CrazyEyeJoe:

I always enjoy interviews with Zizek, as he always manages to get me thinking. Admittedly, I don't always understand what he's trying to say.

    SPIEGEL: Is unbridled individual hedonism the only thing we have with which to oppose this fundamentalism?

    Žižek: No, for two reasons. The first is that our opponent isn't really religion. Zivko Kusti, a Croatian Catholic nationalist priest, declared Catholicism to be a symbol of the fact that people aren't prepared to renounce their national and cultural legacy -- "the whole Croatianness." This statement makes clear that it is no longer an issue of faith and its truth, but rather a political-cultural project.

    [...]

    The second reason, which is even more decisive, is that the unbridled personal freedom of choice fits in excellently with today's capitalism in the sense that the global social and economic process is becoming more and more impenetrable. Individual hedonism and fundamentalism are mutually driving each other. You can only effectively combat fundamentalism with a new collective project of radical change. And there is nothing trivially hedonistic about that.

(emphasis mine)

...?

I honestly don't understand his second point, try as I might.


posted 3303 days ago