Directed by Sophie Fiennes ["my Leni Riefenstahl"]
© 2012 British Film Institute/Channel Four Television/Bord Scannan Na hEireann/The Irish Film Board
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The Unbearable Lightness of Slavoj Zizek's Communism: The Year of Dreaming Dangerously - Review, by Benjamin Kunkel
After Zizek's Talk of Communist Catastrophe: An Alternative Script, by Radical Eyes
Slavoj Zizek: Interview, by Sean O'Hagan
The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, by Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank -- Nina Power Tires of Slavoj Zizek and His Monstrous Essays, by Nina Power
Beethoven and the Illuminati: How the Secret Order Influenced the Great Composer, by Jan Swafford
Right-Wing Sock Puppets Pretending to Be Liberals Assault Progressive Websites, by R.S. Janes
Gnosis in Cyberspace? Body, Mind and Progress in Posthumanism, by Oliver Krueger
Is Slavoj Zizek a Left-Fascist, by Alan Johnson
Akashic Records: The Book of Life, adapted from Edgard Cayce on the Akashic Records by Kevin J. Todeschi
Christian Mystery and Responsibility: Gnosticism in Derrida's The Gift of Death, by Peter Goldman
Noam Chomsky discusses Post-Modern "Theory" and "Philosophy" on LBBS, Z-Magazine's BB, 11/13/95
Slavoj Zizek on Occupy Wall Street
The Dangerous Dreams of Slavoj Zizek, by Jerome Roos
The tragedy of our predicament, when we are within ideology, is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.
***
They Live from 1988 is definitely one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left. It tells the story of John Nada. “Nada,” of course, in Spanish means “nothing.” A pure subject, deprived of all substantial content. A homeless worker in L.A. who, drifting around, one day enters into an abandoned church and finds there a strange box full of sunglasses. And when he put one of them on, walking along the L.A. streets, he discovers something weird. That these glasses function like critique-of-ideology glasses. ...When you put the glasses on, you see dictatorship in democracy. It’s the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom. The explanation for the existence of these strange ideology glasses is the standard story of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Humanity is already under the control of aliens.
***
Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world, how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology.
***
To step out of ideology, it hurts. It’s a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it.... It can shatter many of your, uh, illusions. This is a paradox we have to accept. The extreme violence of liberation. You must be forced to be free. If you trust simply your spontaneous sense of well being or whatever, you will never get free. 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.
***
If you read intelligent Catholic propagandists, and if you really try to discern what deal are they offering you, it’s not to prohibit, in this case, sexual pleasures. It’s a much more cynical contract, as it were, between the church as an institution and the believer, troubled with, in this case, sexual desires. It is this hidden, obscene permission that you get. You are covered by the divine big Other. You can do whatever you want. Enjoy.
***
This is again a key to the functioning of ideology. Not only the explicit message -- renounce, suffer and so on -- but the true hidden message --pretend to renounce and you can get it all.
***
In our postmodern – however we call them – societies, we are obliged to enjoy. Enjoyment becomes a kind of a weird, perverted duty.
***
A desire is never simply the desire for a 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. The ultimate melancholic experience is the experience of a loss of desire itself.
***
Kinder Surprise egg....I don’t think that the chocolate frame is here just to send you on a deeper voyage towards the inner treasure -- what Plato calls “the agalma” -- which makes you a worthy person, which makes a commodity the desirable commodity. I think it’s the other way around. We should aim at the higher goal. The goal in the middle of an object precisely in order to be able to enjoy the surface. This is what is the antimetaphysical lesson,which is difficult to accept.
***
If the classical ideology functioned in the way designated by Marx in his nice formula from Capital, Volume 1: "They don’t know what they are doing, but they are nonetheless doing it," cynical ideology functions in the mode of "I know very well what I am doing, but I am still nonetheless doing it."
