Zizek (Slavoj) Archives - Public Seminar

Feature

The Resistible Rise of Fascists Today

Trump, Erdoğan, Zizek, and All of Us?

November 22, 2016 • by Tomasz Kitlinski

This won’t be just four years; we are going to re-elect Trump. Perhaps it’s just a pessimism that has possessed me, but it seems that we -- the whole we, the global human race -- it seems to me, that we have turned servile. That we have become subservient and substandard ...

Theory & Practice

Molecular Red in Nine Minutes

September 29, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I am happy to concede that Chehonadskih may indeed have mastery and ownership of the field of Russian letters and that I do not. Although one might pause to wonder what this might mean give that the authors in question here – Bogdanov and Platonov – were dedicated proletarian internationalists. ...

Uncategorized

Zizek and me

June 4, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It is illuminating to have comrade Zizek write about one’s work. I think his comments on Molecular Red highlight two paths among which theory can choose to move at the moment: the high road of philosophy, or the low road of something else, as yet unknown. It is less about the wrong or right ...

Uncategorized

Communicative Capitalism

March 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It seems I got the title for my book The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso 2013) from reading Jodi Dean. I read her book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity Press, 2010) in manuscript. On re-reading it, I find this: “disintegrating spectacles allow for ever more ...

Uncategorized

All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

January 4, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014) is an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory. Karatani views world history as a history of modes of exchange. He rejects the classical Marxist view of history though as modes of production, to which political, religious and cultural levels ...

All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

Uncategorized

Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil (2)

November 30, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

When ever Marxists lift their attention from vulgar matters and start creating theories of the subject, it is always the bourgeois subject that seems to need theorizing. Perhaps there is no other kind. Althusser illustrates his theory of ideology with an anecdote about being hailed in the street by a cop: ...

Uncategorized

Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil

November 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Perhaps the first thing to know about Zizek is that his work entails a certain interpretive strategy, which in his new book Absolute Recoil he calls brachylogia, (41) which refers to statements of excessive brevity, with words left out. This can be coupled with Zizek’s insistence that authors misrecognize their more ...

Uncategorized

Spinoza on Speed

November 19, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000) is a book I have always been ambivalent about. It is a kind of Spinozist-accelerationist epic. (As Benjamin Noys has usefully shown). Spinoza on speed. I admire the boldness with which it attempted to describe the situation that was ...

Theory & Practice

#Accelerate in reverse

October 2, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Nothing seems more urgent now than to find useful ways of thinking what Donna Haraway calls naturecultures, and to do so historically. The elimination in advance of the problem of the continuities from the natural to the cultural that is such an ingrained prejudice in the humanities and social sciences ...

Uncategorized

In Support of PODEMOS

June 17, 2014 • by Public Voices

One of the most appalling and discouraging outcomes of the recent European elections has been the rise and affirmation of a number of far-right, xenophobic, and populist electoral parties in East and Northern Europe and in France. This has been largely the outcome of years of austerity policies and crisis, ...

Uncategorized

Ernesto Laclau, 1936-2014

April 23, 2014 • by Robin Blackburn

It is with great sadness that we learn of the death of Ernesto Laclau, the outstanding Argentinean political philosopher, at the age of 78. Ernesto had a heart attack in Seville where he was giving a lecture. He was the author of landmark studies of Marxist theory and of populism ...

Theory & Practice

Kierkegaard’s Frenemies: From Adorno to Zizek

December 23, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

2013 was Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday. I am grateful to Mark Taylor for asking me to contribute something to his birthday celebration, and also for not giving us any time to prepare for it. Had he done so I might have had to do more than say what I think I know. Marx ...