Abstract
Beginning with his engagement with Alfred Sohn-Rethel's seminal treatment of 'real abstraction', Intellectual and Manual Labour, Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly thematised and excavated the ...proposition that capitalism is innervated by a kind of actually-existing metaphysics, the scandal of an abstract form external to human cognition. This essay investigates Žižek's use and criticism of Sohn-Rethel and outlines some of the developments and contradictions in his effort to confront capital's challenge to philosophy's self-sufficiency. It problematizes Žižek's tendency to elide a model of abstraction as a hollowing-out or evacuation of social content (rooted in The Communist Manifesto) with a much more promising conception of real abstraction as its re-articulation or re-functioning, while querying Žižek's recent efforts to transcend the purported limitations of Marx's conceptualisation of capital in the direction of a ('Lacanised') Hegel.
This commentary reflects on the potential of Madra's Late Neoclassical Economics for comprehending neoliberalism. Extending Madra's work, it presents an ideology critique of late neoclassical ...economics (LNE) as articulating a social fantasy of harmonious market order that enables neoliberal proponents to structure their reality against the Real of Capital. Madra's exposition of LNE's orientation around the theoretical problematic of neoclassical humanism enables consideration of neoliberalism as informed by an obsessional neurotic logic, whereby subjects postpone encountering the Real via repeated ideological modifications to preserve their fantasy against traumatic incursions. Exploring the conditions of possibility for functioning markets, LNE reinforces the fantasy of market order through theoretical innovations rationalizing increasingly intensive measures to realize it. Thus, symptoms bleeding through gaps between the Symbolic reality of neolibealism and the Real of Capital are disavowed as market and cognitive failures, foreclosing critical engagement with capitalist dynamics. This is illustrated through examining the new institutional economics of development as disavowing the violence of capitalism.
The function of ideology is to naturalize and maintain unequal relations of power. Making visible how ideology operates is necessary for solving health inequities grounded in inequities of resources ...and power. However, discerning ideology is difficult because it operates implicitly. It is not necessarily explicit in one's stated aims or beliefs. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek conceptualizes ideology as a belief in overarching unity or harmony that obfuscates immanent tension within a system. Drawing from Žižek's conceptualization of ideology, we identify what may be considered as 'symptoms' of ideological practice: (1) the recurrent nature of a problem, and (2) the implicit externalization of the cause. Our aim is to illustrate a method to identify ideological operation in health programs on the basis of its symptoms, using three case studies of persistent global health problems: inequitable access to vaccines, antimicrobial resistance, and health inequities across racialized communities. Our proposed approach for identifying ideology allows one to identify ideological practices that could not be identified by particular ideological contents. It also safeguards us from an illusory search for an emancipatory content. Critiquing ideology in general reveals possibilities that are otherwise kept invisible and unimaginable, and may help us solve recalcitrant problems such as health inequities.
This article reconstructs and evaluates a debate between Pippin and Žižek over the proper interpretation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in relation to Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. Both Pippin and ...Žižek agree that Vertigo exemplifies Hegelian reconciliation: Scottie exhibits Hegel’s reconciliatory “negation of negation” when he realizes that his lost love Madeleine had really been Judy all along, thereby losing his original loss. Yet Pippin and Žižek disagree on the precise significance of the concept of reconciliation both for the film and for the contemporary world. Žižek argues for a revolutionary reading of reconciliation in Vertigo: we learn from reconciliation that we must make a revolutionary break from the present world, in order to bring about a wholly new world. Pippin argues for a reformist reading of reconciliation in Vertigo: we learn from reconciliation that we must find the “traces of reason” latent in the present world, in order to gradually reform it for the better. Ultimately, I argue that Žižek’s reading offers the more authentically Hegelian approach to interpreting Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But if nothing else, the Pippin-Žižek debate demonstrates the profound intellectual fecundity of the intersections between film and philosophy for understanding our current historical moment.
En este texto se discuten los principales desarrollos de Alain Badiou en cuanto a las aportaciones de las matemáticas a una ontología materialista de lo múltiple, desde una perspectiva platónica; ...a través de éstas Badiou pretende enfrentar el reto que implica la antifilosofía de Jacques Lacan. Posteriormente, con base en la crítica que Slavoj Žižek realiza a las nociones de presentación y representación de Badiou, se juzgan los límites y las posibilidades de su propuesta ontológica.
Responding to the book symposium on his Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, Matthew Flisfeder engages with the thoughtful responses made by Clint Burnham, Jamil ...Khader, and Anna Kornbluh, expressing appreciation for the provocations and productive disagreements being generated. The author highlights previous work regarding the decline of symbolic efficiency, his intended meaning of algorithmic desire, and the implications of subjectivity in a social media age in which the subject is apparently aware of the big Other's nonexistence. He reveals Algorithmic Desire as implicitly correcting for a critical- and cultural-theory landscape that has not fully absorbed the Slovenian school's (Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič) psychoanalytic interventions into the critique and development of Althusserian theories of ideology and subjectivity. The essay concludes that this methodology reveals the perverse nature of twenty-first-century neoliberal logic and reiterates that a truly social media is only possible under conditions of universal emancipation.
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.
As European theatre directors become a familiar presence on international stages and a new generation of theatre makers absorbs their impulses, this study develops fresh perspectives on Regie, the ...Continental European tradition of staging playtexts. Leaving behind unhelpful clichés that pit, above all, the director against the playwright, Peter M. Boenisch stages playful encounters between Continental theatre and Continental philosophy. The contemporary Regie work of Thomas Ostermeier, Frank Castorf, Ivo van Hove, Guy Cassiers, tg STAN, and others, here meets the works of Friedrich Schiller and Leopold Jessner, Hegelian speculative dialectics, and the critical philosophy of Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek in order to explore the thinking of Regie – how to think Regie, and how Regie thinks. This partial and ‘sideways look’ invites a wider reconsideration of the potential of ‘playing’ theatre today, of its aesthetic possibilities, and its political stakes in the global neoliberal economy of the twenty-first century.
Abstract This article aims to offer suspended transcendent God as an alternative for the thoughts of Jürgen Moltmann and Slavoj Žižek. Although they place Christ as the basis of eschatological hope, ...they have different opinions regarding the involvement of a transcendental entity (God). If Moltmann emphasizes on God’s intervention in the fulfillment of eschatologicalexpectations Žižek rejects the involvement of transcendental entities by assuming that the divine has died so that the responsibility is transferred to humans. Departing from the lens of Ernst Bloch’s speculative materialism, this article concludes with a construction of a suspended transcendent God. This concept neither accepts nor rejects God’s intervention, but sees it as a speculative possibility.
Abstrak Artikel ini bertujuan menawarkan Allah transenden yang ditangguhkan (suspended transcendent God) sebagai alternatif pemikiran Jürgen Moltmann dan Slavoj Žižek. Meskipun sama-sama menempatkan Kristus sebagai dasar pengharapan eskatologis, akan tetapi keduanya berbeda pendapat perihal keterlibatan entitas transendental (Allah).Jika Moltmann sangat menekankan intervensi Allah dalam pemenuhan pengharapan eskatologis, maka Žižek menolak keterlibatan entitas transendental dengan menganggapyang Ilahi telah mati sehingga tanggung jawab tersebut dialihkan pada manusia. Berangkat dari lensa materialisme spekulatif Ernst Bloch, artikel ini ditutup dengan konstruksi mengenai Allah transenden yang ditangguhkan. Konsep ini tidak menerima maupun menolak intervensi Allah, melainkan melihatnya sebagai kemungkinan spekulatif.
PDF
