Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
London WC1E 7HX
Slavoj Žižek – Masterclass – Communism: An Idea that Divides
Lecture 3: Struggle: Towards a New Master
This is the third of three masterclasses (25th, 27th and 29th of November) by Professor Slavoj Žižek on the topic of Communism: An Idea that Divides.
It seems that in 1989, with the disintegration of Communism, the two centuries of the radical Leftist “paradigm” were over, that this “paradigm” exhausted its potentials, in spite of some recent half-baked attempts to resuscitate it (in Latin America, in Nepal…); that today, Communism is simply no longer an Idea that divides. So what DOES divide today? The answer seems no less clear: the endless struggle between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalist intolerance. However, do these two poles not implicate and strengthen each other? The true line of division remains the one between the totality of the existing global capitalist universe (whose immanent political antagonism is the one between liberal democracy and fundamentalism) and the radical emancipatory (Communist) idea of breaking out of the very space of this division.