Event Date: 27 November 2013

Room B01

Clore Management Centre

Birkbeck, University of London

Malet Street

London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

Slavoj Žižek – Masterclass – Communism: An Idea that Divides

Lecture 2: Ideology: The Terror of Permissive Biopolitics



This is the second of three masterclasses (25th, 27th and 29th of November) by Professor Slavoj Žižek on the topic of Communism: An Idea that Divides.

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.

Talk:

Questions: