Philosophy – Page 6 – Rock Salted

“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.

Slavoj Žižek on Law

“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.”)

Slavoj Žižek – Lacan Between Cultural Studies And Cognitivism

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.

Slavoj Žižek – In the Grey Zone

Link to an article by Slavoj Žižek on the Charlie Hebdo incident:

“In the Grey Zone”

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”

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2013)

Zeitgeist Films

Director: Sophie Fiennes

Main Cast: Slavoj Žižek

Making a film about philosophy is not an easy task. The main problem being: how to keep the audience awake? Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has said that good films can put you to sleep. But these sorts of films are not always widely appreciated, for very much that reason.

Enter Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Žižek, with a documentary — the sequel to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) — that makes contemporary philosophy as entertaining and engaging as possible. Some may say it is still not engaging enough. But the intellectually curious should find a lot to wrestle with, and at least will walk away with a list of interesting movies from around the world that they have probably not yet seen. Ultimately, the film paints a beautiful and horrifying picture of how movies stage our dreams, where desire arises, and how ideologies correlate those desires to objective circumstances to create meaning.

Desire comes from the symbol of the “Big Other”: a god, or, in this case, cinema. It provides meaning to otherwise meaningless, solitary existence. In Fiennes’ and Žižek’s earlier collaboration, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Žižek said, “Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.” It would have been helpful to repeat that assertion here, to better explain the new film’s title. Still, the underlying concepts of importance are revisited here. A key one involves Žižek’s attempts to philosophically preserve free will, as a small but crucial factor set against a backdrop of philosophical concepts that increasingly explain relationships traced back to determined, objective conditions.

“[M]an is not simply a product of objective circumstances. We all have this margin of freedom in deciding how we subjectivize these objective circumstances, which will of course determine us: how we react to them by constructing our own universe.”

The way these objective circumstances are subjectivized is through ideology.

“Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world – how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on.”

But every ideology has to “work as an empty container, open to all possible meanings.” He illustrates with deft examples from Cabaret (1972) to The Fall of Berlin (1950) how different efforts to portray fascist or communist propaganda can utilize the exact same ideological frameworks, the same “empty container”. This analysis of ideology can be applied to anything. To look outside this film, take “business management” gurus. They recommend, for instance, setting a big hairy audacious goal, but it should be attainable. This might help explain why business attracts (and selects for) unhealthy people. They seek simple pleasures from defined goals within the existing organization and obtain excess enjoyment from the social prestige and career advancement that comes with achieving those defined goals.

“How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of all life on earth — an asteroid hitting the planet — than a modest change in our economic order?”

He suggests not waiting for such a magical event to produce change from without, but rather,

“It depends on us, on our will.”

“We should draw a line of distinction, within the very field of our dreams, between those who are the right dreams — pointing towards a dimension effectively beyond our existing society and the wrong dreams, the dreams which are just an idealized, consumerist reflection, [a] mirror image of our society. We are not simply submitted to our dreams – they just come from some unfathomable depths and we can’t do anything about it. This is the basic lesson of psychoanalysis — and fiction cinema. We are responsible for our dreams. Our dreams stage our desires — and our desires are not objective facts. We created them, we sustained them, we are responsible for them.”

He takes a complex view of desire.

“A desire is never simply the desire for certain thing. It’s always also a desire for desire itself. A desire to continue to desire. Perhaps the ultimate horror of a desire is to be fully filled-in, met, so that I desire no longer.”

There are different ways to control desire. Žižek is quite explicit about the methods he favors.

“The conservative solution is we need more police. We need courts, which pass severe judgments. I think this solution is too simple.”

Taking a page straight from filmmaker John Waters (“I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.”), Žižek talks about how religion, using the example of catholicism, puts in place prohibitive injunctions with a hidden message to enjoy transgressing those limits. This is too simple, though, because it takes away freedom, and responsibility.

“Freedom hurts. The basic insight of psychoanalysis is to distinguish between enjoyment and simple pleasures. They are not the same. Enjoyment is precisely enjoyment in disturbed pleasure — even enjoyment in pain. And this excessive factor disturbs the apparently simple relationship between duty and pleasures.”

Rather than seek something superficial and take unhealthy enjoyment from an excess, Žižek suggests pursuing deeper desires that will likely not be fulfilled and accepting the superficial pleasure that arise along the way. He cleverly illustrates this while eating a Kinder Egg chocolate candy, the chocolate covering a simple pleasure and the toy inside something further.

Once freedom of this degree is put on the table, Žižek is talking about revolutionary potentials. These have been tried before, and have failed, but he sees them as still worth pursuing. On failed revolutions, he diagnoses the problem: “The dreams remained the old dreams; and they turned into the ultimate nightmare.” All these examples, with movies, Kinder Egg candies, and so forth, provide easily grasped examples of where the breaking points are among the stuff of everyday life.

This is a well-made film. Its subject is weighty, yet leavened with the constant references to film and pop culture. Terry Eagleton, reviewing a pair of later Žižek’s books, wrote that “Academic philosophers can be obscure, whereas popularisers aim to be clear. With his urge to dismantle oppositions, Žižek has it both ways . . . .” This is precisely the paradox that makes The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology such an interesting film. We have discussions of philosophy that make substantive points worthy of both academic and unschooled audiences. And along the way, viewers can enjoy the “simple pleasures” of seeing Žižek dressed up in a ridiculous Stalin costume, or sitting in a re-constructed set of the club from Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Viewers unfamiliar with anything Žižek has written or said before should still be able to grasp this film, with some mild effort. It represents one of the most potent distillations of his philosophical worldview.

Slavoj Žižek – Guardian Webchat

Link to an online webchat hosted by The Guardian newspaper with Slavoj Žižek:

“Slavoj Žižek webchat – as it happened”

Here’s a select quote:

“I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. *** Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.”