SELF-ISOLATING WITH SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

SELF-ISOLATING WITH SLAVOJ  ŽIŽEK Let me begin with a personal confession: I like the idea of being confined to one’s apartment, with all the time needed to read and work. Even when I travel, I prefer to stay in a nice hotel room and ignore all the attractions of the place I’m visiting. A good essay on a famous painting means much more to me than seeing this painting in a crowded museum. But I’ve noticed this attitude makes now being obliged by the pandemic to confine myself more difficult. To help explain this let me recount, not for the first time, the famous joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka: “‘Waiter! A cup of coffee without cream, please!’ ‘I’m sorry, sir, we have no cream, only milk. So can it be a coffee without milk?’” At the factual level, the coffee remains the same, what changes is making the coffee without cream into coffee without milk — or, more simply even, adding the implied negation and making a straightforward coffee into a coffee without milk. The same thing has happened to my isolation: Prior to the crisis, it was an isolation “without milk” – I could have gone out, I just chose not to. Now it’s just the plain coffee of isolation with no possible negation implied. PANDEMIC! Covid-19 Shakes the World SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK   You can enjoy the paradoxes and provocations of Slavoj Žižek in your own self-isolation with a free e-book of his new book Pandemic! (and do consider supporting radical, independent publishing by ordering a paperback too).   NOW AVAILABLE HERE