멈춰라,생각하라 지젝 강연문 일부 발췌본입니다

24일: WELCOME TO HUMAN ANIMAL KINGDOM

Since, in Europe, modernization was spread over centuries, we had the time to accommodate ourselves to it, to soften its shattering impact, through Kulturarbeit, through the formation of new social narratives and myths, while some other societies exemplarily the Muslim ones were exposed to this impact directly, without a protective screen or temporal delay, so their symbolic universe was perturbed much more brutally, they lost their (symbolic) ground with no time left to establish a new (symbolic) balance. No wonder, than, that the only way for some of these societies to avoid total breakdown was to erect in panic the shield of fundamentalism, the psychotic-delirious-incestuous reassertion of religion as direct insight into the divine Real, with all the terrifying consequences that such a reassertion entails, up to the return with a vengeance of the obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices. The rise of superego is another feature that postmodern permissiveness and the new fundamentalism share; what distinguishes them is the site of the enjoyment demanded: our own in permissiveness, God's own in fundamentalism.

Perhaps the ultimate symbol of this devastated post-historical Korea is the pop-music event of the Summer of 2012: Gangnam Style performed by Psy. As a curiosity, it is worth noting that the Gangnam Style clip surpassed Justin Bieber's clip on Youtube, thus becoming the most watched Youtube clip of all times. On December 21 2012, it reached the magic number of one billion views and since December 21 was the day when those who took seriously the predictions of the Mayan calendar were expecting the end of the world, one can say that the Ancient Mayas were right: the fact that a GangnamStle clip effectively IS the sign of the collapse of a civilization The song is not only wildly popular, it also mobilizes people into a collective trance, with tens of thousands shouting and performing a dance that imitates horse riding, all in the same rhythm with an intensity unseen from the times of early Beatles, referring to Psy as a new Messiah. The music is psydance at its worst, totally flat and mechanically simple, mostly computer-generated (recall that Psy - the singer's name - is a shortened version of psytrance); what makes it interesting is the way it combines collective trance with self-irony. Words of the song (and the staging of the video clip) obviously poke fun at the meaninglessness and vacuity of Gangnam style, some claim even in a subtly subversive way but we are nonetheless entranced, caught in the stupid marching rhythm, participating in it in pure mimesis; flash mobs pop up all around the world imitating moments of the song, etc. Gangnam style is not ideology in spite of ironic distance, it is ideology because of it: irony plays the same role as the documentary style in von Trier's Breaking the Waves in which the subdued pseudo-documentary form makes palpable the excessive content in a strictly homologous way, the self-mocking irony of Gangnam style makes palpable the stupid jouissance of the rave music. Many viewers find the song disgustingly-attractive, i.e., they love to hate it, or, rather, they enjoy finding it disgusting, so they repeatedly play it to prolong their disgust - this compulsive nature of the obscene jouissance in all its stupidity is what true art should release us from.

25일: ECONOMY

So who can pull us out from this depression? My answer may shock some of you a new Master. A Master is needed especially in situations of deep crisis -the function of a Master is here to enact an authentic division, a division between those who want to drag on within the old parameters and those who are aware of the necessary change. Obama is often accused of dividing the American people instead of bringing them all together to find broad bi-partisan solutions but what if this, precisely, is what is good about him? In situations of deep crisis, an authentic division is urgently needed a division between those who want to drag on within the old parameters and those who are aware of the necessary change. Such a division, not the opportunistic compromises, is the only path to true unity. When Margaret Thatcher was asked about her greatest achievement, she promptly answered: the New Labor. And she was right: her triumph was that even her political enemies adopted her basic economic policies the true triumph is not the victory over the enemy, it occurs when the enemy itself starts to use your language, so that your ideas form the foundation of the entire field. Today, when neoliberal hegemony is clearly falling apart, the only solution is to repeat Thatcher's gesture in the opposite direction.

26일: IDEOLOGY

One can go on endlessly in enumerating similar cases suffice it to recall systematic unlearning of the facts about a colonized people imposed by the colonizers. This unlearning does not concern only facts, but even more the ideological space which provides the coordinates for our understanding of the primitives. For example, when early ethnologists encountered a tribe whose totem was some bird, they automatically attributed to the tribe members the ridiculous belief that they factually developed from this bird.

Complementary to this unlearning is the learning of what may appear as our most spontaneous reactions. In an episode from Monty Python's Meaning of Life, a teacher examines his pupils on how to arouse vagina. Caught in their ignorance, the embarrassed pupils avoid his gaze and stammer half-articulated answers, while the teacher reprimands them severely for not practicing the subject at home. With his wife's assistance, he thereupon demonstrates the penetration of penis into vagina; bored by the subject, one of the schoolboys casts a furtive glance through the window, and the teacher asks him sarcastically: "Would you be kind enough to tell us what is so attractive out there in the courtyard?"... This scene is so uncanny because it exhibits, in broad daylight, the way sexual enjoyment is sustained by a superego-imperative: it doesn't come spontaneously, it is a duty.

The very beginning of this episode makes the point in an even clearer way. The pupils in a class are waiting for the teacher to arrive; they are bored, sitting at their benches, yawning and staring into the air. When the one standing close to the door shouts the teacher is coming!, the pupils explode into the wild activity of shouting, throwing papers around, shaking their tables, etc. all the stuff pupils in a class are supposed to do when the teacher is absent, so that, when the teacher enters the class, he can be annoyed and shout at them: stop this circus! Quiet! What this scene makes clear is that the transgressive commotion that annoys the teacher is effectively directed at him it is not spontaneous amusement, but something performed for the teacher.