Slavoj Zizek. Materialism and Theology - 2007 8/8
BackSlavoj 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, 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
Channel: News & Politics
Uploaded: September 12, 2007 at 11:30 am
Author: egsvideo
Length: 00:09:57
Rating: 4.86
Views: 5538
Tags: Slavoj Zizek Intelligent Design islam materialism religion god EGS european graduate school phsychoanalysis philosophy
Video Comments:
danielsiq (November 19, 2008 at 4:20 pm)
What I don't understand is why he thinks materialism is so Vulgar? This is a typical religious view, that materialism is bad.
iwpoe (September 20, 2008 at 10:56 pm)
I do wonder whether or not the Heideggerian hasn't come back to us when Žižek says, "consciousness is originally consciousness of failure".
ToroAzzurro (July 15, 2008 at 1:07 pm)
So basically the matter is that both theology and materialism create a 'semantic authority' by the category of 'one' (god, o the athom, wich is a way to simplify reality by creating some othernesses which are kind of epistemological dogmas, am I right?
t0kt0k (May 17, 2008 at 6:10 am)
Very, very interesting. I'm slowling becoming quite a Zizek fan.
bushka5 (May 12, 2008 at 4:48 pm)
That was hard work still I stuck with it to the bitter end. though most of it went over my head!
camipco (April 24, 2008 at 6:20 am)
Brilliant lecture. "let's not get lost in it..."
KellyLogan (March 13, 2008 at 11:18 am)
The idea of consciousness being a limiting factor rather than a liberating one is very interesting. Doesn't evolutionary theory show that 'evolution' is often a matter of focussing and limiting?
I think you could make a parallel between this and Chomsky's idea of the limitations of language; if so, perhaps one could show, as Chomsky did, that the limitations are actually a necessary structure to creation. That leads me to the thought that if the universe were perfect we would not need a god.
I think you could make a parallel between this and Chomsky's idea of the limitations of language; if so, perhaps one could show, as Chomsky did, that the limitations are actually a necessary structure to creation. That leads me to the thought that if the universe were perfect we would not need a god.
FartheadOgre (February 15, 2008 at 7:07 pm)
So in other words humans are piles of shit that can't accept that they are animals.
KellyLogan (March 13, 2008 at 11:13 am)
I would say instead that humans are animals that are conscious due to imperfections. :^)
0neironaut (April 17, 2008 at 4:12 am)
ehhh, a parallel with Nietzsche when he said in The Gay Science that rationality was borne out of irrationality... by chance, exception, mistake, "catastrophe" (Zizek would say). This is the way of nature; nature is dumb and blind.