Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Hardbacked times

Slavoj Zizek's latest tome, In Defence of Lost Causes, is out in hardback, which means that I will be reading selected passages in over twenty bookstores over the next six months while wondering if I should or ought or can.

The thing is, he's calling for a return to the emancipatory fight for universal values. Having gone through university in the '90s, helping to campaign for niches of being and recognition while studying the history of revolutions, this call has something of a release valve effect on me. If, like me, you haven't got to the new book, you can get this taster of his thinking in 'The Ambitious Legacy of 68' from In These Times:
Today’s utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely.
As Claire loves pointing out to me, feudalism was looking pretty indestructible as a self-replicating system until the black plague. Zizek's quotation makes me want to ask questions in a playwriting sense about utopian thought - what if the existence of today's society, the struggle to keep it as it is with all of its inequalities intact, is the truly unrealistic and hidden utopian project of our personas? Will understanding this help us to break it?

Okay, then. In the meantime, try to figure out what being a global citizen means beyond purchasing a FairTrade mark.

2 comments:

Chris_the_Blogger said...

You're play was OK. I was just hamming it up for my blog.

If it wasn't you who left that comment to begin with I suppose I've just been even more mean and vindictive. I'm sure you're a very nice person and I will make a point of seeing the next of your plays that comes to Brisbane.

A Banach space is something in maths. The joke at the end of my 'review' of Falling Petals is funny (to other maths students) because it would take an infinite amount of time to do what I suggested.

Chris_the_Blogger said...

Also this is the first time, to my knowledge, that someone with a Wikipedia article commented on my blog.