"With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility." From the NYRB, in a masterful review by John Gray.
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...
It seems like a bit of a (perhaps willful) misreading in some parts, IMO.
ReplyDeleteE.g. where Gray talks about Žižek’s reference to things like the Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge, I suspect the latter was, in his usual way, trying to be provocative while making a subtler point about being truly revolutionary in the sense of breaking with the symbolic coordinates of the status quo, rather than about the immediate physical violence of those events per se.
Could be, I'm in no position to judge.
ReplyDeleteSome may be interested in this response:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=2230%22