[West Side Story]: The delinquent gang enacts a whole explanation as a musical number, of course, of why they are delinquents....The paradox here is, how can you know all this and still do it? This is the cynical function of ideology. They’re never what they appear to be – cynical, brutal delinquents. They always have a tiny private dream.
***
Let’s take the English riots of August, 2011. The standard liberal explanation really sounds like a repetition of “Officer Krupke” song. We cannot just condemn this riot as delinquent vandalism. You have to see how these people live in practically ghettos, isolated communities -- no proper family life, no proper education. They don’t even have a prospect of a regular employment. But this is not enough. Because man is not simply a product of objective circumstances. We all have this margin of freedom ….
in deciding how we subjectivize these objective circumstances, which of course determine us. How we react to them by constructing our own universe.
***
The great thing about the Taxi Driver is that it brings this brutal outburst of violence to its radical suicidal dimension.
***
Taxi Driver is an unacknowledged remake of perhaps the greatest of John Ford’s westerns, his late classic The Searchers. In both films, the hero tries to save a young woman who is perceived as a victim of brutal abuse. In The Searchers, the young Natalie Wood was kidnapped and lived for a couple of years as the wife of an Indian chief. In Taxi Driver, the young Jodie Foster is controlled by a ruthless pimp. The task is always to save the perceived victim. But what really drives this violence of the hero is a deep suspicion that the victim is not simply a victim, that the victim, effectively in a perverted way, enjoys, or participates, in what appears as her victimhood. So that, to put it very simply, she doesn’t want to be redeemed. She resists it.
***
Exactly the same holds for the terrifying outburst of violence -- Anders Behring Breivik’s murderous spree in Oslo. Exploding a bomb in front of the government building, and then killing dozens of young members of the Social Democratic Party in an island close to Oslo. Many commentators tried to dismiss this as a clear case of personal insanity. But I think Breivik’s manifesto is well worth reading. It is palpably clear there how this violence that Breivik not only theorized about but also enacted is a reaction to the impenetrability and confusion of global capital.
***
[TAXI DRIVER]: When he is there, barely alive, he symbolically with his fingers points a gun at his own head. Clear sign that all this violence was basically suicidal. He was on the right path, in a way, Travis in the Taxi Driver. You should have the outburst of violence, and you should direct it at yourself, but in a very specific way -- at what in yourself chains you, ties you to the ruling ideology.
***
Modernization, industrialization, as we know from the history of capitalism, means disintegration of old, stable relations. It means social conflicts. Instability is the way capitalism functions. So how to solve this problem? Simple. You need to generate an ideological narrative which explains how things went wrong in a society,
***
Let me just take some other central concepts of the Nazi world to you. The solidarity of the people. My God, there is nothing bad in this notion as such. The problem is, solidarity to what kind of people? If by people, you mean Volksgemeinschaft, the organic community of people, where then the enemy is automatically the foreign intruder -- in this case, we are in Nazism. The crucial thing is to locate ideology where it belongs.
***
The German hard rock band Rammstein are often accused of flirting, playing with the Nazi militaristic iconography. But if one observes closely their show, one can see very nicely what they are doing, exemplarily in one of their best known songs “Reise, Reise.” The minimal elements of the Nazi ideology enacted by Rammstein are something like pure elements of libidinal investment. Enjoyment has to be, as it were, condensed in some minimal tics, gestures, which do not have any precise ideological meaning. What Rammstein does is it liberates these elements from their Nazi articulations. It allows us to enjoy them in their pre-ideological state. The way to fight Nazism is to enjoy these elements, ridiculous as they may appear, by suspending the Nazi horizon of meaning. This way you undermine Nazism from within.
So how does nonetheless ideology do this? How does it articulate pre-ideological elements? These elements can also be seen as a kind of a bribe. The way ideology pays us to seduce us into its edifice. These bribes can be purely libidinal bribes, all those tics which are condensed enjoyment. Or they can be explicit discursive elements, like notions of solidarity, uh, of collective discipline, struggle for one’s destiny and so on and so on. All these in itself are free-floating elements which open themselves to different ideological fields.
