Thought.is

Could Žižek really have been only pretending to be some sort of radical leftist all along? Was his endorsement of Trump to be taken at face value, or was there, yet again, some more subtle point he was making?

When Glenn Beck heard that Jay-Z had sported a leather jacket with the cover of Eugene Thacker’s book “In the Dust of this Planet” stenciled on the back, he got mad.

No doubt, there are plenty of pleasures to be had today. But is it possible to enjoy yourself, to live through yourself rather than through the ubiquitous corporate Hollywood haze of images, desires, and emotions? Is this a question even worth asking?

What is a phantasy?  The word is spelled in a funny way, right?  Instead of the word fantasy with an ‘f,’ (a word that indicates the presence of trolls, dragons or a fairy prince who lives under the Dursley’s stairs) phantasy with a ‘ph’ is a technical word. 

Let’s stick with revolution. At the end of Michael Hardt’s interview he says that the location they picked for the conversation was all wrong. Central Park Lake is too aristocratic a location to stage a talk of revolution, but he rejects other possible locations as clichéd. He rejects the background of the slums as perhaps maudlin, and claims that a factory, or the point of production, would also be clichéd.

I was 11 years old and visiting Europe with my parents on my first trip outside the United States, when I first encountered and rejected the reality of my own strangeness. I was climbing on a concrete play structure in Stockholm– an undulating biomorphic sculpture that was matronly, grey, and curved in such a way as to encourage a boy to touch.

This is not a fair characterization of psychoanalysis as the purpose of analysis is precisely the opposite. That is, rather than attempting to transform the banalities of bourgeois life into mystified objects of desire, the analyst aims at exposing how these object of desire are just projections onto banality.