infobong.com

In These Times is a title I read on occasion, but I should read more often. On one of my rare visits to their site today, I ran across this piece by Slavoj Žižek discussing the ways the Matrix movies invite philosophical interpretation. Like others, he suggests that "the matrix" might be read as the sum of the social and political institutions that determine our perceptions of the real, but, as always, his assertions are unmistakably clear:

Of course, the first movie invites these post-structuralist/postmodern readings in the scene where Neo pulls Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra off of the shelf. One thing I found interesting about this story, though, is Žižek alludes to his "Lacanian friends." Up to this point, I had considered Žižek as a follower of Lacan, and he uses Lacanian ideas in this piece, so perhaps this is his way of saying his ideas are distinct from Lacan's.