Slavoj Zizek. Materialism and Theology. 2007 8/8

http://www.egs.edu/ Slavoj Zizek lecturing about materialism and theology, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the psychoanalysis of culture and societies. Videolecture focuses on fundamentalism, materialism, theology, atheism, atheists, humanists, humanism, reason, logic, rationality, believe, faith, religion, christian, christianity, islam, fundamentalists, fundamentalism, god, nature, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Public open lecture for the students of the European Graduate School EGS, Media and Communication Studies department program, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2007, Slavoj Zizek.
Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian sociologist, postmodern philosopher, and cultural critic is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School EGS who uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia where he lives to this day but he has lectured at universities around the world. He was analysed by Jacques Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan's son in law. His research focuses on Karl Marx, Hegel and Schellingfundamentalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
He has published many books and translations in several languages. He is the author of The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989, Beyond Discourse Analysis (a part in Ernesto Laclau's New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time), London: Verso. 1990, For They Know Not What They Do, London: Verso. 1991, Looking Awry, MIT Press. Enjoy Your Symptom!, Routledge. 1992, Tarrying With the Negative, Durham, New Carolina: Duke University Press. 1993, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan, But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock,1993, The Metastates of Enjoyment,1994, The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters, 1996, The Abyss of Freedom, University of Michigan Press. 1997, The Plague of Fantasies, Multi-culturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multi-national Capitalism, New Left Review, issue 225 pgs. 28--51, The Ticklish Subject, 1999, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (authored with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau), Verso. 2000, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway, Washington: University of Washington Press. The Fragile Absolute, 2000, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 2001, The Fright of Real Tears: Kryzystof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-Theory, British Film Institute (BFI), On Belief, Routledge. Opera's Second Death, Repeating Lenin, Zagreb: Arkzin D.O.O. 2001, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 2002, Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings, Organs Without Bodies. 2003, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 2003, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, 2004, Interrogating the Real, London, Continuum International Publishing Group. 2005, The Universal Exception, London, 2006, Neighbors and Other Monsters (in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology), Cambridge, Massachusetts: University of Chicago Press. The Parallax View, How to Read Lacan, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2007

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Slavoj
• Zizek
• Intelligent
• Design
• islam
• materialism
• religion
• god
• EGS
• european
• graduate
• school
• phsychoanalysis
• philosophy

[PessimisticHumanist]

Who is the guy Zizek is pointing at, apparently present in the room, comparing him with Deleuze?

[egsvideo]

i believe, that the person you are asking about is wolfgang schirmacher, the dean of the media and communications department of the european graduate school. he wrote and edited several books, you can find some of them on amazon.

[NihilAdmirari]

Excellent lecture, though I would not agree with everything he said. Zizek might invest a little too much in shock-value. As usual, EGS makes this place more worthwhile.

[egsvideo]

Thank you for your comment. You are very welcome. More lectures are in the pipeline.

[t0kt0k]

Very, very interesting. I'm slowling becoming quite a Zizek fan.

[KevinFishKing]

When he talks about "vulgar materialism," he is talking about a certain type of materialism. The word "vulgar" functions here similar to the way the word "ear" functions in the phrase "ear doctor." which does not imply that all doctors are ear doctors, but rather refers to the subclass of doctors who deal with ears.

It is also worth noting that when Zizek uses the word "vulgar" he uses with its original meaning: common, crude. Not the meaning: disgusting, bad.

[ceoddyn]

'Some people would say... your comments are torture.' classic

[rajasmasala]

similar to harraway?

[N0113999]

What I think hes saying is that 'natural' materialism comes from theology, in the sense that the concept of a god gives 'sufficient' meaning to everything. Due to this early mistake humans have moved through history with that understanding, and so have facilitated a materialist world, in which possessions dictate the human relationship to the world around us.

[N0113999]

What I think hes saying is that 'natural' materialism comes from theology, in the sense that the concept of a god gives 'sufficient' meaning to everything. Due to this early mistake humans have moved through history with that understanding, and so have facilitated a materialist world, in which possessions dictate the human relationship to the world around us.

[XsavagistX]

Zizek is too limited to civilized perspectives (in all spheres) and he anchors everything to it as if the concepts he speaks of are universal human perspectives. even his concept of non-nature/nature stems from that limited perspective and doesnt go "radical" enough.

[Krelianx]

No, since what we're after is not really a set of existentiales grounded in Dasein's transparent coping (to use Dreyfus' term) within the nexus of purposeful activity. Consciousness of failure should be rather read as the Hegelian 'cunning of reason'.

[Krelianx]

Just in passing, I want to give a general comment to people who are not familiar with these thinkers. When Zizek expresses something that appears to speak against science or for religion, he is usually attacking the philosophical account of scientific practices, not the scientific practices themselves. Zizek does not speak against quantum physics, but about how we mistakenly draw philosophical conclusions from them. Great science does not entail having great philosophical accounts of science.

[Krelianx]

Zizek is a materialist; he is rejecting a particular brand of materialism which rests on a transcendental dualism of subject (opinion, belief and object (fact, truth). Such a simplified picture is of course vulgar, since it is ideologically naive in its ontological foundations (at the philosophical level they are quite pathetic).

[lethalhumour]

The return of Heidegger's infamous broken hammer?