Navayana and Sarai invite you to Navayana's First Annual Lecture
on Monday, 4 January 2010, at 5: 00 p.m.

at Seminar Room, CSDS
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054

The annual lecture is the culmination of the lecture series that Navayana has been organising with Sarai since November 2008.

Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, shall speak on "Ideology in the Post-ideological World: The Case of Hollywood".

Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Sarai shall introduce Žižek and chair the session.


"So when even products of the allegedly 'liberal" Hollywood display the most blatant ideological regression, are any further proofs needed that ideology is alive and kicking in our post-ideological world? Consequently, it shouldn't surprise us to discover ideology at its purest in what may appear as Hollywood at its most innocent: the big blockbuster cartoons. 'The truth has the structure of a fiction' -- is there a better exemplification of this thesis than cartoons in which the truth about the existing social order is rendered in such a direct way which would never be allowed in the narrative cinema with 'real' actors?"
--Žižek in a recent essay, "Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Frontline"


Slavoj Žižek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School. He uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he lives to this day. The more than 40 books he has written deal with topics ranging from philosophy and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theology, film, opera and radical politics. He was a candidate for, and nearly won, the presidency of Slovenia in the first democratic elections after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1990.

Two of his titles, The Sublime Object of Ideology and his latest First as Tragedy, Then as Farce have been published by Navayana.

For further details on Žižek's lecture tour of India, see www.navayana.org