![]() The global climate precariat - all of those whose lives and communities are endangered by the storms, floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and wars produced or intensified by a destabilizing global climate system - are a vast segment of humanity. To put things in the simplest terms possible: Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged Buddhism, Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Žižek | 2 Comments » I still think Žižek’s use of Buddhism as a foil for Lacanianism ends up reducing each to the other’s opposite in ways that miss the multiplicity of each, and especially of the two and a half thousand year tradition of Buddhist thinking and practice, with its many distinctive streams and sub-traditions. Regarding Žižek’s latest response, I don’t have much to add to what I’ve already written. 193-197), but there is plenty more reference both to Žižek and to Lacan in the second part of the book, which develops a Buddhist-inspired (and at times Lacanian-inspired) practice of process-relational “bodymindfulness.” ![]() 185-193) and “Totality, or original hybridity?” (pp. The critiques of Žižek feature in the sections “The Subject and the Subjectless” (pp. Suzuki (among other things) where I had never attempted that.įor those interested in following up on this debate over Buddhism and its possible relations to Lacanian psychology, I would suggest the more complete version of my critique, which was published in my 2018 book Shadowing the Anthropocene (and which Žižek doesn’t seem to have read, so even though it’s open access, I will try to send him a copy of it). In his reply, he later mistakes another author - of the blog And Now For Something Completely Different - for me, confusingly implicating me in a defense of D. Slavoj Žižek has “belatedly” replied, in The Philosophical Salon, to some things I wrote in 2009 about his Lacanianism and his understanding (some would say misunderstanding) of Buddhism, and to other critiques of the latter. Posted in Climate change, Cultural politics, Eco-theory, Politics | Tagged Bruno Latour, class politics, class struggle, climate change, climate politics, ecologism, Latour and Schultz, Marxism, Matthew Huber, Neil Smith, Stefania Barca, working class | 4 Comments » This post explains the difference and the complementarity. In particular, Matthew Huber’s Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022) and Bruno Latour’s and Nikolaj Schultz’s On the Emergence of an Ecological Class (Polity, 2023, Eng.) deserve to be read alongside each other as, at first blush, they seem to be about the same thing - the “class antagonism” of a world divided between climate “winners” and “losers.” On closer inspection, however, I think the two books are about different things occurring at different temporal scales, which makes them somewhat complementary. Thinking further about the global climate precariat (and the ontology of climate trauma, etc.), I’ve been reading a set of books that try to articulate a “class politics” for the present eco-political conjuncture. Posted in Politics | Tagged climate wars, Putin, Russian invasion, Ukraine, war, war ecology | 2 Comments » In that, Ukraine can stand at the forefront. It’s high time to shed the old lenses and shape a new global reality. One of these - and one whose “ war ecology” (to use Pierre Charbonnier’s astute phrase) shapes the nature of this conflict already - is that between fossil-fuel authoritarians (the likes of Putin and Trump) and climate-transitioning democracies (of whom the EU, Biden’s US, and Lula’s Brazil can be leaders). We’re in a new world with new allies and new enemies, whose contours will increasingly be shaped by new conflicts. Zelensky and western supporters need to make clear that that’s what this is, and that no “tradition” of cold war “nonalignment” makes sense any more. There are no good reasons for postcolonial democracies like Lula’s Brazil and the ANC’s South Africa to remain “ neutral” in an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial struggle. Wartime emergencies call for military support, but diplomatic pressure on Russia also needs to increase, which means that Ukraine’s foreign policy must broaden. But one thing neither he nor his western supporters have succeeded at - as this New York Times analysis shows - is convincing the global South to support Ukraine in its struggle. Like Ukrainians in general, whose resistance to the Russian onslaught has been remarkable, President Volodymyr Zelensky has done wonders in so many ways. My reflections on a year of full-scale war in Ukraine can be read here.
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