***
We should not simply oppose a principled life dedicated to duty and enjoying our small pleasures....In this opposition between ruthless pursuit of capitalist expansion and ecological awareness, duty – a strange perverted duty, of course -- duty is on the side of capitalism. As many prestigious analysts noted, capitalism has a strange religious structure. It is propelled by this absolute demand: capital has to circulate, to reproduce itself, to expand, to multiply itself. And for this goal, anything can be sacrificed, up to our lives, up to nature and so on. Here we have a strange unconditional injunction. And a true capitalist is a miser who is ready to sacrifice everything for this perverted duty.
What we see here in Mojave Desert at this resting place for abandoned planes is the other side of capitalist dynamics. Capitalism is all the time in crisis. This is precisely why it appears almost indestructible. Crisis is not its obstacle. It is what pushes it forwards towards permanent self-revolutionizing, permanent extended self-reproduction. Always new products. The other invisible side of it is waste. Tremendous amount of waste. We shouldn’t react to these heaps of waste by trying to somehow get rid of it. Maybe the first thing to do is to accept this waste, to accept that there are things out there which serve nothing, to break out of this eternal cycle of functioning.
***
Maybe this also accounts for the redemptive value of post-catastrophic movies, like I Am Legend and so on. We see the devastated human environment, half-empty factories, machines falling apart, half-empty stores.
What we experience at this moment, the psychoanalytic term for it would have been the “inertia of the real.” This mute presence beyond meaning.
What moments like confronting planes here in Mojave Desert bring to us is maybe a chance for an authentic passive experience. Maybe without this properly artistic moment of authentic passivity, nothing new can emerge. Maybe something new only emerges through the failure, the suspension of proper functioning of the existing network of our life work where we are. Maybe this is what we need more than ever today.
***
Every effective political, ideological symbol or symptom has to rely on this dimension of petrified enjoyment, of the frozen grimace of an excessive pleasure in pain.
***
[TITANIC]: What does the wreck of the Titanic stand for? ...First there is what people ironically refer to as James Cameron’s Hollywood Marxism. This ridiculous fake sympathy with lower classes. Up there, first-class passengers, they are mostly all evil, egotistic, cowardly – embodied in Kate Winslet’s fiancé, played by Billy Zane. This whole narrative is sustained by a much more reactionary myth. We should ask what role does the iceberg hitting the ship play in the development of the love story? My claim is here a slightly cynical one. This would have been the true catastrophe. We can imagine how maybe after two, three weeks of intense sex in New York, the love affair would somehow fade away. Kate Winslet is an upper-class girl in psychological distress, confused. Her ego is in shatters. And the function of Leonardo DiCaprio is simply that he helps her to reconstitute her ego. Her self image. Literally, he draws her image.
It’s really a new version of one of the old favorite imperialist myths. The idea being that when the upper-class people lose their vitality, they need a contact with lower classes, basically ruthlessly exploiting them in a vampire-like way, as it were sucking from them the life energy. Revitalized, they can join their secluded upper-class life.
You know, often in history, the event which may appear as a catastrophe saves persons or an idea, elevating it into a myth. Remember the intervention of the Soviet army and other Warsaw Pact armies in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, to strangle the so-called Prague Spring. The attempt of the Czech democratic communists to introduce a more human-faced socialism. Usually we perceive this brutal Soviet intervention as something that destroyed the brief dream of Prague Spring. I think it saved the dream. Either Czechoslovakia would have turned into an ordinary liberal capitalist state, or at a certain point, which was usually the fate of reformist communists, the Communists in power would be obliged to set a certain limit: “Okay, you had your fun, your freedom. That’s enough. Now we again define the limits.” Again, the paradox is that precisely the Soviet intervention saved the dream of the possibility of another communism and so on and so on.
