Friend of PEL Doug Lain has been trying to score an interview with Slavoj Žižek on his Zero Squared podcast for years. Now, some think that Žižek’s stock is in decline, among other reasons because he said he’d vote for Trump if he could. Could he really have been only pretending to be some sort of radical leftist all along? Doug’s got the full story; find out how it all went down here.
Humor and Infinite Responsibility: Can Levinas Use a Little Stand-Up Comedy?
What is infinite responsibility? And can we live with it?
New from the PEL Citizens’ Forum and Not School
It’s December! Time for PEL Citizens to join or propose groups and discussions in the Citizens’ Forum. Guaranteed to make your holidays more enjoyable! Join an existing or proposed Not School group, or create one of your own.
New in Not School: Niebuhr, Kant, Zizek, Lovecraft
We have group proposals for October on the table, including Zizek’s Contingency, Hegemony and Universality, Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The Fiction group will be reading The Call of Cthulhu.
Descartes’s Horror?
Examining Descartes’s Cogito, one can find that rather than philosophy and reason being a shield from horror and madness, the truth might be the opposite.
July’s Not School Groups
This July, our Not School groups are reading Walker Percy, Slavoj Zizek, Aeschylus and Charles S. Peirce. Come join us, and don’t forget the ep. 118 Aftershow coming up on 7/12!
Not School In May: Levinas, Zizek, Heidegger, Murakami, Auslander
Tackle a trendy continental figure, read an intriguing novel, or propose something of your own! Isn’t it time to stop just listening and get in there and actively read & discuss?
Not School Offerings In March
This month features groups on Zizek, Gadamer, Charles Taylor, Paolo Friere, Virginia Woolf and Philip Auslander. Join up with them or propose your own group.
Not School in January
January’s Not School groups are reading Zizek and Diderot. Come join them, or start your own group.
Not School Group Proposal: Zizek!
For March I’m proposing a Not School reading group on Zizek. The group will read a 25-page transcript of a talk he gave at the International Journal of Zizek Studies 2012 conference. It is, I think, a very nice summary of some of his key philosophical positions and where his current theoretical interests lie. The added advantage of this reading Continue Reading …
Not School Digest #4: Sartre, Heidegger, Zizek, Marx, and Theater
Excerpts from discussions on Sartre’s Nausea, Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” Slavoj Zizek’s Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Marx and Engels’s “Communist Manifesto,” Peter Schaffer’s play Equus, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form.
The Existentialist Self in the World: Doubt, Being and Caring
If from continental philosophy you throw out transcendental phenomenology and older idealist trappings–transcendental subjects and so on–you are left with a system which still has two components: the world and the self. It was the relationship between these two that took hold as the major problem for 20th C. continental philosophy. The upshot of the first phase of the “analysis of the Continue Reading …
Not School Discussion of Zizek Now Available
I and four Citizens took a first crack at discussing The Year of Dreaming Dangerously yesterday (read more about our Not School group here). Since Freud and Jung, psychotherapy has been used to try to make sense of group behavior, and Lacan himself applied his insights to the political realm (among other places). Zizek follows in that tradition, doing a Continue Reading …
Not School: Slavoj Zizek’s “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”
Featuring Mark Linsenmayer, Khari Robertson, Philip Cherny, Matt Cole, and Steve Robinson. Recorded October 22, 2013.
Zizek gives a Marxist analysis of the events of 2011 using Lacanian language: Capital is the “real” behind all of these various conflicts that seem to be between individual groups. Capitalism is never itself confronted as a system, but serves as the underlying force and the principle by which this force itself is made invisible to us.
More October Not School Groups: Zizek, Heidegger, Metzinger, Octavia Butler
Now that the government of the United States has finally shut down, the time is ripe for some revolutionary ideology. October’s Not School activities offer at least two reading groups that should aid in that concern. One is a brand new group which will be reading The Year of Dreaming Dangerously by none other than that superstar philosopher whose nose Continue Reading …
The Digitization of the Real
“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte [From Sotiris Triantis] In a previous article here on the PEL blog ‘Don’t Act. Just Think’: A Short Comment on Slavoj Zizek’s Critique of Activism, I argued that thinking is not enough in order to effect radical change in collective Continue Reading …
‘Don’t Act. Just Think’: A short comment on Slavoj Zizek’s critique of Activism
[From Sotiris Triantis] Slavoj Zizek – in a video titled ‘Don’t Act. Just Think’ – suggests that in the social and political realm we should not act but think. It’s an odd, somewhat counter-revolutionary thesis. Historical change has always been brought about by collective action. A more useful model might be: ‘First Think, Then Act’. When Noam Chomsky was Continue Reading …
Chomsky vs. Zizek
Editor’s Note: We feel the need to provide some coverage of one of the few big news stories in philosophy, which is the ongoing hostile exchange between two giants of the philosophical left, Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek. Since none of us podcasters has read much by either fellow or has much patience for following this story, I’ve asked PEL Continue Reading …
Zizek! – The Elvis of Cultural Theory [Review]
Zizek! is one of those documentaries centered around one really, really interesting person. For that reason it’s more like Crumb or Bukowski – Born Into This than more famously philosophical movies like Waking Life. Zizek!’s structure is simple: The director and a small crew simply follow Slavoj Zizek as he goes about his daily business, which pretty much amounts to him walking Continue Reading …
Marxist Thought Today
The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) seemed to herald the victory of capitalism over socialism, what Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History;” the failure and death of both Marxist thought and political movements. Fukuyama, an eloquent Hegelian political philosopher and one-time neoconservative (and continued anti-Marxist) asserts uncompromisingly in his “End of History” essay that ideology, not economics or Continue Reading …