Zizek masterclass Day One

Kerry, David and myself enrolled on the Zizek masterclass at Birkbeck these next four days, a slightly nervous experience for myself, not because of anyone present; just the experience of being in a higher education institution again.

It was a good lecture; as expected oblique. It was on the emancipatory core of Christianity, but where Agamben would have talked in detail on Law, Messianic time, and the state of exception Zizek was instead focusing on the idea of the community of the Spirit as a body showing political agape and creating areas out of the reach of State control. Some of it was greatest hits: suicide of God, but he did some new thoughts on the book of Job “God is not a Derridean, rather a Deleuzian” ie) he finds miracles everywhere and Jobs suffering is just such a miracle/trauma piece of meaninglessness. Job’s three friends offer him ideology, but God agrees with Job. If he was Derridean he would connect all the ideas together and use his total knowledge to explain the reason for his suffering. But as a Deleuzian he says, of course you are suffering; look at this crazy universe. I’m with him up to a point, but I don’t buy the sheer meaninglessness part. I was also gratified to see that the whole introduction was dedicated to the same topic as out last post: the media handling of torture as an acceptable thing this week. “This man’s confession didn’t even save any lives”…

As you can imagine there were questions, but they were all buffoonery. “isn’t religion merely a carbuncle on the neck of Liberal ideology” or something, one guy asked.