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Philosophy in Transit #2
Event: Philosophy in Transit
Probably the most famous living philosopher, Slavoj Žižek explores the concept of 'event', in the second in this new series of easily digestible philosophy
What is really happening when something happens?
In the second in a new series of accessible, commute-length books of original thought, Slavoj Žižek, one of the world's greatest living philosophers, examines the new and highly-contested concept of Event.
An Event can be an occurrence that shatters ordinary life, a radical political rupture, a transformation of reality, a religious belief, the rise of a new art form, or an intense experience such as falling in love. Taking us on a trip which stops at different definitions of Event, Žižek addresses fundamental questions such as: are all things connected? How much are we agents of our own fates? Which conditions must be met for us to perceive something as really existing? In a world that's constantly changing, is anything new really happening? Drawing on references from Plato to arthouse cinema, the Big Bang to Buddhism, Event is a journey into philosophy at its most exciting and elementary.
What is really happening when something happens?
In the second in a new series of accessible, commute-length books of original thought, Slavoj Žižek, one of the world's greatest living philosophers, examines the new and highly-contested concept of Event.
An Event can be an occurrence that shatters ordinary life, a radical political rupture, a transformation of reality, a religious belief, the rise of a new art form, or an intense experience such as falling in love. Taking us on a trip which stops at different definitions of Event, Žižek addresses fundamental questions such as: are all things connected? How much are we agents of our own fates? Which conditions must be met for us to perceive something as really existing? In a world that's constantly changing, is anything new really happening? Drawing on references from Plato to arthouse cinema, the Big Bang to Buddhism, Event is a journey into philosophy at its most exciting and elementary.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
204 people are currently reading
2064 people want to read
About the author
Slavoj Žižek
633 books7,503 followersSlavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 138 reviews
January 1, 2015
If--accidentially--an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable.
After being left dazed and winded by Carlo Ginzburg's gumshoe pilgrimage, I needed a return to simply thinking. Žižek provided that sufficiently. He divines the philosophical substrata for the evolutionary entity of the Eventin a host of different realizations. All of his favorite influences are visited: Lacan, Hegel, Descartes and Marx. The text felt simply invigorating, as thinking was brought to the fore, apparently it exhales as well, brisk in the frozen air. We discussed Von Trier's Melancholia, Zero Dark-Thirty, Tree of Life and a great deal of Agatha Christie and G.K Chesterton.
After being left dazed and winded by Carlo Ginzburg's gumshoe pilgrimage, I needed a return to simply thinking. Žižek provided that sufficiently. He divines the philosophical substrata for the evolutionary entity of the Eventin a host of different realizations. All of his favorite influences are visited: Lacan, Hegel, Descartes and Marx. The text felt simply invigorating, as thinking was brought to the fore, apparently it exhales as well, brisk in the frozen air. We discussed Von Trier's Melancholia, Zero Dark-Thirty, Tree of Life and a great deal of Agatha Christie and G.K Chesterton.
April 11, 2015
Slavoj Žižek has an associative rather than an analytical mind. He is alert to similarities and resonances but is less concerned about logical consistency or narrative coherence. As a result, this book is filled with interesting ideas and images that cluster but don’t quite connect. One gets the impression that the text was written in a hurry with thoughts tumbling in from all directions. Žižek gave everything a quick dusting and straightening, then left the text to fend for itself (or for the reader to fend for it on Žižek’s behalf). In other words, Žižek has done only part of the job. This is unfortunate because there can be no doubt Žižek has a wealthy mind; however, his writing, instead of being rich, is cluttered.
The theme of the book is the “Event” which is defined early on as “the effect that seems to exceed its cause”. So far, so good. The word is capitalized because it stands for something bigger than expected. There is a gap between what we thought we knew – the causes – and what we now know – the effect. This gap alerts us to the fact that something significant has occurred – the Event.
Our understanding of the Event is enhanced when Žižek suggests that “the ultimate Event is the [Biblical] Fall itself, the loss of some primordial unity and harmony which never existed, which is just a retroactive illusion”. At first glance this statement is puzzling. How can an Event consist of the loss of something that did not exist? The answer is – it can’t. The statement is, in a way, a teaser.
Žižek explains that the Fall – and presumably any other Event – reveals retrospectively the character of the pre-Event conditions. It sheds light on what went before but in a special way since the revealed characteristics were not truly knowable until after the Event. In a sense, the Event creates that preceding reality. In the case of the Fall, the preceding reality is a mythical situation of “primordial unity and harmony”. In non-mythical cases, something important about the pre-existing temporal reality is revealed.
The idea here is contorted but recognizable. An Event has an unexpected character – out of proportion to its apparent causes – while, at the same time, it demonstrates retrospectively that the conditions prior to the Event were other than they seemed to be at the time – or, at least, they have become so as a consequence of the Event. This revision of the pre-Event conditions does not explain the Event but it does illuminate both time periods. The Event sends ripples both forwards and backwards.
One example, cited by Žižek, will suffice. Any truly new work of art will change how preceding works of art are seen. The Event of Kafka’s writing changes our understanding of earlier writing while also affecting writing which takes place after Kafka. This idea is not new to Žižek – he cites T.S. Eliot and Borges in support – but a key point in the present context is that this Janus-faced aspect of an Event is not restricted to art. It can be generalized to other occurrences which may qualify as Events: falling in love, the establishment of a new religion, the introduction of a new philosophical concept, a political revolution.
The special nature of these kinds of occurrences on a personal or social level is easy to accept. And the double-sided temporal effect is also understandable. The difficulty is that in order to get this far, Žižek forces us to machete our way through a jungle of references to Lacan, Rumsfeld, Hegel, Heidegger, Hawking, Hitchcock, Plato and Descartes – Chesterton, Kierkegaard, Augustine, Wagner, Malebranche, Marx, Lenin, Habermas – and many others. Not to mention Buddhism.
Life shouldn’t be that hard.
And then it gets worse. Just when you believe you are catching on to this Event thing, Žižek throws in a zinger that puts it all at risk. Marriage – true love consecrated for eternity – is an undoubted Event. Except when it isn’t. If, perchance, your marriage hits the rocks and you get divorced then, according to Žižek, your marriage was never a marriage in the first place. It wasn’t true love consecrated for eternity since it didn’t last for eternity. And, hence, it could never actually have been an Event.
This suggestion has unpleasant consequences.
Presumably, this analysis applies to all other Events which are subject to the ravages of Time – meaning (potentially) all of them. So, while Žižek doesn’t say this, it follows that no Event can be known definitively to be an Event until the universe comes to an end. Prior to that point it can only be viewed as a contingent (and possibly erasable) Event. And after that point – after the end of the universe – who will know the final answer? Or care?
It is difficult to accept this as a helpful or even meaningful perspective. Divorce or any other subsequent occurrence may have consequences for how an Event is viewed but it cannot dissolve that Event and restore the pre-Event conditions. That is, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, childish nonsense. A four year old might huff and say that the Event never-ever counted but an adult knows better. Contrary to Žižek’s suggestion the outcome of this sequence is two Events, not none.
This retroactive cancellation opportunity is but one example of the non-sequiturs and curious-but-irrelevant asides that are scattered through the pages of this book. As noted above, Žižek is an associative rather than an analytical thinker. He casts his net wide, captures many shiny things, but his ideas often do not connect. This may be intentional on his part. It is conceivable that he is purposely reserving to himself the right to slip through the holes in his argument. But that is nothing to applaud.
Clarity is a virtue. A false simplicity in the guise of clarity is not. Žižek provides us with neither. He has a mind that gathers ideas like burrs. To the extent that he wishes to communicate effectively, it would be better if he could sort through what he has collected and exercise some analytical judgment before releasing a text to the public.
The theme of the book is the “Event” which is defined early on as “the effect that seems to exceed its cause”. So far, so good. The word is capitalized because it stands for something bigger than expected. There is a gap between what we thought we knew – the causes – and what we now know – the effect. This gap alerts us to the fact that something significant has occurred – the Event.
Our understanding of the Event is enhanced when Žižek suggests that “the ultimate Event is the [Biblical] Fall itself, the loss of some primordial unity and harmony which never existed, which is just a retroactive illusion”. At first glance this statement is puzzling. How can an Event consist of the loss of something that did not exist? The answer is – it can’t. The statement is, in a way, a teaser.
Žižek explains that the Fall – and presumably any other Event – reveals retrospectively the character of the pre-Event conditions. It sheds light on what went before but in a special way since the revealed characteristics were not truly knowable until after the Event. In a sense, the Event creates that preceding reality. In the case of the Fall, the preceding reality is a mythical situation of “primordial unity and harmony”. In non-mythical cases, something important about the pre-existing temporal reality is revealed.
The idea here is contorted but recognizable. An Event has an unexpected character – out of proportion to its apparent causes – while, at the same time, it demonstrates retrospectively that the conditions prior to the Event were other than they seemed to be at the time – or, at least, they have become so as a consequence of the Event. This revision of the pre-Event conditions does not explain the Event but it does illuminate both time periods. The Event sends ripples both forwards and backwards.
One example, cited by Žižek, will suffice. Any truly new work of art will change how preceding works of art are seen. The Event of Kafka’s writing changes our understanding of earlier writing while also affecting writing which takes place after Kafka. This idea is not new to Žižek – he cites T.S. Eliot and Borges in support – but a key point in the present context is that this Janus-faced aspect of an Event is not restricted to art. It can be generalized to other occurrences which may qualify as Events: falling in love, the establishment of a new religion, the introduction of a new philosophical concept, a political revolution.
The special nature of these kinds of occurrences on a personal or social level is easy to accept. And the double-sided temporal effect is also understandable. The difficulty is that in order to get this far, Žižek forces us to machete our way through a jungle of references to Lacan, Rumsfeld, Hegel, Heidegger, Hawking, Hitchcock, Plato and Descartes – Chesterton, Kierkegaard, Augustine, Wagner, Malebranche, Marx, Lenin, Habermas – and many others. Not to mention Buddhism.
Life shouldn’t be that hard.
And then it gets worse. Just when you believe you are catching on to this Event thing, Žižek throws in a zinger that puts it all at risk. Marriage – true love consecrated for eternity – is an undoubted Event. Except when it isn’t. If, perchance, your marriage hits the rocks and you get divorced then, according to Žižek, your marriage was never a marriage in the first place. It wasn’t true love consecrated for eternity since it didn’t last for eternity. And, hence, it could never actually have been an Event.
This suggestion has unpleasant consequences.
Presumably, this analysis applies to all other Events which are subject to the ravages of Time – meaning (potentially) all of them. So, while Žižek doesn’t say this, it follows that no Event can be known definitively to be an Event until the universe comes to an end. Prior to that point it can only be viewed as a contingent (and possibly erasable) Event. And after that point – after the end of the universe – who will know the final answer? Or care?
It is difficult to accept this as a helpful or even meaningful perspective. Divorce or any other subsequent occurrence may have consequences for how an Event is viewed but it cannot dissolve that Event and restore the pre-Event conditions. That is, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, childish nonsense. A four year old might huff and say that the Event never-ever counted but an adult knows better. Contrary to Žižek’s suggestion the outcome of this sequence is two Events, not none.
This retroactive cancellation opportunity is but one example of the non-sequiturs and curious-but-irrelevant asides that are scattered through the pages of this book. As noted above, Žižek is an associative rather than an analytical thinker. He casts his net wide, captures many shiny things, but his ideas often do not connect. This may be intentional on his part. It is conceivable that he is purposely reserving to himself the right to slip through the holes in his argument. But that is nothing to applaud.
Clarity is a virtue. A false simplicity in the guise of clarity is not. Žižek provides us with neither. He has a mind that gathers ideas like burrs. To the extent that he wishes to communicate effectively, it would be better if he could sort through what he has collected and exercise some analytical judgment before releasing a text to the public.
December 1, 2015
Defining the Event
1 December 2012
I'm not sure why, but for some reason I seem to want to compare Zizek with Noam Chomsky. I guess the reason is that both authors have brought me around to a new way of thinking that not many other authors have done so in the past. However I'm not sure if you can really compare the two, considering that Chomsky is a political theorist while Zizek is more of a psychoanalyst. Where Chomsky explores the reality behind the political sphere, Zizek seems to be more concerned with the reality behind the social sphere. Also, Zizek has the ability to make me laugh, whereas Chomsky is always so serious.
Anyway, I hadn't had the opportunity of reading any Zizek for a while, so while I was exploring a bookshop, with the intention of writing a Yelp review on the place (I like writing reviews on bookshops, though I try to resist the temptation since it means that I have to buy more books) I decided to grab a couple of his books that I could read on the train on the way to work. This happened to be one of them (though the one that I wanted unfortunately wasn't available – might have to get it online).
The thing with Zizek is that he can actually be quite profound in some of his writings, though he can also be really confusing. In fact it is quite odd because I will be reading a part of the book, scratching my head, trying to work out what he is trying he is saying (since he is using some really complex philosophical statements) when all of a sudden you I have this intense revelation.
Event is, well, a book about the concept of the Event. It is sort of like trying to define an abstract noun. Actually, as I was reading this I came to realise how difficult it is to define an abstract noun. I guess that is why a bunch of Greeks sat in a house 2500 years ago arguing about what love was (and not actually reaching a conclusion). That is the thing with abstract nouns – they really don't have a definition: define love, define happiness, define anger – and do it in a hundred words or less. Okay, you probably could say that happiness is when I am happy or anger is when I am angry, but that is little more than circular reasoning and never actually answers anything. The same goes with an event, though having thought about it for most of the day I have decided upon a better definition than 'something happens'. I would define an event as being an action or a state that causes an irreversible change. For instance, a junkie robs a service station – that is an event because it is an action of the junkie that changes the state of the victim, and the junkie him (or her) self. After committing that robbery there is no way that the Junkie can erase or remove that action – it has happened and it remains permanently in the mind of the victim and the junkie.
