Paper on Reactor and ‘Big Lizard’s Big Idea’ to be presented at Chelsea Theatre symposium
A paper on Reactor and ‘Big Lizard’s Big Idea’ will be presented at Chelsea Theatre’s ‘A Make Believe World’ symposium as part of the Sacred Festival. Daniel Oliver will discuss Reactor’s practice of ‘relational insincerity’, drawing on both Slavoj Žižek and David McNeill to compare the performative force of our behaviour as participants with our behaviour towards the ‘big Other’ of liberal capitalism.
Response to ‘Slavoj Žižek and the Recycling Superstition’
In this response to my previous post (Slavoj Žižek and the Recycling Superstition) I address the ‘the Rs of sustainability’; continue my examination of Žižek’s notion of superstition and his invocation of the ‘paradox of the performative’; and link to a backlight.vpro.nl video in which Žižek is interrogated by giant video screens.
Slavoj Žižek and the Recycling Superstition
Two weeks ago (Thursday, July 1st 2010) I attended Slavoj Žižek’s lecture at the LSE, marking the release of his new book: Living in the End Times. In this post I will address Žižek’s provocative claim that efforts at personal recycling—‘small everyday acts’—equate simply to a superstition. This was by no means the focus of his lecture—it was little more that a passing comment—but, whether he has any valid grounds for making such a statement or not, a careful examination of this contention is an interesting departure point.