Slavoj Zizek. Materialism and Theology. 2007 3/8

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, intelligent design, 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

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[spinozareagan]

Zizek isn't a postmodernist. You and all the rest of the vulgar materialists/petty atheists (Dawkins fan boys) are way out of your element.

Dawkins can tell us an awful lot about evolutionary biology. But he can tell us nothing of our Being.

[schzx]

"Anyone that doesn't subscribe to a reductionistic scientism is a mystic and a pseudophilosopher."

Yes, pretty much.

[theantigaia]

@dgontar the contingency he is referring to is that of your relative perspective, am I correct?

I'm trying to get some of these terms down..I'm a newb to philsophy lol.

[BalladoftheWindfish]

NOW THIS IS AN ATHEIST I WOULD LOVE TO ENGAGE. He even quotes Catholic sources - I love it.

[ot44eto]

The main problem with philosophy and modern science is that our scientific instruments become so precise that thay shown us things that are nonsense fo us. Our common sense is created in specific environment and it is not appliable on very large or very small scales. This is why our common sense fails and our philosphy is impotent to explain the structure of reality in it's extremes. So don't pay attention of some phylosophycal tautology about the natural word. This is no way to gain knowledge.

[jaggerlags]

@7freddie7 He's done more for understanding of evolution than many. Why is this so threatening that you'd have to call him a self-promoter and aggregator of other peoples work? Ha! I should hope so, that seems to be the so called duty of any published author and honest scientist. Richard Dawkins could tell you a lot about evolutionary biology.

[JaCorBoar]

"there must be some unknown feature missing"

Stringtheory = God

[7freddie7]

Dawkins can't even tell us a lot about evolutionary biology, actually. He's not a particularly important scientist; he's merely an expert self-promoter and aggregator of other people's work.

[Jtherva]

This guys doing a good job of explaining why not to believe in religions so far.

[almable1337ify]

wtf

[ryguillian]

@spinozareagan His understanding of evolutionary biology (at least as summarized in "The Selfish Gene") is somewhat primitive; he doesn't give much credit to epigenetic possibilities... see "The Four Dimensions of Evolution"

[JaffarDS]

As a Christian, I find Zizek's insight very interesting. I also find it interesting that he likes Chesterton (who is one of my favorite authors).