Slavoj Zizek

Wednesday

Slavoj Zizek

Secret bioweapon labs are Putin’s MacGuffin 

From our US edition

Some commentators have already noted the strange homology between Russia’s evocation of “secret bioweapon labs” in Ukraine and the US evocation of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which in both cases were used to justify military attack. It’s not that the US was unsure if Saddam had WMDs; they positively knew he did not have them, which is why they risked a ground offensive in Iraq, rather than sticking to air bombing. The nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction perfectly fulfill the role of a “MacGuffin” in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. A MacGuffin is “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance,” per Merriam-Webster.

bioweapon labs

Thursday

Slavoj Zizek

Putin’s Stalinist playbook

From our US edition

Vladimir Putin's actions have shocked many Western observers over the past few days. But his moves bear all the hallmarks of one of his predecessors: Joseph Stalin. Last Monday, the Russian Duma passed a direct appeal to Putin to recognize the Russian-controlled separatist states of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Russian president first said he would not immediately recognize the so-called republics. The reason for this was he wanted it to appear that when he finally did recognize them as independent republics, he was simply reacting to popular pressure from below. This is straight out of the Stalin playbook.

stalin

Thursday

Slavoj Zizek

Was Russia’s ‘rape’ of Ukraine inevitable?

From our US edition

In a press conference earlier this month, Vladimir Putin noted that the Ukrainian government does not like the Minsk agreement and then added: "Like it or not, it's your duty, my beauty." The saying has well-known sexual connotations: Putin appeared to be quoting from “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin” by the Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mold: “Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.” Although the Kremlin press representative claimed that Putin referred to an old folkloric expression, reference to Ukraine as an object of necrophilia and rape is clear.

rape

Tuesday

Slavoj Zizek

Why Julian Assange is hated

From our US edition

The British High Court ruled on Friday that Julian Assange can be extradited from the UK to the US. The US thus won its appeal against a January UK court ruling that he could not be extradited due to concerns over his mental health. This latest twist in the endless Assange saga is just the culmination of the long and slow well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination that reached the lowest level imaginable with unverified rumors that Ecuadorians in their London embassy wanted to get rid of him because of his bad smell and dirty clothes.

assange

Monday

Slavoj Zizek

Hollywood’s vacuous moral turn

From our US edition

On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... The list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of 'Other' deprived of its disturbing Otherness. We should add to this series another key figure from our cultural space: a decaffeinated protester, a protester who says all the right things, but somehow deprives them of their critical edge.

black widow hollywood

Tuesday

Slavoj Zizek

Is communism authoritarian capitalism?

From our US edition

On July 1, 1921, the founding congress of the Chinese Communist party was held in Shanghai, when 12 men gathered in a villa in the richest part of the city. Today, the party has over 90 million members. It has transformed not only China but the history of the entire world. The main stages in its development are well-known. In late 1920, Mao Zedong took over and reoriented the party from city workers to poor farmers. In the mid-1930s, the Long March, although a retreat, established a link between the party and the people across China. In 1949, revolution won. From 1958 till 1975, the Great Leap forward and the Cultural Revolution tried to enforce fast economic and social change.

china communism capitalism

Monday

Slavoj Zizek

Biden is wrong on Putin

From our US edition

I am no fan of Trump, but what Joe Biden said in a recent interview with George Stephanopoulos made me almost nostalgic for some aspects of the last presidency. When Biden was asked if he believes Putin to be a killer, he replied, 'I do.’ He also confirmed reports that in 2011, while serving as vice president, he personally told Putin that Putin does not 'have a soul’. Putin’s reply was quick and masterful: he wished Biden best health and inviting him to a public debate about big existential and ethical issues on Zoom. Biden’s strong words stand in sharp contrast to Trump who, in 2017, when the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly called Putin a 'killer’, suggested that America’s conduct was just as bad as that of the Russian president.

biden putin

Tuesday

Slavoj Zizek

Trump’s barber paradox

From our US edition

For 30 years, Donald Trump regularly visited the Paul Molé Barber Shop in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Adrian Wood, the barber who owns the shop, remembers that Trump would instruct barbers precisely where to snip his mane, and would never allow them to expose his bald spot, as revealed by a report in the New York Post: ‘He’s a complete control freak. He dictates exactly how you cut every hair on his head. “Cut here, cut there. That’s enough.” And you just do what he says.

pardon

Friday

Slavoj Zizek

The thin line between Zionism and anti-Semitism

From our US edition

One of the main reasons Labour lost the election in the UK was a well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Jeremy Corbyn, who was rated Top Anti-Semite of 2019 by the Wiesenthal Center (ahead of actual terrorists!). There is nothing new in this. It is a small part of the worldwide offensive whose victims include many Jews critical of Israeli politics — such as the 'propagandist for Hamas' Gideon Levy, who wrote in Haaretz on December 8: 'Laws labeling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism and the anti-occupation movement as anti-Semitic, are passed with overwhelming majorities.

