The Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University
Looking more tradesman than philosopher in T-shirt and jeans and with a thick salt-and-pepper beard, Slovenian-born Slavoj Žižek takes the audience on an enlightening journey through the perceptions of identity and tolerance. His lecture, titled Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself: Antinomies of Tolerant Reason, begins by asking, “What can philosophy do today? What can it tell the general public haunted by the problems of ecology, racism, religious conflict, and so on?” The role of philosophy, Žižek says, is not to provide answers, but to analyze how we view questions. “How we perceive a problem can itself become part of the problem,” he says. To illustrate his various points, he uses such examples as Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59), the doomed passengers on September 11’s United Flight 93, and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, among others. A question-and-answer session follows the lecture.
About the speaker:Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian sociologist, postmodern philosopher, and cultural critic. Born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, he completed a Ph.D. at Ljubljana University, and between 1981 and 1985 he studied in Paris under Jacques Alain Miler, Jacques Lacan’s son-in-law. In the late 1980s, Žižek returned to Slovenia, where he wrote newspaper columns for the Slovenian weekly Mladina and cofounded the Slovenian Liberal Democratic Party. In 1990, he narrowly missed being elected to a seat on the four-member collective Slovenian presidency. Žižek has published more than a dozen books and numerous philosophical and political articles, edited several collections, and maintained an extensive speaking schedule. He has lectured at universities around the world. His works include The Parallax View (2006), How to Read Lacan (2006), Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004), Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings (2002), The Ticklish Subject (1999), Looking Awry (1991), For They Know Not What They Do (1991), and The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Žižek is currently the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and is a returning faculty member of the European Graduate School, Switzerland. He is the founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. A 2005 documentary about his life and work is titled Žižek! and in 2007 the International Journal of Žižek Studies was started. He enjoys a popular following, and even provided the inspiration for the name of a chic bar in Buenos Aires.
BUniverse
