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COLOQUIO INTERNACIONAL INCONSCIENTE Y FILOSOFÍA: UNA NUEVA MANERA DE PENSAR LO POLÍTICO Intervención Jorge Alemán Muchísimas gracias. Agradezco al Colegio de España estar aquí y a Laura Suárez haberme invitado para poder compartir esta mesa con mi amigo José Luis Pardo y con Markos Zafiropoulos y con mi amigo y maestro Jacques-Alain Miller. Voy a exponer frente a ustedes de manera muy improvisada una serie de líneas que atraviesan un librito que escribí hace poco y que se llama Para una izquierda lacaniana …[1] (con puntos suspensivos). Vaya por delante que yo considero a los libros, como pasa con el arte contemporáneo actual, como cuestiones absolutamente efímeras, es decir, el libro se agota en el momento en que comienza su circulación y me interesa precisamente emplearlos como esto, como lo que voy a hacer aquí, para introducir un trabajo con ellos de transmisión. Foto intervenida de la serie "Paraísos Perdidos II" de Eduardo Medici Lo que voy a narrar frente a ustedes son los diversos problemas que surgieron en relación al título del libro. Siempre me ocurre que estoy, tal vez por una impronta personal mía, situado entre malos entendidos. Hace unos años atrás fue con el libro Lacan: Heidegger, y allí el malentendido consistió en pensar que pretendíamos vincular al psicoanálisis con la filosofía. Por el contrario, Lacan: Heidegger era una intervención de Lacan sobre el texto de Heidegger en función de ajustar el psicoanálisis al siglo XXI. Ahora con la izquierda lacaniana, surgieron otra clase de malos entendidos que intentaré transmitir porque de lo que se trata, con el malentendido es que sea fecundo en la orientación que intentamos avanzar. En primer lugar, les voy a hablar de las distintas formas de ataque que tuvo este texto, especialmente en los blogs. La primera de ella viene de los propios lacanianos, que me dicen que cómo va a haber izquierda lacaniana cuando es evidente la vocación escéptica de Lacan hacia todo

Ernesto Laclau An interview with Ernesto Laclau READ LATER Ernesto Laclau talks to the Greek journal Intellectum about the uses of populism, why radical democracy has nothing to do with liberalism, and how lack of political competition benefits the far-Right. Intellectum: In probably your most famous book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe, you attempted to deconstruct both Marxist theory and liberal democratic thought in order to reinterpret them in such a way that they could contribute to a more sufficient understanding of contemporary politics. What is the significance of the concept of identity for the comprehension of modern reality? Ernesto Laclau: Well I think that the concept of identity can be analysed from different sides. One side would be to identify identity with particularity. There are some difficulties obviously in this type of identification of the two categories. But there are also advantages, because obviously the political problem that presents itself is a problem of general articulation, and general articulation has to rely on some kind of category of identity. So this is the way in which the question of identity emerges today. It can be related to a variety of intellectual contexts, but I think that the essential point is that there are no obvious forms of universality that can replace the notion of identity. Intellectum: In your first book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), you discussed the phenomenon of populism. In 2005 you published On Populist Reason. It seems that populism has remained at the centre of your interest. In a country that is governed by a populist party, what can we assume about the political identity of that people? How is popular subjectivity constructed? EL: I think we have to introduce a classical distinction: the distinction between populus and plebs. Populus is the totality of the community; plebs are those at the bottom of the social pyramid. A characteristic of plebeian

Transcript: Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop BY SARAHANA » Fake leftist melancholia; obscene Zionist pact. Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop First part of the talk is a theoritical discussion on melancholy, mourning and prohibition, addressing Judith Butler and Freud. It's followed by a discussion on Wall Streets protests, including (1) a dissection of Anne Applebaum's recent column in the Washington Post that claims democracy is incompatible with globalization, but also that the Occupy protests (which react to the consequences of globalized economy) are incompatible with democracy (2) the idea of a fake leftist melancholia as it applies to these protests (3) the need to preserve the vacuum the protests create, by refusing to engage in a dialogue with those in power, just yet. Later parts of the unscripted talk discuss the obscene pact of Zionism that allows pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism to co-exist in the same group (like American Christian fundamentalists). Towards the very end, there's a brief mention of the anticipated pact between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood. October 26, 2011 at St. Mark's Bookshop. -- TRANSCRIPT -- I will simply begin by certain historical observations. You probably notice how some people, and I think precisely the wrong people, started to celebrate the Wall Street events as a new form of social carnival: so nice, we have there this horizontal organization, no terror, we are free, egalitarian, everybody can say whatever he or she wants, and so on, all that stuff. It is as if some kind of a carnivalesque collective experience is returning. And this tendency, much more than here, is alive, as you can expect, on the West Coast. A couple of days ago at Stanford they told me that - the other Sunday, about 9 days ago - that in the center of San Francisco, a guy speaking on behalf of those who occupy, said something like, "They are asking you what's your program. They don't get it. We don't have a program. W

