First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Žižek

By Slavoj Žižek

From the tragedy of Sept. 11 to the farce of the monetary meltdown.

Billions of greenbacks were rapidly poured into the worldwide banking approach in a frantic try at monetary stabilization. So why has it no longer been attainable to convey an identical forces to endure in addressing international poverty and environmental crisis?

In this take-no-prisoners research, Slavoj Zizek frames the ethical disasters of the fashionable international when it comes to the epoch-making occasions of the 1st decade of this century. What he reveals is the outdated one-two punch of historical past: the jab of tragedy, definitely the right hook of farce. within the assaults of Sep 11 and the worldwide credits crunch, liberalism dies two times: as a political doctrine and as an fiscal theory.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce is a decision for the Left to reinvent itself within the gentle of our determined old state of affairs. The time for liberal, moralistic blackmail is over.

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Extra resources for First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

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Thus people do not marry to reproduce the nuclear family or work to sustain the capitalist economy. Yet it is nevertheless the unintended consequence (and inexorable result) of, as it is also a necessary condition for, their activity. Moreover, when social forms change, the explanation will not normally lie in the desires of agents to change them that way, though as a very important theoretical and political limit it may do so. I want to distinguish sharply, then, between the genesis of human actions, lying in the reasons, intentions and plans of people, on the one hand, and the structures governing the reproduction and transformation of social activities, on the other; and hence between the domains of the psychological and the social sciences.

Jourdain and his prose, that they realize they are. Nor does it follow that transcendental realism is the only or even, at any moment of time, the dominant philosophy they are acting on. One is therefore, qua philosopher of science, at perfect liberty to criticize the practice of any science for its lack of scientificity. The importance of this should be clear. For example, instrumentalist and fictionalist interpretations of scientific theories may be used quite generally (in chemistry and physics as much as in economics and psychology) to impede attempts to build realist scientific theories.

It should be noted that engagement in a social activity is itself a conscious human action which may, in general, be described either in terms of the agent’s reason for engaging in it or in terms of its social SOCIETIES 39 function or role. When praxis is seen under the aspect of process, human choice becomes functional necessity. Now the autonomy of the social and the psychological is at one with our intuitions. Thus we do not suppose that the reason why garbage is collected is necessarily the garbage collector’s reason for collecting it (though it depends upon the latter).

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