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Semiotic democracy and cultural transformation (or) the transformative power of semiotic democracy
Elizabeth Stark

27/05/2009

The massive and widespread availability of cultural works on the Internet is profoundly impacting the way that we create, view, and consume culture, proposes . Gone are the days of the “one way” medium as king, whereby passive observers merely consume information in a unidirectional fashion. The transformative power of digital technologies has led us to embark upon an age of widespread, democratized cultural production and dissemination. +

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On Universalism
Étienne Balibar

11/05/2009

In Debate With

I welcome this opportunity to publicly exchange words, ideas and perhaps arguments with Alain Badiou on the topic of “universalism” and “universality”1. This is not the first time we have done so throughout our long association as intellectual companions, and perhaps, in a sense, it was always our common object, therefore also our point of heresy. But each of us keeps working, and the circumstances lead to new aspects being highlighted. +

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The Woman Question (1904)
Paul Lafargue

05/04/2009

The bourgeois has thought and still thinks that woman ought to remain at home and devote her activity to supervising and directing the housekeeping, caring for her husband, and manufacturing and nourishing children. Even Xenophon, at the time when the bourgeoisie was newly born and was taking its shape in ancient society, traced the main outlines of this ideal of woman. But if through the course of centuries, this ideal may have appeared reasonable, because it corresponded to economic conditions which prevailed, it is no longer anything more than an ideological survival, since these conditions have ceased to exist. +

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The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos (2006)
Slavoj Zizek

05/04/2009

In the last decade, Davos and Porto Alegre have emerged as the twin cities of globalization. In Davos, the exclusive Swiss ski resort, the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalization is its own best remedy. In the sub-tropical, Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, the counter-elite of the anti-globalization movement convenes, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalization is not our fate, that, as their official slogan has it, “another world is possible.” Lately, however, the Porto Alegre reunions seem to have lost their impetus. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go? +

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The Obscenity of Human Rights: Violence as Symptom (2005)
Slavoj Zizek

04/04/2009

He anxious expectation that nothing will happen, that capitalism will go on indefinitely, the desperate demand to do something, to revolutionize capitalism, is a fake. The will to revolutionary change emerges as an urge, as an “I cannot do it otherwise,” or it is worthless. With regard to Bernard Williams’s distinction between Ought and Must, an authentic revolution is by definition performed as a Must - it is not something we “ought to do” as an ideal we are striving for, but something we cannot but to, since we cannot do it otherwise. Which is why today’s worry of the Leftists that revolution will not occur, that global capitalism will just go on indefinitely, is false insofar as it turns revolution into a moral obligation, into something we ought to do while we fight the inertia of the capitalist present. +

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