As with most of Zizek's books I ended up having to take quite a few notes as I was making my way through it, namely because he does have a habit of packing a huge amount of stuff into his writings. Hey, my review of Living in the End Times was so long that Goodreads couldn't contain it all in one post (and as of this writing I have yet to fix it up – when I get around to it I am going to try and condense it and move the full review onto my blog. Anyway I'll try not to do that with this post though, but rather I will discuss a couple of things that I got out of this book (and I am not going to refer to my notes on this review).
The Fantasy Reality
Like it or not, we here in the western World effectively live in a fantasy. This fantasy isn't just shaped by all of the rubbish that pours out of our television set, but it also is created by our interactions over the internet. For instance I found this awesome video called The Top Ten Ways Facebook Messes with our Head. That's the thing with Facebook – we create this idealised picture of ourself that isn't actually true. In fact what it does it is portrays a fantasy image of ourselves. Look, don't get me wrong, I find Facebook to be a very useful tool, however in other ways I actually hate it. Sure, it is another form of social media, but the thing with Facebook is that you are generally limited only to people that you know. Also, your friends can actually have an influence upon what you post, meaning that you will only ever post things that your friends will like, if only for fear of them unfriending you.
However, the other thing about this world of ours is that we have dreams. Due to the fact that we are actually really, really, wealthy here means that we can plan and do things. We set our aspirations high, and in many cases we don't care about what our actions might do to others. We walk into a department store and purchase clothes, without realising, or even caring about, how these clothes actually got to the store. We let ourselves become entranced by the advertising industry, believing that if we were to spend money on something then our lives would be better. In fact the self-help industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that simply peddles one slogan – believe in yourself. As a matter of fact I'm starting to get sick of people repeatedly posting such slogans onto Facebook (though I have to say that I really don't like unfriending people – I've have only done that a couple of times, and that is namely because they were scams).
The thing about events is that they have this tendency of piercing the fantasy veil that we put around ourselves, such as 9/11 or the Paris Attacks. When something horrific happens, it destroys the fantasy that we have created around ourselves, and in response we give up our freedoms bit by bit so that we may begin to rebuild that fantasy. We want this world to be a nice and pleasant place in which to live, and we simply do not want bad things to happen to us, because if they do, it undermines that false sense of security that we have created around ourselves.
The Fall of Humanity
I have to say that I don't necessarily agree with everything Zizek says, however he seems to have this very interesting understanding of the nature of Christianity. Mind you, I suspect that his interpretation is a much more post-modernist view than many Christians will be comfortable with, but in a number of cases I do believe he makes some valid points. However, the idea of creation being God wanting recognition doesn't work all that well with me because it is basically using human psychoanalysis to attempt to understand the actions of God – it doesn't work simply because God isn't human, God is God.
However, the interesting thing that Zizek points out is that there are two major events in the Bible: the Fall and the Redemption. The fall, in a way, is when that fantasy world comes crashing down and all we are left with is the reality of the situation in which we live. I believe that the idea of the fall in the Bible can give us a great understanding of how we exist within the fantasy realm that is Western Society. In some cases bad things happen, but we are able to reverse that situation to rebuild our fantasy – our house burns down and the insurance company pays for a new one and soon enough that event is a distant memory. By definition, the house burning down isn't actually an Event. An Event would be more like a divorce, or a car accident that leaves us permanently disabled. Our world has been drastically changed and there is no turning back. However while the car accident may be an Event, the divorce isn't necessarily the case – it is the result of a previous Event. It is the same way with the fall: the Event wasn't the expulsion from the garden, it was the result of the event when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. What they had done set about a chain of events that create an irreversible state.
The other Event that Zizek discusses is the redemption, or Christ's death on the cross. This was a conscious action of God that doesn't necessarily undo the effect of the fall – that was irreversible – but rather sets up a new chain of events that changes the nature of God's relationship to us. Many Christian pastors have spoken about how the concept of God being a judgemental God in the Old Testament and a loving God in the New Testament is wrong, but I not entirely sure if I agree with them any more. I'm sure we have all met somebody who simply hates mess, and hates it with a passion, to the point that they will automatically clean up anything that is out of place; or the person that will befriend somebody right up until the point they do something the don't like and they will never speak to them again. Well, that is sort of what God is like – he hates sin, and he hates rebellion, and whenever somebody rebels he wants to wipe that out. This is why the ancient cultures were always trying to pacify God with sacrifices because they knew that if they didn't then God would kill them. However, in comes Christ, God in the flesh. Christ is infinite as God is infinite, and by becoming the subject of all of God's wrath through his death on the Cross, he is able to be the focus – the magnet if you will – for all that anger, which is why in the New Testament you suddenly discover a loving God. Having dealt with his anger against humanity, he is now able to have a relationship with us, which he wasn't able to do before.
The Wound
Zizek really makes me want to write an awful lot, but there is one last thing that I wish to talk about before I finish this off: the idea of the wound. Okay, many of us would love our wounds to be healed, and for the Events of our past to be undone, but the reality is that is not going to happen. For instance I simply cannot go back to my childhood and say to my friends, when we were in his computer shed, “let's create a Window's operating system” as opposed to “let's play adventure games” - the choices that I made, and the path that I took are set, and I have to live with them. In fact our wounds make us what we are. Sure, if my friends and I created a Windows operating system in our parent's back shed we might be billionaires, but I wouldn't be sitting here at 11:30 at night, writing about Zizek – I know what I would rather be doing (and no, it's not being a billionaire – I have no desire to have that much wealth).
Zizek loves to use modern pop culture in his examples, and I will do the same. In Star Trek V the crew of the Enterprise encounter this alien masquerading as God, and to show his power he goes and removes the crews' pain. However Kirk resists, saying that he would rather live with his pain because his pain is what makes him who he is – it defines him. Sure, the paraplegic probably would love to be able to walk like everybody else, but there is a thing about their condition that makes them who they are, and if they weren't in that situation, then maybe there would be things about them that would be different – maybe that influence that they had will not come about.
I mentioned at the beginning that Zizek was a psychoanalyst. It made me think about modern medicine and how we seem to want to treat mental disorders with drugs. It sort of reminds me of how the medieval doctors would treat diseases. They believed that disease was an imbalance of chemicals in the system, and would cure diseases by rebalancing the chemicals through methods such as bleeding. These days we consider it to be barbaric, but isn't that what we are doing with depression? To us depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain, so we deal with it by giving the brain happy drugs. Okay, I'm no expert on depression, but sometimes I feel that we simply resort to drugs to solve all of our problems in the same way that medieval doctors resorted to leeches. My realisation, at the end of this book, was maybe that the solution to our wounds is not to try to heal them, but to learn to live with them, and to rejoice in that which we have become because of them.
1 December 2012
I'm not sure why, but for some reason I seem to want to compare Zizek with Noam Chomsky. I guess the reason is that both authors have brought me around to a new way of thinking that not many other authors have done so in the past. However I'm not sure if you can really compare the two, considering that Chomsky is a political theorist while Zizek is more of a psychoanalyst. Where Chomsky explores the reality behind the political sphere, Zizek seems to be more concerned with the reality behind the social sphere. Also, Zizek has the ability to make me laugh, whereas Chomsky is always so serious.
Anyway, I hadn't had the opportunity of reading any Zizek for a while, so while I was exploring a bookshop, with the intention of writing a Yelp review on the place (I like writing reviews on bookshops, though I try to resist the temptation since it means that I have to buy more books) I decided to grab a couple of his books that I could read on the train on the way to work. This happened to be one of them (though the one that I wanted unfortunately wasn't available – might have to get it online).
The thing with Zizek is that he can actually be quite profound in some of his writings, though he can also be really confusing. In fact it is quite odd because I will be reading a part of the book, scratching my head, trying to work out what he is trying he is saying (since he is using some really complex philosophical statements) when all of a sudden you I have this intense revelation.
Event is, well, a book about the concept of the Event. It is sort of like trying to define an abstract noun. Actually, as I was reading this I came to realise how difficult it is to define an abstract noun. I guess that is why a bunch of Greeks sat in a house 2500 years ago arguing about what love was (and not actually reaching a conclusion). That is the thing with abstract nouns – they really don't have a definition: define love, define happiness, define anger – and do it in a hundred words or less. Okay, you probably could say that happiness is when I am happy or anger is when I am angry, but that is little more than circular reasoning and never actually answers anything. The same goes with an event, though having thought about it for most of the day I have decided upon a better definition than 'something happens'. I would define an event as being an action or a state that causes an irreversible change. For instance, a junkie robs a service station – that is an event because it is an action of the junkie that changes the state of the victim, and the junkie him (or her) self. After committing that robbery there is no way that the Junkie can erase or remove that action – it has happened and it remains permanently in the mind of the victim and the junkie.
As with most of Zizek's books I ended up having to take quite a few notes as I was making my way through it, namely because he does have a habit of packing a huge amount of stuff into his writings. Hey, my review of Living in the End Times was so long that Goodreads couldn't contain it all in one post (and as of this writing I have yet to fix it up – when I get around to it I am going to try and condense it and move the full review onto my blog. Anyway I'll try not to do that with this post though, but rather I will discuss a couple of things that I got out of this book (and I am not going to refer to my notes on this review).
The Fantasy Reality
Like it or not, we here in the western World effectively live in a fantasy. This fantasy isn't just shaped by all of the rubbish that pours out of our television set, but it also is created by our interactions over the internet. For instance I found this awesome video called The Top Ten Ways Facebook Messes with our Head. That's the thing with Facebook – we create this idealised picture of ourself that isn't actually true. In fact what it does it is portrays a fantasy image of ourselves. Look, don't get me wrong, I find Facebook to be a very useful tool, however in other ways I actually hate it. Sure, it is another form of social media, but the thing with Facebook is that you are generally limited only to people that you know. Also, your friends can actually have an influence upon what you post, meaning that you will only ever post things that your friends will like, if only for fear of them unfriending you.
However, the other thing about this world of ours is that we have dreams. Due to the fact that we are actually really, really, wealthy here means that we can plan and do things. We set our aspirations high, and in many cases we don't care about what our actions might do to others. We walk into a department store and purchase clothes, without realising, or even caring about, how these clothes actually got to the store. We let ourselves become entranced by the advertising industry, believing that if we were to spend money on something then our lives would be better. In fact the self-help industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that simply peddles one slogan – believe in yourself. As a matter of fact I'm starting to get sick of people repeatedly posting such slogans onto Facebook (though I have to say that I really don't like unfriending people – I've have only done that a couple of times, and that is namely because they were scams).
The thing about events is that they have this tendency of piercing the fantasy veil that we put around ourselves, such as 9/11 or the Paris Attacks. When something horrific happens, it destroys the fantasy that we have created around ourselves, and in response we give up our freedoms bit by bit so that we may begin to rebuild that fantasy. We want this world to be a nice and pleasant place in which to live, and we simply do not want bad things to happen to us, because if they do, it undermines that false sense of security that we have created around ourselves.
The Fall of Humanity
I have to say that I don't necessarily agree with everything Zizek says, however he seems to have this very interesting understanding of the nature of Christianity. Mind you, I suspect that his interpretation is a much more post-modernist view than many Christians will be comfortable with, but in a number of cases I do believe he makes some valid points. However, the idea of creation being God wanting recognition doesn't work all that well with me because it is basically using human psychoanalysis to attempt to understand the actions of God – it doesn't work simply because God isn't human, God is God.
However, the interesting thing that Zizek points out is that there are two major events in the Bible: the Fall and the Redemption. The fall, in a way, is when that fantasy world comes crashing down and all we are left with is the reality of the situation in which we live. I believe that the idea of the fall in the Bible can give us a great understanding of how we exist within the fantasy realm that is Western Society. In some cases bad things happen, but we are able to reverse that situation to rebuild our fantasy – our house burns down and the insurance company pays for a new one and soon enough that event is a distant memory. By definition, the house burning down isn't actually an Event. An Event would be more like a divorce, or a car accident that leaves us permanently disabled. Our world has been drastically changed and there is no turning back. However while the car accident may be an Event, the divorce isn't necessarily the case – it is the result of a previous Event. It is the same way with the fall: the Event wasn't the expulsion from the garden, it was the result of the event when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. What they had done set about a chain of events that create an irreversible state.
The other Event that Zizek discusses is the redemption, or Christ's death on the cross. This was a conscious action of God that doesn't necessarily undo the effect of the fall – that was irreversible – but rather sets up a new chain of events that changes the nature of God's relationship to us. Many Christian pastors have spoken about how the concept of God being a judgemental God in the Old Testament and a loving God in the New Testament is wrong, but I not entirely sure if I agree with them any more. I'm sure we have all met somebody who simply hates mess, and hates it with a passion, to the point that they will automatically clean up anything that is out of place; or the person that will befriend somebody right up until the point they do something the don't like and they will never speak to them again. Well, that is sort of what God is like – he hates sin, and he hates rebellion, and whenever somebody rebels he wants to wipe that out. This is why the ancient cultures were always trying to pacify God with sacrifices because they knew that if they didn't then God would kill them. However, in comes Christ, God in the flesh. Christ is infinite as God is infinite, and by becoming the subject of all of God's wrath through his death on the Cross, he is able to be the focus – the magnet if you will – for all that anger, which is why in the New Testament you suddenly discover a loving God. Having dealt with his anger against humanity, he is now able to have a relationship with us, which he wasn't able to do before.
The Wound
Zizek really makes me want to write an awful lot, but there is one last thing that I wish to talk about before I finish this off: the idea of the wound. Okay, many of us would love our wounds to be healed, and for the Events of our past to be undone, but the reality is that is not going to happen. For instance I simply cannot go back to my childhood and say to my friends, when we were in his computer shed, “let's create a Window's operating system” as opposed to “let's play adventure games” - the choices that I made, and the path that I took are set, and I have to live with them. In fact our wounds make us what we are. Sure, if my friends and I created a Windows operating system in our parent's back shed we might be billionaires, but I wouldn't be sitting here at 11:30 at night, writing about Zizek – I know what I would rather be doing (and no, it's not being a billionaire – I have no desire to have that much wealth).
