Tolerance, equality, and universal love are all strategies that veil reality of relationship between Self and Other. Whether in writings of Slavoj Žižek, Arthur Miller, or Jacques Lacan, definition of reality, as they explain, is something hidden with all sorts of false claims about The is ugly, and reality is just an illusion that conceals ugly truth. Each of these writers establishes that self is living in an illusion that does not transcend nature of itself in order to find out that ugliness of what is really there. To Žižek, concept of real Other includes all his/her traumatic vulnerability, weakness, and imperfection. He argues in Love Thy Neighbor, No Thanks! that access to Real is possible, but threatening. By answering question of Who is Žižek refers to Lacan by stating that the neighbor is real. Loving Other or neighbor, thus, is an experience of aggression and trauma. With same line of thought, Arthur Miller deals with paradox of in Death of a Salesman by portraying life of Willy as having an illusion of himself as a successful business man that everybody respects but he's actually not that successful. Understanding Willy's background and life portrays truth of what is real, for reader understands that Willy is not what he claims to be. His real life is ugly, and he's just hallucinating that he's successful. This paper suggests that concept of reality and illusion in texts are explained by use of dialogue which gave characters a distinctive voice that acted as a persuasive force. I will explore how conversation is used effectively by main characters in Death of a Salesman to suggest that real is ugly. Also, I will illustrate concept of reality vs. illusion in Death of a Salesman by drawing on Slavoj Žižek's Love Thy Neighbor, No Thanks! where he explains real through use of several examples. My aim is to acknowledge persuasive force that lies behind conversations illustrated by both authors in their texts, and to examine how this force is powerfully used in order to convince reader of reality of an object. This persuasive force was used as a key to communicate knowledge of certain concepts through certain techniques authors used in their texts, which had an impact on different definitions and notions.
The problem which is both created and tackled by this article is that although it advocates the Iranian progressive reformism as the most preferable political force in Iran, it simply does not find reformists’ own formulation of their “competitive advantage” convincing enough. Thus, to provide an argument for Iranian progressive reformism this article not only strives to explain one of the latest Iranian reformists’ mistakes (their stance on the assassination of Qassem Soleimani) through the Lacanian concept of imaginary identification as elaborated upon by Slavoj Zizek, but also to illuminate precisely at formulation of what that mistake was an attempt. In doing so, it conducts a comparative analysis of the funeral processions for General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 and for Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, and then proceeds to draw some perhaps neglected points from the moment of the Islamic revolution of 1979 as well as from the period of Khomeini’s leadership. However, far from being just a more elaborated explanation of Iranian reformism, an attempted reformulation like this of Iranian progressive reformism hopes to pave the way for creating new spaces for political act in Iran. Key Words: Iranian progressive reformism, Slavoj Zizek, Ayatollah Khomeini, Qassem Soleimani, imaginary identification, political act .
In the three previous chapters we mapped out Žižek’s philosophical thinking—territory in which we situated his critique of “postmodern historicism”, as well as his bleak assessment of the struggles of the contemporary left. We have also examined his theory of revolution and his recourse to Christianity as a paradigm for communist brotherhood that may well function as a real alternative to capitalism. Throughout this interpretative and reconstructive exercise, I subjected Žižek’s proposals to a hail of critical questions and commentary, on which I have not yet adequately elaborated. This will precisely be the task that I will undertake in the last two chapters of the book. Our starting point will be to pick up on some of Žižek’s central ideas with which I agree, while taking them to a philosophical terrain that will help us avoid their fatidic consequences: the avowal of subjectless revolutions . I am referring to two Žižekian motifs that are worth reconsidering: the ontology of incompleteness and the universal dimension of politics. Our goal is to “de-Lacanize” those concepts and to see how they could operate in a different kind of political ontology that does not resort to the figure of a transcendental subject, and that renders power as an inescapable condition of experience. I would then like to articulate the two aforementioned concepts with a third one—the Gramscian notion of hegemony—but read alongside the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The purpose of this exercise is to create the conceptual conditions to formulate an emancipatory theory of democracy—a matter that will be taken up in the following chapter
In The Sublime Object of Ideology , Slavoj Žižek tells a story about Buddhist prayer wheels in Tibet as a model of secularization: a belief machine. When routine actions are being performed, the animating principles or belief are no longer foregrounded in the process. While the developers of the scientific method were mostly devout Christians and believed in God’s direct involvement in the affairs of earth, carefully repeating situations through controlled experiments convinced them any potential variance in the processes they investigated could be ignored. Applied generally, through the process of secularization, religious acts are automated so that people can go about their business without requiring constant awareness of God’s presence. While the foundations of science and innovations in healthcare have many connections with religion, the professionalization of medicine acts as a superstructure supporting the belief. A Christian hospital today is like a prayer flag in the wind: operating automatically through set policies but actualizing theology through its repetition of care.
In this paper I offer a critical reading of some aspects of Heidegger’s late philosophy and evaluate how these relate to his nationalist claim that we need to stay rooted in the soil of our homeland. In response to this claim, Žižek suggests thet being-rootless is the primordial state of being-human and that what we represent as our roots are secondary attempts to obfuscate this dimension. First, I will present Heidegger’s philosophy of technology to elucidate his thesis that the essence of modern technology (Gestell) determinates the way we come to experience the totality of beings in our times as “standing reserve”. In the second section, I expound his aesthetics where art is seen as a mode of approaching entities that follows a different logic to that of the Gestell. However, this analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art will reveal a political dimension to the concept of earth which I take to be a reactionary attempt to neutralize the eventual dimension of the Gestell. In the third section, I offer a critical re-interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy following Žižek’s clue. I argue that modern art is characterized by its self-reflexive character which can be deemed transcendental once we accept the ontological dimension of art following Heidegger. These works offer a rooting in our own rootless condition analogous to the grounding in the Abgrund of Hegel’s absolute knowledge. Finally, I offer an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorius Basterds from the perspective of the conceptual framework developed in the previous pages.
