The Terror Fabulous

He can speak more quickly than he can think. He’s like a jackhammer. He has published more than 50 books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages. His most recent book, “Living in the End Times,” is a 400-page treatise on the demise of the liberal democracy.

He gives more than 200 lectures a year and has held visiting professorships at elite American universities. He recently spoke to an audience of 2,000 people in Buenos Aires. He is the subject of two documentary films, and in another film he interprets movies from a psychoanalytical point of view as he speeds across the ocean in a motorboat. There are Zizek T-shirts and Zizek records, and there is a Zizek club and an international Zizek journal.

His repertoire is a mix of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegel’s idealist philosophy — of film analysis, criticism of democracy, capitalism and ideology, and an occasionally authoritarian Marxism paired with everyday observations. He explains the ontological essence of the Germans, French and Americans on the basis of their toilet habits and the resulting relationship with their fecal matter, and he initially reacts to criticism with a cheerful “Fuck you!” — pronounced in hard Slavic consonants. He tells colleagues he values but who advocate theories contrary to his own that they should prepare to enter the gulag when he, Zizek, comes into power. He relishes the shudder that the word gulag elicits.

“Take my friend Peter, for example, fucking Sloterdijk. I like him a lot, but he’ll obviously have to be sent to the gulag. He’ll be in a slightly better position there. Perhaps he could work as a cook.”

One could say it’s funny, especially the way Zizek delivers it, in his exaggerated and emphatic way. But one could also think of the more than 30 million people who fell victim to Soviet terror. Those who find Zizek’s remarks amusing could just as easily be telling jokes about concentration camps.

“But you know?” Zizek says in response to such criticism. “The best, most impressive films about the Holocaust are comedies.”

‘The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West’: Welcome to the Slavoj Zizek Show.

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A War of Apps for and Against Belief – NYTimes.com.

Not smart enough to read source texts, draw conclusions from them and form a cogent argument and yet still are still absolutely certain that you can make sweeping pronouncements about the fundamental nature of reality? There’s an app for that.

Ill-informed mouth-breathers on both sides of the debate ‘started’ by Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” can now download apps to their iPhones that provide them with pat answers to common questions from believers and non-believers alike. Whether you’re congratulating yourself for being a free-thinking radical whose titanic intellect pierced millennia of lies and obfuscation to come to the earth-shattering conclusion that everything bad in the world isn’t down to a talking snake persuading a naked lady to eat a magic apple <em>or</em> an up-with-people post-hippie with a mostly bumper-sticker based knowledge of the precepts of a bastardised faith cobbled together from whatever mythology happened to be lying around Palestine in 0AD- there’s software that will make an argument about the most significant things humanity can conceive of into a asinine technologically mediated grind!

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The Argonaut Folly (part 1 of 3) | HiLobrow.

ONCE UPON A TIME, according to Apollonius of Rhodes (and before him Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and countless forgotten mythopoets), a Greek prince named Jason was sent by his uncle, a usurper, to parts unknown on a mission impossible: to fetch a magical golden ram’s fleece. Jason commissioned a 50-oared galley, the Argo, and manned it with the noblest heroes of the era. Their number included mighty Heracles; the bard Orpheus, whose voice enchanted nature itself; bronco-busting Castor and his immortal brother, the boxer Polydeuces; Zetes and Calaïs, the winged sons of the North Wind; as well as the seer Idmon, the sign-reader Mopsus, fleet-footed Euphemus, eagle-eyed Lynceus, shape-shifting Periclymenus, and Aethalides the mnemonist. After adventures on one perilous island after another, and having safely navigated the Clashing Rocks guarding the entrance to the Black Sea, the surviving Argonauts arrived at Colchis (Georgia), acquired the fleece with the aid of the witch Medea, and made their way back home.

That, at any rate, is what we learn from children’s books of mythology. But a wised-up reading of the Argonautica of Apollonius suggests that Jason’s crew of ultra-talented specialists was less a ship of heroes than a Narrenschiff, a ship of fools[...]

But in what sense can the Argonauts be called foolish? They are fools for precisely the same reason that they are heroes: because each one of them is superior to ordinary mortals in an overly specialized fashion. When they’re in their rightful element — council, banquet table, or boudoir, in Jason’s case; in Heracles’, the battlefield — there is no stopping them. But in every other circumstance the Argonauts are, as Apollonius frequently notes, amechanos: without resource. Jason is all talk, no action; Heracles is all brawn, no brain. When Tiphys dies (after a mysterious illness that, frankly, bears investigation), Jason collapses on the beach, lamenting, “We are doomed to grow old here, inglorious and obscure”; and when Heracles breaks his oar he sits speechless and glaring: “He was not used to idle hands.” It proves all too easy for these intrepid birds of passage to become as helpless as Baudelaire’s albatross, whose enormous wings make him monarch of the air but a risible cripple on earth. No wonder that Heracles grumbles about how they seem more like exiled criminals than heroes: to be an Argonaut is to be a superman viewed by ordinary mortals as a misfit, a loser, an outlaw.”

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I’m not going to talk about Cocorosie’s album Grey Oceans. That I don’t want to talk about it shouldn’t be taken to mean that is beneath my contempt or unspeakably awful- I don’t talk about the vast majority of music that I listen to. I have no strong feelings about Cocorosie. I can imagine hearing them at a polite but not formal dinner or an ethnic-organic cafe. To me they’re the musical accompaniment to Hummus.
What I want to talk about is the article on Stereogum that has caused me to write three blog posts about Cocorosie in almost as many days and spend more time with their music than I have with anything that I am genuinely excited by.
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“Kennedy’s breakthrough, published in the journal Apeiron this week, is based on stichometry: the measure of ancient texts by standard line lengths. Kennedy used a computer to restore the most accurate contemporary versions of Plato’s manuscripts to their original form, which would consist of lines of 35 characters, with no spaces or punctuation. What he found was that within a margin of error of just one or two percent, many of Plato’s dialogues had line lengths based on round multiples of twelve hundred.

Believing that this pattern corresponds to the 12-note musical scale widely used by Pythagoreans, Kennedy divided the texts into equal 12ths and found that “significant concepts and narrative turns” within the dialogues are generally located at their junctures. Positive concepts are lodged at the harmonious third, fourth, sixth, eight and ninth “notes”, which were considered to be most harmonious with the 12th; while negative concepts are found at the more dissonant fifth, seventh, 10th and 11th.

For once, Alfred North Whitehead’s description of western philosophy as “a series of footnotes to Plato” looks like being an understatement. “We’ve got some 2,000 pages of Plato,” says Kennedy. “We now know that underneath all of those genuine dialogues there’s another layer of symbolic meaning. This is the beginning of a big debate. It will take years to make sense of all this.”

Platos stave: academic cracks philosophers musical code | World news | The Guardian.

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“Combining archival research with close textual analyses, Geroulanos significantly revises not only the most polemical and problematic accounts of antihumanism’s emergence, but also many of the standard narratives of the successive stages of twentieth-century French philosophy, from Kojève’s purportedly Marxist and anthropological readings of Hegel in the 1930s to Heidegger’s 1946 “Letter on Humanism,” understood as a manifesto of antihumanism. In Geroulanos’s account, the story is far more complicated and much less linear. Beyond recasting the work of the best known thinkers of the mid-century, Geroulanos also highlights the significance of lesser-known figures, from the philosophy of science to theology. In incorporating these voices, he is able to show that atheist antihumanism, far from being opposed to currents of either scientific or religious thinking, was, in fact, deeply indebted to them.”

Man dies again! « The Immanent Frame.

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