The Reality of the Virtual - Part One

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In this tour de force filmed lecture, Slavoj Zizek lucidly and compellingly reflects on belief - which takes him from Father Christmas to democracy - and on the various forms that belief takes, drawing on Lacanian categories of thought. In a radical dismissal of todays so called post-political era, he mobilizes the paradox of universal truth urging us to dare to enact the impossible. It is a characteristic virtuoso performance, moving promiscuously from subject to subject but keeping the larger argument in view.

"Slavoj Žižek is a realist thinker. Žižek is always trying to think from the standpoint of the real and, at the same time, to think through the standpoint of the real. Going beyond the Lacanian Real, this is an examination of those real elements (which may or may not resist symbolization) that constitute the nodal points of our wordly existence, the points that undermine all systematic attempts to determine this existence in advance and by means of externally derived iron laws. It is unlikely that Žižek himself would put the matter in this fashion. This is because his strategy is precisely to flirt with 'iron principles' (what he has most recently named "lost causes") in order to expose how the political contingencies of our world are nowadays veiled by a palliative language that uses the alibi of contingency to defeat principles."