Author: Slavoj Žižek Publisher: Verso ISBN: 9780860919711 Size: 51.58 MB Format: PDF, Mobi View: 6531 Get Books. (Žižek, 1989: 196, emphasis added). As we saw in 1e above, such an idea would in fact reproduce in philosophy the type of thinking which, he argues, characterizes political ideologies and the subject’s fundamental fantasy (see 3a). Jan 05, 2009 Her/His subjects, in turn, are supposed to know (S2) the edicts of the sovereign and the Law (as the classical legal notion has it, “ignorance is no excuse”). . This choice of radical evil, however, is not itself a historical choice either for individuals or for the species, for Kant. Žižek’s statements on today’s liberal capitalism are complex, if not in mutual tension. Recall Hegel’s unambiguous celebration of the absolute power of Understanding from his Foreword to the Phenomenology: ‘The action of separating the elements is the exercise of the force of Understanding, the most astonishing and greatest of all powers, or rather the absolute power.’ This celebration is in no way qualified; that is, Hegel’s point is not that this power is nonetheless later ‘sublated’ into a subordinate moment of the unifying totality of Reason. The supreme (and, for many, the most problematic) case of this counter-movement occurs at the very end of the Logic, when, after the notional deployment is completed, reaching the full circle of the absolute Idea, the Idea, in its resolve/decision, ‘freely releases itself’ into Nature, lets Nature go, leaves it off, discards it, pushes it away from itself, and thus liberates it.8 Which is why, for Hegel, the philosophy of nature is not a violent reappropriation of this externality; it rather involves the passive attitude of an observer: as he puts it in the Philosophy of Mind, ‘philosophy has, as it were, simply to watch how nature itself sublates its externality’.9. In the “180 degree turn” of the individual towards this Other who has addressed him, the individual becomes a political subject, Althusser says. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes—all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary … But these are words whose only “meaning” lies finally in their function, which is to guarantee that there will (continue to) be meaning. Hence, Žižek’s bold opening in The Sublime Object of Ideology is to claim that today ideology has not so much disappeared from the political landscape as come into its own. In a thrilling tour de force that made his name, he explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. the pre-Oedipal “anal father”). In line with how Žižek presents his own work, this article starts by examining Žižek’s descriptive political philosophy. In a way that is oddly reminiscent of Nietzsche, Žižek generally presents his work in a polemical fashion, knowingly striking out against the grain of accepted opinion. DIVA theoretical analysis of social conflict that uses examples from Kant, Hegel, Lacan, popular culture and contemporary politics to critique nationalism./div, Did Somebody Say Ideology? As for Lacan, so for Žižek, the civilizing of subjects necessitates their founding sacrifice (or “castration”) of jouissance, enacted in the name of sociopolitical Law. In the political field, similarly—and as we saw in part 2c—subjects of a particular political community will claim that others cannot understand their regime’s sublime objects. If Althusser famously denied the importance of what people “have on their consciences” in the explanation of how political ideologies work, then for Žižek the role of guilt—as the way in which the subject enjoys his subjection to the laws—is vital to understanding subjects’ political commitments. His second remark is that the gap between notion and existence is precisely the mark of finitude; it holds for finite objects like 100 thalers, but not for God: God is not something I can have (or not have) in my pocket . Žižek agrees with both Foucault and Marx that modern political regimes exert a form of power that is both less visible and more far-reaching than that of the regimes they replaced. . That is to say, what if the ‘reconciliation’ between the Particular and the Universal occurs precisely through the division that cuts across the two? Indeed, as Žižek comments about the resurgence of racism across the first world today, it is often precisely the strangeness of others’ particular ethnic or national Things that animates subjects’ hatred towards them. There is, Žižek argues, ultimately no actual, Real Thing better than the other real things subjects encounter that these words name (2e). Just because, when subjects say “the Queen is the Queen!” they are at one level reaffirming their allegiance to a political regime, Žižek at the same time holds that this does not mean that this regime could survive without appearing to rest on such deeper Truths about the way the world is. Instead, ideological fantasies posit various exemplars of a persecutory enemy or, as Žižek says, “the Other of the Other” to whom the explanation of political disunity or discontent can be traced. Please read our short guide how to send a book to Kindle. Equally, the jouissance the subject considers itself to have lost is posited by the fantasy as having been taken from it by this persecutory “Other supposed to enjoy” (see 3b). The multitude of a thing’s actual properties is not simply reduced to the inner core of this thing’s ‘true reality’; what is more important is that the signifying reduction accentuates (profiles) the thing’s inner potential.