But what do y'all think?
― Tim, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― alext, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Josh, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― mark s, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
His style is exactly glib enough for my taste. Connections between Marx and the Marx Brothers are CHEAP but also NECESSARY.
I like him, but then I'm a bugger for a bit of post-Althusserian Lacanian-Marxism. And anyone who hates Heidegger and can't be doing with Derrida can't be all bad. He is also responsible for my liking of Zlatko Zahovic and the Slovenian football team. Mind you, his article in the latest London Review of Books was a bit pisspoor. His one on the Matrix was ded ded good though.
Was also the day when Chesterfield wuz robbed in the FA Cup Semi- final in 1997. Memories...
― Nathan Barley, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― anthony, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― mandee, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― the pinefox, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Mandee, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Momus, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― The Hegemon, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Sterling Clover, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― mark s, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Momus, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Mandee, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
*sobs* a lot
I'd tried to erase that day from my memory, thanks a lot Barley!!!
― chris, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
zizek is a leninist, a means-to-an-ends kind of guy, so his stance here is unexpected.
of 24: "It is here that we encounter the series' ideological lie: in spite of the CTU's ruthlessness, its agents, especially Bauer, are warm human beings - loving, caught in the emotional dilemmas of ordinary people."
which begs the question: well, can't ruthless people also be loving fathers? s/z's answer is:
"As Arendt says, the fact that they are able to retain any normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity."
i can't help finding his paradoxes (and there are umpteen more in the article) a bit fortune cookie. isn't the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity the morally depraved act itself? likewise, do we need his thoughts on 'why is cheney telling us this' -- isn't the fact of torture enough?
― Theorry Henry (Enrique), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 09:58 (eighteen years ago) link
― Real Goths Don't Wear Black (Enrique), Monday, 3 April 2006 10:43 (seventeen years ago) link
But the main point is fairly straightforward. The means-to-an-end argument, when it comes to torture, boils down to "do what you need to do, then pay the price later." But by implying that torture has no price for those who practice it, legal or emotional, 24 to some extent moves the issue beyond mere means-to-an-end - there's no longer any moral balancing going on at all. It simply becomes "this is what we do." Torture becomes unfortunate but no longer morally troubling. The notion that this somehow goes to a person's guilt and depravity is popularly accepted in the entrenchment of the consideration of remorse as a mitigating factor in sentencing for crimes.
It's basically the same argument w/r/t Cheney openly justifying what was formerly tacitly permitted: this does violence to the notion that there is a price to be paid for these actions, that there is a price that should be paid. The point is not merely to bring formerly hidden acts out into the open, but to disrupt and overturn the systems of understandings that necessitated the acts be hidden. A government which has to hide its torture is one which submits to the notion that, strictly speaking, what is being done is wrong. And there is always the possibility that the torture will be publicly exposed, resulting in loss of face and power for the ruling government.
The hiding at least pays lipservice to the notion that what is happening is morally reprehensible (as Mac says on Commander In Chief, "I don't want to hear that he was tortured"). What is changed in publicly announcing the use of torture is not necessarily the seriousness of the acts of torture committed (which, perhaps in the short-term, does not increase), but the system of morality within which that act is situated, and the system of power relationships. The Government says "you can no longer hold your avowed distaste for torture over me"; if the public does nothing at this stage, it effectively acknowledges "I accept your use of the torture as morally defensible."
I think that the ramifications for "society" in this are pretty huge, and that it's therefore right for Zizek to argue that the consideration of the moral depravity of an act can go beyond the act itself and extend to how it is framed in discourse.
― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Monday, 3 April 2006 13:56 (seventeen years ago) link
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Monday, 3 April 2006 14:21 (seventeen years ago) link
― Real Goths Don't Wear Black (Enrique), Monday, 3 April 2006 14:23 (seventeen years ago) link
I wouldn't go that far because I haven't really gotten to the "make your own zizekian argument" stage. But yeah his stuff (esp. these sorts of arguments) feels very familiar now, you sort of know where it's going immediately.
