old news?

Compare & Despair - as Stuart Smalley used to say. It's certainly easy to despair, these days.

The world seems to be ripping itself apart. Revolutions, earthquakes, nuclear meltdown, tornados that tear apart a third of the towns they touch. Is this the supposed evidence that Judgement Day is upon us? Only now we have to wait another five months until the final, total destruction of the planet.

Tornado victims cheer themselves with the thought that "The Good Lord will provide."

Meanwhile, it is said that prophet "Camping reads neither Hebrew nor Greek, the two main languages of the Bible, but insists his arithmetic is ironclad."

Matt Tutor, Camping's longtime producer "...thinks $100 million is a conservative figure for the money Camping has spent publicizing May 21."

from LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/la-me-rapture-20110521,0,1687317.story

Zizek

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Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek is the subject of the hagiographic documentary Zizek! This is not the place to learn or understand what this provocative gadfly really believes, other than snippets of his contrarian personality. The film plays mostly like a comedy as it follows the hyperactive Zizek from a lecture in Buenos Aires to his hometown of Ljubljana to New York for more lecturing and adulation. He claims to be a "card carrying Lacanian," which someone more knowledgeable than I could explain. But as near as I can tell that translates as someone who has combined the teachings of Freud and Lacan with a Marxist perspective to derive a psychoanalytic critique of capitalism and modern life.

While this documentary may not be the place to understand Zizek, a quick perusal of the Wikipedia article will yield much jargon and opaque language:

It can be argued however that Žižek's most original aspect comes from its insistence that a Lacanian model of the barred or split subject, because of its stipulation that individuals' deepest motives are unconscious, can be used to demonstrate that ideology has less become irrelevant today than revealed its deeper truth...

To him, the Real names points within the ontological fabric knitted by the hegemonic systems of representation and reproduction that nevertheless resist full inscription into its terms, and which may as such attempt to generate sites of active political resistance...

The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the "mirror stage". Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, "identification" is an important aspect of the imaginary. The relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification is a locus of "alienation", which is another feature of the imaginary, and is fundamentally narcissistic. The imaginary, a realm of surface appearances which are deceptive, is structured by the symbolic order. It also involves a linguistic dimension: whereas the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the "signified" and "signification" belong to the imaginary. Thus language has both symbolic and imaginary aspects. Based on the specular image, the imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship to the body (the image of the body).

Probably the better place to get a sense of what Zizek is about is to read him here, where he contributes regularly, and somewhat more clearly. It is his critique of capitalism and the consumer society that makes him someone important to read.

Why am I writing about a philosopher in a photography blog? To show off some intellectual acumen? To process some of the ideas? To give myself a theoretical underpinning? The opacity and specialized language are a serious hindrance, which lead me to feel even stronger that my unexamined modus operandi are all I am capable of. Let me take my pictures. Don't ask me to examine my motives.

But from time to time, I will...