zionism

Wednesday

Slavoj Zizek

Human sexuality is innately perverse

From our US edition

Many politically correct feminists aggressively dismiss Freud and psychoanalysis in general as outdated. I myself was recently attacked in Austria as an old white man who hasn’t read a book for 30 years. What they are effectively doing is repressing Freud’s basic insight, that of a split or divided subject and of the unconscious — the fact that people in general don’t know what they want and don’t want what they desire.This is why explicit free consent of both partners in a sexual act is not enough to preclude violence. Even if a written contract or a selfie of both partners is not required, the minimum that those who worry about violence in sex demand is explicit verbal consent, as is required by a new law proposed in New South Wales.

sexuality

Monday

Slavoj Zizek

Free Julian Assange — his fate is inextricably tied to our own

From our US edition

I visited Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison on November 21. One small detail, insignificant in itself, did strike me as emblematic of how prisons function with regards to welfare and human rights. All the guards were very kind and repeatedly emphasized that everything they do is for our own good. For example, Assange is in solitary confinement 23 hours per day. He has to eat all his meals alone in his cell, and when he is allowed out for an hour he can’t meet other prisoners. The communication with a guard who accompanies him is reduced to a minimum. Why such severe treatment since he is now just in protective custody? (He served his prison time and he is only there to prevent him escaping extradition.

julian assange

Friday

Slavoj Zizek

Don’t insult Joker by comparing him to Trump

From our US edition

Critics weren’t sure how to categorize Joker: is it just a piece of entertainment (like other Batman films), an in-depth study of the genesis of pathological violence, or an exercise in cultural theory? From his radical leftist standpoint, Michael Moore called it 'a timely piece of social criticism and a perfect illustration of the consequences of America's current social ills', pointing out that it explores the protagonist’s origin story, examines the role of bankers, the collapse of healthcare and the divide between rich and poor. However, Joker does not only depict this America, it also raises a 'discomfiting question' in Moore’s mind: what if one day the dispossessed decide to fight back?

joker

Tuesday

Slavoj Zizek

The Nobel Committee honors an apologist for genocide

From our US edition

Peter Handke’s Nobel win is the latest in a series of unfortunate incidents surrounding the Nobel prize in literature, from the weird decision to give it to Bob Dylan in 2016 to last year’s sexual assault scandal. When Handke called for the prize to be abolished in 2014 he said it was a 'false canonization' of literature. The fact that he has now won it proves he was right. This is what Sweden is today – if the Nobel committee had any courage they would give the peace prize to Julian Assange (one of the true heroes of our time), yet instead they would rather honor an apologist for genocide.

peter handke nobel

Thursday

Slavoj Zizek

Trump will be re-elected because of left-liberal stupidity

From our US edition

Not such a long time ago, in a galaxy that now appears far, far away, the public space was clearly distinguished from the obscenities of private exchanges. Politicians, journalists and other media personalities were expected to address us with a minimum of dignity, talking and acting as if the common good is their main preoccupation, avoiding vulgar expressions and reference to personal intimacies. There were, of course, rumors about their private vices, but they remained that – private matters mentioned only in the yellow press. Today, however, not only we can read in the mass media about the intimate details of public personalities, populist politicians themselves often regress to shameless obscenity.

donald trump re-elected

Saturday

Slavoj Zizek

How to boil a frog

From our US edition

Back in the early 1990s Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, outlined the new ANC government’s strategy to deal with the whites: 'it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water.' As Dr Oriani-Ambrosini put it, 'He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.

frog

Tuesday

Slavoj Zizek

In defense of treason

From our US edition

The recent G20 meeting in Osaka and its surrounding events provide a sad view of the emerging New World Order: Trump exchanging love messages with Kim Jong-un and inviting him to the White House, Putin jovially clapping hands with Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and so on, with Merkel and Tusk, the two voices of old European reason, marginalized and mostly ignored. This NWO is very tolerant: they all respect each other, no one is imposing on others imperialist Eurocentrist notions like women’s rights. This new spirit is best encapsulated by the interview Putin gave to the Financial Times on the eve of the Osaka summit, in which he, as expected, lambasted the ‘liberal idea’ claiming that it ‘outlived its purpose.

treason

Friday

Slavoj Zizek

Transgender dogma is naive and incompatible with Freud

From our US edition

Although partisans of LGBT+ like to dismiss psychoanalysis as out of date, many of them fully participate in the ongoing repression of basic Freudian insights. If psychoanalysis taught us anything, it is that human sexuality is immanently perverted, traversed by sadomasochist spins and power games, that in it, pleasure is inextricably interlinked with pain. What we get from many LGBT+ ideologists is the opposite of this insight, the naive view that, if sexuality is not distorted by patriarchal or binary pressure, it becomes a happy space of authentic expression of our true selves. Suffice it to remember what happened with Girl (2018), a Belgian film about a 15-year-old girl, born in the body of a boy, who dreams of becoming a ballerina.

therapists freud

Friday

Slavoj Zizek

Let’s not demystify the vagina, please

From our US edition

In the struggle against ‘sexism’ (some) women demanded that we end the fetishization of their breasts and accept them as just another part of a woman’s body. One of the results of this struggle for ‘free nipples’ was that, in some big cities, groups of women organized protest walks where they were naked above the belt – the point was precisely to de-eroticize breasts. We are now entering the next logical step in this direction – the goal is now to ‘demystify’ the ultimate sexual object.

vagina