Yeah he is very repetitive, and not just in terms of overall approach but in terms of specific detail - the analogy of the husband and the wife who have the tacit agreement w/r/t his infidelity is in half a dozen other books by him. For me it's really all about the world-building of the first two big books (The Sublime Object and For They Know Not What They Do).
― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Monday, 3 April 2006 14:53 (seventeen years ago) link
(of course, he also coasts in other things too, but then that's more an element of not seeing himself as a "theoretician" so much as a sort of gadfly polemicist)
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Monday, 3 April 2006 15:02 (seventeen years ago) link
But cool that he'd thought enough about it to come up with that one perfect phrase.
― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Monday, 3 April 2006 15:21 (seventeen years ago) link
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Monday, 3 April 2006 15:30 (seventeen years ago) link
― Nathalie (stevie nixed), Saturday, 13 May 2006 14:08 (seventeen years ago) link
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n08/letters.html
excellent combination of bad faith and projection, well done.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 12:16 (fifteen years ago) link
it would be kind of interesting to see him deploy that argument w/r/t palestine though, also not an independent state pre-1948, etc etc etc
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 12:18 (fifteen years ago) link
I agree that he is too understanding of China's policies, but I thought this paragraph was spot-on:
One of the main reasons so many people in the West participate in the protests against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly propagated by the Dalai Lama, is one of the chief points of reference for the hedonist New Age spirituality that has become so popular in recent times. Tibet has become a mythic entity onto which we project our dreams. When people mourn the loss of an authentic Tibetan way of life, it isn’t because they care about real Tibetans: what they want from Tibetans is that they be authentically spiritual for us, so that we can continue playing our crazy consumerist game. ‘Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre,’ Gilles Deleuze wrote, ‘vous êtes foutu.’ The protesters against China are right to counter the Beijing Olympic motto – ‘One World, One Dream’ – with ‘One World, Many Dreams’. But they should be aware that they are imprisoning Tibetans in their own dream.
There are other peoples the Chinese central government has oppressed as well, such as the Uyghurs, but since they don't have evoke similar imagery in Westerners as the Tibetans do, and don't have a charismatic leader like the Dalai Lama, they are mostly ignored. (Also, the Uyghurs happen to be mostly muslims, which of course makes them less likely to get much Western support.)
― Tuomas, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:15 (fifteen years ago) link
The difference is, though, that the Israeli government has done little if nothing to develop the Palestinian areas. I'm not trying to defend China here, but the two situations aren't that easily comparable.
― Tuomas, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:20 (fifteen years ago) link
oh that bit about new-age hippies was what i meant by 'projection'; i suppose it might be true of some people who are actively pro-tibet, but most people seem to be against the occupation on more liberal grounds. just as many people who broadly support the palestinian cause might not be so keen on hamas.
zizek doesn't actually advance any evidence of this syndrome, anyway:
When people mourn the loss of an authentic Tibetan way of life, it isn’t because they care about real Tibetans: what they want from Tibetans is that they be authentically spiritual for us, so that we can continue playing our crazy consumerist game.
is just a standard zizek-y paradox. i'm sure he's used it before, conjoining it with the line from 'to be or not to be'; "the poles do the camping, we do the concentrating."
i'm not saying palestine corresponds with tibet 1:1, but zizek's take on it is likely to be 180 degress from his take here -- namely that the occupier is right, and the vocal support for a religio-nationalist cause is wrong.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:26 (fifteen years ago) link
Tibetan Buddhism, deftly propagated by the Dalai Lama, is one of the chief points of reference for the hedonist New Age spirituality that has become so popular in recent times.
