Yesterday, a friend, as they say, heard that her partner was invited for a two week walking tour in Sri Lanka. It was immediately clear and fine that the partner would go but it left my friend feeling somewhat sore. This is then partly a short tale of a very boring moment of jealousy but …
Category archives: philosophy
Chesterfield Spire
There is no finer spire than that of Chesterfield Church. It is the result of a mistake of course but is the finest piece of Gaudi architecture north of Barcelona. Walter Benjamin was concerned with ‘aura’ and the impossibility of meaning remaining constant across time. The ‘aura’ of this spire is maintained by it being …
desire…
Zizek’s definition of an obsessional neurotic (himself included) is someone whose object of desire is the other’s desire. So I do recall a very intimate moment in which a friend told me that he had been drawn into the eyes of a woman, he had seen in her a great beauty which was not an …
skyfall and ideological form
Starting from the premise that the film makers are aware of what they are doing but that still they are tracing a shape whose contours are formed by the ideological sub-strata of our society. This is the ‘big other’ of Zizek and via his work Lacan, something to which reference is made implicitly in all …
practising structure
My daughter E is doing something for the first time and showing me. She explains that this is the way she usually does it. She has no way of doing it though, she is just doing it. I ask her if that is the case, does she have a way to do it or is …
integration
I’ve been writing or am always about to be writing about integration. My current stock reply to any questions is that the Jews died in Germany not because they weren’t integrated but precisely because they were integrated. Integration is a question of what is it into which you are integrated. Everyone is integrated even if …
babylonian virtues – minority report
Babylonian Virtues – Minority Report is the title of the second chapter by Gunjević in God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. I didn’t read directly a reference to the film Minority Report in the chapter which is, effectively, an evaluation of Negri and Hardt’s book Empire in the context of their use of Augustinian ideas to …
apocalyptic prevarication
Far from luring us into a perverse self-destructive rapture, adopting the properly apocalyptic stance is – today more than ever – the only way to keep a cool head. This is Zizek (should I say of course) turning an idea on its head with a hope filled lucidity. The idea is that the apocalyptic stance …
god and nature and the solution
Some time ago in a sitting room in France with some British friends I was looking at the photos, prints and paintings hanging on the walls. I had began a conversation with them about the idea that the natural world, the landscape, nature shared important attributes with God, perhaps the Old Testament God who had …
jeremy *unt, james naughtie and the big other
Another line of Zizek’s is illustrated by the spoonerism of James Naughtie on the Today programme. James Naughtie is barely, but just about manages, to suppress his hysterical laughter. Everyone who has heard the clip knows he is pissing himself laughing and covering it with a cough. I have heard no criticism of him for …
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