Zizek loves to use modern pop culture in his examples, and I will do the same. In Star Trek V the crew of the Enterprise encounter this alien masquerading as God, and to show his power he goes and removes the crews' pain. However Kirk resists, saying that he would rather live with his pain because his pain is what makes him who he is – it defines him. Sure, the paraplegic probably would love to be able to walk like everybody else, but there is a thing about their condition that makes them who they are, and if they weren't in that situation, then maybe there would be things about them that would be different – maybe that influence that they had will not come about.
I mentioned at the beginning that Zizek was a psychoanalyst. It made me think about modern medicine and how we seem to want to treat mental disorders with drugs. It sort of reminds me of how the medieval doctors would treat diseases. They believed that disease was an imbalance of chemicals in the system, and would cure diseases by rebalancing the chemicals through methods such as bleeding. These days we consider it to be barbaric, but isn't that what we are doing with depression? To us depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain, so we deal with it by giving the brain happy drugs. Okay, I'm no expert on depression, but sometimes I feel that we simply resort to drugs to solve all of our problems in the same way that medieval doctors resorted to leeches. My realisation, at the end of this book, was maybe that the solution to our wounds is not to try to heal them, but to learn to live with them, and to rejoice in that which we have become because of them.
March 11, 2015
I picked up Slavoj Zizek’s new book, Event, next to the cash register in the gift shop at the Tate Britain. Philosophy is an impulse buy at the Tate Britain. In this book Zizek takes seriously the theme of the Penguin book series "Philosophy in Transit" in which this is the second volume. His entry in the series is structured as a sequence of stops on a commuter rail line, as if a rapid reader could gobble up each chapter between stops. This may be possible for Zizek, the self-described "manic excessive," but the rest of us shouldn't despair at not finishing the book by the time we get to Central London. This book worked very well as a travel book for me, though, fitting into a side pocket of my jacket.
Zizek dashes off the key concept of the book between sentences headed elsewhere: " . . . an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes - and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its cause." This is a very good place to start. Hume is nowhere mentioned in the book, nor is Sextus Empiricus, but this definition is worthy of the sceptical tradition of these two. Yes, the Event as gap is a very good place to start. This idea may even go further than the author thinks.
His "stops" are:
1) Framing
2) Felix Culpa
3) Buddhism Naturalized
4) Three Events of Philosophy (Plato, Descartes, and Hegel)
5) The Three Events of Psychoanalysis (the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary)
6) The Undoing of an Event, and
7) Final Destination: "Nota Bene!"
I will present a couple of thoughts about two of these. First, on Buddhism: Zizek is famous for his debunking of Buddhism. In general he follows Nietzsche’s well-worn path in this. He combines the profane with the sacred: he hurtles along from the "Stamina Training Unit" (You will have to read it for yourself. I was howling . . .) to finally arrive at his Buddhism critique; or what he thinks is his Buddhism critique, for in "Buddhism" he initially lumps all sorts of New Age philosophies that have nothing to do with Reverend Gotama’s stories from the Pali Canon.
He shows some familiarity with the First Discourse, which contains the core of Gotama’s ethical theory, but starts his critique with the Second Discourse, on the anatta doctrine. He quite rightly, to my mind, defends free will against deterministic fantasies from both Buddhism and philosophers allied with the “cognitive science” strain of contemporary philosophy. The Churchlands are specifically named, who he says “claim that we are not biologically wired to our everyday self-understanding as free autonomous Selves.” Zizek, of course, is a “self” guy, as a follower of Freud and Lacan. He accuses the no-self crowd, including both the naturalized science philosophers and the Buddhists, of “implicit naivety.”
Zizek addresses the First Discourse when he says that Buddhism is concerned with solving the problem of suffering, “ . . . so its first axiom is: we don’t want to suffer. (For a Freudian, this already is problematic and far from self-evident (sic) – not only on account of some obscure masochism, but on account of the deep satisfaction brought about by passionate attachment.” He accuses Buddhism of inconsistency: “But a problem arises here: if moderate good acts (the elementary morality with which Buddhist practice begins) help us to get rid of our excessive attachments, is it not the case that, when we reach Nirvana, we should be able to perform even brutal evil acts in such a way that leave no traces, because we perform them at a distance?” Well, no, actually this seems to be a non-sequitur, at least to this reader. There is no reason to think that an arhat who had achieved Nirvana would forget the First Discourse once he got there.
But it also seems to me that Zizek has come closer to a puzzling truth of Reverend Gotama’s doctrine than he realizes. For isn’t the Event, as he defines it as the gap between cause and effect, the exact spot of Gotama’s Nirvana? If not Gotama’s Nirvana, then surely Dogen’s Nirvana! For isn’t this the place of being “un-conditioned?” Zizek’s Event is intended, it seems, in a Hegelian sense: it is a moment in time which changes the course of future events. Dogen’s Event is a stop in time, an eternal moment, but an Event all the same, by Zizek’s original definition.
Another stop in Zizek's commute throws off a hint into his answer to a question around which he often hovers, but doesn’t always state clearly: Why did the Communist project of the Twentieth Century fail? He says, “The Chinese Cultural Revolution serves as a lesson here: destroying old monuments proved not to be a true negation of the past. Rather it was an impotent passage a l’acte, an ‘acting out’ which bore witness to the failure to get rid of the past.” The reason the Communist regimes of the Twentieth Century failed to achieve communism is because they recapitulated structures of dominance from the previous bourgeois and even feudal periods of history. Not a bad explanation.
Or was it because they never had a good idea of the goal to begin with? Zizek actually states pretty well what that goal should have been: “Imagine a society which fully integrated into its ethical substance the great modern axioms of freedom, equality, the duty of society to provide for education and basic healthcare of all it's members, and which rendered racism or sexism simply unacceptable and ridiculous – there is no need even to argue against, say racism, since anyone who openly advocates racism is immediately perceived as a weird eccentric who cannot be taken seriously.” This flushes out Marx’s “from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs” with some basic safeguards to human dignity. This seems like a pretty good place to end up.
Zizek dashes off the key concept of the book between sentences headed elsewhere: " . . . an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes - and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its cause." This is a very good place to start. Hume is nowhere mentioned in the book, nor is Sextus Empiricus, but this definition is worthy of the sceptical tradition of these two. Yes, the Event as gap is a very good place to start. This idea may even go further than the author thinks.
His "stops" are:
1) Framing
2) Felix Culpa
3) Buddhism Naturalized
4) Three Events of Philosophy (Plato, Descartes, and Hegel)
5) The Three Events of Psychoanalysis (the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary)
6) The Undoing of an Event, and
7) Final Destination: "Nota Bene!"
I will present a couple of thoughts about two of these. First, on Buddhism: Zizek is famous for his debunking of Buddhism. In general he follows Nietzsche’s well-worn path in this. He combines the profane with the sacred: he hurtles along from the "Stamina Training Unit" (You will have to read it for yourself. I was howling . . .) to finally arrive at his Buddhism critique; or what he thinks is his Buddhism critique, for in "Buddhism" he initially lumps all sorts of New Age philosophies that have nothing to do with Reverend Gotama’s stories from the Pali Canon.
He shows some familiarity with the First Discourse, which contains the core of Gotama’s ethical theory, but starts his critique with the Second Discourse, on the anatta doctrine. He quite rightly, to my mind, defends free will against deterministic fantasies from both Buddhism and philosophers allied with the “cognitive science” strain of contemporary philosophy. The Churchlands are specifically named, who he says “claim that we are not biologically wired to our everyday self-understanding as free autonomous Selves.” Zizek, of course, is a “self” guy, as a follower of Freud and Lacan. He accuses the no-self crowd, including both the naturalized science philosophers and the Buddhists, of “implicit naivety.”
Zizek addresses the First Discourse when he says that Buddhism is concerned with solving the problem of suffering, “ . . . so its first axiom is: we don’t want to suffer. (For a Freudian, this already is problematic and far from self-evident (sic) – not only on account of some obscure masochism, but on account of the deep satisfaction brought about by passionate attachment.” He accuses Buddhism of inconsistency: “But a problem arises here: if moderate good acts (the elementary morality with which Buddhist practice begins) help us to get rid of our excessive attachments, is it not the case that, when we reach Nirvana, we should be able to perform even brutal evil acts in such a way that leave no traces, because we perform them at a distance?” Well, no, actually this seems to be a non-sequitur, at least to this reader. There is no reason to think that an arhat who had achieved Nirvana would forget the First Discourse once he got there.
But it also seems to me that Zizek has come closer to a puzzling truth of Reverend Gotama’s doctrine than he realizes. For isn’t the Event, as he defines it as the gap between cause and effect, the exact spot of Gotama’s Nirvana? If not Gotama’s Nirvana, then surely Dogen’s Nirvana! For isn’t this the place of being “un-conditioned?” Zizek’s Event is intended, it seems, in a Hegelian sense: it is a moment in time which changes the course of future events. Dogen’s Event is a stop in time, an eternal moment, but an Event all the same, by Zizek’s original definition.
Another stop in Zizek's commute throws off a hint into his answer to a question around which he often hovers, but doesn’t always state clearly: Why did the Communist project of the Twentieth Century fail? He says, “The Chinese Cultural Revolution serves as a lesson here: destroying old monuments proved not to be a true negation of the past. Rather it was an impotent passage a l’acte, an ‘acting out’ which bore witness to the failure to get rid of the past.” The reason the Communist regimes of the Twentieth Century failed to achieve communism is because they recapitulated structures of dominance from the previous bourgeois and even feudal periods of history. Not a bad explanation.
Or was it because they never had a good idea of the goal to begin with? Zizek actually states pretty well what that goal should have been: “Imagine a society which fully integrated into its ethical substance the great modern axioms of freedom, equality, the duty of society to provide for education and basic healthcare of all it's members, and which rendered racism or sexism simply unacceptable and ridiculous – there is no need even to argue against, say racism, since anyone who openly advocates racism is immediately perceived as a weird eccentric who cannot be taken seriously.” This flushes out Marx’s “from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs” with some basic safeguards to human dignity. This seems like a pretty good place to end up.
April 3, 2022
Жижек начинает с того, что дать определение понятию "событие" очень непросто, и сразу дает оговорку, что попробует дать приблизительное определение.
Самое первое определение на примере детективов Агаты Кристи: «нечто шокирующее, из ряда вон выходящее, случающееся внезапно и прерывающее обычный ход вещей, нечто, появляющееся из ниоткуда, без видимых причин, явление без твердого бытия у своего основания.» Я думаю, что ему следовало бы на этом остановиться, поскольку это понятное определение. Но он не останавливается и начинает раскручивать определение и так и эдак. Он заявляет, что в событии есть нечто «чудесное» - от веры в Иисуса Христа, обычной человеческой любви и до политических протестов, приводящих к свержению диктатора. В самом деле так. Создание нового вида искусства – тоже событие.
Согласны. На основе этих предпосылок, Жижек дает следующее определение: « событие является тем следствием, которое, по-видимому, превосходит свои причины, а пространство события – тем, что открывается в пробеле, отделяющем следствие от его причин.» Вам стало понятнее, что же такое событие?
«Наше первое предварительное определение события как следствия, которое превосходит свои причины, таким образом, приводит нас к неконсистентному множеству: является ли событие переменой в том, как нам является реальность, или же сокрушающей трансформацией самой реальности? Уменьшает ли философия независимость события или может ли она эту самую независимость объяснить? Еще раз: можно ли внести какую-либо ясность в эту загадку?»
Далее он предлагает так называемые остановки: «Первой остановкой будет изменение или разрушение рамки, сквозь которую мы рассматриваем реальность, а второй – Грехопадение. За ними последует нарушение симметрии; буддистское Просветление; встреча с Истиной, разбивающей нашу обыденную жизнь; существование иллюзии истины, превращающей саму истину в нечто событийное; травма, дестабилизующая символический порядок, в котором мы живем; появление нового Главного Означающего, т. е. означающего, выстраивающего целое поле смысла; опыт чистого потока смысла (или бессмысленного); радикальный политический разрыв и обращение событийного достижения вспять.»
Как Вы поняли, с каждым разом определение понятия «событие» становится все запутаннее и запутаннее. Он ссылается на теории Жака Лакана, Жиля Делёза, которые для меня пока неизвестны, развивает свою теорию на основе очень понятных событий, что Вам кажется, что все понятно. Он рассматривает понятие события с разных точек зрения. Но в конечном итоге, я прихожу к мысли, что первое определение было понятнее всего. Но сам процесс попытки понимания его концепции интересен и захватывающ. Думаю, что стои�� перечитать.
Самое первое определение на примере детективов Агаты Кристи: «нечто шокирующее, из ряда вон выходящее, случающееся внезапно и прерывающее обычный ход вещей, нечто, появляющееся из ниоткуда, без видимых причин, явление без твердого бытия у своего основания.» Я думаю, что ему следовало бы на этом остановиться, поскольку это понятное определение. Но он не останавливается и начинает раскручивать определение и так и эдак. Он заявляет, что в событии есть нечто «чудесное» - от веры в Иисуса Христа, обычной человеческой любви и до политических протестов, приводящих к свержению диктатора. В самом деле так. Создание нового вида искусства – тоже событие.
Согласны. На основе этих предпосылок, Жижек дает следующее определение: « событие является тем следствием, которое, по-видимому, превосходит свои причины, а пространство события – тем, что открывается в пробеле, отделяющем следствие от его причин.» Вам стало понятнее, что же такое событие?
«Наше первое предварительное определение события как следствия, которое превосходит свои причины, таким образом, приводит нас к неконсистентному множеству: является ли событие переменой в том, как нам является реальность, или же сокрушающей трансформацией самой реальности? Уменьшает ли философия независимость события или может ли она эту самую независимость объяснить? Еще раз: можно ли внести какую-либо ясность в эту загадку?»