This is bullshit as regards specifically Tibetan Buddhism, which strikes me as being way too particularist to offer much to New Age thinking. The Dalai Lama's charisma and media savvy has done far more to keep Tibet in the public consciousness of Western liberals. I'm also pretty sure that a lot of anti-Chinese government protests are grounded in issues other than Tibet. Amnesty's campaigns are one obvious example.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:29 (fifteen years ago) link
Plenty of Stalin apologists argued that he was only liquidating horrible reactionaries, too.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:30 (fifteen years ago) link
Yes to the Dalai Lama's media profile keeping it in public consciousness - linked to strong idea of Tibet as a separate occupied country, a profile that abkhazia, dagestan, kurdistan, don't have - kosovo being the anomaly here (but western govts wanted kosovar independence, rather than western people - so a bit of a red herring?)
Aren't Uyghar's in a minority in Xianjiang?
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:39 (fifteen years ago) link
laxalt, by that i'm guessing you think none of these countries deserve independence? pretty blatantly in the case of kosovo.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:41 (fifteen years ago) link
bringing the opinion of 'western people' is a huge red herring, really, but i'd have thought those western people who have heard of kosovo will generally recall why its independence from serbia could be seen as a good thing for the people of kosovo.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:43 (fifteen years ago) link
No that isn't what I mean. (also wether Western Govt's wanted Kosovar independence or not shouldn't make that independence any more or less desirable per se)
I'm not suggesting any of these countries either deserve or don't deserve independence (just that western policy towards Kosovo was unusual as the usual state of affairs is to preseve integrity of the nation state).
Its more that I was trying to suggest that Tibet has a higher profile as an actual occupied state in western minds, whereas the others are probably thought of as regions - and that itself must be at least partially responsible for pro-Tibetan feeling in the west.
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:46 (fifteen years ago) link
Surely one of the Kosovans' core claims to independence is that Kosova corresponds to what a nation-state is supposed to be?
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:50 (fifteen years ago) link
yeah, undeniably. though again: palestine is fairly prominent in the west. those other places barely even register as names, kurdistan excepted. i think there's some kind of insinuation threaded through this line -- i don't know what it is exactly, but my main reaction is 'so what?'
western policy towards Kosovo was unusual as the usual state of affairs is to preseve integrity of the nation state
greater serbia wasn't a nation state. plus the west had been operating in the former yugoslavia pre-1999. plus it was the west (germany) that encouraged its break-up.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:51 (fifteen years ago) link
I'm curious as to why Zizek is someone you guys read/talk about? Is he someone you read in school, and if so in what course of study? Or is he a big public intellectual in the UK or Australia or somewhere, and in those places public intellectuals are taken seriously? I'm just ignorant but curious, not trying to be snarky.
― Euler, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:52 (fifteen years ago) link
-- Euler, Saturday, April 19, 2008 2:52 PM (7 seconds ago) Bookmark Link
he's definitely a prominent public intellectual -- ie he doesn't just address a specialist philosophy audience. (there is a q-mark over what his specialism is, perhaps.)
there've been about four films made about him, he gets new yorker profiles done on him, he gets into the LRB, guardian, etc, and he publishes a lot.
he's achieved this mostly post-9/11 and i was at uni before then and anyway he doesn't have much to say on my subject (history).
as for public intellectuals being taken seriously -- britain has often perceived itself as not giving intellectuals their due, in comparison with france where they alledgedly have a bigger public profile.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:57 (fifteen years ago) link
What do you mean by greater serbia?
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:57 (fifteen years ago) link
yugoslavia
- croatia
xxxpost
Yeah, the French version of Play Your Cards Right was hosted by Louis Althusser.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:59 (fifteen years ago) link
in that case, i agree Yugoslavia, like USSR not a nation state
but kosovo was part of Serbia, not part of Yugoslavia. Same reason Estonias independence a different matter to, say, Dagestans, no?
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:59 (fifteen years ago) link
He also was on the DVD of _Children of Men_, and made me realize that I did not in fact like _Children of Men_.
― Eppy, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:03 (fifteen years ago) link
-- Noodle Vague, Saturday, April 19, 2008 2:59 PM (13 seconds ago) Bookmark Link
well this is the thing. but the received opinion is that french intellectuals had a nicer time of it.
