Sunday, December 30, 2012

Slavoj Žižek on Ecology as a Religion

As provoking and radical as ever: Slovene philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek on Ecology in an excerpt from the pop-philosophical documentary Examined Life (2008). Following the movie's subtitle "philosophy is in the streets", Žižek's agitation takes place in the midst of a North American dump.

Highlights:

There is no nature: Nature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb - nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes [and] we profit from that. (3:45)

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Ecology will slowly turn into the new opium of the masses [...] Ecology is more and more taking over this role of a conservative ideology. (5:11)

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We need more alienation from our life world [...] we should become more artificial. (8:57)

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To recreate--if not build--an aesthetic dimension in things like this, in trash itself - that's the true love of the world.
Because what is love? Love is not idealization. Every true lover knows that: If you really love a woman or a man, that you don't idealize him or her.
Love means that you accept a person with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points and nonetheless the person is absolute for you, everything that makes life worth living [...] You see perfection in imperfection itself - and that's how we should learn to love the world. True ecologists love all this [points to the pile of trash].
(9:37)