Joel Schalit

Just Like One of Us

He’s not considered a player in public debates about Israel, but he should be. In Wednesday’s edition of Religion Dispatches, I discuss Slavoj Zizek’s criticisms of  ‘anti-anti-Semitism’, in his new book, Violence.

Released in the UK at the beginning of 2008, the volume did not appear in the US until August. The last time I reviewed a book by Zizek was Welcome to the Desert of the Real, for the SF Bay Guardian, in October 2002.

Also worth noting: We published a review of the Independent Jewish Voices anthology in Zeek yesterday. Whereas my review tackled the book from ‘abroad’, Keith Kahn-Harris explains its significance for British Jews.

Thinking Ahead

When I first began working in publishing, it was the mid-1990s. The ‘zine explosion was already well underway, and the first web periodicals (such as Bad Subjects) were just starting to build the first substantial online readerships. Conversely, in the world of books, traditionally academic, non-fiction publishers such as Verso were beginning to chalk up serious successes with crossover political titles, such as journalist Doug Henwood’s legendary Wall Street.  For the intellectual left, it was a time of immense creativity and ferment.

Compared to the past, according to the headlines, all we currently have to offer is a culture of continuous crises and closures. Music consumption is at an all time low, magazines and newspapers (both in print and online) point to dwindling (and, to be quite frank, aging) readerships, and book publishers keep issuing reports of mounting losses. After my new book is done, one of the things I would definitely like to explore is writing a cultural history of this period. Say, 1989-2009.

Bass Materialism: Grievous Angel Presents Dubstep Sufferah Volume 3
 

Youth Are Getting Restless

Sheinkin Situationism, June 2007.

All About the Subtext

If you have the patience, the results are well worth it. Sitting in the exact same spot from where I listened to him lecture last year following the premier of Astra Taylor’s Zizek, on Sunday night, I spent two and a half hours watching the same Slovenian philosopher explain why movies matter. 

A collaboration with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema isn’t as overtly transgressive as the title implies. What’s radical (hence ‘perverted’) about it is how Pervert simplifies a decidedly complex, psychoanalytic approach to interpreting films for a non-academic audience.

Replete with footage of Zizek in San Francisco (on city streets, standing by the Golden Gate Bridge, etc.) Pervert is also a curious study in the intersection of his career with the Bay Area. A fan of the many Hitchcock and Coppola dramas shot here, most of Zizek’s discussions of them ( The Birds, for example) were filmed in SF. 

Worth noting is Pervert’s sixties-style editing and visual detail. At times resembling an avant-garde documentary – imagine a vintage public television feature on Jean-Luc Godard hosted by Marshall McLuhan – Pervert is as stylistically rich as it is intellectually stimulating. Or, to put it simply, dope.

Talking Negri

From a letter to a friend in Italy

I guess what I sense in Negri’s language is a capacity to recognize and interact with social evil, on a massive scale, with a confidence that it will be eventually overcome, sans any kind of happy communist eschatology or messianic Jewish versions of hope.

There’s a kind of self-assurance that I see in his work, which, while quietly remaining committed to Marx’s concept of contradiction – the ultimate irrationality of capitalist development – nevertheless appreciates the growing complexity of domination.

Is this a coded way of saying that the guy remains dialectical despite recognizing how bad things continue to get? That’d be entirely fair.

Zizek for Passover

So what would be the truly radical ethico-political act today in the
Middle East? For both Israelis and Arabs, it would be to renounce the
(political) control of Jerusalem–that is, to endorse the
transformation of the Old Town of Jerusalem into an extra-state place
of religious worship controlled (temporarily) by some neutral
international force. What both sides should accept is that, by
renouncing the political control of Jerusalem, they are effectively
renouncing nothing–they are gaining the elevation of Jerusalem into a
genuinely sacred site. What they would lose is only what already
deserves to be lost: the reduction of religion to a stake in political
power plays.

From Let’s be Realists, Let’s Demand the Impossible!, In These Times, August 30th, 2006