[TITANIC]: So here, again, through the temporal catastrophe, we have a love story which is, as it were, redeemed in its idea, saved for eternity. We can ultimately read the catastrophe as a desperate maneuver to save the illusion of eternal love. But all this which is quite acceptable for our liberal, progressive minds, all this is just a trap. Something to lower our attention threshold, as it were, to open us up to be ready to accept the true conservative message of rich people having the right to revitalize themselves by ruthlessly appropriating the vitality of the poor people. There is a wonderful detail which tells everything. When Kate Winslet notices that Leonardo DiCaprio is dead, she, of course, starts to shout: “I will never let go. I will never let go,” while at the same moment she pushes him off. She is what we may call, ironically, a vanishing mediator.
***
We usually think that military discipline is just a matter of mindlessly following orders. Obeying the rules. You don’t think. You do what is your duty. It’s not as simple as that. If we do this, we just become machines. There has to be something more. This more can have two basic forms. The first more benign form is an ironic distance, best epitomized by the well-known movie and TV series M*A*S*H. Where the military doctors are involved in sexual escapades, make jokes all the time. Some people took Robert Altman’s movie M*A*S*H even as a kind of an antimilitaristic, satiric product, but it’s not. We should always bear in mind that these soldiers with all their practical jokes, making fun of their superiors and so on, operated perfectly as soldiers. They did their duty.
***
[FULL METAL JACKET]: I think that the drill sergeant, the way it is played in an exemplary way in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, that the drill sergeant is rather a tragic figure. I always like to imagine him as the person who, after his work, returns home, is quite decent and so on. All this obscene shouting is just a show put on, not so much to impress ordinary soldiers, whom he is training, as to bribe them with bits of enjoyment.
***
You don’t only have explicit rules. You always, in order to become part of a community, you need some implicit, unwritten rules, which are never publicly recognized, but are absolutely crucial as the point of the identification of a group....
Just think about Lindsay Anderson’s classic If. The public life is democratic. We have professors who interact with their pupils, nice atmosphere, teaching, friendship, spirit of cooperation. But then we all know what happens beneath the surface. Older pupils torturing, sexually abusing the younger. This same mixture of obscenity and sadistic violence. And again, what is crucial here is we should not simply put all the blame or all the enjoyment on the older pupils. The victims are part of this infernal cycle of obscenity. It is as if in order to really be a member of a community, you have to render your hands dirty. And I think that even the Abu Ghraib scandal of American soldiers torturing, or especially humiliating Iraqi prisoners is to be read in this way. It’s not simply we, the arrogant Americans, are humiliating others. What Iraqi soldiers experienced there was the staging of the obscene underside of the American military culture.
***
FULL METAL JACKET]: In Full Metal Jacket, it’s the character of Joker, played by Matthew Modine, who is close to what we would call a normal soldier, a M*A*S*H type of soldier. He has a proper ironic distance. He proves, at the end, militarily, the most efficient soldier. Returning back to me. Why then will I soon shoot myself? Something went wrong there. But what? I did not just run amok. But I got too directly identified with these obscene rituals. I lost the distance. I took them seriously. If you get too close to it, if you over identify with it, if you really immediately become the voice of this superego, it’s self-destructive. You kill people around you. You end up killing yourself.
***
[THE DARK KNIGHT]: The truly disturbing thing about The Dark Knight is that it elevates lie into a general social principle, into the principle of organization of our sociopolitical life. As if our societies can remain stable, can function, only if based on a lie. As if telling the truth – and this telling the truth is embodied in Joker -- means distraction, disintegration of the social order.... At the end, Batman himself takes upon himself the crimes, murders committed by Harvey Dent, the public prosecutor turned criminal,
in order to maintain the trust of the public into the legal system. The idea is if the ordinary public were to learn how corrupted was or is the very core of our legal system, then everything would have collapsed, so we need a lie to maintain order.
