So here’s a brief, lazy post where I don’t actually stitch together any meaningful ideas of my own. Instead, I’m going to leave you all with this brilliant video of a talk by the newest love of my life, Slavoj Žižek. This is possibly the only man in the world of whom I can say the following: He makes my uterus quiver and I wouldn’t mind having his Babies. With a capital B. In the plural. Even though they would probably be half-evil and half-communist.
But really, the brutality and charm of this man, on a scale of one to mouth-left-gaping, are the square root of minus one (Because Žižek was so influenced by Lacan. Sorry, it’s that time of the month where I feel like I have to be pretentious). My prejudiced worship of him aside, this 2 hour video comprising of a talk and Q&A session with one of the greatest living intellectuals of our time is absolutely riveting. I promise. Especially if you’re stuck in the Parisian heat without a fan in your house and have escaped to a place of your choice with WiFi and an AC, your afternoon will fly by and before you know it, it will be sunset and you will have learned a lot of new things.
The very intriguing-sounding title of the talk is ‘Love as a Political Category’ and Salvoj talks about things as diverse as Love, Hegel, Christianity, Buddhism and western philosophy, to the Delhi rape case, farmers’ suicides in India, the economic crisis, ‘culture’ as an instrument of colonialism, capitalism, even the famous movies Das Leben der Andern and Goodbye Lenin, and my favourite of them all- the Truth.
The Truth, or even the truth, it’s working-class cousin, is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last few months and I was surprised to see that my ideas about it were actually very similar to Žižek’s. I don’t think that the Truth lies within us, all that lies within us are the narratives we make up for ourselves to absolve ourselves of all the bad things we do, so that we can sleep at night. These are our personal myths, and we don’t lie to anyone as much as we lie to ourselves. No one ever believes they are bad or, taking it a notch up, evil. All our personal fictions prove to us how we are tender, loving human beings with good intentions, in spite of all the shitty things we do. I will maybe pursue this line of thought in detail in a later post, because for now the jealous lover that is my mémoire beckons, so I must end quickly and use my words sparingly (I’m saving all my words for Him- my dissertation!).
Anyway, remember that the video is, above all, plain FUN. I had a great time watching it. Especially around the 46th minute. And also look out for the dirty Jesus Christ joke after the first hour. Very funny. To conclude, as Slavoj says, life is generally shit, but what we need is a miracle every now and then. He is surprisingly and adorably naive at times, especially when it comes to love, which he believes is one of those miracles that make life less shitty. I’m afraid I’m not as optimistic about love, my life’s ambition being, as I recently told a friend, to have as much casual sex as possible and publish and travel as much as possible till I eventually die of syphilis in an exotic land, like our friend Nietzsche. Maybe at his age one can afford to adopt the attitude he does towards love. (Cannot stop myself from adding here how interesting the term ‘falling’ in love is. The very terminology involves falling, breaking, losing control, getting hurt. This is an idea I had dealt with in the very first poem I posted on this blog, called ‘Falling Women’.) Love is a very violent notion and emotion. All I can say about Slavoj Žižek is, he says a lot of bullshit, but without all the bullshit.
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