"Nature is a crazy bitch": Žižek on the apocalypse

Unlike Baudrillard, who always took himself way too seriously, I've always liked Slavoj Žižek, ever since Mark Kingwell encouraged me to read Looking Awry back when I was his grad student. I liked him even more when I read an interview with him, where he said that he was all ready to move to America until it became clear that American schools expected him to actually teach and do research. 

Žižek is basically the court jester of continental philosophy, preferring to make his points through jokes and outrageous remarks, rather than through dry, opaque, or even just lengthy, arguments. The New Scientist has an interview with him, about his new book Living in End Times. But if you're expecting yet another diatribe against capitalism, technology, and mankind's war against nature, think again. Žižek says he has a "naive Enlightenment fascination" with science, thinks we should stop paying rent to Bill Gates, and wonders whether reality has been fully rendered. And this part is a total delight:

...certain environmentalists delight in proving that every catastrophe - even natural ones - is man-made, that we are all guilty, we exploited too much, we weren't feminine enough. All this bullshit. Why? Because it makes the situation "safer". If it is us who are the bad guys, all we have to do is change our behaviour. But in fact Mother Nature is not good - it's a crazy bitch.

So what should we do instead?

The fear is that this bad ecology will become a new opiate of the people. And I'm against the ecologists' anti-technology stance, the one that says, "we are alienated by manipulating nature, we should rediscover ourselves as natural beings". I think we should alienate ourselves more from nature so we become aware of the utter contingency, the fragility of our natural being.