Renata Salecl on Violence & Identity at ICI Berlin 2012

Full lecture available at: http://ici.berlin/events/renata-salecl/
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The ideology of post-industrial societies has heavily relied on the idea that everyone can make it, that success is just a matter of right choices and that one is individually guilty for one's failures. In a paradoxical way, the poor have identified with this ideology of choice. In the last years, however, we have witnessed eruptions of violence (London riots, for example) where we do not see a critique of the dominant ideology but rather an intense identification with the ideals of consumerist society. The lecture looks at how a paradoxical form of complementarity is emerging between the rich and the poor through new types of identifications and how both violence and denial are essential supports of these identifications.

© ICI Berlin 2012