"You don't escape into fantasy in order to avoid reality, you construct your real activity itself as an escape."
( Slavoj Zizek)
( Slavoj Zizek)
The aim of this project is to explore what is identity. The human is a social creature therefore is part of the identity but at same time each of us experience the separation from everyone by the meaning of ' I am'. This inextricable duality was discussed by Wilhelm Dithery when he wanted to understand the individuum and how the group works. He concluded that without defining the individuum impossible to comprehend what is a group. In the same time the personal behaviour is different within the group then within itself. So it is impossible to perceive the group through a 'unique man' and vice versa. His work ends with this unsolvable circulus vicious without defining what is an individuum or how the group works.
To deeper understand the topic I listened an interview about voyeurism and digital identity with Paul Holdengraber and Slavoj Zizek philosopher and film theorist. The first thing what I noticed that none of them thought personal identity is rooted in innate qualities. They think the identity it not given by birth to an individuum rather it must be built and therefore each of us is unique.
Slavoj Zizek turn to Søren Kierkegaard to comprehend the self- identification. Kierkegaard was a religious philosopher who perceived the individuum trough the bible. He stated, to be able to create own identity you need to have a free will. In the bible the apple symbolizes the freedom of the human action. The whole apple also refers to the unconditionally given harmony within us what existed in the paradise that every human would like to achieve by its own activity. The inner goodness given to everyone by birth, but it could be destroyed by the choices that we make. When Eve bite the apple she lost this inner goodness and everybody is ' Adam and Eve' because everyone born into our planet with clean soul but in the life some point they lose it. Some thinkers believe like Maslow that it happens because lack of knowledge but the bible states that the root of luck of knowledge is the loss of inner goodness.
Kierkegaard thinks that the identity is a result of an inner dialectic process. He suggests when a person denial God than he/she resists its true nature. The identity develops by this inner fight, how we are and who we want to be. “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” (Kierkegaard) One of the main task of a human is to discover who he/she is and complete itself.
Slavoj Zizek uses the idea of the dialectics of identity to interpret an incident from a film called Blue Velvet (Directed by David Lynch) The scene begins with a protagonist who enter a room to have a sexual intercourse with the woman who waits him there. During their sexual interaction a man voyeur them. Zizek questioning that it is a third person or perhaps just the imagination of the men itself who would like to be the voyeur too. He agrees that the identity formed by an inner dialectic and therefore f the main question for him is what is really identifies a person, Is it the projected self-image that others knows or the hidden side of the person which contains suppressed desires, fantasies and imaginations.
Søren Kierkegaard
First published Tue Dec 3, 1996; substantive revision Fri Jul 27, 2012
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (b. 1813, d. 1855) was a profound and prolific writer in the Danish “golden age” of intellectual and artistic activity. His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and fiction. Kierkegaard brought this potent mixture of discourses to bear as social critique and for the purpose of renewing Christian faith within Christendom. At the same time he made many original conceptual contributions to each of the disciplines he employed. He is known as the “father of existentialism”, but at least as important are his critiques of Hegel and of the German romantics, his contributions to the development of modernism, his literary experimentation, his vivid re-presentation of biblical figures to bring out their modern relevance, his invention of key concepts which have been explored and redeployed by thinkers ever since, his interventions in contemporary Danish church politics, and his fervent attempts to analyse and revitalise Christian faith.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
Philosopher
Senior Researcher, Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek,
Žižek received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis. He has been called the "Elvis of philosophy" and an "academic rock star." His work calls for a return to the Cartesian subject and the German Ideology, in particular the works of George Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Slavoj Žižek's work draws on the works of Jacques Lacan, moving his theory towards modern political and philosophical issues, finding the potential for liberatory politics within his work. But in all his turns to these thinkers and strands of thought, he hopes to call forth new potentials in thinking and self-reflexivity. He also calls for a return to the spirit of the revolutionary potential of Lenin and Karl Max
http://bigthink.com/experts/slavoj-zizek.