Browsing by Subject "Zizek"
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Item ¡Hasta la utopía siempre! : conflicting utopian ideologies in Havana’s late socialist housing market(2012-12) Genova, Jared Michael; Sletto, Bjørn; Kahn, TerryThrough the broader contextualization of ethnographic fieldwork in Havana’s newly reformed housing market, this study theorizes the Cuban late socialist condition through a lens of utopian ideological conflict. A popular narrative of free market utopia has emerged in the face of the state’s recalcitrant ideology of state socialism. The popular narrative is reproduced through growth in the informal economy, while the socialist utopian narrative is maintained by the ubiquity of its bureaucratic apparatus. Inspired by postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1994), this thesis theorizes the Cuban state narrative as an ideological simulation, supported only through its strongest simulacrum – the government bureaucracy. Previous work on Cuba has cited the importance of access to government-purchased goods to fuel the informal economy and individual wealth accumulation. This study highlights the reproduction of a narrative of free market utopia in the desire for access to transactions as intermediaries, particularly as the deals increase in hard currency value. The passage of Decreto-Ley Number 288, which authorized the buying and selling of homes has served to rapidly capitalize the market and encourage further development of an informal network of brokers. Greater economic hybridization in the housing sector, among others, is gradually eroding the totalizing nature of the state’s socialist utopia.Item Koj?ve and Levinas: Universality Without Totality(2010-07-14) Pepitone, Anthony J.I have structured my master's thesis in terms of an opposition between Kojeve's existentialist, Marxist philosophical formulation of Hegel's Phenomenology and Levinas's post-Heideggerian, anti-Hegelian phenomenology in Totality and Infinity. While Levinas's project is explicitly anti-totalitarian, Kojeve's reading of the Phenomenology emphasizes the End of History in Hegel's philosophy without shrinking from its totalizing aspects. While the philosophical project of each thinker is generally antithetical to the other, it is my contention that the universal and homogeneous state, conceived by Kojeve to be the rational realization of the end of history, is a legitimate moral project for Levinasian ethics. This thesis provides both an exegesis of Kojeve's reading of Hegel's master/slave dialectic in the Phenomenology and an interpretation of the tragedy of the slave understood in terms of Holderlin's theory of the tragic. It is through the master/slave dialectic that history consummates in the end of history. Later in the thesis, I outline Levinas's project as an ethics as first philosophy in opposition to the Eleatic traditions in Western philosophy. We can trace Levinas's project in his unconventional reading of the cogito and the idea of infinity. Whereas Descartes represents a philosophical return home for Hegel, Levinas's reading of Descartes represents a philosophical sojourn away from home in the second movement of the Meditations. With these notions, we have a formal basis in accounting for the conflict in Levinas's thought between the moral necessity of universal rights and the dangers of assimilation. Finally, I argue for why the universal and homogeneous state is an ethically worthy goal from a Levinasian perspective. On this question, I engage the thought of a number of thinkers of the left: Kojeve, Derrida, Horkheimer, Adorno and Zizek. I conclude that Levinas's thought on universalism and eschatology can serve as a moral basis for the left-Hegelian project of realizing a universal and homogeneous state. Because such a state is distinguishable from a totalizing End of History, the eschatological concern for one's singularity within history is compatible with the prophetic call to strive for political universality. Ultimately, it is the responsibility to this prophetic call that guarantees one's singularity.