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Violent Thoughts About Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek has been telling lies about me. He attacked a recent book of mine, Infinitely Demanding, in the London Review of Books.[1] Since then, things have gone from bad to worse, but I will spare the reader the grisly details. What I would like to do here is to use this debate as a lever for trying…

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The Violent State

Whose headless body is this Whose scarlet shroud Whose torn and wounded cloak Whose broken voice? (1) I Meditations on violence  The macho encounter between Simon Critchley and Slavoj Zizek over competing ethics of violence staged in the recent Naked Punch Supplement left me with the distinct feeling that violence is too important a matter…

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LEARN TO LIVE WITHOUT MASTERS.

AN INTERVIEW WITH SLAVOJ zIZEK BY OSCAR GUARDIOLA-RIVERA London, November-December 2007 1. GETTING RID OF THE BIG OTHER. OGR: It seems as if, in the end, your philosophical and political project is to break through the various impasses of extrinsic vs. intrinsic accounts of everything, from cinema to science and politics, without playing to the…

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Janam’s Commitments

On January 4, 1989, Jana Natya Manch (Janam) convened at Jhandapur village, on the outskirts of Delhi, to complete an interrupted play. Three days before, Janam began to perform their play Halla Bol in support of Ramanand Jha's campaign for the Ghaziabad municipal elections. Jha was backed by the Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the federation…

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Israel’s Bankrupt Politics

To this historian of empire, the Israeli onslaught on the captive Palestinians of Gaza strikingly recalls the tactics of colonial counterinsurgency, as recent research by Laleh Khalili at SOAS underlines. Attempting to crush nationalist resistance, the British surrounded civilian populations with barbed wire during the Southern African War, 1899-1902. Aiming to destroy Algerian nationalism, the…

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