Three takes on the 2011 England Riots: Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Žižek and Stuart Hall
These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers. […] We are all consumers now, consumers first and foremost, consumers by right and by duty. The day after the 11/9 outrage George W. Bush, when calling Americans to get over the trauma and go back to normal, found no […]
On Democracy: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Zizek
“This, then, my friend,” said I, “is the fine and vigorous root from which tyranny grows, in my opinion.” “Vigorous indeed,” he said; “but what next?” “The same malady,” I said, “that, arising in oligarchy, destroyed it, this more widely diffused and more violent as a result of this licence, enslaves democracy. And in truth, […]
On Revolt: Kropotkin, Camus, Bataille, Arendt, Žižek
The anxious expectation that nothing will happen, that capitalism will go on indefinitely, the desperate demand to do something, to revolutionize capitalism, is a fake. The will to revolutionary change emerges as an urge, as an “I cannot do it otherwise,” or it is worthless. With regard to Bernard Williams’s distinction between Ought and Must, […]
