nomos
Administrator
the author of that article is either missing much of the point of the film, or disingenuously misconstruing zizek, deleuze and foucault. there's an anti-intellectual bent to the piece that undermines the discussion.
one of zizek's main arguments in the film is that the embrace of a postmodern condition in which everything is relative and there are no universals has led us to a state of detachment, irresponsibility and ironic remove which, in its aggregate, is far more destructive than any given totalitarian regime. this is not to uncritically embrace totalitarianism. he's making a comparison between late capitalism and soviet rule, but i don't think see him pining for the dictatorship that he was quite happy to see off at the turn of the 1990s. the point is that if we pretend that we are after ideology, that capitalism is inevitable, and that right and wrong are just matters of subjective, situated interpretation, then we are far worse off than a society bound to an enforced moral framework (e.g. "the father who says you will visit your grandmother because i said so."). i'm not a zizek expert, but that's my interpretation and (with some caveats around his attachment to psychoanalysis and stalin) i'd largely agree.
one of zizek's main arguments in the film is that the embrace of a postmodern condition in which everything is relative and there are no universals has led us to a state of detachment, irresponsibility and ironic remove which, in its aggregate, is far more destructive than any given totalitarian regime. this is not to uncritically embrace totalitarianism. he's making a comparison between late capitalism and soviet rule, but i don't think see him pining for the dictatorship that he was quite happy to see off at the turn of the 1990s. the point is that if we pretend that we are after ideology, that capitalism is inevitable, and that right and wrong are just matters of subjective, situated interpretation, then we are far worse off than a society bound to an enforced moral framework (e.g. "the father who says you will visit your grandmother because i said so."). i'm not a zizek expert, but that's my interpretation and (with some caveats around his attachment to psychoanalysis and stalin) i'd largely agree.