Далее он предлагает так называемые остановки: «Первой остановкой будет изменение или разрушение рамки, сквозь которую мы рассматриваем реальность, а второй – Грехопадение. За ними последует нарушение симметрии; буддистское Просветление; встреча с Истиной, разбивающей нашу обыденную жизнь; существование иллюзии истины, превращающей саму истину в нечто событийное; травма, дестабилизующая символический порядок, в котором мы живем; появление нового Главного Означающего, т. е. означающего, выстраивающего целое поле смысла; опыт чистого потока смысла (или бессмысленного); радикальный политический разрыв и обращение событийного достижения вспять.»
Как Вы поняли, с каждым разом определение понятия «событие» становится все запутаннее и запутаннее. Он ссылается на теории Жака Лакана, Жиля Делёза, которые для меня пока неизвестны, развивает свою теорию на основе очень понятных событий, что Вам кажется, что все понятно. Он рассматривает понятие события с разных точек зрения. Но в конечном итоге, я прихожу к мысли, что первое определение было понятнее всего. Но сам процесс попытки понимания его концепции интересен и захватывающ. Думаю, что стои�� перечитать.
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June 28, 2024کتاب هشت فصله (همگی سوار شوید، ایستگاه اول: قابگرفتن، قاببندی مجدد، در قاب گذاشتن. ایستگاه دوم: فلیکس کالپا. ایستگاه سوم: بودائیسم طبیعیشده. ایستگاه چهارم: سه رخداد فلسفه (فصل مورد علاقهام). ایستگاه پنجم: سه رخداد روانکاوی. ایستگاه ششم: خنثیکردن رخداد. مقصد پایانی: خوب ملاحظه کنید) که توی هر کدوم ژیژک از جنبهای متفاوت مفهوم رخداد رو میشکافه. برای اونایی که میخوان ژیژک رو شروع کنند، انتخاب بهجائیه.
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اغلب میگویند امروزه، که به طور کامل در معرض رسانهها، فرهنگ اعترافات عمومی و ابزارهای کنترل دیجیتال قرار گرفتهایم، فضای خصوصی در حال محو شدن است. باید ادعایی را در برابر این قولِ پیشِ پا افتاده علم کرد که نقطهی مقابل آن است: این فضای عمومی حقیقیست که دارد محو میشود. کسی که عکسهای عریان خود یا اطلاعات بسیار شخصی و رؤیاهای وقیحانهاش را در فضای اینترنت به نمایش میگذارد، فردی عورتنما نیست: افراد عورتنما در فضای عمومی اختلال ایجاد میکنند، اما کسی که عکسهای عریان خود را در اینترنت به اشتراک میگذارد در فضای خصوصی خود باقی مانده و فقط آنقدر آن را گسترش میدهد که دیگران را نیز شامل شود. و اگر بخواهیم به فیلم مستند عملِ کشتن (۲۰۱۲) بازگردیم، باید بگوییم که همین نکته در مورد انور و دوستانش نیز صدق میکند: آنها دارند فضای عمومی را خصوصی میکنند، به طریقی که بسیار تهدیدآمیزتر از خصوصیسازی اقتصادی است. این خصوصیسازی نمونهای بارز از این مسئله است که چهطور در جوامع ما، رخدادِ رهاییبخش مدرنیته به تدریج فسخ و خنثی میشود.
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اغلب میگویند امروزه، که به طور کامل در معرض رسانهها، فرهنگ اعترافات عمومی و ابزارهای کنترل دیجیتال قرار گرفتهایم، فضای خصوصی در حال محو شدن است. باید ادعایی را در برابر این قولِ پیشِ پا افتاده علم کرد که نقطهی مقابل آن است: این فضای عمومی حقیقیست که دارد محو میشود. کسی که عکسهای عریان خود یا اطلاعات بسیار شخصی و رؤیاهای وقیحانهاش را در فضای اینترنت به نمایش میگذارد، فردی عورتنما نیست: افراد عورتنما در فضای عمومی اختلال ایجاد میکنند، اما کسی که عکسهای عریان خود را در اینترنت به اشتراک میگذارد در فضای خصوصی خود باقی مانده و فقط آنقدر آن را گسترش میدهد که دیگران را نیز شامل شود. و اگر بخواهیم به فیلم مستند عملِ کشتن (۲۰۱۲) بازگردیم، باید بگوییم که همین نکته در مورد انور و دوستانش نیز صدق میکند: آنها دارند فضای عمومی را خصوصی میکنند، به طریقی که بسیار تهدیدآمیزتر از خصوصیسازی اقتصادی است. این خصوصیسازی نمونهای بارز از این مسئله است که چهطور در جوامع ما، رخدادِ رهاییبخش مدرنیته به تدریج فسخ و خنثی میشود.
January 22, 2017
I received this book as a Christmas gift, and had never encountered Zizek before. Reading up on him made me really interested in digging into this.
Unfortunately, the book ended up reminding me of driving behind a particularly scatterbrained friend.
At first he starts out driving in a straightforward way, carefully following the rules of the road and being considerate of the fact that you're trying to follow. Then, without warning, he veers off and accelerates randomly, forcing you to really pay attention to keep up. You start to get annoyed as he does this again and again, and you become more and more sure that the route he's following, while sometimes pretty, has almost nothing to do with the destination. A few more seemingly random turns later, he pulls over in a scenic neighborhood, gets out of his car and heads into a French cinema. You follow, hoping for some explanation, but all he does is tell you about the show and quote some woo woo from his favourite philosopher, Hegel.
The drive continues like this, with frequent stops at random movies or operas or for rants against Buddhism or capitalism, and generally seems to go on forever. Sometimes it feels like Zizek is trying his best to lose you, and at other times he's creeping along or driving in lazy circles and you're begging him to get on with it. Eventually though, mercifully, the trip ends when you arrive about a block from where you started.
The above probably makes it sound like I hated the book, but the weird thing is that I often enjoyed. While Zizek's writing was often an annoying stream of consciousness, it did sometimes present very interesting ideas. The problem was that there are so many ideas that momentarily catch Zizek's attention, the interesting ones are lost in the crush and his treatment of them comes off as shallow. This is made worse by the fact that Zizek sometimes writes in a way that pointlessly obscures the idea he's trying to communicate. I don't know if I've ever expereinced a book before that had me loving it one moment and then rolling my eyes the next.
Ultimately, I really can't recommend this book. I left with the feeling that, had Zizek edited out the pointless asides and quotes from Hegel and Lacan, and maybe rewrote some sections for basic clarity, this book would have ended up as a short and moderately interesting article. Maybe someone with more familiarity with Zizek's other works, or the works of Hegel, Lacan or Marx, would get more out of this.
Unfortunately, the book ended up reminding me of driving behind a particularly scatterbrained friend.
At first he starts out driving in a straightforward way, carefully following the rules of the road and being considerate of the fact that you're trying to follow. Then, without warning, he veers off and accelerates randomly, forcing you to really pay attention to keep up. You start to get annoyed as he does this again and again, and you become more and more sure that the route he's following, while sometimes pretty, has almost nothing to do with the destination. A few more seemingly random turns later, he pulls over in a scenic neighborhood, gets out of his car and heads into a French cinema. You follow, hoping for some explanation, but all he does is tell you about the show and quote some woo woo from his favourite philosopher, Hegel.
The drive continues like this, with frequent stops at random movies or operas or for rants against Buddhism or capitalism, and generally seems to go on forever. Sometimes it feels like Zizek is trying his best to lose you, and at other times he's creeping along or driving in lazy circles and you're begging him to get on with it. Eventually though, mercifully, the trip ends when you arrive about a block from where you started.
The above probably makes it sound like I hated the book, but the weird thing is that I often enjoyed. While Zizek's writing was often an annoying stream of consciousness, it did sometimes present very interesting ideas. The problem was that there are so many ideas that momentarily catch Zizek's attention, the interesting ones are lost in the crush and his treatment of them comes off as shallow. This is made worse by the fact that Zizek sometimes writes in a way that pointlessly obscures the idea he's trying to communicate. I don't know if I've ever expereinced a book before that had me loving it one moment and then rolling my eyes the next.
Ultimately, I really can't recommend this book. I left with the feeling that, had Zizek edited out the pointless asides and quotes from Hegel and Lacan, and maybe rewrote some sections for basic clarity, this book would have ended up as a short and moderately interesting article. Maybe someone with more familiarity with Zizek's other works, or the works of Hegel, Lacan or Marx, would get more out of this.
March 1, 2014
Žižek's triumph here is not of sustained argument. This is philosophy as hyperactive readings, outré jokes and dizzying film criticism, united by the central conceit of Event. Equally at home discussing finer points of Hegel and quoting from Wrath of the Titans, Žižek is genuinely engaged with culture in a way not often associated with academics.
To name a few of the scattered thoughts, we get love as its own retroactive creator, The Crying Game revealing heterosexual desire as homosexual, Gangnam Style as sign of cultural end-times, the EU as sadist superego, Zero Dark Thirty as deceitful normaliser of torture, Hollywood as obsessed with using defeat of an alien 'Thing' to produce a couple, politically correct language as the obverse of politicians' sinister euphemisms, Buddhism as capitalist religion, and a Holocaust haiku partaking of the 'Absolute'.
The proliferation of ideas in a short space is worth the journey, regardless of whether you agree with them; they're thrown out with such abandon as to most usefully be springboards to your own reflection.
To name a few of the scattered thoughts, we get love as its own retroactive creator, The Crying Game revealing heterosexual desire as homosexual, Gangnam Style as sign of cultural end-times, the EU as sadist superego, Zero Dark Thirty as deceitful normaliser of torture, Hollywood as obsessed with using defeat of an alien 'Thing' to produce a couple, politically correct language as the obverse of politicians' sinister euphemisms, Buddhism as capitalist religion, and a Holocaust haiku partaking of the 'Absolute'.
The proliferation of ideas in a short space is worth the journey, regardless of whether you agree with them; they're thrown out with such abandon as to most usefully be springboards to your own reflection.
May 8, 2022
“De werkelijke verschrikkingen vinden niet plaats wanneer God ons heeft verlaten, maar wanneer God te dichtbij komt.” - 3,5.
May 27, 2018
I wish the “pre-Eventual situation” was that Zizek had thought up a point to this text before writing it. He goes off on SO MANY tangents that have little to do with ‘Event as concept’. I’ve never seen Zizek speak, but his voice really bothered me as that of a cranky old man. He dehumanizes those with autism at one point, complains about political correctness in another. He treats (and essentially dismisses) racism as if it’s a behavioral issue rather than a structural one. He only brings up single conclusions— his conclusions — to different topics and he treats them like facts. He never mentions female perspectives and seems to live in a woman-less world, or a world where women only exist as objects to bear the grunt of thrusting penises. I couldn’t have been more annoyed or frustrated with this book.
April 6, 2022
First read: 4 stars. This read: 5 stars.
Event is some of Zizek's most lucid and accessible writing, presented in a light and compact 200-page paperback. Taking on topics of sex, love, religion and politics through all the usual lenses of opera, poetry, obscene jokes, Hitchcock, and other cinema, Zizek delineates several of the forms an Event may take, and discusses why the deadlock the Left finds itself in may not yet be the end of the road. Published in 2014, it obviously predates important global situations such as Trump's presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, so I'm eager to see where he's taken his idea in more recent works. If you're new to Zizek, this is a great place to start.
Event is some of Zizek's most lucid and accessible writing, presented in a light and compact 200-page paperback. Taking on topics of sex, love, religion and politics through all the usual lenses of opera, poetry, obscene jokes, Hitchcock, and other cinema, Zizek delineates several of the forms an Event may take, and discusses why the deadlock the Left finds itself in may not yet be the end of the road. Published in 2014, it obviously predates important global situations such as Trump's presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, so I'm eager to see where he's taken his idea in more recent works. If you're new to Zizek, this is a great place to start.
April 8, 2014
Zizek at his incoherently coherent best.
Some repetition of stories, if you have read his other books, but I thought he captured the different-but-related facets of the Event. Zizek seems to be competing with Badiou over the term, but in many ways he puts more flesh onto the notion.
My favourite is: "As such, it is an event: at its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it."
The trauma of the event. A trauma that shifts the space of the evental horizon. The trauma of subject of the event.
Some repetition of stories, if you have read his other books, but I thought he captured the different-but-related facets of the Event. Zizek seems to be competing with Badiou over the term, but in many ways he puts more flesh onto the notion.
My favourite is: "As such, it is an event: at its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it."
The trauma of the event. A trauma that shifts the space of the evental horizon. The trauma of subject of the event.
May 9, 2017
filthy Slovene rambles about the psychoanalysis of everyday events like going to the toilet
Read
April 8, 2022zizek rules
January 15, 2023
veel te moeilijk voor mijn kleine breintje, stukken die ik wel begreep waren erg sterk.
March 29, 2023
a fun ride :)
January 27, 2021
sei lá o zizek fala tanto sobre pouca coisa e em poucas palavras sobre muito
gostei muito do livro apesar dele não dar muita base pro conceito que ele quer discutir, acaba meio que delimitando mais ou menos os limites dele através de uma quantidade imensa de análises de acontecimentos e no fim o livro acaba sendo mesmo o que ele promete: uma viagem através de um conceito, mas sem um inicio e sem um fim
e no fim das contas o badiou ta certo sobre o zizek, ele psicanalisa tudo, o que é muito foda mas é meio... foda no sentido não tão foda, mas também foda
gostei muito do livro apesar dele não dar muita base pro conceito que ele quer discutir, acaba meio que delimitando mais ou menos os limites dele através de uma quantidade imensa de análises de acontecimentos e no fim o livro acaba sendo mesmo o que ele promete: uma viagem através de um conceito, mas sem um inicio e sem um fim
e no fim das contas o badiou ta certo sobre o zizek, ele psicanalisa tudo, o que é muito foda mas é meio... foda no sentido não tão foda, mas também foda
February 9, 2021
This is the second time I’ve read this book. I barely processed a quarter of it the first time, years ago. Beware - if you don’t have any experience with philosophy under your belt, this will be a slow, slow read.
