Slavoj Žižek. Lessons from the ‘Airpocalypse’
The exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst: An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia (28 June 2017 — 8 January 2018) displays the work of a group of art collectives which, under the abbreviation NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) [New Slovenian Art], revived totalitarian imagery and paraphernalia in the 1980s, exhibiting them as blank signifiers at a time which coexisted with the triumph of the free market after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With this exhibition as a backdrop, and in response to a joint invitation from the Museo Reina Sofía and Madrid’s Círculo de Bellas Artes, Slavoj Žižek will put forward a reflection, over two lectures, on the deaths and resurrections of the fascist ghost.
At Museo Reina Sofía, his intervention will set out from the analysis of contemporary fascism, focusing on the issue of refuge today in NSK’s totalitarian fascination, at a time when fascist landmarks are re-emerging (the ideal of racial supremacy and extreme nationalism) and appear to be on the cusp of shaping a new ideological landscape of post-Brexit Europe and the refugee crisis — where the motives and dangers of this fascist temptation are found. Against the atmosphere of neo-liberal jubilation in 1989, Žižek will analyse how the failings of this system have made the potent return of one of the twentieth century’s biggest nightmares possible.
Slavoj Žižek. Philosopher, sociologist, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. International director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, researcher at the Institute for Sociology at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and lecturer at the European Graduate School (Switzerland). He has taught as guest professor at different institutions, including the Paris 8 University, Columbia University and Princeton University, among numerous others. He is the author of numerous books on philosophy, psychoanalysis and film, including The Sublime Object of Ideology (1992), Repeating Lenin (2004), First as Tragedy, then as Farce (2011), Less Than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectic Materialism (2015) and The New Class Struggle. Refugees and Terror (2016). Moreover, his analysis of ideology through Hollywood cinema has been the subject matter for two films: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), both directed by Sophie Fiennes. In 1990 he was a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia.