16/05/
2013, 21:00h, cinema
Europa, 6th Subversive festival
Slavoj Žižek "
Love as a political category"
Moderator:
Srećko Horvat
Che Guevara's statement that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love" should be read together with his much more problematic statement on revolutionaries as "killing machines": "
Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy." These two apparently opposite stances are united in
Che's motto: "Hay que endurecerse sin perder jamás la ternura. (One must endure -- become hard, toughen oneself - without losing tenderness.)" Or, to paraphrase
Kant and
Robespierre again: love without cruelty is powerless; cruelty without love is a blind, short-lived passion. Guevara is here paraphrasing Christ's declarations on the unity of love and sword -- in both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable and pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence -- it is this link which raises love "over and beyond the natural limitations of man." Has this topic any relevance for our late capitalist predicament?
Slavoj Žižek
Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working in the traditions of Hegelianism,
Marxism and
Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis.
Žižek is a senior researcher at the
Institute of Sociology,
University of Ljubljana,
Slovenia, and a professor at the
European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at many important universities. He is currently the
International Director of the
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at
Birkbeck, University of London and president of the
Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. He has been called 'the most dangerous political philosopher in the
West'. He is a traditional guest and Parteigenosse at
Subversive Festival. He has published over 50 books that have been translated into 20 languages. He writes on many topics including subjectivity, ideology, capitalism, fundamentalism, racism, tolerance, multiculturalism, human rights, ecology, globalization, the
Iraq War, revolution, utopianism, totalitarianism, postmodernism, pop culture, opera, cinema, political theology, and religion. Some of his books are
The Sublime Object of Ideology (
2002.), The Ticklish
Subject (
2006.),
Violence (2008.),
The Parallax View (2009.),
First As
Tragedy, Then As
Force (
2010).
http://www.subversivefestival.com/foruml/7/
222/en/slavoj-zizek-love-as-a-political-category
- published: 26 May 2013
- views: 75151