Žižek’s writing isn’t as complex as it could be, given the scope of topics.
His tone is casual and familiar. That, at least, makes the density of his ideas easier to swallow.
A variety of mediums and examples are used to substantiate his claims, some of which you may need to look up in order to apply aptly. Žižek also likes to namedrop every certifiable philosopher and psychologist both living and dead, followed by “got it wrong because…”
While it is entertaining to read a modern philosopher go off on some big names, Žižek is very good at retaining focus on his topic. This is a great way to introduce, or reintroduce, yourself to the classics and the modern players in this area of study.
Event both holds your hand and pushes you off the edge, expecting you to know nothing and everything. The book is separated into “stops” and “connections'' instead of chapters, and centers around “event” - “the effect that seems to exceed its cause”. The book slams through many possible iterations of event, from Heidigger to Chrisitianity, and keeps the reader readjusting the exact meaning. Žižek’s transit theme and book cover illustrate the multifaceted, illusive nature of his topic.
Be prepared to fight him in the margins with annotations. This book is much like someone introducing you to a black hole, telling you how the black hole exists, and then pushing you in at the end of it all. No answers, only more questions - albeit more intelligent questions. That is the fuel of philosophy, right?
I recommend Don Delillo’s White Noise as a companion novel. It uses a larger narrative to demonstrate the parts of “catastrophe” and challenge the notion of “ordinary”. Žižek’s theories are both depicted and challenged through its analysis. If you aren’t engaging with the Event, try reading it again after some time has passed.
It’s one of those.
Žižek’s writing isn’t as complex as it could be, given the scope of topics.
His tone is casual and familiar. That, at least, makes the density of his ideas easier to swallow.
A variety of mediums and examples are used to substantiate his claims, some of which you may need to look up in order to apply aptly. Žižek also likes to namedrop every certifiable philosopher and psychologist both living and dead, followed by “got it wrong because…”
While it is entertaining to read a modern philosopher go off on some big names, Žižek is very good at retaining focus on his topic. This is a great way to introduce, or reintroduce, yourself to the classics and the modern players in this area of study.
Event both holds your hand and pushes you off the edge, expecting you to know nothing and everything. The book is separated into “stops” and “connections'' instead of chapters, and centers around “event” - “the effect that seems to exceed its cause”. The book slams through many possible iterations of event, from Heidigger to Chrisitianity, and keeps the reader readjusting the exact meaning. Žižek’s transit theme and book cover illustrate the multifaceted, illusive nature of his topic.
Be prepared to fight him in the margins with annotations. This book is much like someone introducing you to a black hole, telling you how the black hole exists, and then pushing you in at the end of it all. No answers, only more questions - albeit more intelligent questions. That is the fuel of philosophy, right?
I recommend Don Delillo’s White Noise as a companion novel. It uses a larger narrative to demonstrate the parts of “catastrophe” and challenge the notion of “ordinary”. Žižek’s theories are both depicted and challenged through its analysis. If you aren’t engaging with the Event, try reading it again after some time has passed.
It’s one of those.
December 20, 2020
стала первой книгой, которую я наконец прочитала (вернее послушала) у Жижека и почему-то боялась, что будет нудно, запутано и сложно. в общем уже очевидно, что оказалось все не так: множество примеров, перекликающимися с размышлениями в других контекстах, отсылок на знакомые фильмы, а сюжет незнакомых он рассказывает и все становится ясно, ссылки на его любимых мыслителей: Гегеля, Маркса, Лакана.
Сложнее всего мне пока с самим ходом мысли, Жижек явно склонен к ассоциативному мышлению, отдельной работой остается распознать и понять эту связь между произведениями и идеей, которую он приводит довольно просто и ясно, но глубокого понимания от этого у меня, как читателя, не всегда появляется.
Давать определение астрактному понятию не самая простая работа и не уверена, что у нее есть конец, с одной стороны многим поколениям мыслителей будет о чем мыслить, а с другой стороны от осознания тщетности работы и ускользающих смыслов одни расстройства. Слушать было настолько легко и интересно, что планирую послушать по второму кругу, явно не будет лишним.
Сложнее всего мне пока с самим ходом мысли, Жижек явно склонен к ассоциативному мышлению, отдельной работой остается распознать и понять эту связь между произведениями и идеей, которую он приводит довольно просто и ясно, но глубокого понимания от этого у меня, как читателя, не всегда появляется.
Давать определение астрактному понятию не самая простая работа и не уверена, что у нее есть конец, с одной стороны многим поколениям мыслителей будет о чем мыслить, а с другой стороны от осознания тщетности работы и ускользающих смыслов одни расстройства. Слушать было настолько легко и интересно, что планирую послушать по второму кругу, явно не будет лишним.
May 16, 2016
I've listened to, literally, hundreds of hours of Zizek's talks and lectures in the last four years or so, so I'm already familiar with a lot of the ideas, concepts, and even the examples themselves in this book. Nonetheless, to put his thoughts on many fields under a unifying concept, that is, to look at the big bang, the notion of "self" in philosophy, love, political protests etc in the lens of "Event", is in itself insightful enough, at least for me.
استمعت - حرفيًا - لمئات الساعات لمحاضرات جيجك خلال السنوات الأربع الماضية تقريبًا؛ لذا أعرف الكثير من الأفكار والمفاهيم وحتى الأمثلة المذكورة في هذا الكتاب. لكن مع ذلك، مجرد وضع أفكاره حول عدة مجالات ومعالجتها باستخدام مفهوم واحد، أي النظر إلى الانفجار الكبير ومفهوم الذات أو النفس في الفلسفة أو الحب أو الاحتجاجات السياسية إلخ بمنظار مفهوم "الحدث" كان مفيدًا للغاية، على الأقل بالنسبة لي
استمعت - حرفيًا - لمئات الساعات لمحاضرات جيجك خلال السنوات الأربع الماضية تقريبًا؛ لذا أعرف الكثير من الأفكار والمفاهيم وحتى الأمثلة المذكورة في هذا الكتاب. لكن مع ذلك، مجرد وضع أفكاره حول عدة مجالات ومعالجتها باستخدام مفهوم واحد، أي النظر إلى الانفجار الكبير ومفهوم الذات أو النفس في الفلسفة أو الحب أو الاحتجاجات السياسية إلخ بمنظار مفهوم "الحدث" كان مفيدًا للغاية، على الأقل بالنسبة لي
November 9, 2017
Saya telah mendengarkan berbagai ceramah Zizek di Youtube, jadi saya sudah terbiasa dengan banyak gagasan, konsep, lelucon dan bahkan contoh yang ditawarkan dalam buku ini. Seperti biasa, Zizek selalu ngebacot soal filsafat, psikoanalisa, sejarah, komunisme, kajian pop culture, dan sebagainya, dan sebagainya. Yang paling menarik adalah pembahasannya soal etika zen dan budhisme dalam melanggengkan kapitalisme, menyebut kalau Max Weber masih hidup pasti bakal nulis The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.
i-want-money
September 4, 2014This would appear to be another in the series short-and-probably-decent-entry-level-Zizek=book. The chapter "The Three Events of Philosophy" (ie, Plato, Descartes, Hegel) can be read online right about here :: http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijz...
September 13, 2014
I'm still making up my mind on Zizek, even though I've read a few of his books now. I like reading them, and I think I'm hoping that if I keep reading them, I'll start to understand them a little more. I like how his sentences and paragraphs read to me like thought puzzles, and it feels good to tease them apart.
On those rare occasions when I think I've done that, I feel like one of the Pakleds on Start Trek, saying, "We are smart." Conversely, when I can't figure out what Zizek is saying, which is most of the time, I tell myself, "We are not smart."
Anyway, I liked this book--I liked how he stuck to the idea of "event" and the various meanings, derivations and connotations he built around it. I highlighted a lot, if that means anything:
—
An ‘Event’ can refer to a devastating natural disaster or to the latest celebrity scandal, the triumph of the people or a brutal political change, an intense experience of a work of art or an intimate decision.
—
This is an event at its purest and most minimal: something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation.
—
At first approach, an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes – and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes. Already with this approximate definition, we find ourselves at the very heart of philosophy, since causality is one of the basic problems philosophy deals with: are all things connected with causal links? Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere?
—
is an event a change in the way reality appears to us, or is it a shattering transformation of reality itself?
—
the basic feature of an event: the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme.
—
at its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it.
—
the Fall itself creates that from which we Fall.
—
the ultimate Event is the Fall itself, the loss of some primordial unity and harmony which never existed, which is just a retroactive illusion.
—
This is how, even in an empty region of space, a particle emerges out of Nothing, ‘borrowing’ its energy from the future and paying for it (with its annihilation) before the system notices this borrowing.
—
the ultimate Event is the Fall itself, i.e., things emerge when the equilibrium is destroyed, when something goes astray.
—
Event as the moment of Enlightenment, of getting disentangled from the cobweb of illusory reality and entering the void of Nirvana.
—
the ongoing shift in the predominant libidinal economy, in the course of which the relationship to a human Other is gradually replaced by the captivation of individuals by what Lacan baptized with the neologism les lathouses: consumerist object-gadgets which attract the libido with their promise to deliver excessive pleasure, but which effectively reproduce only the lack itself.
—
should, instead, ‘let oneself go’, drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of accelerated progress, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being.
—
The ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative path is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.
—
Buddhism provides a kind of subjective eventalization of scientific cognitivism: the Event which takes place when we fully assume the results of brain sciences is the Event of Enlightenment, the attainment of Nirvana, which liberates us from the constraints of our Self as an autonomous substantial agent.
—
Do our acts leave good traces? The Buddhist answer is: no, when we find ourselves in Nirvana, our acts leave no traces; we are at a distance – subtracted – from the Wheel of Desire. But a problem emerges here: if moderate good acts (the elementary morality with which the Buddhist practice begins) help us to get rid of our excessive attachments, is it then not the case that, when we reach Nirvana, we should be able to perform even brutal evil acts in such a way that they leave no traces, because we perform them at a distance? Would not precisely this ability be the sign of recognition of a true bodhisattva?
—
is Nirvana, the goal of Buddhist meditation, just this shift in the subject’s stance towards reality? Or is the goal the fundamental transformation of reality itself, so that all suffering disappears, so that all living beings are relieved of their suffering?
—
‘undeserved’ happiness is still happiness.
—
We cannot escape from the clutches of Fate, but we also cannot escape from the burden of responsibility into Fate.
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the true Event is the Event of subjectivity itself, illusory as it may be.
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There are three (and only three) key philosophers in the history of Western metaphysics: Plato, Descartes and Hegel. Each of them enacted a clear break with the past: nothing remained the same after they entered the scene.
—
Does this exceptional status of Plato, Descartes and Hegel not provide the ultimate proof that, in each case, we are dealing with a philosophical Event in the sense of a traumatic intrusion of something New which remains unacceptable for the predominant view?
—
Remember Plato’s description of Socrates when he is seized by an Idea: it is as if Socrates is the victim of a hysterical seizure, standing frozen on the spot for hours, oblivious to reality around him – is Plato not describing here an event par excellence, a sudden traumatic encounter with another, supra-sensible dimension which strikes us like lightning and shatters our entire life?
—
love not a kind of permanent state of exception?
—
the violence of falling in love, the violence nicely indicated by the Basque term for falling in love – maitemindu – which, literally translated, means ‘to be injured by love’.
—
Ideas are not the hidden reality beneath appearances
—
Ideas are nothing but the very form of their appearance, this form as such.
—
What Plato was not ready (or, rather, able) to accept was the thoroughly virtual, immaterial (or, rather, insubstantial) evental status of Ideas: Ideas are something that momentarily appear on the surface of things.
—
the Absolute is a pure Event, something that just occurs – it disappears before it even fully appears.
—
What one should always bear in mind when talking about cogito, about the reduction of a human being to the abyssal point of thinking without any external object, is that we are not dealing here with silly and extreme logical games (‘imagine that you alone exist …’), but with the description of a very precise existential experience of radical self-withdrawal, of suspending the existence of all reality around me to a vanishing illusion, which is well-known in psychoanalysis (as psychotic withdrawal) as well as in religious mysticism (under the name of so-called ‘night of the world’).
—
A potentiality can be inserted into (or withdrawn from) past reality.
—
The subject’s engagement in the symbolic order coils the linear flow of time in both directions: it involves precipitation as well as retroactivity (things retroactively become what they are; the identity of a thing only emerges when the thing is in delay with regard to itself) – in short, every act is by definition too early and, simultaneously, too late.
—
The problem is, of course, that an act always occurs simultaneously too fast (the conditions are never fully ripe, one has to succumb to the urgency to intervene, there is never enough time to wait, enough time for strategic calculations, the act has to anticipate its certainty and risk that it will retroactively establish its own conditions) and too late (the very urgency of the act signals that we come too late, that we always should have already acted; every act is a reaction to circumstances which arose because we were too late to act). In short, there is no right moment to act – if we wait for the right moment, the act is reduced to an occurrence in the order of being.
—
Spirit itself is thus radically de-substantialized: it is not a positive counter-force to nature, a different substance which gradually breaks and shines through the inert natural stuff; it is nothing but this process of freeing-itself-from.
—
The true horror does not occur when we are abandoned by God, but when God comes too close to us.
—
the fiasco of God is still the fiasco of God.
—
after the act of creation is accomplished, God loses even the right to intervene in how people interpret his law.
—
The first commandment says: ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ What does the ambiguous ‘before me’ refer to? Most translators agree that it means ‘before my face, in front of me, when I see you’ – which subtly implies that the jealous god will nonetheless turn a blind eye to what we are doing secretly, out of (his) sight.
