One of my favorite cultural critics is Slavoj Žižek, from Slovenia. He’s sassy, has an inimitable style and is really witty; kind of like the Oscar Wilde of postmodern Marxist philosophers. Here’s a Žižek linkdump for everyone.
First of all, he’s on Twitter. Or it may be him, at any rate. It’s not listed as a “verified account,” [...]
The Onion: New Nietzschean Diet Lets You Eat Whatever You Fear Most
Yes, I realize that it’s been a month since I’ve posted. No, I don’t find it acceptable either. More soon; it’s not as though I don’t have ideas for posts or anything.
The first two tales are from John Cage’s book Silence (Cage was a practicing Zen Buddhist), and the third was spotted in a thread at MetaFilter.
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A young man in Japan arranged his circumstances so that he was able to travel to a distant island to study Zen with a certain Master for a three-year period. [...]
Because, you know, fuck actually reading Das Capital, Phenomenology of Spirit or Ecce Homo in the internet age. Some of these Twitter feeds aren’t in English.
Karl Marx: @charles_h_marx (deutsch)
Sigmund Freud: @sfreud
Friedrich Nietzsche: @nietzsche_f (deutsch) and @nietzsche_bot
Slavoj Žižek: @zizekspeaks
G. F. Hegel: @GeorgHegel
Carl Jung: @thecarljung
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My favorite painting by Magritte is The Treachery of Images (referenced in this post). But The Art of Conversation is amazing as well.
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Michel Foucault on L’Art de la Conversation:
In a landscape of battling giants or of the beginning of the world, two tiny persons are speaking–an inaudible discourse, a murmur instantly reabsorbed into the silence [...]
Ah, the 80s. Our hair was big, our guitar solos were shredding (and usually played by people with big hair), and our drug war was shiny and new. D.A.R.E. was the hip approach to schoolin’ the kids about the reefer madness; my school participated in it during the program’s inaugural year. Unfortunately, studies have since [...]
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Friedrich Nietzsche on the role/appeal of the satyr chorus in Greek tragedy:
[T]he satyr was the primordial image of man, the expression of his highest and strongest emotions, as an inspired reveller, enraptured by the approach of the god, as a sympathetic companion, in whom the suffering of the god was repeated, as a messenger bringing [...]
“How different are the prudent and formidable words of the obsessive. He delights in his discourse, touches it up, polishes it. He is the man of one single utterance, and of one unique image. He’ll serve it to you over and over, prepared or presented differently. Don’t be offended. He [...]
The Schopenhauer-on-LSD-sounding title of this post is also the unlikeliest line to ever appear in a low-budget comedy film. Ninja Bachelor Party, co-written and co-starring Bill Hicks, was filmed over the course of a decade and was completed in 1991. I’d never seen it, but we have the youtubes now, so yay!
Bill Hicks is [...]
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(Click on the paintings for larger versions. More about the paintings: Waterhouse, Dali.)
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It could be said that the typical World Wide Web surfer today, sitting alone in front of a PC screen, is increasingly a monad with no direct windows onto reality, encountering only virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in a global [...]