Note: Start video on 33:33 (absolutely nothing happening before that, but just people waiting for the panelist to go on stage).

On Friday I was invited to attend Slavoj Žižeks lecture "Conditions of Possibility" with M. Hägglund & A. Johnston at City University of New Yorks Graduate Center.

Martin Hägglund (associate professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale University) and Adrian Johnston (professor in the department of philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta) both read legthy and endogamic discourses about Heidegger, classic philosophical concepts, and stubbornly narrow minded “canons”. You can not make philosophy (then again, they were reading and regurgitating, not creating or philosophizing) and begin by taking for granted Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Lacan… We are in the XXI century! Of course those were great philosophers, and their contributions are extremely significant, but that does not mean they are unquestionable. As a matter of fact, that`s what philosophy is about!

Isn`t it about time we look beyond the fatality of cause-and-effect, the linearity of time, the etnocentric and anthropocentric view of philosophy?

On the contrary Žižek, in his well known flamboyant manner (his tics have gotten much worse, I wonder about his health), and making a few, but not too many (which was a welcomed change) pop-culture references, did not read, questioned his colleagues, and went on about seemingly disparate subjects that eventually tied in together quite well.

I may not agree with all Žižek says, but one has to respect such a risk taker in a world dominated by idolatrous worshipping ass kissing experts and their endogamic and excluding entourage.