Ocupar Wall Street: o que todos querem saber sobre o movimento DOSSIER | 16 OUTUBRO, 2011 - 01:55 É um colectivo de activistas, sindicalistas, artistas, estudantes. Para muitos norte-americanos, essa acção directa e não violenta é a única oportunidade que resta para terem alguma voz política. Por Nathan Schneider, The Nation. Ouvi dizer que o grupo Adbusters organizou o movimento Occupy Wall Street? Ou os Anonymous? Ou US Day of Rage? Afinal, quem os juntou todos? Todos esses grupos participaram. Adbusters fez a convocação inicial em meados de Julho, e produziu um cartaz muito sexy, com uma bailarina fazendo uma pirueta no lombo da estátua do Grande Touro, com a polícia anti-tumultos no fundo. O grupo US Day of Rage, criação da estrategista de Tecnologias da Informação Alexa O'Brien, que existe quase exclusivamente na Internet, também se envolveu e fez quase todo o trabalho inicial de encontros e pelo Tweeter. O grupo Anonymous - com as suas múltiplas, incontáveis e multiformes máscaras - agregou-se no final de Agosto. Mas em campo, em Nova York, quase todo o planeamento foi feito pelo pessoal envolvido na Assembleia Geral de NYC. É um colectivo de activistas, artistas, estudantes, que se reunira antes na campanha "New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts" [Novaiorquinos contra os cortes no orçamento]. Essa coligação de estudantes e sindicalistas acabou de levantar a ocupação de três semanas perto do City Hall, que recebeu o nome de Bloombergville, na qual protestaram contra os planos do presidente da câmara, de demissões e cortes no orçamento da cidade. Aprenderam muito naquela experiência e estavam ansiosos para repetir a dose, desta vez em movimento mais ambicioso, aspirando a ter mais impacto. Mas, de fato, não há ninguém, nem grupo nem pessoa, a comandar toda a ocupação de Wall Street. Ninguém manda? Ninguém é responsável? Como se tomam as decisões? A própria Assembleia Geral tomou as decisões para a ocupação na

In this Oct. 18, 2011 photo, an Occupy Wall Street protestor speaks into microphone for a live-streaming online interview at the media area in Zuccotti Park in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)   From its inception, the Occupy movement has had a contentious relationship with the mainstream media. On September 17, a few hours into the first day of the occupation, as a couple of hundred people assembled in Zuccotti Park, some demonstrators were already complaining of a "media blackout." I was there, as an enthusiastic participant, yet even I wasn't convinced the event was particularly newsworthy: in May more than 10,000 people had marched through nearby streets airing similar grievances; a month later protesters camped for two weeks outside City Hall as part of a protest called Bloombergville. Yet accusations flew through the Twittersphere. The traditional media are ignoring us! Why aren't we big news? About the Author Astra Taylor Astra Taylor is the director of the documentary films Zizek! and Examined Life. She has written for Monthly Review,... Also by the Author Occupy Wall Street on Your Street (Occupy Wall Street) Banks trying to foreclose on homes are surprisingly vulnerable to direct action-a fact that Occupy Our Homes intends to exploit. Astra Taylor 7 comments The Other Prison Population (Movements, Disability Rights Movement) Disabled people march on Washington to protest policies that keep them out of sight, out of mind. Astra Taylor Related Topics Entertainment Religion Social Issues Technology War Before long, Occupy Wall Street would be. When protesters managed to hold their ground through the weekend, sleeping on hard concrete and eating pizza donated by well-wishers from around the world, reporters began dutifully to file stories. But the charge of a media "blackout" persisted until September 24, when shaky video of several young women being cordoned off and pepper-sprayed point-blank by a white-shirted police officer was up

