Lacanian Ink 29 Otherness

by Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Josefina Ayerza

The paradoxical figure of the individual who stands for the big Other. One should not think primarily of the leader-figures who directly embody/personify their community (king, president, master), but, rather, of the more mysterious figures of protectors of appearances. Today, it seems that appearances no longer have to be protected. We all know the innocent child from Andersen's "The Emperors New Clothes" who publicly proclaims the fact that the emperor is naked today, in our cynical era, such a strategy no longer works, it lost its disturbing power, since everyone is publicly saying all the time that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc.), and nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor had his clothes on... Slavoj Zizek - The Inexistence of the Big Other. All of this indicates why we cannot agree with a philosophy of mortality and finitude. There is no ontological status of death. Of no existent we can say that it is a being-for-death. Because existence is a transcendental degree and nothing else, we must ask with Saint Paul: Death, where is thy victory?. Dying, exactly like existing, is a mode of being-there, and therefore a purely logical correlation. The philosophy of death is included in one sentence: Do not be afraid by the logic of a world, or by the games of existence. We are living and dying in many different world. Alain Badiou - Towards a New Concept of Existence.

About the author

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.

He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).

Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."