After very nearly liberating Palestine at the Church of St. Paul and creating worldwide brotherhood and peace between the three religions, we invited Mustafa and Miriam over to brunch on our Brooklyn porch, to discuss why and whether the word “communism” should be dragged back into international discourse, despite the monumental failure and cruel actions of the movement throughout the twentieth century.
Since I was not entirely persuaded, I decided to take Zizek to the beach at Montauk and examine him more closely in a more romantic atmosphere. Montauk is where Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was shot, which is a movie about the eternal repetition of love and its failure – and still, love. That’s how it is with Zizek, too, who loves communism so much that he ends up comparing it more to death than to love. That’s also the name of his new book, Living In The End Times. The official excuse for going to the beach was working on my own book, What Does a Jew Want?, which will be published next spring, as part of a series Zizek is co-editing, but since we didn’t say a word about the book and just enjoyed the amazing, and almost entirely empty, beach, I also decided to ignore (for now) the question of the Jew, and to post two unedited video clips.
The first one above is Zizek on communism, Jenin, and other animals, and the second one below is Zizek on the beach. The question that springs to mind is, of course, “What does a communist want?” Heed this warning and watch at your own peril.
Udi Aloni is writing a regular column for the Israeli website Ynet called Brooklyn-Jenin about his experience living between New York City and the Jenin refugee camp, where he is teaching a film production class. You can read the entire Brooklyn-Jenin series here. This article was translated by Dena Shunra.
