In the follow-up pandemic book, Pandemic-2, ?i?ek begins to get prescient and slick, eschewing Lacanian metaphysics for free associations and open water explorations of free will (Free Willy? Remember, 30 years ago now in the cinemas? A boy and his whale. Ahab in rehab and a whale who longs to be free, like you and me. It was a Michael Madsen vehicle: Remember how he danced in Reservoir Dogs to "Stuck in the Middle with You" while torturing the badged barbarian with a human face, Clowns to the Left of me / Jokers to the Right"?) Suddenly, ?i?ek is scary. in his last book he is in pajamas, but now, here in P-2, he's got on his Big Boy Pants. Free will. He rolls in the Church and Immanuel Kant. He writes,
It may appear that, in a time like the present when a virus threatens our lives, our predominant stance would be that of a "will to know": to understand fully the workings of the virus in order to successfully control and eliminate it. However, what we can increasingly witness is a version of the will NOT to know too much about it, insofar as this knowledge could limit our usual way of life.
The will not to know. Der Wille zur Impotenz. Let Science deal with it. But then, as Z. points out, Science can't even figure out the origin of the Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan without resorting to invective and starting a conspiracy theory about the "sudden" death of origin critic Luc Montagnier (he was 89) who averred that the virus looked to him like a g-o-f monster. Wipe your hand across your mouth.
But what ?i?ek was saying was that we live in a time when we willfully deep-dive in dumpster ignorance, fantasists at play like barking seals in the Twittersphere, ironic reactionaries punkin' the very concept of Democracy. Trump cries "Fake News." The MSM hardblows, "Conspiracy Theory." Dissed and misinformation abounds. The will to not know, argues ?i?ek, recalls Catholicism, or something, no doubt Spanish Inquisition style. of not wanting to know, he writes:
A similar stance was, for a long time, adopted by the Catholic Church, which in response to the rise of modern science, insisted that it was better for us not to know some things.
He then reminds us that Kant had similar feelings, expressed in his preface to The Critque of Pure Reason. Let some things be. Hell, even the God-killing, Church-hating Nietzsche, who described ministers as "the turkey-cocks of God," believed that philosophical modesty should restrain how much we seek to know. But ?i?ek is here going further -- indeed, he's going about as far as you can go. Lissy up: Maybe there is no free will. He inquires:
Today's cognitive sciences give rise to the same dilemma: if brain science imposes the conclusion that there is no free will, what does this do to our moral autonomy? Since the results of science pose a threat to our (predominant notion of) autonomy and freedom, should we curtail science?
Because we're at the End Times of Das Kapital, according to many In The Know, it might be more cost-effective to curtail humanity and egg on the technological singularity. Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.
?i?ek seems to sense this in P-2 and well ahead of the herd of intelligentsia in search of PhD theses, when he refers, essentially two years before anyone else has had a real sniff, to Elon Musk and the Neuralink revolution. Neuralink refers to a brain-computer interface (BCI) technology that is bringing us all closer to a largely unexamined life ahead with computers --the blind will see, the lame will browse the Internet, and, if Musk and his ilk have their way, we will use BCI to enter a new age of "telepathy," where we all communicate without speaking; just thinking. My, won't that bring new life to Twitter. (I've written about Musk and this phenomenon elsewhere.) ?i?ek wants us to avoid seeing such technology as Jesus or as the dawn of mass-scale mind control:
Both extremes are to be avoided in interpreting the significance of Neuralink: we should neither celebrate it as an invention that opens the path toward Singularity (a divine collective self-awareness) nor fear it as a signal that we will lose our individual autonomy and become cogs in a digital machine.
Well, two years later, Neuralink, now on the fast track, after FDA approval (originally denied after Neuralink lab doings led to the horrid deaths of some 1500 animals), and Musk is seeking human volunteers for the brain implants. He'll probably get them, as some 200,000 volunteers signed on for his one-way trip to Mars a few years back. One way.
Mad World is essentially Pandemic-3: The Aftermathematics. ?i?ek wrote a lot off op-eds, commentaries, film reviews in the Covid-19 years. And Mad World is his third collection. He's prolific and occasionally prolixic and probably forgets, at times, that he's sent pieces to media outlets that have already material that's already been published elsewhere before. The New YorkTimes got all over his sh*t in 2014 for writing about ISIS fundamentalism, only to have a NYT reader rat him out to an editor (maybe it was an ISIS subscriber taking umbrage at ?i?ek repeating himself -- like ISIS doesn't???), and the paper of record scourged him for double-dippin' self-plagiarism. The Slov shrugged. If only we'd take AI plagiarism so seriously. Imagine: Someday ChatGPT and/or Bard will be hooked into Turn It In and reputations will go down in Hindenburg flames when we are caught copying our earlier selves.
Mad World has three main sections that cover War, Films, and Sex. All of the ones that have taken place since Covid-19. There's been lots of sex since Covid ended and the masks came off, and the human population is expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050, according to the World Bank, which, of course, is good news to them. By war coverage, ?i?ek basically means the doings in Ukraine. And, given the excitement now in Palestine, ?i?ek's comparison of Ukraine to the West Bank is also instructive, enetertaining, and probably a whole lot of truthful-esque. The other war he refers to is the seeming inevitable conflagration with China, which closes the book. And may close the Book on us all.
In "The War of Lumpen-Bourgeoisie," ?i?ek trotskies in Lenin, by way of philosopher Boris Buden, to make a point about the riff-raff who took over after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ?i?ek writes,
The so-called oligarchs in Russia and other post-Communist countries are another case of rich rabble; they are not even an authentic creative bourgeoisie, rather they are a bourgeois counterpart to what Marx called lumpen-proletariat: lumpen-bourgeoisie.
Buden calls for a re-radicalization of the proletariat. In his essay, "The West at War: On the Self-Enclosure of the Liberal Mind, cited here by the double-dippin' slovenly "plagiarist," Buden argues that "our imagination must reclaim the idea of fast and radical change as a condition for our survival." Buden sees the authoritarian force that Putin represents as "the system that best serves the interests of the global ruling class today." ?i?ek has no problem with that sentiment; he agrees, but still finds it doomed, like thinking we'll grow up and deal with climate change before the cavemen take over completely. ?i?ek sees Putin as a product of the so-called lumpen-bourgeoise. Others have argued similarly, such as Ben Judah, Fragile Empire (2014), who details how Putin was handpicked by oligarchs. This could account for why Russian oligarch yachts were the first to be targeted by Biden's economic sanctions.
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