real utopias

Listen to a Free Library Podcast: Slavoj Zizek | Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept (Recorded 9/23/2014) (Slavoj Zizek | Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept: ''The most dangerous philosopher in the West'...

LSE SU Terra, an indigenous rights group at LSE who I have the pleasure of knowing and sometimes working with, organised Indigenous Genius week last week. There was a string of events- talks on ‘The Dread’ of New Zealand, a meeting with Nixiwaka Yawanawá, an indigenous Amazonian working with Survival International, and a panel debate on whether ‘Development=Progress?’. 

Hegel is the ultimate bête noire of the last two centuries of philosophy:proponents of Lebensphilosophie, existentialists from Kierkegaard onwards, materialists, historicists, analytic philosophers and empiricists, Marxists, traditional liberals, religious moralists, deconstructionists and Deleuzians, they alldefine themselves through different modalities of rejecting Hegel. But when enemies start to speak the same language, it is a reliable sign that something is eluding them all. So what if something happens in Hegel, a break-through into a unique dimension of thought which was obliterated, rendered invisible, by the so-called post-metaphysical thought? What if the ridiculous image of Hegel as the absurd “absolute idealist” who “pretended to know everything” is an exemplary case of what Freud called Deck-Erinnerung (screen-memory), a fantasy-formation destined to cover up a traumatic truth? The task of the symposium will be to unearth aspects of this traumatic truth.

The master class analyses phenomena of modern thought and culture with the intention to discern elements of possible Communist culture. It moves at two levels: first, it interprets some cultural phenomena (from today’s architecture to classic literary works like Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise) as failures to imagine or enact a Communist culture; second, it explores attempts at imagining how a Communist culture could look, from Wagner’s Ring to Kafka’s and Beckett’s short stories and contemporary science fiction novels.

It seems that in 1989, with the disintegration of Communism, the two centuries of the radical Leftist “paradigm” were over, that this “paradigm” exhausted its potentials, in spite of some recent half-baked attempts to resuscitate it (in Latin America, in Nepal…); that today, Communism is simply no longer an Idea that divides. So what DOES divide today? The answer seems no less clear: the endless struggle between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalist intolerance. However, do these two poles not implicate and strengthen each other? The true line of division remains the one between the totality of the existing global capitalist universe (whose immanent political antagonism is the one between liberal democracy and fundamentalism) and the radical emancipatory (Communist) idea of breaking out of the very space of this division.

Parenti is an internationally known, highly respected political scientist and award-winning author and lecturer.

In this lecture drawing on his new ‘Seventeen Contradictions and The End of Capitalism’ David Harvey will explore the way capital works, how systemic contradictions are socially and spatially constructed, and ask whether these contradictions and inequalities generate new political and cultural pathways beyond capitalism.