***
Let's be frank. We can have a state public system of power as legitimate as you want, submitted to critical press, democratic elections, and so on and so on. Apparently it just serves us. But nonetheless, if you look closely into how even the most democratic state power functions, in order for it to display true authority -- and power needs authority -- there has to be, as it were, between the lines, all the time this message of, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are legalized through elections, but basically we can do with you whatever we want."
***
Let's take Stalinism. Officially, Stalinism was based on atheist Marxist theories. But if we look closely at the subjective experience of a Stalinist political agent, leader, we see that it's not a position of an arrogant master who can do whatever he wants. It's, on the contrary, the position of a perfect servant. In the Stalinist universe there definitely is what in psychoanalytic theory we call "the big Other." This big Other in the Stalinist universe has many names. The best known of them are the necessity of historical progress towards communism, of simply history. History itself is the big Other, history as the necessary succession of historical stages. A Communist experiences himself as simply an instrument whose function is to actualize a historical necessity.
The people, the mythic people whose instrument the totalitarian leader is, are never simply the actually existing individuals, groups of people and so on. It's some kind of imagined idealized point of reference which works even when, for example, in rebellions against the Communist rule, like in Hungary '56, when the large majority of actually-resisting people rises up,
is opposed to the regime. They can still say no. These are just individuals. They are not the true people.... The way to undermine Stalinism is not simply to make fun of the leader, which can be, up to a point, even tolerated. It is to undermine this very reverence, mythic reverence, which legitimizes the Stalinist leader: the people.
This is how I read the, by far, best work of Milos Forman, his early Czech films. Black Peter, The Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman's Ball, where he mocks precisely the ordinary people in their daily conformism, stupidity, egotistic lust and so on and so on. It may appear that this is something very arrogant, but, no. I think that this is the way to undermine the entire structure of the Stalinist universe. To demonstrate, not that leaders are not leaders --They are always ready to say, "Oh, but we are just ordinary people like you." No! That there is no mythic people which serves as the ultimate legitimization.
***
So what is the big Other, this basic element of every ideological edifice? On the one hand, of course, the big Other is the secret order of things. like divine reason, fate or whatever, which is controlling our destiny.
***
A supreme example of this agency of the big Other as the agency of appearance is the prattling busybody .... This precisely is the function of the big Other. We need for our stability a figure of big Other for whom we maintain appearances. So that's the tragedy of our predicament. In order to fully exist as individuals, we need the fiction of a big Other. There must be an agency which, as it were, registers our predicament. An agency where the truth of ourselves will be inscribed, accepted. An agency to which to confess.
But what if there is no such agency? .... There may be a virtual big Other to whom you cannot confess. There may be a real Other, but it's never the virtual one. We are alone.
***
[BRAZIL]: I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, nonreligious man, bureaucracy, state bureaucracy, is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine. It is in this scene from Brazil that we see the intimate link between bureaucracy and enjoyment. What the impenetrable omnipotence of bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment. The intense rush of bureaucratic engagement serves nothing. It is the performance of its very purposelessness that generates an intense enjoyment, ready to reproduce itself forever.
***
In the ordinary theological universe, your duty is imposed onto you by God or society or another higher authority, and your responsibility is to do it. But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, you are also responsible for deciding what is your duty. There is always in our subjectivity, in the way we experience ourselves, a minimum of hysteria. Hysteria is what? Hysteria is the way we question our social, symbolic identity.
[THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST]: What is hysteria at its most elementary? It's a question addressed at the authority which defines my identity. It's "Why am I what you are telling me that I am?" In psychoanalytic theory, hysteria is much more subversive than perversion. A pervert has no uncertainties while, again, the hysterical position is that of a doubt, which is an extremely productive position. All new inventions come from hysterical questioning. And the unique character of Christianity is that it transposes this hysterical questioning onto God himself as a subject....
How did we come to that unique point, which I think makes Christianity an exception? It all began with the Book of Job....
