Scrawled in Wax

Other than what friends have told me, I’m not really familiar with Zizek’s academic work. But here’s why I love it when Slavoj writes for the LRB: here, he traces a line from Ahmadinejad to Alan Badiou to Kung Fu Panda to Berlusconi. Yeah, Kung Fu Panda. It sounds ludicrous, but it works. Utlimately, the piece is a very Zizek-like argument about how modern democracies function, particularly in relation to global capitalism.

And he does this cool thing where, in order to explain his perspective, he opens up the double meaning of ‘representation’ in representative democracy. On the one hand, it’s about choosing people to speak for you in your best interests; on the other it’s about the projection, real or false, of the workings of that system into the public mind, so that people keep their faith in it. Those two things – a system of governance and our perception of it -  aren’t necessarily the same, particularly at times of crisis. This is where he throws in Badiou, and does a much smarter version of that annoying platitude “it’s the corporations that run things, dude”. Really solid stuff.

Zizek also did something similar in talking about Obama and financial crisis, which all these months on, is still worth your time to read.

(Unrelated, pointless plea: Amazon, can you forget about selling the Kindle in the U.K. and get it up here soon, please? Instapaper’ing stuff like this on my phone works – but only for now.)