Occupy Ethnography: Reflections on Studying the Movement by Zoltán Glück and Manissa McCleave MaharawalTweetFacebookEmail Winter has seen Occupy Wall Street shift gears. Meetings have moved indoors, and the movement is now more a network of decentralized groups working on symbiotic projects and campaigns. Winter has also brought a moment of self-reflection. Conversations about strategy abound, as do conversations about how best to use one's time and energy. This moment of self-reflection is also an opportunity to turn the analytic gaze upon ourselves and ask what it means to do research on a constantly changing social movement and what lessons Occupy may have to teach the ethnographer. Here in New York, since January, Occupy has been planning for the General Strike on May 1st. These meetings, which started as unwieldy debates about the very idea of a general strike, are now becoming focused planning meetings where important decisions about march routes, alliance-building, tactics, and points of negotiation with organized labor are being decided. In such a context, participation often means being involved in an outreach cluster, taking on some share of the labor in your working group, and thereby becoming implicated in the success or failure of the tasks of the day. The "participation" of participant observation, then, is a process whereby one becomes part of the group (ethnos) that one is writing (graphos) about. Far from being unique to these planning meetings, we argue that because of the structure and process of Occupy, ethnography becomes a practice through which the researcher is inscribed in the movement. The Occupy movement is one deeply concerned with its process, seeking to realize ideals of inclusion and democratic participation through the practice of consensus decision making. With this practice, the process of making a decision is just as important as the decision itself. Consensus explicitly aims to prevent the oppression that occurs th

RETOMANDO LA CALLE, HACIENDO POLÍTICA: EL MOVIMIENTO OCCUPY EN EE UU Sobre voces, símbolos y una gran X El arraigo del movimiento de ocupación de plazas en EE UU ha sido una de las sorpresas del comienzo de curso. Este texto aborda la particularidad del movimiento: su virtud de "reconstruir conexiones y capacidades colectivas". VICENTE RUBIO VIERNES 11 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 2011.  NÚMERO 161 Un miembro del sindicato de estibadores, en un acto de Occupy Oakland el 1 de noviembre. Foto: Oakland Local En una entrevista realizada en 2006, el artista Mark Di Suvero mostraba su malestar al ser preguntado por esa "gran X" de acero y pintura roja que acababa de instalarse en Zucotti Park, y cuya autoría le correspondía. "No es una X. Es una serie de tetraedros abiertos en sus extremos", respondía secamente. Los actuales ocupantes de la plaza, y los habituales del lugar -colaboradores en los grupos de trabajo, curiosos, paseantes-, además de rebautizar el espacio como Liberty Square, hace ya semanas que se refieren a la estructura firmada por Di Suvero como "la cosa roja" -o el "cacharro rojo", o "esa cosa fea roja"-. Es un elemento más de esa geografía improvisada y crepitante que conforma la plaza. Hace unos días, a la sombra de esa gran X, el filósofo esloveno Slavoj Zizek advertía a los ocupantes de la plaza sobre los peligros de dejar traducir la energía social que OccupyWallStreet ha desatado en una estrecha serie de 'demandas': "Las protestas han creado un vacío en la hegemonía ideológica. Y se necesita tiempo para llenar ese vacío adecuadamente, ya que es un vacío preñado de posibilidades, una apertura hacia lo verdaderamente nuevo". La pregunta es pues ¿cómo, con qué, llenar ese vacío? En torno a esa incógnita aguardan multitud de posibilidades, y también peligros y trampas. Algunos comentaristas ya han señalado el acecho de la mercantilización del fenómeno: el canal de televisión MTV ha grabado un episodio de

