> threatening the very survival of humanity. What, however, are the
> implications of this catastrophe? Are we dealing merely with the logic of
> Capital, or is this logic just the predominant thrust of the modern
> productivist attitude of technological domination over and exploitation of
> nature? Or furthermore, is this very technological exploitation the
> ultimate expression, the realization of the deepest potential of modern
> Cartesian subjectivity itself? The author's answer to this dilemma is the
> emphatic plea of 'Not guilty!' for the Cartesian subject.
Ho ho ho -- sometimes you just gotta love Zizek. He knows where the sacred cows are grazing, and can never resist rustling up a good old-fashioned radical stampede. For "Descartes" read, "Marx", i.e. a subject capable of grasping history and actually changing the damn thing; and note how, in the beginning of this passage, he lays out the competing theories on the marketplace of theory -- the Habermasian, the post-structuralist, the cognitive scientists, and that curious reference to the post-Marxist critical thinker (of course, Zizek himself).
I wonder what he'd make of Adorno. Sure does have that multinational dialectical strain in his thought...
-- Dennis