Welcome to the Desert of the Real
Preceded by | Repeating Lenin (2001) |
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Followed by | Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings (2002) |
Welcome to the Desert of the Real is a 2002 book by
Etymology
The book's title comes from a quote delivered by the character Morpheus in the 1999 film The Matrix: "Welcome to the desert of the real".[1] Both Žižek's title and the line from The Matrix refer to a phrase in Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.[2] Part of this phrase appears in the following context of the book:
If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly [...] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacrum [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
Early in The Matrix, Neo used a hollowed-out book with the title Simulacra and Simulation to hide an illegal data disc which appeared in an early scene of the film.[3] Later in the film, Morpheus utters these words after the main character Neo wakes up from his computer-generated virtual reality, experiencing the Real as a desolate, war-torn, yet spectacular geography. For Žižek, this represents a prime example of the 20th century's "passion for the Real," for which the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the ultimate artistic expression. His argument is that because this passion was sublimated into the postmodern "passion for the semblance," Americans experienced the "return of the Real" in exactly the same way as Neo did in the film, i.e., as a nightmarish virtual landscape or "reality as the ultimate 'effect.'"[4]
Overview
This section possibly contains original research. (April 2017) |
Žižek argues that global capitalism and fundamentalism are two parts of the same whole: ultimately, their opposition in political and everyday discourses represents a false ideological conflict in both the Marxian and psychoanalytic senses. This is just a continuation of the prior cultural logic in which fascism served as the "obscene superego supplement" or fantasy to liberal democracy's Reality.
Žižek shows how today the fundamentalist terrorist plays an analogous symbolic role to the Jew during the
While the United States claims to be standing for democratic rights and principles, it actually suspended these same rights at home and legitimized torture in order to fight the war on terror. Rather than seeing these as real exceptions, Žižek identifies them as central tendencies in liberal democracy, a system inherently susceptible to corruption and unable to universalize its own rights. Changing conditions of war further erode any distinctions that could be made between a state of war or exception and a state of peace, central distinctions in democratic ideology.
Because the democratic system is always generating new
The same displacement of socio-economic conflict that occurred under fascism is mirrored in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the "symptomal knot" of all the economic and cultural logics of the contemporary world. In his rejection of binary ethical choices and predictive certainty, Žižek is certainly
Reception
Loren Glass argues from a
However, Glass criticizes Žižek for (like Baudrillard and Virillo) mirroring Rightist apocalyptic rhetoric by focusing on "glitzy" events rather than slow-building historical processes. And furthermore, he argues against Žižek's use of the "placeholder" concept of the Real because it represents a retreat "from an earlier materialist confidence in the methodological accessibility of historical experience," and against the appropriation of elements of Christianity (e.g. the injunction to "love thy neighbour" contained in the peaceniks' ethical act), which Glass deems unnecessary in Marxist praxis.
See also
Notes
- ^ The Matrix. 1999. Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski. USA: Warner Brothers.
- ISBN 0-472-06521-1(English).
- ^ The Matrix. 1999. Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski. USA: Warner Brothers.
- ^ Slavoj Žižek. Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London and New York: Verso, October 2002, pg. 12.
- .
Sources
- International Journal of Žižek Studies
- Glass, Oren (2008). "The Spirit of Terrorism Ground Zero Welcome to the Desert of the Real America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War Portents of the Real: A Primer for Post-9/11 America". Historical Materialism. 16 (2): 217–229. .
- Slavoj Žižek. Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London and New York: Verso, October 2002.
- Lana and Andy Wachowski (Dir.). The Matrix. 1999.