May 19
On pp. 89-91 (Ch 8: “Of Stones, Lizards, and Men”), Žižek says, and asks:
[We must avoid] “the naïve evolutionist approach which sees historical development as the gradual disintegration of primordial organic forms of life…In contrast to such an evolutionist notion of progress, one should stick to the notion that the New emerges in order to resolve an unbearable tension in the Old, and was as such already ‘present’ in the Old in a negative mode, in the guise of an infinite sadness and longing.
This is what, on a totally different level, Walter Benjamin was trying to articulate…the present revolution will retroactively realize the crushed longings of all the past, failed revolutionary attempts. What this means is that, in a properly historical perspective as opposed to evolutionist historicism, the past is not simply past, but bears within it its proper utopian promise of a future Redemption: in order to understand a past epoch properly, it is not sufficient to take into account the historical conditions out of which it grew—one has also to take into account the utopian hopes of a Future that were betrayed and crushed by it…Thus we are dealing with…the dialectical notion of a historical epoch whose ‘concrete’ definition has to include its crushed potentials, which were inherently ‘negated’ by its reality.
How, then, are we to answer the automatic criticism that such a melancholic presentiment of the future can be perceived only if we read the past from the perspective of the future—that is, distorted through teleological lenses? Is it not that this melancholic presentiment was not ‘really there’, but is just akind of perspective distortion, read into the past from our later standpoint?
Žižek, Slavoj. Excerpt including Ch. 6 “The Fantasmic Real”, Ch. 7 “Why is the Truth Monstrous”, and Ch. 9 “The Structure and Its Event”. In The Fragile Absolute — or, why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? London/New York: Verso, 2000. 63-107.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990). Please read: “First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming” [1969]. (Optional: continue as you wish to “Second Series of Paradoxes of Surface Effects”, “Third Series of the Proposition”, and “Fourth Series of Dualities.” [1969].) In The Logic of Sense. Trans. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivales. Ed. by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. 1-27. [First Published as Logique du sens. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969.]
Behnke, Kerstin (2006). “The Destruction of Representation: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay in the Present Age.” In Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. 179-187.
Lynch, Michael (1991). “Science in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Biology and Philosophy 6: 205-226.
Optional:
Birringer, Johannes. “Games and the Theater of Telepresence.” In Performance, Technology & Science. New York: PAJ Publications, 2008.
May 26
Kristeva, Julia (1997). “Powers of Horror” [1982]. Translated by Leon S. Rudiez. In Kelly Oliver, ed., The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press, 229-247. Originally published in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bolter, Jay David; Blair MacIntyre; Maribeth Gandy; and Petra Schweitzer (2006). “New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura.” In Convergence Vol. 12(1): 21-39.
Weimar, Klaus (2006). “Text-critical Remarks et alia.” In Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. 189-194.
Klima, Alan (2001). “The Telegraphic Abject: Buddhist Meditation in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Proceedings of the Society of the Comparative Study of Society and History, vol : 552-582.