‘READING’ SLAVOJ ZIZEK A GROUP READING SEMINAR WITH MAXIMUS KIM
we are closing this location at the end of july, and going on hiatus.
thanx immense to all wonderful friends and artists: art hungry & excellent chefs, collaborators, writers, visionaries, crazies who are really the sane ones, lovely people, deadliners, builders, grave diggers, seed planters, aerial performers, sound wrestlers & catchers & sculptors, and my greatest love to our collective core. without you nothing.
i will be writing a book about these past few years and researching future manifestations of zero-point in a new location, collaborating on a chapter in maxi kim’s new novel, curating in other spaces, and i have started a mail art project: if you would like to join simply email me your address! zeropointspace@gmail.com
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our last experience at 1049 e. 32nd st.
this saturday, july 26th 1 pm - 3 pm
a workshop:
READING’ SLAVOJ ZIZEK
A GROUP READING SEMINAR with MAXIMUS KIM
please enjoy to join us…the book is fascinatingly appropriate after MAPS / LOCATIONS and we are relocating to a temporary ether…it is a dense work, but very common sense, and i think it provides an excellent dialog missing from what is currently taught, or has been taught in the past… (the book is provided with your donation)
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the delicious details:
‘READING’ SLAVOJ ZIZEK
A GROUP READING SEMINAR with MAXIMUS KIM
“[O]ne should distinguish between ordinary escapism
and this dimension of Otherness, this magic moment
when the Absolute appears in all its fragility:
the prisoners have seen a ghost –
neither the resuscitated obscene ghost of the past,
not the spectral ghost of the capitalist present,
but the brief apparition of a future utopian Otherness
to which every authentic revolutionary stance should cling.”
- Slavoj Zizek1
Since the beginning of the short twenty first century I have participated in group – reading seminars as the basis of my art and writing process. Reading for me can be not only important, but also primary to a person’s creative economy. As Rainer Ganahl put it, “Meeting people, reading together and discussion [can be] an art of temporary encounter, an act that can affect both our noetic and social activities.”2
The title of this introduction alludes to a similar artist-run reading seminar by Rainer Ganahl entitled Reading Karl Marx (1998-2001). Commissioned by Craig Martin as part of the Open House Projects, what initially struck me was the fact that the vast majority of people who participated in Reading Karl Marx seminars have never actually read anything by Marx. In staging ‘Reading’ Slavoj Zizek at Zero-point, I would like to foster a similar open-door atmosphere. Ideally, there should be no assumption that the participants have a prior knowledge of the subject. Neither are they asked to read the text in advance. Participants may not have the time, the patience, habit or perhaps the educational grooming to read often elitist, sometimes indecipherable academic texts. It has been my experience that in order to facilitate meaningful discussion through the study of Zizek, we would have to read together, sometimes phrase-by-phrase. Simultaneously, participants have urged other participants to cross out certain paragraphs. I have found myself comforting readers; don’t be afraid of simply absorbing the surface of Zizek. Depth and surface are often on identical sides of the Moebius strip. Divorcing, dividing, violently stripping the text from its original philosophical roots may be the most utopic act of all. At the end of the day ‘Reading’ Slavoj Zizek is not about reading Lacan. And it certainly isn’t about rereading Marx.
Why Zizek? Why not more established names such as Deleuze? Derrida? Or Foucault? With the help of group-reading seminars I came to understand that reading chapter-by-chapter, paragraph-by-paragraph, enabled a more precise discussion. However with this precision came a price: xenophobia. In London and Berlin, the group-reading emphasis on French intellectuals and French theory often encouraged the concealment and silence of non-french thinkers such as Zizek, bell hooks, and Cornel West. Moreover, much of French theory – deconstruction, for example – is notorious for its inability to engage popular culture – and hence, a wider audience. On the other hand, Zizek’s texts – often highlighting today’s headlines, movies and television programs – can serve as a barometer to comprehend our contemporary situation, without pretension or guilt. In the ‘Reading’ Slavoj Zizek seminars all contributions are welcomed and I try not to solicit or impose classical interpretations, as is often the case with continental pedagogical readings.
In the beginning of 2008 I worked with new groups of artists from University of Greenwich and Goldsmiths College. The art school approach has the advantage of reaching people whom in most cases have never broached reading this kind of literature. However I believe the true positive emancipatory potential of the experience can be reached at experimental spaces such as Zero-point. After all, Zero-point has a keen understanding of the relationship between dreams and reality. Themes such as Geobiotic and Dreamtime encourages participants to question the contemporary frame of reality, to question the fantasies that shape our global, consumer capitalist world. It is by re-imagining the social imaginary that the social can effectively change. In a way, as naïve as it sounds and contrary to many of the totalizing concepts of today’s social fabric that see people solely as unconscious and manipulated consumers, it is surprising how little it takes to stimulate change. Let’s read! Let’s re-imagine a new utopia for the short twenty-first century!!
$10 - $15 donation
please rsvp : zeropointspace@gmail.com
remember: the book will be included in the workshop for reading and discussion…
hope to see you there!
love & ruckus.
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