No meaning in catastrophes. Here we have the first step in the direction of delegitimizing suffering. The contrast between Judaism and Christianity is the contrast between anxiety and love. The idea is that the Jewish God is the God of the abyss of the Other's desire. Terrible things happen. God is in charge, but we do not know what the big Other, God, wants from us. What is the divine desire? To designate this traumatic experience, Lacan used the Italian phrase, Che vuoi? "What do you want?" This terrifying question, "But what do you want from me?"
The idea is that Judaism persists in this anxiety, like God remains this enigmatic, terrifying Other. And then Christianity resolves the tension through love. By sacrificing his son, God demonstrates that he loves us. So it's a kind of an imaginary, sentimental, even, resolution of a situation of radical anxiety.
If this were to be the case, then Christianity would have been a kind of ideological reversal or pacification of the deep, much more shattering Jewish insight. But I think one can read the Christian gesture in a much more radical way. This is what the sequence of crucifixion in Scorsese's film shows us. What dies on the cross is precisely this guarantee of the big Other. The message of Christianity is here radically atheist. It's the death of Christ is not any kind of redemption or commercial affair in the sense of Christ suffers to pay for our sins. Pay to whom? For what? and so on. It's simply the disintegration of the God which guarantees the meaning of our lives. And that's the meaning of the famous phrase, Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani. "Father, why have you forsaken me?"
Just before Christ's death, we get what in psychoanalytic terms we call subjective destitution, stepping out totally of the domain of symbolic identification, canceling or suspending the entire field of symbolic authority,
the entire field of the big Other. Of course, we cannot know what God wants from us, because there is no God. This is the Jesus Christ who says, among other things, "I bring sword, not peace." "If you don't hate your father, your mother, you are not my follower." Of course this doesn't mean that you should actively hate or kill your parents. I think that family relations stand here for hierarchic social relations. The message of Christ is, "I'm dying, but my death itself is good news. It means you are alone, left to your freedom.
Be in the Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, which is just the community of believers."
It's wrong to think that the Second Coming will be that Christ as a figure will return somehow. Christ is already here when believers form an emancipatory collective. This is why I claim that the only way really to be an atheist is to go through Christianity. Christianity is much more atheist than the usual atheism, which can claim there is no God and so on. But nonetheless it retains a certain trust into the big Other. This big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution or whatever. We humans are nonetheless reduced to a position within a harmonious whole of evolution, whatever
***
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, 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 sustain them. We are responsible for them....
The first step to freedom is not just to change reality to fit your dreams. It's to change the way you dream. And, again, this hurts, because all satisfactions we have come from our dreams.
***
One of the big problems of all great revolutionary movements of the 20th century, such as Russia, Cuba or China, is that they did change the social body, but the egalitarian communist society was never realized. The dreams remained the old dreams, and they turned into the ultimate nightmare.
Now, what remains of the radical left waits for a magical event when the true revolutionary agent will finally awaken, while the depressing lesson of the last decades is that capitalism has been the true revolutionizing force,
even as it serves only itself.
How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of all life on earth, an asteroid hitting the earth, than a modest change in our economic order? Perhaps the time has come to set our possibilities straight and to become realists by way of demanding what appears as impossible in the economic domain....It depends on us, on our will.
In revolutionary upheavals, some energy, or rather some utopian dreams take place. They explode. And even if the actual result of a social upheaval is just a commercialized everyday life, this excess of energy, what gets lost in the result, persists not in reality but as a dream, haunting us, waiting to be redeemed. In this sense, whenever we are engaged in radical emancipatory politics, we should never forget, as Walter Benjamin put it almost a century ago, that every revolution is not only -- if it is an authentic revolution -- is not only directed towards the future, but it redeems also the past failed revolutions. All the ghosts, as it were, the living dead of the past revolution,
which are roaming around, unsatisfied, will finally find their home in the new freedom.
***
I may be freezing to death, but you will never get rid of me. All the ice in the world cannot kill a true idea.
-- The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, directed by Sophie Fiennes