-- laxalt, Saturday, April 19, 2008 2:59 PM (9 seconds ago) Bookmark Link
i don't think this is a very fruitful way to look at this issue -- comparatively, from the outside, but also using unchanging categories like 'serbia' and 'kosovo', and indeed 'nation-state'. "kosovo was part of Serbia, not part of Yugoslavia", but serbia was "part of" yugoslavia, so...
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:05 (fifteen years ago) link
Yeah I wasn't skitting you I was just playing the comedy disinformation game.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:06 (fifteen years ago) link
I.E. yes of course this is a widespread perception but from my experience French TV channels frequently mistake po-faced earnestness for intellectualism. NOT THAT THEY ARE ALONE IN THIS
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:07 (fifteen years ago) link
Ok, thanks for the help! I work in pretty mainstream analytic philosophy in the US (and also in France), and it would be weird for any of us to get attention on a general interest internet message board. But we all have provocative political things to say, it's just that we don't work on those things as our speciality and so we don't receive attention for them. I wanted to gauge better why Zizek gets this kind of attention, since he's never come up in a discussion I've had with colleagues in the US or France.
― Euler, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:08 (fifteen years ago) link
The west has quite clearly encouraged the breakup of state-nations such as yugoslavia, and the USSR. Whether it is fruitful or not, I still find the west encouraging the breakup of nation-states to be unusual. This distinction clearly exists, fruitful or not
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:10 (fifteen years ago) link
-- laxalt, Saturday, April 19, 2008 3:10 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link
ussr was an empire rather than a state-nation or nation-state.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:15 (fifteen years ago) link
state-nations do sometimes have a tendency to be constructed that way don't they!
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:17 (fifteen years ago) link
not on expert on how far it had a 'national' identity -- from the rate of break-up, i'm thinking maybe not too much. of course, this could be down to western 'encouragement', but it does seem to have been unusually fissile.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:23 (fifteen years ago) link
new celebrity eggheads? (just looking for ideas. zizek is 60 next year and he seems like the tail end of a eurotheory wave.)
― tipsy mothra, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:34 (fifteen years ago) link
Whether it is fruitful or not, I still find the west encouraging the breakup of nation-states to be unusual.
Divide and conquer. Nationalism, the idea that particular ethnic groups should have their own discrete states, is a recent ideology and never a neutral one. There is no consistent U.S. policy toward ethnic nationalism -- it's mostly encourage the break up of our enemies/competitors (Russia, Serbia, Iraq), and help our friends stick together (Pakistan).
― Gavin, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:49 (fifteen years ago) link
Nationalism, the idea that particular ethnic groups should have their own discrete states, is a recent ideology and never a neutral one.
kind of a CHALLENGING OPINION. what ideologies are neutral? what political philosophies are older? (and therefore more valid?)
anyway, nationalism doesn't have to specify 'ethnic groups' and your view of US influence would gratify the state department.
(did the US do *that much* to aid chechnya against russia?)
i don't get why you (and laxalt) are so keen on the preserving territorial integrity of serbia and russia!
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:55 (fifteen years ago) link
But Gavin, I don't really think the US has encouraged the breakup of either Russia or Iraq! (precisely why Kosovo is something of an anomaly).
I have no particular desire to preserve territorial integrity of either serbia or russia, but neither do i believe that fragmentation is a default good for peoples either (the smaller the state, the weaker when it comes up against commerical interests?)
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 15:04 (fifteen years ago) link
It seemed like some posters were assuming it's always good and right and natural for particular ethnic (or maybe I should say "cultural" to be more expansive) groups to have their own self-governing political entities, and were assuming that the U.S. is somehow consistent on this question. I was trying to point out the actual pattern of U.S. support for cultural nationalism around the world is consistent, but only with U.S. interests. I am not justifying it.
As far as "keen on Serbia's territorial integrity," that is much less important to me than explaining what actually happened, not some Hollywooded-up genocide -> U.S. benevolent cluster bombing -> happy flag-waving new nation paradigm that is continually regurgitated by the media. I don't know what crawled up your ass, I might as well ask you why you are so keen on the U.S. paying Al Qaeda to fuck with Serbia back in the '90s!
