In case you missed your chance to win a date with them to watch the new Transformers movie, see this video of a public conversation between Julian Assange and Slavoj Žižek about the impact and ethics of Wikileaks on the world (it’s significant, they say). It happened at London’s Frontline Club on July 2nd, with DemocracyNow!’s Amy Goodman moderating.And yep, Zizek really seems to like Assange (but not, he lets it be known, Lady Gaga). Back in January, Zizek registered his approval of Wikileaks in this typically dense essay, but worried that by repeating the battle between secret conspiracies and the public’s right to freedom of information, Assange and everyone else was underselling the revolutionary impact of his web page:There has been, from the outset, something about its activities that goes way beyond liberal conceptions of the free flow of information. We shouldn't look for this excess at the level of content. The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn't we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don't know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.Below, some choice quotations from this radical love-fest:Zizek: “If you are a terrorist, what are then they who accuse you of terrorism!”
Assange: “We shouldn’t always see censorship as a bad thing. It shows society is not yet completely sown up, but still has some political dimension to it.”
Zizek (on his alleged friendship with Lady Gaga): “Absolute denial. I didn’t even listen to one of her songs.”
Assange: “What advances us as a civilization is the entirety of our knowledge.”
Zizek: “We all know that the emperor is naked, but the moment somebody says the emperor is dead: everything changes. You [Julian] are not only violating the rules, you are changing the very rules that we violate!”
Assange: “You’re here because you think that change is possible, and you’re probably right.”
Zizek: “WikiLeaks pushes us to the point that we can no longer pretend not to know. Even if you ignore WikiLeaks, it has changed the field. Nobody can pretend that WikiLeaks didn’t happen!”
Assange (on what he wants for his 40th birthday): “I want to move away from the Orwellian ‘he who controls the present controls the past’.”
Zizek: “There are still ethical miracles… ordinary people who do something wonderful. That is our hope today.”
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