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From Sartre to Zizek, freedom or Bashi-Bazouklouk¹ — Engin Kurtay

“Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment.” Continue reading “From Sartre to Zizek, freedom or Bashi-Bazouklouk¹ — Engin Kurtay”

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Enjoying what we don’t have* – Engin Kurtay

(*) The title is barrowed from the book of Todd McGowan, “Enjoying what we don’t have – The political project of psychoanalysis“, University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

(Sendika.org’da Türkçe’sini okumak için tıkla)

How does the symbolization of a lack turns into fun? To understand this mechanism, I will proceed under the guidance of the articles of Professor Slavoj Zizek’s “Ego Ideal and the Superego, Lacan as a Viewer of Casablanca” and Owen Hewitson’s “What Does Lacan Say About … Jouissance?”

The ideal ego is the way the subject (small other) desires to be perceived by Other, thus, it is ‘imaginary’. Ego Ideal, by contrast, is the subject’s self-positionning into societal rules, thus, it’s “symbolic”. The superego is distinguished from Ego Ideal as its back-face, evil twin: it judges, “stigmatizes” the subject by its inadequacy to conform law. It mocks, have fun with it. Here reveals the paradoxical formula that connects ‘jouissance’ to ‘obscene’: The more Subject tends to comply, the more it becomes subject to get judged and stigmatized – and this duality of opposite agencies (Ego Ideal versus the superego) become eventually trapped into a swirl of self-perpetuating ‘obscene jouissance’. Continue reading “Enjoying what we don’t have* – Engin Kurtay”

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Feminism having turned to its opposite and Zizek’s warnings

The good, the bad and the ugly (Kollontai, Goldberg and Steinem)

Professor Zizek’s article that has recently been published in Russian Times with the title Sex in the modern world: Can even a ‘yes, yes, yes’ actually mean ‘no?’” provides a sound framework for rethinking on the impasses of nowadays feminism. At the end of the article, Lewinsky’s statements as referred by the Professor, exemplify the main theme of the #metoo movement. This theme is typically as follows: there is always a “strong” man on stage … either a famous businessman, or artist, actor, TV commentator, a man with a career and wealth or so … and the campaign is typically aiming to judge the man’s using his power on women for sex.

Continue reading “Feminism having turned to its opposite and Zizek’s warnings”

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Cinselliğin Politikası (olmaz) – Bölüm 4 – Prof Slavoj Žižek

Bizim üzerinde çalışacağımız asıl eksen, bu ortadaki iki “normal” arasındaki çatışma eksenidir [y ekseni]. Meselemiz, ortadaki bu iki kampın her ikisinin de kendi tarafındaki aşırı versiyonunu görmezden gelerek bununla hesaplaşmaktan yan çizmesidir. Ilımlı-muhafazakar müslümanlar müslümanlığın IŞİD-Boko Haram tipi baskıcı barbar versiyonunu görmezden gelir, benzer şekilde kadın ve gey haklarının “açık fikirli” savunucuları da LGBT+’nın maskaralıklarını görmezden gelir. Ortadaki bu her iki kamp da, kendi taraflarından üreyen bu aşırı uçların kendi [dünya kurgularında, kuramlarında] çözümsüz bıraktıkları noktalardan üreyen arızalar olduğunu tartışmak istemezler.

Continue reading “Cinselliğin Politikası (olmaz) – Bölüm 4 – Prof Slavoj Žižek”

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Sexual is (not) Political – Part 3 – Prof Slavoj Zizek

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Although the LGBT trend is right in “deconstructing” the standard normative sexual opposition, in de-ontologizing it, however, it reduces this tension to the fact that the plurality of sexual positions is forcefully reduced to the normative straight-jacket of the binary opposition of masculine and feminine, with the idea that, if we get away with this straight-jacket, we will get a full blossoming multiplicity of sexual positions (LGBT etc.), each of them with a full ontological consistency: once we get rid of the binary straight-jacket, I can fully recognize myself as gay, bisexual, or whatever. From the Lacanian standpoint, however, the antagonistic tension is irreducible, it is constitutive of the sexual as such, and no amount of classificatory diversification and multiplication can save us from it. Continue reading “Sexual is (not) Political – Part 3 – Prof Slavoj Zizek”