― Gavin, Saturday, 19 April 2008 15:07 (fifteen years ago) link
But Gavin, I don't really think the US has encouraged the breakup of either Russia or Iraq
No, but Serbia is a historical Russian ally, so fucking them up does weaken Russia. Combined with the "Color Revolutions" along Russia's border and the message supporting Kosovo sends to other minorities in Russia (including Chechnya)... I guess the jury can still be out on this one. And as for Iraq, we will just have to disagree, or maybe take it to another thread. I think that dividing the country along ethnic lines has been in the cards for a while and certain policies (walls, arming various militias) are exacerbating this.
― Gavin, Saturday, 19 April 2008 15:11 (fifteen years ago) link
iirc you were on the kosovo thread again getting misty-eyed about milosovic?
i don't buy the hollywood version, but 'what actually happened' doesn't reflect so well on the serbs.
again, the US acting in its interests is challenging-opinion material. what state or actor on the international stage doesn't do this?
xpost
haha the US *wishes* it could control iraq to that degree.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 15:14 (fifteen years ago) link
No, but Serbia is a historical Russian ally, so fucking them up does weaken Russia
"fucking them up"
― G00blar, Saturday, 19 April 2008 15:16 (fifteen years ago) link
banriquit, you keep drawing these false dichotomies and putting me into them instead of responding to my posts. I have reservations about encouraging Kosovo independence and disagree with the mainstream narrative about these events -- oh I must be a misty-eyed apologist for the savage Serbs! What exactly does dragging the discussion down to this level accomplish other than re-establishing your "big dawg" status on this thread?
Yes, well, no shit. Yet people still believe we invade other countries for some sort of greater good, like stopping bad guys. I guess we shouldn't bother to remind them how the world actually works.
― Gavin, Saturday, 19 April 2008 15:24 (fifteen years ago) link
that seems to me a pretty big dichotomy: acting in self-interest/stopping bad guys.
but to respond, ok:
No, but Serbia is a historical Russian ally, so fucking them up does weaken Russia. Combined with the "Color Revolutions" along Russia's border and the message supporting Kosovo sends to other minorities in Russia (including Chechnya)...
tbh my reaction is like, AND? i don't really have a dog in this fight. on the whole i'll take my capitalism with (on the whole) the rule of law rather than without.
And as for Iraq, [...] I think that dividing the country along ethnic lines has been in the cards for a while and certain policies (walls, arming various militias) are exacerbating this.
i seriously don't think the US has the power to direct events the way you're suggesting here; i don't even know if they anticipated the break-up and the transfer of power to iran. this is not a great example of US cunning.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 15:29 (fifteen years ago) link
that seems to me a pretty big dichotomy: acting in self-interest/stopping bad guys
I'm sorry, I thought you agreed the U.S. works (and by works, I mean invades/bombs/imposes sanctions) in its own self-interest, not to stop eeeeevil terrorists or promote magical democracy freedoms.
on the whole i'll take my capitalism with (on the whole) the rule of law rather than without.
Well, that's your preference. I should point out laxalt's excellent point that breaking up nations into smaller bits makes them weaker in practically every case -- the rule of law is too weak to do anything to stop corporate abuse, or prevent exploitation from larger powers.
Again, this is a much larger debate, and I am not really ready for it before my first cup of coffee. One narrative says that the ethnic strife was a "powder keg" just waiting to explode and the U.S. ignorantly had no idea (ethnic powder keg metaphor also used for Yugoslavia, interestingly enough). While I agree there are historical ethnic tensions, I think the U.S. has exacerbated them, and has engaged in many actions that weaken the national sovereignty of Iraq, pushing it towards breakup. Arming competing militias, building walls around neighborhoods, etc. It's a big question, one I consider often -- is the U.S. interested in Iraq as an independent nation-state or not? They say they are, although some others (Biden) are explicitly supporting break up.
