<nettime-ann> Slavoj Zizek lecture

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The UCSD Visual Arts Department, in conjunction with Calit2, presents:

SLAVOJ ZIZEK

"POLITICS BETWEEN FEAR AND TERROR"

lecture
15 November 2006
5:00 - 8:00 pm
Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall
University of California, San Diego

Introduction by Norman Bryson

simulcast:
http://live-calit2.ucsd.edu:8080/ramgen/broadcast/live.rm
(Real player and broadband connection required)


Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.
He is well known for his use of the works of Jacques Lacan in new readings
of popular culture. He writes on a wide range of topics including
fundamentalism, violence, political correctness, globalization,
subjectivity, human rights, myth, postmodernism, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Zizek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has been a visiting professor at, among others,
the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium,
Princeton University, The New School, the European Graduate School, the
University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the
University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of
London.

Zizek's early career was hampered by the political environment of 1970s
Yugoslavia. In 1975, he was prevented from gaining a post at the
University of Ljubljana after his Master's thesis was deemed to be
politically suspect. He spent the next few years undertaking national
service in the Yugoslav army and eventually became involved with a group
of Slovenian scholars whose theoretical focus was on the psychoanalytic
theory of Jacques Lacan.

It was not until the 1989 publication of his first book written in
English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, that Zizek achieved international
recognition as a major social theorist. Since then, he has continued to
develop his status as an intellectual outsider and confrontational
maverick. One of his most-widely discussed books, The Ticklish Subject
(1999), explicitly positions itself against Deconstructionists,
Heideggerians, Habermasians, cognitive scientists, feminists and what
Zizek describes as New Age "obscurantists".

One of the problems in outlining Zizek's work and ideas is that he
frequently changes his theoretical position between books and sometimes
even within the pages of one book. Because of this, some of his critics
have accused him of inconsistency and lacking intellectual rigor. However,
Ian Parker claims that there is no " Zizekian" system of philosophy
because Zizek, with all his inconsistencies, is trying to make us think
much harder about what we are willing to believe and accept from a single
writer. Indeed, Zizek himself defends Jacques Lacan for constantly
updating his theories, arguing that it is not the task of the philosopher
to act as the Big Other who tells us about the world but rather to
challenge our own ideological presuppositions. The philosopher, for Zizek,
is more someone who criticizes than someone who tries to answer questions.

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Presented by the UCSD Visual Arts Department (http://visarts.ucsd.edu) and
the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
(http://calit2.net)



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