Fifth day of ‘Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture’ Masterclass by Slavoj Žižek. The event took place from 15th to 19th June 2009 at Birbkeck Institute for the Humanities in London.
Everybody knows T. S. Eliot’s famous essay Notes towards the definition of culture. This masterclass analyses phenomena of modern thought and culture with the intention to discern elements of possible Communist culture.
It moves at two levels: first, it interprets some cultural phenomena (from today’s architecture to classic literary works like Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise) as failures to imagine or enact a Communist culture; second, it explores attempts at imagining how a Communist culture could look, from Wagner’s Ring to Kafka’s and Beckett’s short stories and contemporary science fiction novels.
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