 |
In Defense Of Lost Causes: Žižek |
|
Today I have bought a copy of Žižek's latest tome:  Hardback as well -- all shiny and new. From the dust jacket: "The era of grand explanations is over; we should no longer aim at all-explaining systems and global emancipatory projects; the violent impostion of grand solutions should leave room for forms of specific resistance and intervention. ... If the reader feels a minimum of sympathy with these lines, she should stop reading and cast aside this volume. This book is unashamedly committed to the 'Messianic' standpoint of the struggle for universal emancipation." Here is a review by Terry Eagleton. Selections from... "Žižek is not a postmodernist at all. In fact, he is virulently hostile to that whole current of thought, as this latest book illustrates. If he steals some of the postmodernists’ clothes, he has little but contempt for their multiculturalism, anti-universalism, theoretical dandyism and modish obsession with culture. In Defense of Lost Causes is out to challenge the conventional wisdom that ideologies are at an end; that grand narratives have slithered to a halt; that the era of big explanations is over, and that the idea of global emancipation is as dead in the water as the former proprietor of the Daily Mirror."... "The self-consciously outrageous case the book has to argue is that there is a “redemptive” moment to be plucked from such failed revolutionary ventures as Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Žižek is by no means a champion of political terror: the Mao he offers us here, for example, is the mass murderer who mused that “half of China may have to die” in the Great Leap Forward, and who remarked that though a nuclear war might blow a hole in the planet, it would leave the cosmos largely untouched. His aim is not to justify such demented views, but to make things harder for the typical liberal middle-class dismissal of them. In pursuing this goal, the book offers us a wealth of political and philosophical insight..." ... "It is not the nave of its central thesis which makes this book so compelling, but its side chapels. Slavoj Žižek, as usual, seems gratifyingly unable to remember what case he has just been pursuing, and there are some splendid digressions, including an account of the changing role of the scherzo in Shostakovich, a disquisition on Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”, and reflections on Eisenstein’s lost masterpieces. In Defense of Lost Causes is a frenetic, eclectic parody of intellectual scholarship, by one so assured in his grasp of the finer points of Kafka or John le Carré that he can afford to ham it up a little."  I think I will enjoy reading this book. |
|
Turning 50 and not having it |
|
"...speaking like Ali G - I'm just not having it" ... and other stuff. |
|
The Dude makes Hollywood blockbuster debut |
|
|
|
Stop apologising for the things you've never done |
|
And shit like that... It is a little known fact that I look like Paul Weller at the peak of his sexual attractiveness (I leave you to work out when that was/is). Chumps. |
|
meme shite |
|
1) What was the last 1980s song you heard? 2) What was the last thing you saw on Youtube? 3) What was the last entry on Wikipedia you viewed? 4) What was the last computer/video game you completed all the way through? 5) What did you last pig out on? 6) What is the last undeleted text message on your mobile phone? Fuck noes -- I never look at nor answer the fucking shite. 7) When did you last have a conversation with someone other than a family member? Don't be so fucking stupid. 8) Aside from where you live, what is the last village/town/city you visited? I have a place inside my head - it doesn't have a name but it is pretty and has flowers and shit like that. 9) What was the last competition you won? Does a raffle count? I once won a giant panda at the circus that was making an appearence at Saltwell Park - it was very unwieldy and awkward to get home even though it had a lead attached. I called it Marmaduke and gave it to my sister. The circus owner did not like his entire enterprise being appropriated. 10) What are the last three blogs you visited? Do I look like I have a fucking memory? And what's with all the fucking questions like? |
|
The quiet life |
|
There was some loony fucking scumfuck chalver dickheed ootside wor flat last neet shouting and swearing his heed off and being abusive to some stupid fucking bint who no doubt is the spunktrench that he unloads his tattie watter into when he isn't tugging his worm onto his own belly hisself and that... anyways - I owpened the window and told the fucker to fuck off (and added a few other choice morsels as well) whereupon the daft twat started threatening me and getting all pissy like chalvers do and that - telling me he was going to kick our door down and shit like that - and doing that daft sort of walk thing they do when they walk like that prick out of Oasis - or Kevin the teenager's friend -- anyway -- I then gave him some more choice morsels to chew on and called the filth. The wifey on the phone asked me where he was -- i told her "ootside wor hoose" and she says "we are a bit busy at the moment - it will be about 45 minutes 'till someone can get there". Useless, useless fucking shit and bastards. Doomed - we are all doomed. |
|
Tribal shite |
|
If I was Impy and it related to Celtic then I would gan on and on and on about this like a fucking tele-sales caller (or something cleverer than that as a simile).
Toon -- top 10 Premier league signings. |
|
Happy Loyalty Day Americans |
|
Your President doth proclaim toward you in this year of our Lord 2008 here.
|
|
This is just a question |
|
I really like diet cherry coke. My problem is - it is so very difficult to actually buy the fucker in the shops (it's never there). 1) why is that? 2) fucked if I know. 3) can Adam Smith's representative on earth in the here and now explain it to me? |
|
Juxtaposition deliberate to piss off fuckheads |
|
“I find it easy to say I’m not a socialist now,” he says. “Painful though I found that, it didn’t cost me as much as to say I’m no longer a Marxist, which wouldn’t really be true. Because it’s the way I think. I think like someone who uses the historical materialist method of analysis.” |
|
Hawking: Primitive Alien Life May Exist |
|
|
|
An agnostic - David Duff is one of them |
|
Make yer mind up young man! Fence sitter! Also has a garden to attend to. I like gardens - wish i had one -- better still an allotment. |
|
people were hurt -- divvint laugh |
|
|
