My thinking about the Anthropocenic predicament continues to be informed, even haunted, by Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker, along with their literary predecessor novels by (Lviv-born) Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, respectively. Two keynote talks I’ve been invited to give this October — one for Ukraine’s Congress of Culture, to take place in […]
Posts Tagged ‘Zizek’
Through an Anthropo(s)cenic Glass, Darkly
Posted in Anthropocene, Cinema, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, tagged 1 Corinthians 13, Anthropocene, climate trauma, Congress of Culture, deep time, Earth's deep past, eco-trauma, geology, geophilosophy, Holocene, IPCC, Late Holocene, Lviv, Peter Brannen, Solaris, Tarkovsky, Through a Glass Darkly, Ukraine, Vermont Humanities Conference, Zizek, Конгрес культури on August 11, 2021 | 1 Comment »
Generalized Floating Dread Event (GFDE)
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged 2020 U.S. presidential election, affective contagion, affective politics, dark flow, dark matter, emptiness, political affect, revolutions, Zizek on October 30, 2020 | 2 Comments »
Rather like the Airborne Toxic Event in Don Delillo’s 1980s novel White Noise, these days seem, to many of us, suffused with a kind of Generalized Floating Dread. I’ve picked this sense up from students, from colleagues, from friends and neighbors. It is as if there is a cloud of dark matter around us, whose […]
On political volatility
Posted in Politics, tagged France, French elections, Le Pen, Macron, Melenchon, Sanders, Zizek on May 3, 2017 | 3 Comments »
While the French elections arguably offer little choice for those looking for radical eco-political options, there is a tendency to see in them — as in other recent political shifts — something that is altogether more negative than it need be. Slavoj Zizek, for instance, argues that the choice between Macron and Le Pen is a […]
Interview & autobio
Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, autobiography, Buddhism, Dzogchen, interviews, Lacan, meditation, pagan studies, paganism, Peirce, post-traditional Buddhism, religion, Shinzen Young, spirituality, Whitehead, Zizek on May 31, 2016 | 4 Comments »
Interviews are funny things: you have to think on the spot, but later realize how deeply and profoundly imperfect (!) was your choice of words. The Imperfect Buddha Podcast has an interview with me in which host Matthew O’Connor (of Post-Traditional Buddhism) and I talk at length about Buddhism, process-relational metaphysics, panpsychism, social constructionism, cognitive science, […]
Zizek v. Buddhism: who’s the subject?
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, subjectivity, Zizek on December 11, 2012 | 15 Comments »
This started out as a response to Slavoj Zizek’s recent talk here at the University of Vermont on “Buddhism Naturalized,” but evolved into a consideration of subjectivity, which happened to be the topic of my next post in the pre-G (process-relational ecosophy-G) series. So this can be considered part 1 of a 2-part series.
Examining life, trash, & radical nature
Posted in Philosophy, Visual culture, tagged ecology, film, Morton, nature, philosophy, Zizek on February 11, 2011 | 6 Comments »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCfiv1xtoU I enjoyed Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life when I first saw it a couple of years ago, and, having just watched it again, I’m glad to see that it bears re-viewing. As one might expect, some segments are more lasting than others. Slavoj Zizek wearing an orange safety vest talking about ecology at a […]
on Buddhism, objects, Zizek, Morton, etc.
Posted in Politics, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, object-oriented philosophy, relationalism, Zizek on October 25, 2010 | 5 Comments »
I’ve been meaning to catch up on the discussions over Buddhism and objects/relations, Slavoj Zizek’s critique of “Western Buddhism,” and related topics, which have been continuing on Tim Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, Jeffrey Bell’s Aberrant Monism, Skholiast’s Speculum Criticum Traditionis, and elsewhere. I haven’t quite caught up, but here are a few quick notes on […]
‘dark flow’ & the vitality of emptiness
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged Buddhism, dark vitalism, emptiness, Lacan, Zizek on December 1, 2009 | 5 Comments »
The image of dark flow, described as 1400 galaxy clusters streaming toward the edge of the universe at blistering speed in the ongoing “afterglow” of the big bang (or something like that), has haunted me ever since I read about it several days ago. Caused “shortly after the big bang by something no longer in […]
more on Žižek & nature’s discontents
Posted in Philosophy, tagged speculative realism, Zizek on November 30, 2009 | 2 Comments »
It’s interesting to watch a topic spin itself out rhizomically across the blogosphere. Picking up on Žižek’s ecological musings, Levi Bryant seems more or less in agreement with what I had argued here last week, as does Michael Austin, while Ben Woodard criticizes the narrowing of the “ecology of concepts of nature” (a point I […]
Žižek and his Others
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, ecology, environmentalism, Lacan, paganism, Zizek on November 24, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Speaking here at the University of Vermont last Friday, Slavoj Žižek responded to a student query about where to study Lacanianism by lauding our Film and Television Studies Program as the only one anywhere at which Lacanians are actually “in power” — the current chair, former chair, and at least one other faculty member, plus […]
radical orthodoxies, left & right. . .
Posted in Politics, tagged ecopolitics, Islam, political theory, radical orthodoxy, traditionalism, Zizek on November 13, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Slavoj Zizek’s engagement with theologians like radical orthodoxist John Milbank continues to perplex me a little bit, but having heard him speak a few days ago with death-of-God theologian Thomas Altizer at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Montreal left me reassured me that Zizek is far from the wildest (and zaniest) mind out […]
Žižek on Iran
Posted in Politics, tagged Iran, Zizek on June 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I’m reprinting Slavoj Žižek’s (copyright-free) analysis of the events in Iran, which were forwarded to Infinite Thought by Ali Alizadeh, who I mentioned in a recent post. It’s vintage Žižek: by turns provocative, unpredictable, overwrought, and brilliant, in its verve if not necessarily its accuracy, though I think he gets it mostly right. I would […]