by JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER
I am going to bring an end to the secret: the title of the next Congress of the WAP. After "The Names-of-the-Father", it will be "The objects a in the Analytic Experience". From One (the Name-of-the-Father) to others (the objects a), this is a good sequence. No less good because it is the flip side of the sequence that is laid at the end of the seminar "L'angoisse" and that goes from the a, in the singular, to "The Names-of-the-Father" in the plural.
go to article
When, in 1953, Chou En Lai, the Chinese Prime
Minister, was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to
end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him
what does he think about the French Revolution; Chou
replied: "It is still too early to tell." In a way,
he was right: with the disintegration of the
"people's democracies" in the late 1990s, the
struggle for the historical place of the French
Revolution flared up again. The liberal revisionists
tried to impose the notion that the demise of
Communism in 1989 occurred at exactly the right
moment: it marked the end of the era which began in
1789, the final failure of the statist-revolutionary
model which first entered the scene with the
Jacobins.
go to article
One of the most devious traps which lurk for Marxist
theorists is the search for the moment of the Fall,
when things took the wrong turn in the history of
Marxism: was it already the late Engels with his more
positivist-evolutionary understanding of historical
materialism? Was it the revisionism AND the orthodoxy
of the Second International? Was it Lenin? Or was it
Marx himself in his late work, after he abandoned his
youthful humanism (as some "humanist Marxists"
claimed decades ago)? This entire topic has to be
rejected: there is no opposition here, the Fall is to
be inscribed into the very origins. (To put it even
more pointedly, such a search for the intruder who
infected the original model and set in motionm its
degeneration cannot but reproduce the logic of
anti-Semitism.) What this means is that, even if -
or, rather, especially if - one submits the Marxist
past to a ruthless critique, one has first to
acknowledge it as "one's own", taking full
responsibility for it, not to comfortably get rid of
the "bad" turn of the things by way of attributing it
to a foreign intruder (the "bad" Engels who was too
stupid to understand Marx's dialectics, the "bad"
Lenin who didn't get the core of Marx's theory, the
"bad" Stalin who spoils the noble plans of the "good"
Lenin, etc.).
go to article
Tilton Gallery - New York, NY - 11/17/2006
by ALAIN BADIOU
For the last couple of decades, the intellectual situation in France has been marked by countless discussions about the status to be accorded to the word "Jew" within the divisions of thought.
Undoubtedly, this has to do with the suspicion, based on some indubitable facts and some contrived ones, that anti-Semitism has made a 'return'. But had it ever disappeared? Or is it not rather crucial to see that a considerable change has taken place in the nature of anti-Semitism's forms, criteria and inscription in discourse over the last thirty years?
go to article
Tilton Gallery - New York, NY - 11/20/2006
by SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The general conclusion is that, although the topic of populism is emerging as crucial in today's political scenery, it cannot be used as the ground for the renewal of the emancipatory politics. The first thing to note is that today's populism is different from the traditional version - what distinguishes it is the opponent against which it mobilizes the people: the rise of "post-politics," the growing reduction of politics proper to the rational administration of the conflicting interests. In the highly developed countries of the US and Western Europe, at least, "populism" is emerging as the inherent shadowy double of the institutionalized post-politics, one is almost tempted to say: as its supplement in the Derridean sense, as the arena in which political demands that do not fit the institutionalized space can be articulated. In this sense, there is a constitutive "mystification" that pertains to populism: its basic gesture is to refuse to confront the complexity of the situation, to reduce it to a clear struggle with a pseudo-concrete "enemy" figure (from "Brussels bureaucracy" to illegal immigrants). "Populism" is thus by definition a negative phenomenon, a phenomenon grounded in a refusal, even an implicit admission of impotence.
go to article
Pratt Institute - Brooklyn, NY - 11/16/2006
by ALAIN BADIOU
Our question will be:
What is the dominant ideology today? Or, if you want, what is, in our countries, the natural belief? There is the free market, the technology, the money, the job, the blog, the reelections, the free sexuality, and so on. But I think that all that can be concentrated in a single statement:
There are only bodies and languages.
This statement is the axiom of contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism. Why?
go to article
Two Hollywood productions were released to mark the 5th anniversary of the 9/11: Paul Greengrass's United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. The first thing that strikes the eye is that both try to be as anti-Hollywood as possible: both focus on the courage of ordinary people, with no glamorous stars, no special effects, no grandiloquent heroic gestures, just a terse realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is undoubtedly a touch of authenticity in the films - recall how the large majority of critics unanimously praised the film's avoiding of sensationalism, its sober and restrained style. It is this very touch of authenticity that should make us suspicious - we should immediately ask ourselves what ideological purposes it serves.
go to article
Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Published: January 5, 2007
The United States is continuing, through other means, the greatest crime of Saddam Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple the Iranian government.
Go to the article