Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets. Philosophers have long done their best thinking when directly engaging with the outside world, not in isolation from it. Socrates roved the Athenian agora, courting trouble with the authorities. Rousseau immortalized his rambles through nature on the printed page. Nietzsche once said that only ideas conceived while walking have any value. In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.

An elderly man raised his hand. “What, in your opinion, is a good social order?” he asked. “Communism!” Zizek said, affecting surprise that he could be expected to deliver any other answer. “I am absolutely in favor of egalitarianism with a taste of terror.” There was laughter among the younger generation while the elderly man looked horrified, and stammered, “I’ve seen dictatorships in other countries, and I believe democracy is better than your dictatorships.” “I agree,” Zizek said. “But my problem is, what is democracy-today? I am not saying Eastern European socialism is better - my God, I lived there. But take this country. What do you, here, decide at elections? I am just saying that something happened twenty or twenty-five years ago, with the collapse of socialism, and, at the same time, the Western social-democratic worker state losing its power of sustaining political imagination. What disappeared at that point was the belief that humanity, as a collective subject, can actively intervene and somehow steer social development. In the last thirty years, we are again accepting the notion of history as fate. Thirty or forty years ago, there were still debates about what the future will be - Communism, socialism, fascism, liberal capitalism, totalitarian bureaucratic capitalism. The idea was that life would somehow go on on earth, but that there are different possibilities. Now we talk all the time about the end of the world, but it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Life on earth maybe will end, but somehow capitalism will go on.”

Žižek’s key rhetorical tactic used to subvert conformist liberal democratic discourse is irony. This involves something peculiarly Žižekian, something that is palpable in every book he has written and every article he has published. The first move involves a rejection of the (typically hegemonic) liberal response to a given issue. One might think that, given Žižek’s political commitments, the next move would be to assert the far Left/Marxist view to counter the liberal position. Instead, Žižek often takes a stance that is uncomfortably close to the right-wing position, but then argues that the right-wing position simply makes a much stronger case for the far Left position.

A deviation: have you ever been doing a repetitive motion over and over and then thought, "My God, what am I doing?" Exercise allows us to engage in these repetitive motions without having to question why. The superego asks the id, "What are you doing? Don't make me look stupid," and then the ego and id respond, "Go to bed, old man. I am working out like Olivia Newton-John!" In any case, you pull this handle, and lean over, and it is like you start the lawn mower with the help of the mollusk. One arm, then the other. Like that. OK! All right. Come back later and we will do the lower-body workout, which is almost completely pointless, because hardly anyone flexes their leg muscles, and everyone wants to wear the skinny jeans of their youth, which is futile, I think.

This imperative to 'look busy' is one of the many reasons why contemporary life is quite as unpleasant as it is. In every cafe, every restaurant, every pub, every shop, staff are instructed to carry out this Sisyphean command, as a way of somehow performing the generation of value. That is why clean tables are sprayed and scrubbed even while people eat nearby; chairs are stacked up even while customers attempt to salvage some slight enjoyment of an evening; why piles of jumpers are endlessly folded and re-folded. No one can relax, neither the employee nor customer alike, even - especially! - when there is no work to be done. Rather get the inmates to make and pull apart baskets than have them talk to each other or get any funny ideas. The language of Nu-labour (and consequently of business, particularly the immaterial or creative kind, and education, which rolled into the linguistic mess like a puppy given a particularly baroque doggie treat) is all about the proliferation of meaninglessness as a performance of this imperative to 'look busy'. By looking busy one actually becomes busy, like the depressed academic who flirts with admin when the research ideas have run dry, only to discover that he or she has created a paper monster that threatens to eat and regurgitate them into a giant, depressed spreadsheet. Turning non-work into all-consuming sad passion: bad faith for the Microsoft Office Age. The creative risk historically possessed by the 'romantic' artist was in recent decades transplanted onto the body of a classically uptight and repressed figure - the dull banker, the tax man, the mortgage broker - thus we ended up with a character type invested with a classical respect that had nevertheless completely lost his mind. The excesses of speculative finance ultimately managed to incorporate all the domains of art (the art market), language (nu-language) and any other branch of human endeavour where a modicum of invention may once have resided. Now the creative destroyers are after the school-children! The future is at once bizarre and depressing.

Leading active members of today's economics profession, the generation presently in their 40s and 50s, have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule--as one might expect from a gentleman's club--this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen. They offer a "rape is like the weather" fatalism about an "inevitable" problem (pay inequality) that then starts to recede. They oppose the most basic, decent, and sensible reforms, while offering placebos instead. They are always surprised when something untoward (like a recession) actually occurs.