You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.
In contrast to modern art, which causes displeasure-modern art, by definition, hurts. In this precise sense, modern art is sublime: it causes pleasure-in-pain, it produces its effect through its own f...
What makes Berlusconi so interesting as a political phenomenon is the fact that he, as the most powerful politician in his country, acts more and more shamelessly: he not only ignores or neutralizes a...
Are, however, the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to...
An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.
أول درس يجب تعلمه هو عدم لوم الأفراد ومواقفهم، المشكلة ليست فساد الفرد وجشعه، ولكن النظام الذي يشجعه على الفساد. الحل ليس شعار في الشوارع الرئيسية وليس وول ستريت، ولكن في تغيير النظام الذي يجعل الشوار...
Dangerous situation and we don’t have any clear ethical guidance here. And did you notice, when you talk about the possible and the impossible, how strangely this is distributed? On the one hand, in t...
But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This absurdity is si...
For example, tolerance designates a real problem—when I criticize it, I am, as a rule, asked: But how can you be in favor of intolerance towards foreigners, of misogyny, of homophobia? Therein resides...
What is true thinking? Thinking is not solving problems. The first step in thinking is to ask these sorts of questions: Is this really a problem? Is this the right way to formulate the problem? How di...
WHEN THE TURKISH COMMUNIST WRITER Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, the time of the big purges and show trials, a Soviet apologist trying to convince him about the need for vio...
For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension o...
لقد خلق المتظاهرون فراغا – فراغا في حق الأيدولوجيا المهيمنة، وهناك حاجة إلى الوقت لملء مساحة هذه الموضة الإيجابية. هذا هو سبب أننا لسنا بحاجة لأن نقلق كثيرا من الهجمات الموجهة لـ احتلوا وول ستريت، فان...
What this means is that we should reject not only all manifestations of ‘alternative modernity’ (which amount to a ‘capitalism without capitalism’, without its destructive aspect), but also all attemp...
What if eternity is a sterile, impotent, lifeless domain of pure potentialities, which, in order fully to actualize itself, has to pass through temporal existence?
I just stood for justice, whatever the costs. How can this be wrong?
For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us.
When Zeno the Cynic was confronted with Eleatic proofs of the non-existence of movement, he simply raised and moved his middle finger, or so the story goes …
La misma dinámica del capitalismo nubla la frontera entre inversión 'legítima' y especulación 'salvaje' porque la inversión capitalista es, en su misma esencia, una apuesta de riesgo(...), un acto con...
It is as if, in today's permissive society, transgressive violations are allowed only in a privatized form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of any public, spectacular, or ritualistic dimension. We...