The Dominating role of Violence in Slavoj Zizek's Philosophy - presented by Paul Taylor (Zizekian Studies)

My comment on the video: Thanks for the perceptive critique of "Secret Millionare" Paul Taylor its funny how millionaires of such large companies are secret pseudo individuals hiding behind there stone walled property. I really agree that the secret is how one individual/family can violent exploit all the everyday shown people for excessive monetary gain. They give back with the hand that feeds what has been taken ten fold with the other. One worker in an army of thousands gets a holiday and a check to buy back the fruits of their own labour. This video made me think, as Bukowskis tombstone said "Don't Try" haha

Summary thoughts:
The background of violence is the real. The overall system of media and the status quo want to diffuse our emancipatory potential by allowing us our political insight into the way our world operates only through capitalist entertainment. The establishment gives to us via the silver screen a symbolic illusion of what we truly want economic and social freedoms - true equality.Reality Tv is yet another way modern capitalism exploits the powerless in society by monetising even our most personal relationships with our families and turning them into entertainment content to feed the corporate machine.

Paul Taylor argues that we are sold a cure to our problems which is in fact one of the main reasons for our suffering. He takes exceptions to figures like Bono and Bob Geldof who only specifically through gaining vast riches by functioning in the system can afford to true and right the wrongs of social inequality. Taylor highlights how our dependency on figures of philanthropy and charity for certain issues like poverty in Africa stop us from getting to the core of the issue namely creating a fair and even playing for countries and people to compete in an equal economic game.

The fetishist disavowal:of violence "I know very well but even so" I keep the cycle of violence continuing is one of humanities most deeply troubling problems. And as Taylor states quoting Hegel to flee from something one fears is not the answer as the thing we seek to put distance in-between ourselves still exerts a hidden power over you. One could think of all the Rambo films and action thrillers were the lead protagonist flees from corrupt beaucracy only to latter be engulfed in a much larger conflict with the same force. Violence and confrontation in Zizek's view seems inevitable because only through confronting the wrongs in the mechanics of society can we get closer to a better one 'or fail a bit better" as he says.

Perpetual violence mares each and every life within society from the poor all the way to the rich know one escapes the structural violence of institutions and society. One need only look at a hagged former President or Prime Minister to demonstrate the inability to run from power relations and the drain on our human lives that they exert. Marx himself agreed that the bourgeois are victims of their own success at the top of the social totem pole for example their loveless marriages he saw as  more akin to financial transactions of hereditary wealth than anything to do with individual subject's entering into loving wed-lock. For all the abuses the elite subject the lower parts of society too in work through the abuse of the means to production and capital it does seem a just reward for them to not truly be able to marry for love, at least in the past! Vestiges of this inability to truly love of the 1% percent can even be seen in hit shows on modern cable television take for instance Game of Thrones" with the almighty rich and royal Lannister House whose siblings are forced to marry for power, money and social standing instead of love no wonder they become fixated with prostitution, war and incest.

A summary of how Zizek's Hegalian-Marxist Lacanian View developed - by Paul Taylor 

The Marxist Slovenian philosopher Božidar Debenjak was an early influence on Slavoj Žižek. It was from Debenjak that Slavoj began to turn to German idealism and Slavoj Žižek began to be influenced by the Frankfurt School. It was in Božidar Debenjak's course at the University of Ljubljana that Slavoj Žižek read Karl Marx's Das Kapital through the lens of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind. The perspective formed through this interrogation of Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has heavily influenced Slavoj Žižek's contemporary works. Slavoj Žižek has associated with Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič, both Heideggerian philosophers.

Slavoj Žižek was hired at the University of Ljubljana in 1971 where he worked as an assistant researcher. His master's thesis was controversial due to the Marxist tendency of the reformist Slovenian regime in 1973 and therefore he lost his position at the university. After this period he worked for the Yugoslav army in Karlovac. Slavoj Žižek later began to work as a clerk for the Slovenian Marxist Center where he became acquainted with Mladen Dolar and Rastko Močnik. Both of these scholars were focused on the works of Jacques Lacan. Slavoj Žižek began working for the Institute of Sociology for the University of Ljubljana in 1979. Shortly after in the 1980's he began to publish books which examined Heglian and Marxist theories from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Slavoj Žižek has two sons from two different marriages.

Slavoj Žižek wrote the introduction to John Lee Carre and G.K. Chesterston's Slovenian translated novels. Slavoj Žižek edited a number of translations of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud to Slovenian. It was not until the late 1980s when Slavoj Žižek came under the scrutiny of public attention. During this period he was a columnist from his work for Maldina, a magazine aimed at youth which criticized the Titoist regime. The magazine gained notoriety for its stance against certain aspects of the times Yugoslavian politics, in particular the increasing militarization policies aimed towards society. Up until October of 1988 Slavoj Žižek was an active member of the Communist Party of Slovenia. He quit during the protest against the JBZ-trial. He was not alone in this protest, he quit along with thirty two other public intellectuals with origins in Slovenia. Slavoj Žižek was involved with the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights a social movement fighting for democracy in Slovenia. In 1990 the first free elections were held in Slovenia. At this time Slavoj Žižek ran for President aligned with the Liberal Democratic Party.

Slavoj Žižek became widely recognized as an important theorist of contemporary times with the publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book to be written in English, in 1989. Since this time Slavoj Žižek has taken the contemporary philosophical world by storm, never afraid of confrontation he is a dangerous theorist. Slavoj Žižek's work cannot be categorized easily. He calls for a return to the the Cartesian subject. Slavoj Žižek also calls for a return to The German Ideology, in particular the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Slavoj Žižek's work draws on the works of Jacques Lacan, moving his theory towards modern political and philosophical issues, finding the potential for liberatory politics within his work. But in all his turns to these thinkers and strands of thought, he hopes to call forth new potentials in thinking and self-reflexivity. Slavoj Žižek also calls for a return to the spirit of the revolutionary potential of Lenin and Karl Marx.