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Thursday, May 15th, 2008

🦋 Pills

(Žižek is speaking of the choice offered, in The Matrix [and note, I haven't seen that movie], between a blue pill that will make the protagonist wake up to reality and a red pill that will bring him into the fantasy permanently):

But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions; but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions which regulate it, you lose reality itself.

I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill, which enables a fake fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive... not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.

...Also, a really nice digression in the fourth segment, about movie characters grappling with "the autonomous undead object" -- the red shoes, Dr. Strangelove's right hand, the ventriloquist's dummy in Dead of Night. "The lesson is clear: the only way for me to get rid of this autonomous partial object, is to become this object."

posted evening of May 15th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

🦋 The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire; it tells you how to desire.
I just found out about this documentary today from A White Bear. Looks fantastic! You can watch it on YouTube, albeit broken up into 10-minute chunks. Slavoj Žižek is also the subject of the documentary Žižek!, which you can also watch broken up.

(This YouTube user Mariborchan, from Maribor, Slovenia, has uploaded plenty more Žižek videos and other philosophical lectures.)

posted evening of May 14th, 2008: Respond

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