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Showing posts from December, 2017

Navigating Zizek: Uncanny Happiness

Navigating Zizek Intro: Slavoj Zizek seems to be everywhere, all over YouTube, presenting papers, and teaching at three different schools at least, while at the same time still managing to publish 2-3 new books per year.   Granted, much of what Zizek puts out is rehashed or recycled ideas and anecdotes from previous books and essays, it is nonetheless mystifying how much this guy’s engaged.   To say that he’s prolific is an understatement.   I’ve already read a lot of Zizek, but I doubt that I’ve read even half of what he’s written so far, and the dude keeps on writing.   So it’s a bit of a catch up game for me.    Now, I understand there’s a lot of criticism out there of Zizek already and there is a question whether my voice will add anything at all to the conversation, already in progress.   If anything, my voice will most likely get drowned out in the sea of critique of Zizek’s ideas, this I understand.   The reason I’m doing this is personal. There are lots of other

Behold the Pirates

The rise of the Pirate party in recent Czech elections shows that the left may in fact be invigorated enough to go beyond the Occupy movement and its ultimate failure. Gaining 22 seats in the Czech parliament, the Pirates are now the third largest party in Czech Republic. The only irony here is that the Pirates consider themselves a center party.   This digital ‘left’ acts as a counter point to the alt-right described by Angela Nagle in her book on the subject called ‘Kill All Normies.’   As if there is no end to all the irony in the world, in today’s upside-down world, it is the ‘right’ that is most plugged into the digital world and the internet, somehow able to coopt every tactic that the old ‘new left’ used in its political stance on very diverse issues, from feminism and gay rights, to environmentalism and animal rights, and literally turning them inside-out, into stances like men’s rights, which were initially tongue-in-cheek, but developed into a strangely potent politica