>I think that the true infertility is the very lack of meaningful historical experience. It’s a society of pure meaningless hedonism. Today, ideology is no longer big causes such as socialism, >equality, justice, democracy. The basic injunction is ‘have a good time’ or to put it in more spiritualist terms ‘realize yourself’. This is why I think Dalai Lama is such a big hit. He preaches >enlightened Hollywood egotism; be happy, realize your potentials and so on and so on. And this is our despair today. I think that this film gives the best diagnosis of the ideological >despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history, or, to use another political term, bio politics. And my god, this film literally is about bio politics.

i have not seen the film, and cannot claim to have understood -- i mean really
understood -- the zizek that i've read, which is much of zizek . . . but . . .

so far as i can tell, this a lament precisely about the absence of ideology, the
replacement of identity politics by an agenda of pure ego gratification
devoid of historical anchoring  . . . so i find myself wondering:  isn't it ironic
that after two generations of almost universal lamentation about the
pernicious fall-out of ideologies, we now suddenly find ourselves hearing
about the tragedy of a-historicity? . . . hmmmm. . . .

in view of the fact that zizek worries about the contemporary world being
"meaningless," maybe the central question can be posed this way [and with
full recognition that all these words are multiply loaded] :    is meaning itself  
possible without ideology??

mike

.