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Zizek and the Nostalgia for Communism

Marxism after Terror. Zizek and the Nostalgia for Communism. Badiou’s passion for the Real.

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Zizek and the Nostalgia for Communism

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  1. Marxism after Terror Zizek and the Nostalgia for Communism

  2. Badiou’s passion for the Real “In contrast to the nineteenth century’s utopian and scientific projects and ideals … the twentieth century aimed at delivering the thing itself, at directly realizing the longed-for New order. The ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality—the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality” (SlavojZizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates[London and New York, Verso, 2002], 5-6).

  3. Logic of Substitution “When Lacan affirms that anxiety is the only subjective way to search for the lost object, he defines a paradox. What is sought is not the object but its absence, because its present absence introduces the signifier of lack. The phallus (as the signifier of lack) changes from a metaphoric to a metonymic signifier, for the lack (as phallic signifier) moves, circulates. It is everywhere and nowhere. Everyone may bear it and, at the same time, nobody does” (Lander, “The Logic of Anxiety,” in Subjective Experience)

  4. Chaos as absent presence/present absence In Badiouan formulation it is equivalent to the act of voiding the Void. In any case, the Void when voided does not cease to be voidal. It continues to be voidal through the presence of lack, the presence of a substitute for lack. In the same manner by taming it through a substitute, chaos becomes chaotic.

  5. Chaos as Organizational Design • The substitution of a non-presentable presence (chaos before human signification) by a presentable absence (describing the principle of chaos through scientific or philosophical means) inaugurates the beginning of human history

  6. Oedipus as History History amounts to a plane of composition that is already pre-defined by a ‘genetic axis’ or an ‘overcoding structure’ in which Oedipus, or the Name-of-the-Father, the supervising agency of the division of labor, is everywhere inscribed on the plane

  7. Consistency of Oedipus The plane is self-composed by Oedipus, a plane where no exit to non-Oedipal, non-historical, non-patriarchal, non-sexist, non-human consistency is possible.

  8. Circularity of Drives “Nirvana as a return to pre-organic peace is a false vacuum, since it costs more (in terms of energy expenditure) than the circular movement of the drive” (Zizek, Less Than Nothing, 945).

  9. Zizek’s alternative “Out of revolt we should shamelessly pass to enforcing a new order” (Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, 154).

  10. What can Zizek teach us? if, on the one hand, the oedipal capitalist system accommodates terror as it serves as the ontological buffer for the positivity of its normality, and if, on the other hand, global resistance to capitalism is having difficulty escaping a predefined space of determination where exit to nonhistoricality is still fraught with dangers, especially the danger of being co-opted by the oedipal war machine

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