Geert Lovink: You have been to Japan. What’s your opinion on the technological culture in this country? Slavoj Zizek: First I must say that I don’t have my own positive theory about Japan. What I do have, as every Western intellectual, are the myths of reference. There is the old, Read more…
For many long years in left-wing (and not only left-wing) mythology the State appeared as the original source of Evil, as a living dead sponging off the body of the community. The repressive, particularly ideological machinery of the State was presented as the process of supervising and maintaining discipline, as Read more…
[Extract. Appeared in New Left Review I/202, November-December 1993] Why speak about courtly love (amour courtois) today, in the age of permissiveness, when sexual encounter is often nothing more than a ‘quickie’ in some dark corner of an office? The impression that courtly love is something out of date, long superseded Read more…
Jacques Lacan is responsible for saying, “there is no sexual relation.” This should not make lovers too upset, for in fact, Love is what we have to make up for the Relation that is missing. Eros would be the potential of supreme Good, for harmony uniting men and women, women Read more…
The world today is more and more marked by the frontier separating its insiders from its outsiders, between the “developed” – those to whom human rights, social security and the like apply – and the others, the excluded. The main concern of the “developed” is to contain the explosive potential Read more…
Zizek: Yes, but my point is that prohibition is masked as this kind of universal, objective, knowledge statement. This is for me today’s Spinozist world, especially in the United States. For example, every can, every package, is full of information. Of course this information is about what it contains and Read more…
[Extract. Appeared in New Left Review I/183, September-October 1990] Why is the West so fascinated by the recent events in Eastern Europe? The answer seems obvious: what fascinates the Western gaze is the re-invention of democracy.It is as if democracy, which in the West shows increasing signs of decay and Read more…