Author event: Zizek at the University of Chicago
On April 12 and April 19 at 4:00 p.m., Slavoj Zizek, Critical Inquiry visiting professor and co-author of The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, will present two lectures at the University of Chicago (1126 E. 59th Street). The April 12 lecture is titled "The Ignorance of Chicken, or, Who Believes What Today." The April 19 lecture is titled "The Uses and Misuses of Violence." Both events are free and open to the public.
In The Neighbor, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how the problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today’s central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt’s political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book’s exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Zizek’s "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought.