I discuss Peter Sloterdijk’s critique of egalitarian projects presented in his book Zorn und Zeit and Slavoj Žižek’s response to it. My claim is that both of these thinkers show an oscillation ...between polemical and analytical aspects when using the concept of ressentiment. By using the concept of ressentiment, Sloterdijk explains the transformation of anger in Western societies. He holds that the atemporal anger, which characterized ancient greeks assumes a temporal form and becomes the project of revenge and ressentiment under Christianity and later emancipatory movements. I show that alongside this view, the author implies a political-polemical argumentation with the intent of delegitimizing the political left movements. Then I discuss the notion of ressentiment in Žižek’s view, which implies the same ambivalence, on the one hand, this concept is introduced as an alternative to Sloterdijk’s attempts at delegitimization, on the other, it seeks to explain anger and revenge related phenomena. At last, I claim that Sloterdijk’s and Žižek’s positions differ on the polemical aspect, but are compatible analytically.
What is seen when one's gaze falls upon the plurality of thought within economics? If one gazes from the perspective of Slavoj Žižek, of Kojin Karatani, and of Jacques Lacan, one finds a pronounced ...parallax within the differing perspectives of economic reality. This essay explores the application of parallax ontology-primarily as discussed in Žižek's The Parallax View-to economic pluralism. Parallax ontology acknowledges that our conception of reality, economic or otherwise, is riven with parallax gaps, to be thought of as irreducible gaps or minimal distances between perspectives. It argues that one should consider these parallax gaps to exist within economic pluralism and to be subjects in and of themselves, a perspective that ultimately rejects any form of monism within economic thought.
This article offers a theoretically informed case study of the George Floyd Uprising that emerged in May 2020. In addition to analyzing details of the uprising, it illustrates the ways in which ...particular uprisings can register at the level of the universal. I make this point through a critical engagement with theories of universality offered by Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Todd McGowan, whose work helps us to theorize universality in its concrete and singular manifestation. Along the way, I show how adjacent work in the Black radical tradition, social movement studies, and the critical social sciences at large can also enter a constructive dialogue with these approaches to universality. Using theory and data, the case study illustrates how this insurgent act embodied the striving towards universal human dignity and liberation. It is long overdue for the humanistic social sciences to revisit and reengage the concept of universality. By doing so, we may generate better social theory, and better understand major movements for social change in the twenty-first century.
Managerialism is often unwittingly assumed to be devoid of ideological import. This is because its market-based principles, utilitarian understanding of human behaviour, and the instrumental logic of ...its science-based methods are thought to imbue its applied forms with a certain rationality and objectivity, one that is capable of fathoming the deepest and most enduring 'truths' of effective management in contemporary times. This paper challenges such reckonings by applying Slavoj Žižek's mode of ideological critique. It argues that far from being bereft of ideological stimulus, managerialism is steeped in currents of ideological cynicism generated by the very epistemological realities of scientism under which it operates. Indeed, such currents may even provide the foundation upon which its applied forms are readily accepted by organisational members in their workplace behaviours, despite what they know or believe.
Der französische Sinologe und Philosoph François Jullien, der unterschiedliche Kulturen, aber auch differente Theorien in eine produktive Spannung zueinander setzen möchte, versucht, Abstände ...zwischen differenten Ansätzen nicht zu nivellieren, sondern ein atopisches – also ortloses – Dazwischen für neue Ideen und Lösungen produktiv werden zu lassen. Dies gilt auch für das Verhältnis von chinesischer und europäischer Medizin, insbesondere für Vorstellungen von Hygiene, die gerade in Zeiten der COVID- 19-Krise neue Bedeutung erlangt haben. Im Beitrag wird Julliens Hygiene-Begriff mit Bezug auf die gegenwärtige Pandemie untersucht. In der Folge vertrete ich die These, dass Jullien den Ansprüchen der eigenen Methode nicht genügt und zudem Hygiene primär individualistisch denkt, ein Ansatz, der im Zusammenhang von pandemischen Krisen bald an seine Grenzen stößt.
