek.
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My opinion is that the left is not able to offer a true alternative to global capitalism. Yes, it is true that ‘capitalism will not be around for ever’ (it is the advocates of the new politics of resistance who think that capitalism and the democratic state are here to stay); it will not be able to cope with the antagonisms it produces. But there is a gap between this negative insight and a basic positive vision. I do not think that today’s candidates – the anti-globalisation movement etc – do the job.
So what are we to do? Everything possible (and impossible), just with a proper dose of modesty, avoiding moralising self-satisfaction. I am aware that when the left builds a protest movement, one should not measure its success by the degree to which its specific demands are met: more important than achieving the immediate target is the raising of critical awareness and finding new ways to organise.
However, I don’t think this holds for protests against the war in Iraq, which fitted all too smoothly the space allotted to ‘democratic protests’ by the hegemonic state and ideological order. Which is why they did not, even minimally, scare those in power. Afterwards, both government and protesters felt smug, as if each side had succeeded in making its point.
”Slavoj Zizek’s response to critics’ responses on his article Resistance Is Surrender in the London Review of Books, 15 Nov 2007.
(via hautepop)
(via hautepop)
“Another liberal worry is that there is no organised political power to take over if Mubarak goes. Of course there is not; Mubarak took care of that by reducing all opposition to marginal ornaments, so that the result is like the title of the famous Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None. The argument for Mubarak – it’s either him or chaos – is an argument against him.”
Zizek on Egypt and Revolution
Via The Guardian
“[In the purest form of cultural capitalism]…in the consumerist act you buy your redemption from being only a consumerist.” [Note: Starbucks is one of my company’s clients]
“For me, shopping is like masturbating in public.”
Slavoj Zizek on why his wife does all of his clothes shopping for him. Priceless.
Yes, please! This man is a hilarious. The two occasions I’ve seen him lecture, I’ve cried from laughing so hard. Watching him make some uppity, 18 year old east coast UChicago freshmen look like an idiot for criticizing his analysis of Rosseau and then asking him to explain Rosseau to him was a highlight of my graduate school experience. Via Critical CultureGet Slavoj Žižek to Host SNL!
Zizek on love, deconstruction and “cynicism.” And more importantly, an absolutely hilarious impression of Judith Butler’s response to the following question: “Is this a bottle of tea?”
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“This is why it is interesting to imagine a sequel to Avatar in which, after a couple of years (or, rather, months) of bliss, the hero starts to feel a weird discontent and to miss the corrupted human universe. The source of this discontent is not only that every reality, no matter how perfect it is, sooner or later disappoints us. Such a perfect fantasy disappoints us precisely because of its perfection: what this perfection signals is that it holds no place for us, the subjects who imagine it.” (On Avatar)
“Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism (his crude privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath this sympathy for the poor lies a reactionary myth…It concerns a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality estored through brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.”
Zizek on James Cameron.
”Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Avatar. It’s as brilliant as you think it would be.
- Slavoj Žižek, “Return of the natives”
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Modern & Im/material Things
I'm Christina Dennaoui. I like cultural analysis, technology, and electronic music. I make beats. I drink bourbon. I'm a nice lady, so you should talk to me. Content Areas: Electronic Music, Critical Theory, Media Studies, Technology, Digital Culture
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