—
On 21 December 2012, it reached the magic number of one billion views – and, since 21 December was the day when those who took seriously the predictions of the Mayan calendar were expecting the end of the world, one could say that the Ancient Mayans were right: the fact is that the ‘Gangnam Style’ video effectively is the sign of the collapse of civilization.
—
Many listeners find the song disgustingly attractive, i.e., they ‘love to hate it’, or, rather, they enjoy the very fact of finding it disgusting so they repeatedly play it to prolong their disgust. Such an ecstatic surrender to obscene jouissance in all its stupidity entangles the subject into what Lacan, following Freud, calls ‘drive’; perhaps its paradigmatic expressions are the repulsive private rituals (sniffing one’s own sweat, sticking one’s finger into one’s nose, etc.) that bring intense satisfaction without our being aware of it – or, insofar as we are aware of it, without our being able to do anything to prevent it.
—
This drive is that which is ‘in the subject more than itself’: although the subject cannot ever subjectivize it, assume it as its own by way of saying ‘It is I who want to do this’, it nonetheless operates in its very kernel.
—
With love it is the same as with religious belief: I do not love you because I find your positive features attractive, but, on the contrary, I find your positive features attractive because I love you and therefore observe you with a loving gaze.
—
when you fall in love, you don’t just know what you need/want and look for the one who has it – the ‘miracle’ of love is that you learn what you need only when you find it.
—
Today, it is as if the knot of three levels which characterized traditional sexuality (reproduction, sexual pleasure, love) is gradually dissolving: reproduction is left to biogenetic procedures which are making sexual intercourse redundant; sex itself is turned into recreational fun; while love is reduced to the domain of ‘emotional fulfilment’.
—
A speech act thus becomes a symbolic Event if and when its occurrence restructures the entire field: although there is no new content, everything is somehow thoroughly different.
—
This, perhaps, is the most succinct definition of what an authentic act is: in our ordinary activity, we effectively just follow the (virtual-fantasmatic) co-ordinates of our identity, while an act proper is the paradox of an actual move which (retroactively) changes the very virtual, ‘transcendental’ co-ordinates of its agent’s being – or, in Freudian terms, which does not only change the actuality of our world, but also ‘moves its underground’.
—
Falling in love is a contingent encounter, but, once it occurs, it appears as necessary, as something towards which my entire life was moving.
—
the true triumph is not the victory over the enemy, it occurs when the enemy itself starts to use your language, so that your ideas form the foundation of the entire field.
—
The Fall (into love) never happens at a certain moment, it has always-already happened.
—
The true statement of hatred is not ‘Now I realize how much I hate you!’ but ‘Now I know I have always hated you!’ Only this second statement undoes the past itself.
—
In other words, the truly New emerges through narrative, the apparently purely reproductive retelling of what happened – it is this retelling that opens up the space (the possibility) of acting in a new way. Furious about his treatment, a worker participates in a wildcat strike, say; however, it is only when, in the aftermath of his action, he counts/retells it as an act of class struggle that the worker subjectively transforms himself into the revolutionary subject, and, on the basis of this transformation, he can go on acting as a true revolutionary.
—
So it’s not just that the symbolic order is all of a sudden fully here – there was nothing, and a moment later it is all here – but there is nothing and then, all of a sudden, it is as if the symbolic order was always-already here, as if there had never been a time without it.
—
In an Event, things not only change: what changes is the very parameter by which we measure the facts of change, i.e., a turning point changes the entire field within which facts appear.
—
In capitalism, where things have to change all the time to remain the same, the true Event would have been to transform the very principle of change.
On those rare occasions when I think I've done that, I feel like one of the Pakleds on Start Trek, saying, "We are smart." Conversely, when I can't figure out what Zizek is saying, which is most of the time, I tell myself, "We are not smart."
Anyway, I liked this book--I liked how he stuck to the idea of "event" and the various meanings, derivations and connotations he built around it. I highlighted a lot, if that means anything:
—
An ‘Event’ can refer to a devastating natural disaster or to the latest celebrity scandal, the triumph of the people or a brutal political change, an intense experience of a work of art or an intimate decision.
—
This is an event at its purest and most minimal: something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation.
—
At first approach, an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes – and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes. Already with this approximate definition, we find ourselves at the very heart of philosophy, since causality is one of the basic problems philosophy deals with: are all things connected with causal links? Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere?
—
is an event a change in the way reality appears to us, or is it a shattering transformation of reality itself?
—
the basic feature of an event: the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme.
—
at its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it.
—
the Fall itself creates that from which we Fall.
—
the ultimate Event is the Fall itself, the loss of some primordial unity and harmony which never existed, which is just a retroactive illusion.
—
This is how, even in an empty region of space, a particle emerges out of Nothing, ‘borrowing’ its energy from the future and paying for it (with its annihilation) before the system notices this borrowing.
—
the ultimate Event is the Fall itself, i.e., things emerge when the equilibrium is destroyed, when something goes astray.
—
Event as the moment of Enlightenment, of getting disentangled from the cobweb of illusory reality and entering the void of Nirvana.
—
the ongoing shift in the predominant libidinal economy, in the course of which the relationship to a human Other is gradually replaced by the captivation of individuals by what Lacan baptized with the neologism les lathouses: consumerist object-gadgets which attract the libido with their promise to deliver excessive pleasure, but which effectively reproduce only the lack itself.
—
should, instead, ‘let oneself go’, drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of accelerated progress, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being.
—
The ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative path is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.
—
Buddhism provides a kind of subjective eventalization of scientific cognitivism: the Event which takes place when we fully assume the results of brain sciences is the Event of Enlightenment, the attainment of Nirvana, which liberates us from the constraints of our Self as an autonomous substantial agent.
—
Do our acts leave good traces? The Buddhist answer is: no, when we find ourselves in Nirvana, our acts leave no traces; we are at a distance – subtracted – from the Wheel of Desire. But a problem emerges here: if moderate good acts (the elementary morality with which the Buddhist practice begins) help us to get rid of our excessive attachments, is it then not the case that, when we reach Nirvana, we should be able to perform even brutal evil acts in such a way that they leave no traces, because we perform them at a distance? Would not precisely this ability be the sign of recognition of a true bodhisattva?
—
is Nirvana, the goal of Buddhist meditation, just this shift in the subject’s stance towards reality? Or is the goal the fundamental transformation of reality itself, so that all suffering disappears, so that all living beings are relieved of their suffering?
—
‘undeserved’ happiness is still happiness.
—
We cannot escape from the clutches of Fate, but we also cannot escape from the burden of responsibility into Fate.
—
the true Event is the Event of subjectivity itself, illusory as it may be.
—
There are three (and only three) key philosophers in the history of Western metaphysics: Plato, Descartes and Hegel. Each of them enacted a clear break with the past: nothing remained the same after they entered the scene.
—
Does this exceptional status of Plato, Descartes and Hegel not provide the ultimate proof that, in each case, we are dealing with a philosophical Event in the sense of a traumatic intrusion of something New which remains unacceptable for the predominant view?
—
Remember Plato’s description of Socrates when he is seized by an Idea: it is as if Socrates is the victim of a hysterical seizure, standing frozen on the spot for hours, oblivious to reality around him – is Plato not describing here an event par excellence, a sudden traumatic encounter with another, supra-sensible dimension which strikes us like lightning and shatters our entire life?
—
love not a kind of permanent state of exception?
—
the violence of falling in love, the violence nicely indicated by the Basque term for falling in love – maitemindu – which, literally translated, means ‘to be injured by love’.
—
Ideas are not the hidden reality beneath appearances
—
Ideas are nothing but the very form of their appearance, this form as such.
—
What Plato was not ready (or, rather, able) to accept was the thoroughly virtual, immaterial (or, rather, insubstantial) evental status of Ideas: Ideas are something that momentarily appear on the surface of things.
—
the Absolute is a pure Event, something that just occurs – it disappears before it even fully appears.
—
What one should always bear in mind when talking about cogito, about the reduction of a human being to the abyssal point of thinking without any external object, is that we are not dealing here with silly and extreme logical games (‘imagine that you alone exist …’), but with the description of a very precise existential experience of radical self-withdrawal, of suspending the existence of all reality around me to a vanishing illusion, which is well-known in psychoanalysis (as psychotic withdrawal) as well as in religious mysticism (under the name of so-called ‘night of the world’).
—
A potentiality can be inserted into (or withdrawn from) past reality.
—
The subject’s engagement in the symbolic order coils the linear flow of time in both directions: it involves precipitation as well as retroactivity (things retroactively become what they are; the identity of a thing only emerges when the thing is in delay with regard to itself) – in short, every act is by definition too early and, simultaneously, too late.
—
The problem is, of course, that an act always occurs simultaneously too fast (the conditions are never fully ripe, one has to succumb to the urgency to intervene, there is never enough time to wait, enough time for strategic calculations, the act has to anticipate its certainty and risk that it will retroactively establish its own conditions) and too late (the very urgency of the act signals that we come too late, that we always should have already acted; every act is a reaction to circumstances which arose because we were too late to act). In short, there is no right moment to act – if we wait for the right moment, the act is reduced to an occurrence in the order of being.
—
Spirit itself is thus radically de-substantialized: it is not a positive counter-force to nature, a different substance which gradually breaks and shines through the inert natural stuff; it is nothing but this process of freeing-itself-from.
—
The true horror does not occur when we are abandoned by God, but when God comes too close to us.
—
the fiasco of God is still the fiasco of God.
—
after the act of creation is accomplished, God loses even the right to intervene in how people interpret his law.
—
The first commandment says: ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ What does the ambiguous ‘before me’ refer to? Most translators agree that it means ‘before my face, in front of me, when I see you’ – which subtly implies that the jealous god will nonetheless turn a blind eye to what we are doing secretly, out of (his) sight.
—
On 21 December 2012, it reached the magic number of one billion views – and, since 21 December was the day when those who took seriously the predictions of the Mayan calendar were expecting the end of the world, one could say that the Ancient Mayans were right: the fact is that the ‘Gangnam Style’ video effectively is the sign of the collapse of civilization.
—
Many listeners find the song disgustingly attractive, i.e., they ‘love to hate it’, or, rather, they enjoy the very fact of finding it disgusting so they repeatedly play it to prolong their disgust. Such an ecstatic surrender to obscene jouissance in all its stupidity entangles the subject into what Lacan, following Freud, calls ‘drive’; perhaps its paradigmatic expressions are the repulsive private rituals (sniffing one’s own sweat, sticking one’s finger into one’s nose, etc.) that bring intense satisfaction without our being aware of it – or, insofar as we are aware of it, without our being able to do anything to prevent it.
—
This drive is that which is ‘in the subject more than itself’: although the subject cannot ever subjectivize it, assume it as its own by way of saying ‘It is I who want to do this’, it nonetheless operates in its very kernel.
—
With love it is the same as with religious belief: I do not love you because I find your positive features attractive, but, on the contrary, I find your positive features attractive because I love you and therefore observe you with a loving gaze.
—
when you fall in love, you don’t just know what you need/want and look for the one who has it – the ‘miracle’ of love is that you learn what you need only when you find it.
—
Today, it is as if the knot of three levels which characterized traditional sexuality (reproduction, sexual pleasure, love) is gradually dissolving: reproduction is left to biogenetic procedures which are making sexual intercourse redundant; sex itself is turned into recreational fun; while love is reduced to the domain of ‘emotional fulfilment’.
—
A speech act thus becomes a symbolic Event if and when its occurrence restructures the entire field: although there is no new content, everything is somehow thoroughly different.
—
This, perhaps, is the most succinct definition of what an authentic act is: in our ordinary activity, we effectively just follow the (virtual-fantasmatic) co-ordinates of our identity, while an act proper is the paradox of an actual move which (retroactively) changes the very virtual, ‘transcendental’ co-ordinates of its agent’s being – or, in Freudian terms, which does not only change the actuality of our world, but also ‘moves its underground’.
—
Falling in love is a contingent encounter, but, once it occurs, it appears as necessary, as something towards which my entire life was moving.
—
the true triumph is not the victory over the enemy, it occurs when the enemy itself starts to use your language, so that your ideas form the foundation of the entire field.
—
The Fall (into love) never happens at a certain moment, it has always-already happened.
—
The true statement of hatred is not ‘Now I realize how much I hate you!’ but ‘Now I know I have always hated you!’ Only this second statement undoes the past itself.
—
In other words, the truly New emerges through narrative, the apparently purely reproductive retelling of what happened – it is this retelling that opens up the space (the possibility) of acting in a new way. Furious about his treatment, a worker participates in a wildcat strike, say; however, it is only when, in the aftermath of his action, he counts/retells it as an act of class struggle that the worker subjectively transforms himself into the revolutionary subject, and, on the basis of this transformation, he can go on acting as a true revolutionary.
—
So it’s not just that the symbolic order is all of a sudden fully here – there was nothing, and a moment later it is all here – but there is nothing and then, all of a sudden, it is as if the symbolic order was always-already here, as if there had never been a time without it.
—
In an Event, things not only change: what changes is the very parameter by which we measure the facts of change, i.e., a turning point changes the entire field within which facts appear.
—
In capitalism, where things have to change all the time to remain the same, the true Event would have been to transform the very principle of change.
August 15, 2015
[a full-fledged review in Dutch this time - didn't really survive its feedback so I guess it's a bad review, but still..]
In de Westerkerk mocht eenieder tijdens de presentatie van het nieuwe boek van Slavoj Žižek dromen over de enige politieke gebeurtenis die authentiek, en tevens typisch communistisch, genoemd mag worden: de omverwerping van het kapitalisme. Žižek gaf er een kritische uiteenzetting vanuit de preekstoel, die door Jan Jaap van der Wal zowel slecht ingeleid als gemodereerd werd. Het was een ongewoon schouwspel waar Žižek graag aan mee deed om wat revolutionaire gedachten te kunnen uitwisselen met de toehoorders, zijn leftist friends. De inhoud van Event valt echter, net als diens presentatie, wat tegen: lezers zullen zeer geduldig de interessante opmerkingen moeten destilleren uit een overdaad aan fraai gewauwel.
