Slavoj Zizek - A Revolution ne s'autorise que d'elle même

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Slavoj Zizek

A revolution ne s'autorise que d'elle même

http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=43737

Today, the meaning of "liberalism" moves between two opposed poles: economic liberalism (free market individualism, opposition to strong state regulation, etc.) and political libertarian liberalism (accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, etc.) – in the US, Republicans are more liberal in the first sense and Democrats in the second sense. The point is, of course, that, while one cannot decide through closer analysis which is the "true" liberalism, one also cannot resolve the deadlock by way of trying to propose a kind of "higher" dialectical synthesis, or by way of "avoiding the confusion" through on a clear distinction between the two senses of the term: the tension between the two meanings is inherent to the very content that "liberalism" endeavors to designate, it is constitutive of this notion, so this ambiguity, far from signaling the limitation of our knowledge, signals the innermost "truth" of the notion of liberalism.

Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion

http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454

According to Jean-Claude Milner, a unified Europe can only constitute itself on the condition of the progressive erasure of all divisive historical traditions and legitimizations: consequently, the unified Europe is based on the erasure of history, of historical memory. Recent phenomena like holocaust revisionism, the moral equation of all victims of the WWII (Germans suffered under the Allied bombardments no less than Russians and Englishmen; the fate of the Nazi collaborators liquidated by the Russians after the war is comparable to the victims of the Nazi genocide, etc.), are the logical outcome of this tendency: all specified limits are potentially erased on behalf of abstract suffering and victimization. And – this is what Milner is aiming at all along – this Europe, in its very advocacy of the unlimited openness and multicultural tolerance, again needs the figure of the "Jew" as a structural obstacle to this drive to unlimited unification.