Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to an interview with Michael Scott Christofferson conducted by Daniel Zamora:
Bonus quote:
“The anarchist denunciations of [state power] from Foucault to James Scott are less worried about transnational monopolies than about the (now defunct) Soviet party state or even the social-democratic nanny state. And as for the intellectual and cultural polemics, they always end up denouncing Marx and Marxism. I think these battles on the left are unproductive politically and intellectually . . . .”
Link to an article by Japhy Wilson:
“The Joy of Inequality: The Libidinal Economy of Compassionate Consumerism”
Bonus links: “The Politics of Online Friendship” and “So You’re Still Being Publicly Shamed” and “Too Much of Not Enough: An Interview with Alenka Zupančič”
Link to an article by Adam Kotsko:
Bonus link: “How to Read Žižek on the Refugee Crisis”
Link to an interview of Slavoj Žižek by Michael Schulman:
Bonus link: “Slavoj Žižek on Tavis Smiley”
Link to an article by Mathew Snow:
Link to an excerpt from the book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (2015) by William Davies:
“We Are All Just Rats in a Cage: How the 1 Percent Profits From Your Misery”
Bonus link: “The Happiness Industry and Depressive-Competitive Disorder”
NOVA: The Great Math Mystery (April 2015)
PBS
Director: Dan McCabe and Richard Reisz
“The Great Math Mystery,” an episode of the long-running PBS science show Nova, is in essence an analysis of mathematics and analytic philosophy. In the program, about 99% of the show consists of people from the analytic philosophical school talking about math, plus one token representative from the Continental Philosophy school (Stephen Wolfram) and a few comments by analytic philosophy people about the Continental Philosophy view. What this show desperately needed was a dose of the “fairness doctrine” by giving something closer to 50% of the airtime to the Continental view. Ideally, Alain Badiou would have been featured, because he is perhaps the most well-known living philosopher to argue about the nature of mathematics from outside the caste of “working mathematicians”. Count this episode among the many that PBS airs that is a polemic disguised as an even-handed treatment.
“The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition of the functioning of law. Law functions only insofar as its subjects are fooled, insofar as they experience the authority of law as ‘authentic and eternal’ and do not realize ‘the truth about the usurpation’. That is why Kant is forced, in his Metaphysics of Morals, to forbid any question concerning the origins of legal power: it is by means of precisely such questioning that the stain of this illegitimate violence appears which always soils, like original sin, the purity of the reign of law.”
Slavoj Žižek, “The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to Psychoanalysis,” from Psychoanalysis and… (Feldstein and Sussman, eds., Routledge 1990).
See also, Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) (“Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: ‘Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.’ After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.” [This refers to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who was rumored to have been an illegitimate son]) and Walter Bagehot, in The English Constitution and Other Essays (“[The British monarchy:] Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all combatants.”) and David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, Part II, Essay XII “Of the Original Contract” (1758) (“Yet reason tells us, that there is no property in durable objects, such as lands or houses, when carefully examined in passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period, have been founded on fraud and injustice.”)
Link to an article by Slavoj Žižek from Umbr(a): Science and Truth, No. 1 (2000): 9-32:
“Lacan Between Cultural Studies And Cognitivism”
This is one of Žižek’s very best journal articles.
Link to an article by Slavoj Žižek on the Charlie Hebdo incident:
Bonus links: “Laughter in the Dark” (“And here we confront Charlie Hebdo’s greatest failing, not that its cartoonists mocked the Prophet or skewered the Mullahs, but that the magazine became a tool of the ruling order, aiming its most savage work at the most vulnerable citizens of France: the weak, the marginalized and the dispossessed. In the end, Charlie Hebdo, like much of the French intelligentsia, became an agent of orthodoxy, a persecutor of the poor and the powerless, deaf to their desperation.”) and “The Red Flag and the Tricolore”