Slavoj Zizek at Southbank

a fragment of the talk of Slavoj Zizek at Southbank Centre (London) 09 March 2009

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Zizek

[funkatraz]

people laugh becasue they are embarrased -its a technique for releiving anxiety pressure - they want others to beleive they undertand, but they don;t and are releived when everyone is

[willwkrueger]

why are they laughing in the end? what he just said is the key to open the door to vistas beyond postmodern fragmentation in western paradigm and brings the proper philosophical and meta sociological view of capitalism to approach it as a global cultural political phenomena

[DaimonTheFallen]

The people who are accusing Zizek os Stalinism are falling into the same traps as he's setting up for you. when he says "I'm a Stlainist" its to get you to think about how the image of a think is conditioned into culture, and how people label each other. Obviously you're missing the point.

[huwlemmey]

He is obsessed with Stalin, I'll give you that, but it doesn't follow that that makes him a Stalinist- more intrigued by the bizarre phenomenon that Stalinism was (is?) and the potential that such an extremity opens up- or at least reveals. To call him a Stalinist sounds like a denunciation- and would a stalinist ever say 'I don't know what to think'? I dunno, I'm not an expert but he's not peddling dead ideologies.

[huwlemmey]

Ha! Don't worry, culture is as much deseminated by rule breakers as by authorities trying to spread their ideology (or whatever). He didn't actually say it, it was the bureaucrat who introduced him- I'm sure he'd appreciate it (or maybe not, who knows? Who cares?)

[AryaOrlova]

I am sorry, I was a bit late and honestly didn't hear him saying that. And I didn't record all the talk, only few min...

[TheEqualiser00]

sorry- by the way I wasn't there, it was soldout. i am seeing him talk on sunday. here he talks about political struggle but his political career failed. he talks about the common enemy without saying who it is, as he has said himself before he "doesn't know what to think" perhaps because Stalin's empire is no more.

[TheEqualiser00]

Huwlemmy, the man's obsessed with Stalin; he suggests that Trotsky inspired Stalinist war communism. Trotsky was far more complex than that. Of course, Zizek's thought is centred around Stalin which is not surprising considering his Czech context. Your comments are ignorant.

AryaOrlova, thanks for not carrying out Zizek instructions if indeed that's what he said!

[huwlemmey]

No he's not, that's a glib and crass take on his thought and thoroughly inaccurate.

Also- tut tut, I was at this talk and didn't he say 'Please don't record' at the start?!

[TheEqualiser00]

Thanks for this video. Zizek is an important thinker, but he is of the 'socialism-in-one-country' Stalinist school of thinking.