Welcome to the Desert of the Real by Slavoj Zizek

Author:Slavoj Zizek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

1 See Matt Ridley, Genome, New York: Perennial 2000, p. 64.

2 See Jürgen Habermas, Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2001.

3 Along these lines, we should especially emphasize the ambiguous (‘undecidable’, to use the fashionable term) nature of contemporary feminism in developed Western countries – the predominant American feminism, with its legalistic twist à la Catherine MacKinnon, is ultimately a profoundly reactionary ideological movement, always ready to legitimize US army interventions with feminist concerns, always there to make dismissive patronizing remarks about Third World populations (from its hypocritical obsession with clitoridectomy to MacKinnon’s racist remarks about how ethnic cleansing and rape are in Serb genes …).

4 ‘On Evil: An Interview With Alain Badiou’, Cabinet, Issue 5 (Winter 2001), p. 72.

5 See Alain Badiou, Deleuze, Paris: Hachette 1997.

6 And the difficulty of assuming interpellation is a great topic of post-traditional Hollywood. Which is the unifying feature between two Martin Scorsese films, The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun? In both cases, the human incarnation of the divine figure (Christ, the Dalai Lama) is depicted in the difficult process of assuming his mandate.

7 And this stance is far from being limited to Western ‘postmodern’ countries. In 2001, there emerged in Russia a movement called ‘Walking Together’, the official Putin youth organization whose ideology is ‘Eurasian’, advocating ‘Russian values’ against the West. One of their original ideas is to resort to burning books: in order to fight the influence of Western liberal decadence, they propose mass gatherings where people bring their decadent books and in return get free copies of proper Russian books, while the decadent books are thrown on a pile and publicly burned. Of course, this call to burning books was dismissed, in Russia itself and abroad, as a comic interlude not taken seriously by the top Putin nomenklatura itself; precisely as such, however, it works as an indication of a potential future – it was Herbert Marcuse who, apropos of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, claimed that, in the history of the emergence of Fascism, comedy precedes tragedy, the ultimate horror first appears as (is perceived as) operetta-like comedy.

8 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 37.

9 This inherent limitation of democracy also accounts for the unique power of fascination exerted by the figure of Salvador Allende: in so far as he tried to combine socialism with ‘pluralist democracy’, his true role is not that of a model to follow, but (independently of his subjective intentions) that of a negative hero whose task was to demonstrate, by means of his very defeat (tragic death in 1973), the impossibility of socialism without violence, in a ‘soft’ parliamentary way. That is to say, let us face it: we (old enough to be his contemporaries) all knew that his project was doomed, so that we were ultimately just waiting for it to happen, secretly even craving for his death.

10 These distinctions are counterbalanced by some important condensations, multiple meanings of terms; say, the Russian term for peace, mir, also means ‘world, universe’ and the closed universe of the

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