This paper draws on Slavoj Žižek's critique of ideology in seeking to account for the persistence and transformability of the neoliberal project. Against understandings of neoliberalism as a utopian ...representation projected onto an external reality, I argue that neoliberal ideology operates as a social fantasy, which structures reality itself against the traumatic Real of Capital. The evolution of the neoliberal project should be understood, not as the meticulous manipulation of social reality, but as a series of increasingly desperate attempts to hold the very fabric of reality together. Reconceptualizing neoliberalization as a form of obsessional neurosis can help to explain the relentless persistence of “zombie neoliberalism” and its paradoxical trajectory towards increasingly intensive forms of social engineering. This argument is developed through a critical engagement with the work of the economist Jeffrey Sachs. From shock therapy to the Millennium Villages Project, Sachs's trajectory embodies the characteristics of the neoliberal neurosis.
The paper aims to undermine the apparently monolithic power of neoliberalism, by challenging dominant critical representations of the neoliberal project in terms of a hyper‐rational governmentality. It also aims to subvert the attempts by Jeffrey Sachs and other neoliberals to reposition themselves as opponents of the Washington Consensus, and as spokesmen of the Occupy movement. The chosen method of attack is more satirical than polemical. Neurotic neoliberals such as Sachs have successfully appropriated ethical objections to neoliberalism in the name of “globalization with a human face”. In the present conjuncture, an immanent critique that reveals the internal incoherence of neoliberal ideology, and the hapless floundering of its proponents, is perhaps more effective than a repetition of familiar forms of moral condemnation. An alternative subtitle for this paper might therefore be “Towards a satirical materialism”.
This article illustrates how the works of Slavoj Žižek can advance the field of emotional geographies, as well as our understandings of emotion, space, and society. Žižek provides a rich social ...theoretical vocabulary that can help explain cultural discontent, how emotional worlds bond and fall apart, why there is no guaranteed harmony in love with our partner, and how emotional worlds are organized in ways so that people can hold onto something that resembles ‘subjectivity’ and ‘reality’. I focus on geographers’ interpretations of Jacques Lacan's notion of jouissance: a concept that is at the heart of Žižek's writings. First, I consider how geographers’ canonical portrayals of Lacan as the arch phallogocentric thinker rely on what Žižek calls the “false poetry of castration”. Second, I address how Žižek's notion of enjoyment (his usual translation of jouissance) as the “paradoxical payment” informs his critical engagement with Marxism, as well as questions about the political and emotional. I then turn to discuss how the irruptions of enjoyment can take place amidst spaces of nationalism and consumption. The article concludes by affirming the prospect of making emotional geographies less enjoyable than ever before.
This paper proposes an exploration of various points of intersection between poetry, thought and contemporary photography by means of a ‘parallactic’ analysis of the volume El truco preferido de ...Satán, a compilation by Spanish poet Jenaro Talens that features a selection of fragments from Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, which have been paired up with photographs by Alberto García-Alix, arguably the most renowned artistic chronicler of the Movida Madrileña in the 1980s. The resulting relationship of intermediality and supplementarity is a complex one, with moments of proximity, but also of extraneation. In order to capture these nuances and to elevate the obtained insights to a more general level, the notion of parallax, particularly in one of Slavoj Žižek’s specific formulations, serves as this essay’s methodological framework, as it sets out to understand García-Alix’s photographs as the elusive, spectral, parallactic supplement that discovers what would otherwise remain hidden in Benjamin’s fragments.
In Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, Matthew Flisfeder develops an alternative structuralist theory of social media. As a Žižekian analysis of social media, this ...book is an important contribution to the field of Žižekian studies. While Flisfeder theorizes social media in relation to Slavoj Žižek's idea of the big Other, he nonetheless proposes an unorthodox understanding, importantly choosing not to engage Žižek's analysis of technology, which develops in the context of his discussion of artificial intelligence and virtual reality in relation to Freud's "prosthetic God" and Lacan's lathouses. The present essay suggests that Žižek's analysis of technology has radical implications for understanding social media, providing an important perspective that shifts the emphasis of theorizing social media from desire to anxiety in a zone "beyond the pleasure principle," an analysis that Žižek situates in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the big Other.
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