Desalniettemin heeft Žižek een originele ingang in de communistische discussie vanwege de volledig metafysische achtergrond van zijn betoog over het sleutelwoord 'gebeuren': nadat Martin Heidegger het begrip Ereignis ('het gebeuren') introduceerde om het eigenlijke denken van de metafysische traditie te bezorgen, maakten Franse filosofen zoals Deleuze en Badiou dit begrip op eigenzinnige wijze relevant voor metafysische discussies. Žižeks argumentatie poogt aan te tonen dat de traditie van filosofie tegenwoordig schreeuwt om 'het zuivere gebeuren'. Binnen het marxistische discours is deze beoogde navolging van relevante denkwijzen een opmerkelijke omkering van interpretaties van ideologie.
De eerste vaststelling in het boek is dat aan alle gebeurtenissen te merken is dat we nog steeds niet begrijpen wat het betekent te gebeuren. Het eerste hoofdstuk betoogt daarom dat een ontdekking van juist ondoorgrondelijke, fantasmatische nieuwe werelden een dialectische inmenging in de werkelijkheid is. Vervolgens betoogt Žižek dat het emancipatoir aspect van dit type gebeuren een overgave is aan de desintegratie van een samenhang van het werkelijke. De ideologie die hierop hedendaags het hardst probeert te reageren is het boeddhisme: diens lege subjectivisme slaagt erin haar autonomie af te leggen om het 'lijden' onder het fantasme te bestrijden - en zonder succes. Immers, onthechting van de wereld blijft geconfronteerd met diezelfde wereld. Boeddhisme is paradigmatisch voor het onafwendbare subjectieve gebeuren: juist de illusoire aflegging is een dialectische inmenging.
De filosofen hebben dit subjectieve gebeuren tot in haar uiterste uitgewerkt: in Plato leest men de bezetenheid die het fantasmatische en werkelijke vermengt, in Descartes de waanzin van het lege subject en in Hegel de noodzakelijke zelfsublimatie. Zo kan men in lijn met de psychoanalyse slechts één diagnose stellen: men moet het onmogelijke ondernemen en het lege a priori tegen de tijdsstroom in forceren, opdat het immer bevreemdende handelen werkelijk zin heeft. Een juist gebruik van de pseudo-substantiële, subjectieve leegheid maakt pas echt een communale ruimte mogelijk, alhoewel de ideologieën van de onoverkomelijkheid van deze leegheid (o.a. degradatie van het subject naar een rader in de machine) het gebeuren uiteraard glashard zullen ontkennen.
Het is zijn tegendraadsheid binnen de eigen traditie en zijn gepassioneerde en getrouwe betrokkenheid bij bekende filosofische stromingen die hem tot een interessant denker maken. Echter, zijn metafysische bouwwerk wankelt wat wanneer het de degens kruist met het heideggeriaanse denken, een domein waar Žižek als expert wordt beschouwd vanwege (onder andere) zijn uitgebreide kritieken. Nergens geeft Žižek rekenschap van de performatieve kracht van zijn eigen metafysische spreuken. Een reflexieve act ten opzichte van zijn talige exposé omtrent 'het gebeuren' is wat men zou mogen verwachten van een boek dat haar onderwerp dankt aan Heideggers begrip Ereignis. Met een dergelijke verkenning van zijn eigen gedachtegang in haar wereldlijke verschijning had hij 'de lege huls van het subject' als analogie wellicht niet geponeerd.
Dergelijke eigenaardigheden kan men hem wel vergeven: Žižek is consistent genoeg, en elke filosoof lijkt wel een ingewikkelde relatie te hebben tot de intellectuele erfenis die zijn denken bepaalt. Daarmee onderscheidt Žižek zich niet. Vooral moet ook de complexiteit van resulterende posities binnen filosofische discussies geen nieuws zijn, en al helemaal niet voor geoefende filosofen als Hans Achterhuis. In zijn recensie durfde de emeritus hoogleraar (van de Universiteit Twente) het boek niet uit te leggen, alhoewel dit boek goed te volgen is voor eenieder met enige vertrouwdheid met een marxistisch dan wel hegeliaans discours (bijvoorbeeld: de gemiddelde filosofiestudent). Voor de leek is Event hoogstwaarschijnlijk te moeilijk. Rutger Bregman van de Correspondent behoort tot de tweede categorie: zijn slappe bespreking van het boek zegt meer over de stand van expertise binnen de journalistiek dan over de moeilijkheidsgraad van het boek.
Het waarlijk frustrerende is dat de opmerkelijke werken van Žižek doortrokken zijn met talloze concessies aan mogelijke lezers. Als showfilosoof wordt de kern van zijn betoog ommuurt met grapjes, verhaaltjes en filmverwijzingen. Elk opgeschreven ter illustratie, zonder ontwarbare functie voor zijn betoog. Hij draaft hier zo ver in door dat de metafysische argumentatie tweede viool begint te spelen. De geveinsde noodzaak van het 'goedkope vermaak' zouden academici als Hans Achterhuis aan moeten vechten, maar de schrijftruukjes worden nu verwelkomd met gedachtegangen die vergelijkbaar zijn met het boerse 'baat het niet, dan schaadt het niet'. Als een filosofie als deze geen blijk kan geven van enige standaard voor omgang met haar volgers, dan kan men zich afvragen wat voor ‘authentieke’ communale ruimte het voorstelt.
Dat men Žižek de vrijheid tot Spielerei gunt bewijst dat er een totaal gebrek heerst aan enige vorm van gevoelde urgentie van academische geschriften binnen het publieke discours. Rutger Bregman en vele anderen met hem willen niet meer de aandacht opbrengen die nodig is om het belang van ingewikkelde filosofische beschouwingen uit te zoeken. Žižek dankt zijn faam aan oppervlakkige strategieën om mensen alsnog deelgenoot te maken van een retro-filosofie, die ondanks de nodige complexiteit vooral niet al te veel mag vervelen. De uiteenzetting wordt gemakzuchtig in stapjes ingedeeld met een onzinnige reisanalogie en aan het eind dienen we allemaal een bijzonder inzicht in 'het gebeuren' verworven te hebben. Voor de serieuze filosofiestudent is zijn nieuwe boek daarom weinig waardevol: hij lijkt er meer op een slim, oud opaatje dat zijn kleinkinderen vermaakt met grapjes en hersenkronkels dan op een academicus die daadwerkelijk te denken geeft.
In de Westerkerk mocht eenieder tijdens de presentatie van het nieuwe boek van Slavoj Žižek dromen over de enige politieke gebeurtenis die authentiek, en tevens typisch communistisch, genoemd mag worden: de omverwerping van het kapitalisme. Žižek gaf er een kritische uiteenzetting vanuit de preekstoel, die door Jan Jaap van der Wal zowel slecht ingeleid als gemodereerd werd. Het was een ongewoon schouwspel waar Žižek graag aan mee deed om wat revolutionaire gedachten te kunnen uitwisselen met de toehoorders, zijn leftist friends. De inhoud van Event valt echter, net als diens presentatie, wat tegen: lezers zullen zeer geduldig de interessante opmerkingen moeten destilleren uit een overdaad aan fraai gewauwel.
Desalniettemin heeft Žižek een originele ingang in de communistische discussie vanwege de volledig metafysische achtergrond van zijn betoog over het sleutelwoord 'gebeuren': nadat Martin Heidegger het begrip Ereignis ('het gebeuren') introduceerde om het eigenlijke denken van de metafysische traditie te bezorgen, maakten Franse filosofen zoals Deleuze en Badiou dit begrip op eigenzinnige wijze relevant voor metafysische discussies. Žižeks argumentatie poogt aan te tonen dat de traditie van filosofie tegenwoordig schreeuwt om 'het zuivere gebeuren'. Binnen het marxistische discours is deze beoogde navolging van relevante denkwijzen een opmerkelijke omkering van interpretaties van ideologie.
De eerste vaststelling in het boek is dat aan alle gebeurtenissen te merken is dat we nog steeds niet begrijpen wat het betekent te gebeuren. Het eerste hoofdstuk betoogt daarom dat een ontdekking van juist ondoorgrondelijke, fantasmatische nieuwe werelden een dialectische inmenging in de werkelijkheid is. Vervolgens betoogt Žižek dat het emancipatoir aspect van dit type gebeuren een overgave is aan de desintegratie van een samenhang van het werkelijke. De ideologie die hierop hedendaags het hardst probeert te reageren is het boeddhisme: diens lege subjectivisme slaagt erin haar autonomie af te leggen om het 'lijden' onder het fantasme te bestrijden - en zonder succes. Immers, onthechting van de wereld blijft geconfronteerd met diezelfde wereld. Boeddhisme is paradigmatisch voor het onafwendbare subjectieve gebeuren: juist de illusoire aflegging is een dialectische inmenging.
De filosofen hebben dit subjectieve gebeuren tot in haar uiterste uitgewerkt: in Plato leest men de bezetenheid die het fantasmatische en werkelijke vermengt, in Descartes de waanzin van het lege subject en in Hegel de noodzakelijke zelfsublimatie. Zo kan men in lijn met de psychoanalyse slechts één diagnose stellen: men moet het onmogelijke ondernemen en het lege a priori tegen de tijdsstroom in forceren, opdat het immer bevreemdende handelen werkelijk zin heeft. Een juist gebruik van de pseudo-substantiële, subjectieve leegheid maakt pas echt een communale ruimte mogelijk, alhoewel de ideologieën van de onoverkomelijkheid van deze leegheid (o.a. degradatie van het subject naar een rader in de machine) het gebeuren uiteraard glashard zullen ontkennen.
Het is zijn tegendraadsheid binnen de eigen traditie en zijn gepassioneerde en getrouwe betrokkenheid bij bekende filosofische stromingen die hem tot een interessant denker maken. Echter, zijn metafysische bouwwerk wankelt wat wanneer het de degens kruist met het heideggeriaanse denken, een domein waar Žižek als expert wordt beschouwd vanwege (onder andere) zijn uitgebreide kritieken. Nergens geeft Žižek rekenschap van de performatieve kracht van zijn eigen metafysische spreuken. Een reflexieve act ten opzichte van zijn talige exposé omtrent 'het gebeuren' is wat men zou mogen verwachten van een boek dat haar onderwerp dankt aan Heideggers begrip Ereignis. Met een dergelijke verkenning van zijn eigen gedachtegang in haar wereldlijke verschijning had hij 'de lege huls van het subject' als analogie wellicht niet geponeerd.
Dergelijke eigenaardigheden kan men hem wel vergeven: Žižek is consistent genoeg, en elke filosoof lijkt wel een ingewikkelde relatie te hebben tot de intellectuele erfenis die zijn denken bepaalt. Daarmee onderscheidt Žižek zich niet. Vooral moet ook de complexiteit van resulterende posities binnen filosofische discussies geen nieuws zijn, en al helemaal niet voor geoefende filosofen als Hans Achterhuis. In zijn recensie durfde de emeritus hoogleraar (van de Universiteit Twente) het boek niet uit te leggen, alhoewel dit boek goed te volgen is voor eenieder met enige vertrouwdheid met een marxistisch dan wel hegeliaans discours (bijvoorbeeld: de gemiddelde filosofiestudent). Voor de leek is Event hoogstwaarschijnlijk te moeilijk. Rutger Bregman van de Correspondent behoort tot de tweede categorie: zijn slappe bespreking van het boek zegt meer over de stand van expertise binnen de journalistiek dan over de moeilijkheidsgraad van het boek.
Het waarlijk frustrerende is dat de opmerkelijke werken van Žižek doortrokken zijn met talloze concessies aan mogelijke lezers. Als showfilosoof wordt de kern van zijn betoog ommuurt met grapjes, verhaaltjes en filmverwijzingen. Elk opgeschreven ter illustratie, zonder ontwarbare functie voor zijn betoog. Hij draaft hier zo ver in door dat de metafysische argumentatie tweede viool begint te spelen. De geveinsde noodzaak van het 'goedkope vermaak' zouden academici als Hans Achterhuis aan moeten vechten, maar de schrijftruukjes worden nu verwelkomd met gedachtegangen die vergelijkbaar zijn met het boerse 'baat het niet, dan schaadt het niet'. Als een filosofie als deze geen blijk kan geven van enige standaard voor omgang met haar volgers, dan kan men zich afvragen wat voor ‘authentieke’ communale ruimte het voorstelt.
Dat men Žižek de vrijheid tot Spielerei gunt bewijst dat er een totaal gebrek heerst aan enige vorm van gevoelde urgentie van academische geschriften binnen het publieke discours. Rutger Bregman en vele anderen met hem willen niet meer de aandacht opbrengen die nodig is om het belang van ingewikkelde filosofische beschouwingen uit te zoeken. Žižek dankt zijn faam aan oppervlakkige strategieën om mensen alsnog deelgenoot te maken van een retro-filosofie, die ondanks de nodige complexiteit vooral niet al te veel mag vervelen. De uiteenzetting wordt gemakzuchtig in stapjes ingedeeld met een onzinnige reisanalogie en aan het eind dienen we allemaal een bijzonder inzicht in 'het gebeuren' verworven te hebben. Voor de serieuze filosofiestudent is zijn nieuwe boek daarom weinig waardevol: hij lijkt er meer op een slim, oud opaatje dat zijn kleinkinderen vermaakt met grapjes en hersenkronkels dan op een academicus die daadwerkelijk te denken geeft.