The Øther 2009-2010 READ LATER By Daniel Tutt, American University Comments and or questions are welcome. Please direct them to danielp.tutt@gmail.com Proximity towards the jouissance of the Other, or the neighbor, in Lacan's seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis becomes a matter of ethical concern because the Other as das Ding (the thing) poses problems outside of the moral relationship. In this paper I will examine the ethical positions of two psychoanalytic theorists, Eric Santner and Slavoj Žižek. The proximity towards the excessive jouissance of the neighbor as das Ding presents a number of interesting ethical problems. Žižek's confrontation with das Ding is a complex procedure that remains ambiguous, particularly in light of his sympathies towards the Christian Pauline agape version of radical love. Žižek's treatment of proximity towards the Other seeks a total escape from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates of the oppressive symbolic order, whereas with Santner, in his text The Psychotheology of Everyday Life, the "mental excess" of jouissance caused by confrontation with the Other as das Ding is sought to be converted into an owning of the excessive proximity into a "blessings of more life." This paper first identifies and describes the Lacanian subject - a subject rooted in lack and the crisis of symbolic investiture and argues that Lacanian subjectivity is capable of radical freedom from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates that sustain its relationship to its own freedom. There are several meta-ethical questions that arise in light of Lacan's notion of ethics for subjectivity inhabited by fantasmatic symptoms and a symbolic order structured by oppressive fantasy relations. These problems will be explored in this paper as they guide both Žižek's and Santner's work, particularly the superego demand to "love thy neighbor as thyself." The question of politics in relation to the Other for Santner is centered on how to convert

danieltutt.com The #Occupy Movement and Gramsci OCT. 16, 2011 READ LATER As we enter the second or third week of the #Occupy movement, I'm beginning to sense that the momentum is no longer an issue. The movement seems to have gotten past the hump of legitimacy and we're now into a bona fide new wave of social protest. At this point, the movement has already succeeded, purely in its capacity to incite a new potential into political discourse. It is fair to categorize the #Occupy movement as a form of 'political disobedience', as distinct from 'civl disobedience' insofar as it is purely concerned about the deadlock of politics, after politics, with creating the space for a new possibility of politics. The #Occupy movement is a form of agonistic democracy a la Laclau and Mouffe in On Populist Reason, and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. What is crucial for the movement to maintain its vibrancy is that it continue to keep the demand closed, or if you like, to keep the crisis exposed. The crisis of the system is the problem, and the idea of any modicum of policymakers creating reform is not sufficient. The idea of #Occupy when thought as a visual metaphor is perhaps best envisioned as a collection of struggles that are gathered under a single umbrella. The wider and more able to cover the space of struggles, contradictions, and inadequiecies that politics has provided in recent times, the more potent the power of the movement will gain. In other words, if #Occupy does not open space for the Tea Party, Ron Paul'ies, alter-globalization activists, greenies, identity politics, anarchists, etc, then it will fail. No one struggle can define this movement, especially not entrenched institutional interests such as organized labor or MoveOn.org. From the standpoint of strategy, the #Occupy movement has expanded on the idea of following power to various summits and protesting physical space (IMF, World Bank, Seattle in 99′ etc) and has sought to directly occup

Resposta ao desafio de Žižek BY ADMIN - 08/11/2011 POSTED IN: DESTAQUES Talvez esteja na literatura, nas invenções formais para interpretar o mundo, a linguagem capaz de "articular nossa falta de liberdade" Por Alexandre Pilati* Em sua recente participação no movimento de ocupação de Wall Street, o filósofo esloveno Slavoj Žižek proferiu um discurso lúcido e agudo, do qual podemos extrair pelo menos uma frase marcante a respeito da relação entre a linguagem e a ideologia. Disse Žižek: "Nós nos 'sentimos livres' porque somos desprovidos da linguagem para articular nossa falta de liberdade". Para qualquer um que tenha como ofício refletir sobre a cultura e a arte contemporâneas, a frase de Žižek é uma pedra no sapato, um espinho na garganta. No atual estágio do capitalismo, a cultura e a arte em geral, e a literatura em particular, estariam conseguindo produzir formas capazes de articular a nossa "falta de liberdade", a fim de torná-la inteligível? Quais seriam as possibilidades de a literatura e a crítica literária produzirem hoje uma consistência discursiva tão radical e dilacerada que pudesse romper com as mais fundamentais marcas ideológicas do mundo do espetáculo e da tecnologia que aprofunda a alienação? Pensemos aqui especificamente na literatura. Quanto mais estudo literatura e produzo crítica literária, mais me sinto dividido a respeito das possibilidades da literatura no mundo contemporâneo. Em certo sentido, a literatura (e talvez de modo especial a poesia) é uma das formas mais contundentes de expor os nervos dos comprometimentos ideológicos que marcam o avanço planetário e irrefreável da lógica da mercadoria. Noutros termos, entretanto, parece que seu poder se dilui, especialmente pela forma restrita que assume em meio às estratégias de tecnologização da escrita e também pela maneira como ela tem se tornado uma matéria desprovida de sentido vital abrigada em redutos acadêmicos (ca