[lbo-talk] Zizek reference

Philip Pilkington pilkingtonphil at gmail.com
Tue Apr 7 07:50:07 PDT 2009


I think Zizek picks up this idea from Alain Badiou who, in my opinion, is a better writer. Here's a quote that should fit the bill from his book "Ethics" ( http://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Essay-Understanding-Evil-war/dp/1859844359/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239114865&sr=1-1 ):

"Parliamentary politics as practised today does not in any way consist of setting objectives inspired by principles and of inventing the means to attain them. It consists of turning the spectacle of the economy into the object of an apathetic (though obviously unstable) public consensus. In itself, the economy is neither good or bad; it is the place of no value (other than commercial value, and of money as a general form of equivalence). It simply 'runs' more or less well. Routine politics is the subjective or valorizing moment of neutral exteriority. For the possibilities whose development it pretends to organize are in reality circumscribed and annulled, in advance, by the external neutrality of the economic referent." (Ethics, p: 31).

Here's a Zizek reference if its preffered - its from his essay "Repeating Lenin" ( http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm):

"“Fidelity to the democratic consensus” means the acceptance of the present liberal-parliamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns, and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose socio-political order would be different. In short, it means: say and write whatever you want — on condition that what you do, does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus."



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