zizek reading group saturday july 26th 1pm - 3pm - bon voyage zero-point 1049

[zeropoi...@gmail.com]

dear friend,
as you know
we are closing this location at the end of july, and going on hiatus.

thanx immense to all wonderful friends and artists: art hungry &
excellent chefs, collaborators, writers, visionaries, crazies who are
really the sane ones, lovely people, deadliners, builders, grave
diggers, seed planters, aerial performers, sound wrestlers & catchers
& sculptors, and my greatest love to our collective core. without you
nothing.

i will be writing a book about these past few years and researching
future manifestations of zero-point in a new location, collaborating
on a chapter in maxi kim's new novel, curating in other spaces, and i
have started a mail art project: if you would like to join simply
email me your address! zeropoi...@gmail.com

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our last experience at 1049 e. 32nd st.
this saturday, july 26th 1 pm - 3 pm

a workshop:
READING’ SLAVOJ ZIZEK
A GROUP READING SEMINAR with MAXIMUS KIM

please enjoy to join us...the book is fascinatingly appropriate after
MAPS / LOCATIONS and we are relocating to a temporary ether...it is a
dense work, but very common sense, and i think it provides an
excellent dialog missing from what is currently taught, or has been
taught in the past... (the book is provided with your donation)

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the delicious details:
‘READING’ SLAVOJ ZIZEK
A GROUP READING SEMINAR with MAXIMUS KIM


“[O]ne should distinguish between ordinary escapism

and this dimension of Otherness, this magic moment

when the Absolute appears in all its fragility:

the prisoners have seen a ghost –

neither the resuscitated obscene ghost of the past,

not the spectral ghost of the capitalist present,

but the brief apparition of a future utopian Otherness

to which every authentic revolutionary stance should cling.”


- Slavoj Zizek1




Since the beginning of the short twenty first century I have
participated in group – reading seminars as the basis of my art and
writing process. Reading for me can be not only important, but also
primary to a person’s creative economy. As Rainer Ganahl put it,
“Meeting people, reading together and discussion [can be] an art of
temporary encounter, an act that can affect both our noetic and social
activities.”2


The title of this introduction alludes to a similar artist-run reading
seminar by Rainer Ganahl entitled Reading Karl Marx (1998-2001).
Commissioned by Craig Martin as part of the Open House Projects, what
initially struck me was the fact that the vast majority of people who
participated in Reading Karl Marx seminars have never actually read
anything by Marx. In staging ‘Reading’ Slavoj Zizek at Zero-point, I
would like to foster a similar open-door atmosphere. Ideally, there
should be no assumption that the participants have a prior knowledge
of the subject. Neither are they asked to read the text in advance.
Participants may not have the time, the patience, habit or perhaps the
educational grooming to read often elitist, sometimes indecipherable
academic texts. It has been my experience that in order to facilitate
meaningful discussion through the study of Zizek, we would have to
read together, sometimes phrase-by-phrase. Simultaneously,
participants have urged other participants to cross out certain
paragraphs. I have found myself comforting readers; don’t be afraid of
simply absorbing the surface of Zizek. Depth and surface are often on
identical sides of the Moebius strip. Divorcing, dividing, violently
stripping the text from its original philosophical roots may be the
most utopic act of all. At the end of the day ‘Reading’ Slavoj Zizek
is not about reading Lacan. And it certainly isn’t about rereading
Marx.


Why Zizek? Why not more established names such as Deleuze? Derrida? Or
Foucault? With the help of group-reading seminars I came to understand
that reading chapter-by-chapter, paragraph-by-paragraph, enabled a
more precise discussion. However with this precision came a price:
xenophobia. In London and Berlin, the group-reading emphasis on French
intellectuals and French theory often encouraged the concealment and
silence of non-french thinkers such as Zizek, bell hooks, and Cornel
West. Moreover, much of French theory – deconstruction, for example –
is notorious for its inability to engage popular culture – and hence,
a wider audience. On the other hand, Zizek’s texts – often
highlighting today’s headlines, movies and television programs – can
serve as a barometer to comprehend our contemporary situation, without
pretension or guilt. In the ‘Reading’ Slavoj Zizek seminars all
contributions are welcomed and I try not to solicit or impose
classical interpretations, as is often the case with continental
pedagogical readings.


In the beginning of 2008 I worked with new groups of artists from
University of Greenwich and Goldsmiths College. The art school
approach has the advantage of reaching people whom in most cases have
never broached reading this kind of literature. However I believe the
true positive emancipatory potential of the experience can be reached
at experimental spaces such as Zero-point. After all, Zero-point has a
keen understanding of the relationship between dreams and reality.
Themes such as Geobiotic and Dreamtime encourages participants to
question the contemporary frame of reality, to question the fantasies
that shape our global, consumer capitalist world. It is by re-
imagining the social imaginary that the social can effectively change.
In a way, as naïve as it sounds and contrary to many of the totalizing
concepts of today’s social fabric that see people solely as
unconscious and manipulated consumers, it is surprising how little it
takes to stimulate change. Let’s read! Let’s re-imagine a new utopia
for the short twenty-first century!!


$10 - $15 donation

please rsvp : zeropoi...@gmail.com
remember: the book will be included in the workshop for reading and
discussion...


hope to see you there!


love & ruckus.


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