July 5, 2019
Se lembram quando eu falei que tinha lido o "Guia Ilustrado para Slavoj Zizek" por um acaso do destino?! Bem, então como eu gostei das ideias desse "filósofo mais perigoso do mundo", principalmente no que tange a linguagem, a imagem e o desejo, fui atrás de livros dele. Um dos que encontrei foi esse: Acontecimento. Achei incrivelmente pertinente com muitas coisas pelas quais a sociedade atual e inclusive fiz um textinho apoia do nele lá no meu blog. Deixo o link no final. Claro, as partes que mais me interessaram foram as que falam nos três temas acima. Mas achei muito legal como ele usa as análises de filmes bem atuais (e outros nem tanto, mas clássicos) para analisar o funcionamento do ser humano e da sociedade em que ele está inserido. Adorei que ele cita o Neil Gaiman para explicar o que é o amor. Talvez seja por isso que ele seja um "filósofo perigoso" porque diferente da grande maioria desses estudiosos, ele não fica trancado num quarto pequeno burguês e vai viver o mundo. Faz isso para falar com esse mundo que está ao redor dele nos termos das pessoas que vivem esse mundo e não da elite que o controla e diz o que deve ou não valer. O link para o post é esse.
January 19, 2019
I enjoyed the broad jumps from pop culture, to film analysis, to historical analysis, to psychoanalysis and philosophy. Zizek has a rare talent for weaving all these pieces together in an interesting way and making an interesting point from a piece of uninteresting pop culture.
This is the first of Zizek I’ve read, so I’m not sure if this is just his general style, but I also felt this broadness of topic led to a lack of coherency. It wasn’t clear where the book was headed except in one direction after another. It helps even less when many of the philosophers Zizek uses to explain topics don’t read very clearly themselves.
In the broadness of Zizek’s definition of event, the defining of the possibility of some future event remains very subjective. Was the election of Donald Trump, or Brexit, or #metoo a sufficient event?
This is the first of Zizek I’ve read, so I’m not sure if this is just his general style, but I also felt this broadness of topic led to a lack of coherency. It wasn’t clear where the book was headed except in one direction after another. It helps even less when many of the philosophers Zizek uses to explain topics don’t read very clearly themselves.
In the broadness of Zizek’s definition of event, the defining of the possibility of some future event remains very subjective. Was the election of Donald Trump, or Brexit, or #metoo a sufficient event?
February 2, 2019
A good quick read, a possible good start to reading Zizek?
I enjoyed his critiques on art, however I had to do further readings when he talked about Hegel (which, really, isn't such a bad thing).
I think it's important to mention that it was also a fun read, which is rare when reading philosophy.
I enjoyed his critiques on art, however I had to do further readings when he talked about Hegel (which, really, isn't such a bad thing).
I think it's important to mention that it was also a fun read, which is rare when reading philosophy.
June 27, 2021
Un texto mu sencillo y divertido para conocer lo que significa un acontecimiento a nivel filosófico, social e individual.
January 27, 2021
This book's premise was fantastic, and I thoroughly enjoyed the extended metaphor of investigating a subject as a philosophical journey. The first couple of 'stops' on the 'journey' were the most substantial and most interesting, whilst the last couple felt like we were drifting into a less promising area. I have no problem with the idea of 'going rogue' or 'off-road' (or perhaps, off-rail in this case) or even immersing ourselves into what Zizek calls the 'amphibious notion with even more than fifty shades of grey.' However, I didn't get the relevance of where he was taking us and felt that several other places might have been more fruitful. I also wish that he had followed a K.I.S.S. approach and actually addressed the sorts of examples he listed in his 'all aboard' opening chapter. Worse still, he opens with the idea that with the topic of 'Event' we are already at the heart of philosophy, only to meander away and never come back again.
Overall, whilst I was not a fan of the way that Zizek bounces all over the place - using examples from philosophical treatise and pop-stars in one paragraph and then rolling straight over into movie reviews and quotes from Agatha Christie in the next – I forgive him because the core notion was 'philosophy in transit.' His writing style created a sense of being on a train and seeing the landscape flash by as a blurred montage from which some items seem to jump out whist others melt away. Nothing has a chance to be anything substantial because the train has already moved on before you can focus on any particulars. Furthermore, whilst he doesn't offer any real solutions or tie off loose ends, a journey tends to be linear, with an ending located differently to where you began. So again, perhaps we can forgive him for leading us astray and dumping us in the wilderness. After all, we did choose to board the train (albeit it under the false pretences of the opening).
The idea that an 'Event' can be anything from falling in love to the Twin Towers' collapse seems obvious. Yet, when you keep thinking of options, you move towards other apparent 'big deals' such as paparazzi oopsie-scoops, military coups, celebrity engagements, revelations about waterboarding and so on. You end up with a very diverse set of 'events' that seem to qualify for an 'Event.' This diversity causes you to wonder how Event should be defined.
Zizek himself defines it in a variety of ways under different contexts, such as: "…event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it. Such a frame can sometimes be directly presented as a fiction which nonetheless enables us to tell the truth in an indirect way." Alternatively, Zizek explains it thus: "an event at its purest and most minimal: something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation," and then elsewhere: "an event is the effect that seems to exceed its causes."
In other words, Zizek admits that whilst we can explain and understand an event, it is not so simple to define it. Moreover, an 'approximate definition' is enough, and indeed highly philosophical, because as he says, we intuitively grasp the concept of event and moving forward requires something of a leap of faith. This again suits his writing style – rather than being strictly pragmatic or orderly, you simply have to go along for the ride and see where Zizek will take you, hoping or trusting that it will be somewhere worthwhile.
Whilst this book was written before Donald Trump was running for President, let alone all that has happened since, I was reading it in a post-Trump world and it makes you realise that Events are eternal. The murder of Caesar, his romance with Cleopatra, her suicide, the collapse of ancient Egyptian, the revolutions in modern Egypt, the feeling that you get if you're lucky enough to enter an Egyptian tomb and see the light fall on the painted walls, the discovery of new treasures announced on the news… over and over again, events can be re-framed as Events.
Interestingly, however, it is their importance that makes them a capital-e Event. That importance can be personal or global. Meeting 'the one' is a deeply personal and pivotal moment which makes it an Event for those two people, and perhaps a few extended family members. On the other hand, the romance between two world leaders (governmental or celebrity) quickly escalates the kiss from an event to an Event. Again – it's an obvious distinction, but it is interesting to be reminded that the focus of attention is enough, like placing the issue under a magnifying glass or microscope. (Which raises a whole new question of definition now that we live in an Instagram-Twitter world where things like Fart-gate or Bernie-in-a-chair consume hours beyond measure).
What was also interesting was the idea of an anti-event. What if there was a negative event you wish to dispute or re-write? What happens if there was no event at all but you can create it by saying so? As I write this in late January 2021, the ex-President of the USA has repeatedly suggested that the election was 'stolen' while a counter-faction denied this to be true. The debate ultimately could be said to have led to the protests at Capitol Hill – a seriously big Event – with potentially profound repercussions. In other words, there was an Anti-event and Event intimately locked together.
What is of particular interest to me, and the primary reason I decided to read this book is that metaphor can be seen as an event. It is a moment in which the expected is replaced with the unexpected, a moment in which we might have an ah-ha moment as we are forced to re-review the world around us and potentially see it in a different light. It seems disingenuous to compare an architectural moment to September 11 or falling in love. However, there are moments in architectural history where particular buildings, drawings, or manifestos have shifted the collective thinking and reframed the way we see the built world around us. If there was a debate as to whether metaphor had the power to alter the hegemony of architectural ideology, then the answer can be framed in terms of the scale of the Event.
Overall, I'm not entirely convinced that Zizek was really 'into' his subject, but he gave it a red hot go. I give the book three stars because it was a very clever premise, a very clever framing of the material, and a very thought-provoking read. However, the journey was not overly enjoyable for me, and the destination was not worth the cost of the ticket.
Overall, whilst I was not a fan of the way that Zizek bounces all over the place - using examples from philosophical treatise and pop-stars in one paragraph and then rolling straight over into movie reviews and quotes from Agatha Christie in the next – I forgive him because the core notion was 'philosophy in transit.' His writing style created a sense of being on a train and seeing the landscape flash by as a blurred montage from which some items seem to jump out whist others melt away. Nothing has a chance to be anything substantial because the train has already moved on before you can focus on any particulars. Furthermore, whilst he doesn't offer any real solutions or tie off loose ends, a journey tends to be linear, with an ending located differently to where you began. So again, perhaps we can forgive him for leading us astray and dumping us in the wilderness. After all, we did choose to board the train (albeit it under the false pretences of the opening).
The idea that an 'Event' can be anything from falling in love to the Twin Towers' collapse seems obvious. Yet, when you keep thinking of options, you move towards other apparent 'big deals' such as paparazzi oopsie-scoops, military coups, celebrity engagements, revelations about waterboarding and so on. You end up with a very diverse set of 'events' that seem to qualify for an 'Event.' This diversity causes you to wonder how Event should be defined.
Zizek himself defines it in a variety of ways under different contexts, such as: "…event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it. Such a frame can sometimes be directly presented as a fiction which nonetheless enables us to tell the truth in an indirect way." Alternatively, Zizek explains it thus: "an event at its purest and most minimal: something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation," and then elsewhere: "an event is the effect that seems to exceed its causes."
In other words, Zizek admits that whilst we can explain and understand an event, it is not so simple to define it. Moreover, an 'approximate definition' is enough, and indeed highly philosophical, because as he says, we intuitively grasp the concept of event and moving forward requires something of a leap of faith. This again suits his writing style – rather than being strictly pragmatic or orderly, you simply have to go along for the ride and see where Zizek will take you, hoping or trusting that it will be somewhere worthwhile.
Whilst this book was written before Donald Trump was running for President, let alone all that has happened since, I was reading it in a post-Trump world and it makes you realise that Events are eternal. The murder of Caesar, his romance with Cleopatra, her suicide, the collapse of ancient Egyptian, the revolutions in modern Egypt, the feeling that you get if you're lucky enough to enter an Egyptian tomb and see the light fall on the painted walls, the discovery of new treasures announced on the news… over and over again, events can be re-framed as Events.
Interestingly, however, it is their importance that makes them a capital-e Event. That importance can be personal or global. Meeting 'the one' is a deeply personal and pivotal moment which makes it an Event for those two people, and perhaps a few extended family members. On the other hand, the romance between two world leaders (governmental or celebrity) quickly escalates the kiss from an event to an Event. Again – it's an obvious distinction, but it is interesting to be reminded that the focus of attention is enough, like placing the issue under a magnifying glass or microscope. (Which raises a whole new question of definition now that we live in an Instagram-Twitter world where things like Fart-gate or Bernie-in-a-chair consume hours beyond measure).
What was also interesting was the idea of an anti-event. What if there was a negative event you wish to dispute or re-write? What happens if there was no event at all but you can create it by saying so? As I write this in late January 2021, the ex-President of the USA has repeatedly suggested that the election was 'stolen' while a counter-faction denied this to be true. The debate ultimately could be said to have led to the protests at Capitol Hill – a seriously big Event – with potentially profound repercussions. In other words, there was an Anti-event and Event intimately locked together.
What is of particular interest to me, and the primary reason I decided to read this book is that metaphor can be seen as an event. It is a moment in which the expected is replaced with the unexpected, a moment in which we might have an ah-ha moment as we are forced to re-review the world around us and potentially see it in a different light. It seems disingenuous to compare an architectural moment to September 11 or falling in love. However, there are moments in architectural history where particular buildings, drawings, or manifestos have shifted the collective thinking and reframed the way we see the built world around us. If there was a debate as to whether metaphor had the power to alter the hegemony of architectural ideology, then the answer can be framed in terms of the scale of the Event.
Overall, I'm not entirely convinced that Zizek was really 'into' his subject, but he gave it a red hot go. I give the book three stars because it was a very clever premise, a very clever framing of the material, and a very thought-provoking read. However, the journey was not overly enjoyable for me, and the destination was not worth the cost of the ticket.
October 15, 2014
Book Review: Event by Slavoj Zizek
Philosophers have great difficulty writing books for the general reader. They either use technical terms and obscure language that give the impression of deep thought, beyond the reach of the uninitiated and essentially boring, or they write in plain language that reveals their deep thoughts to be nothing more than what our grandparents called common sense.
It was Bertrand Russell who said that ‘common sense is not so common’ and he, of course, was the supreme exemplar of the art of conveying deep thoughts in everyday language. Roger Scruton has in more recent times preserved this tradition but regrettably Slavoj Zizek has not.
The theme of Event is said to be the impact of three great philosophers, Plato, Descartes and Hegel who are said to have each revolutionised thought in their time, thus constituting three great events in the history of philosophy. Few of Russell’s readers will doubt this contention and it was probably well understood by many well-read people of still earlier generations. What Zizek adds in describing the nature of an event is mostly drawn from a hotchpotch of existentialist jargon, avent garde cinema productions, especially film noir, Eastern mysticism and obscene anecdotes. One puts down this book with a nasty taste in the mind.
Philosophers have great difficulty writing books for the general reader. They either use technical terms and obscure language that give the impression of deep thought, beyond the reach of the uninitiated and essentially boring, or they write in plain language that reveals their deep thoughts to be nothing more than what our grandparents called common sense.
It was Bertrand Russell who said that ‘common sense is not so common’ and he, of course, was the supreme exemplar of the art of conveying deep thoughts in everyday language. Roger Scruton has in more recent times preserved this tradition but regrettably Slavoj Zizek has not.
The theme of Event is said to be the impact of three great philosophers, Plato, Descartes and Hegel who are said to have each revolutionised thought in their time, thus constituting three great events in the history of philosophy. Few of Russell’s readers will doubt this contention and it was probably well understood by many well-read people of still earlier generations. What Zizek adds in describing the nature of an event is mostly drawn from a hotchpotch of existentialist jargon, avent garde cinema productions, especially film noir, Eastern mysticism and obscene anecdotes. One puts down this book with a nasty taste in the mind.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 138 reviews