"Welcome to the desert of the real"

αναφωνεί ο Μορφέας στο Matrix, χαιρετώντας τον ήρωα που ξυπνά στην "αληθινή πραγματικότητα (real reality)". Τη φράση αυτή διάλεξε για τίτλο στο βιβλίο του σχετικά με την 11η Σεπτεμβρίου ο Slavoj Zizek.

Καιρό είχα να διαβάσω (μη μαθηματικό) κείμενο που να απαιτεί να γυρίζω πίσω ξανά και ξανά για να καταλάβω τι θέλει να πει ο ποιητής... Αλλά αξίζει. Οι θέσεις του Ζιζέκ έχουν αρκετό ενδιαφέρον. Αποστασιοποιείται από την κυρίαρχη ρητορική περί φονταμενταλισμού και δημοκρατίας και τα παραπλανητικά διλήμματα του τύπου δημοκρατία ή τρομοκρατία και προσπαθεί να προσεγγίσει τις ρίζες των συμβάντων της 11ης Σεπτεμβρίου και της μετέπειτα περιόδου, κάνοντας τελικά μια φιλοσοφική και ψυχολογική, πέρα από πολιτική ανάλυση.

Παραθέτω εδώ μερικά αποσπάσματα. Χωρίς σχόλια, περιττά θα ήταν.

'The late-capitalistic consumerist California paradise is, in its very hyperreality, in a way unreal, substanceless, deprived of material inertia.'

'... the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of "real life" itself, its reversal into a spectral show.'

'...we should be able to discern, in what we experience as fiction, the hard kernel of the Real which we are able to sustain only if we fictionalize it. In short, we should discern which part of reality is "transfunctionalized" through fantasy, so that, although it is part of reality, it is perceived in a fictional mode.'

'The problem with the twentieth-century "passion for the Real" was not that it was passion for the Real, but that it was a fake passion, whose ruthless pursuit of the Real behind appearances was the ultimate stratagem to avoid confronting the Real...'

'What makes life "worth living" is the very excess of life: the awareness that there is something for which one is ready to risk one's life (we may call this excess "freedom", "honour", "dignity", "autonomy", etc.). Only when we are ready to take this risk are we really alive. Chesterton makes this point apropos of the paradox of courage:
A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it, he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.'