― Gavin, Saturday, 19 April 2008 15:44 (fifteen years ago) link
well, you know, stopping terrorists may have been part of the afghanistan invasion. probably would not have gone down without 9/11. promoting democracy has historically (zizek disputes that it is a necessary relationship, but this is a side-point) promoted markets. it's not like killing bad guys and promoting democracy IMPEDE their interests.
this makes no sense at all. kosovo is always going to be run by a larger power! it's not news that small states can't function independently. so that's why, given the choice, US-style capitalism is probably going to work out better than russian-style capitalism for kosovo. i'm not saying it's going to be paradise, and the weirdness of a US muslim protectorate... for another thread.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 16:13 (fifteen years ago) link
Yes, I agree, we have derailed Zizek's thread long enough (though he certainly supported ethnic nationalism when he was involved in Slovenian politics), though I'll leave you with an interesting interview I just re-read in which Samatha Power (brought up as a candidate for new celebrity egghead!) gets kneecapped by Democracy Now over Kosovo.
― Gavin, Saturday, 19 April 2008 16:22 (fifteen years ago) link
Isn't it not so much whether a nation is run by a larger power or not, it is about the power that corporations wield.
Wait, what terrorists were being stopped by the Afghanistan war again?
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 16:41 (fifteen years ago) link
i don't know, is it? in these specific cases, tibet, palestine, kosovo, how does that figure?
-- laxalt, Saturday, April 19, 2008 5:41 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link
i'm sure you can google this.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 16:46 (fifteen years ago) link
lol mccaine in nyt pwning tho. his constituency recognize & ignore while he cat-strings huckabees zombie cohort?
― mkcaine, Saturday, 19 April 2008 16:58 (fifteen years ago) link
rong thred
― mkcaine, Saturday, 19 April 2008 16:59 (fifteen years ago) link
mkcaine for presinedt
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 17:01 (fifteen years ago) link
"Yeah I wasn't skitting you" <--- not heard skitting you since school.
Zizek has become a bit of an opinions4u troll. Which is why he gets the Guradian work and stuff I guess.
I still kinda like him though, and K-Punk need somewhere to glom his ideas from.
― Raw Patrick, Saturday, 19 April 2008 17:29 (fifteen years ago) link
K-Punk need somewhere to glom his ideas from.
http://www.soulstrut.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/snapgraem26wuch9.gif
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 17:36 (fifteen years ago) link
damn son
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 19 April 2008 18:43 (fifteen years ago) link
Anybody seen the "Zizek blathers on about Lacanian readings of Movies" doc? Looks interesting.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 19 April 2008 18:47 (fifteen years ago) link
yeah you totally sold that!
i think he takes a fresh look at such critically neglected films as 'psycho' and 'blue velvet' through the optics of freudian psychoanalysis.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 18:55 (fifteen years ago) link
Mentioning this K-Punk thing reminds me of something...a few years ago I was reading ILM and somebody brought that blog up, so I took a look at it. WTF is that guy on about? Do any of you understand it? I get this way with thinkers in "critical theory": like the words sorta make sense individually, but together it sounds like pure nonsense (this thread, at least at the top, is like that to me also) e.g.
""The truly radical assertion of historical contingency has to include the dialectical tension between the domain of historical change itself and its traumatic 'ahistorical' kernel qua its condition of (im)possibility."
I'm not afraid of egghead rambling---I am/pretend to be an egghead, even, and get paid for it. But I will have worked all day today to write like one page of clear philosophical text: it won't be mysterious and sexy like what I quoted there, but I will have communicated a thought. What's the attraction of text like that?
― Euler, Saturday, 19 April 2008 18:55 (fifteen years ago) link
er by "What's the attraction of text like that", I mean of Zizek's. So much for communicating a thought!
― Euler, Saturday, 19 April 2008 18:56 (fifteen years ago) link
hahahaha. don't even go there. it comes under i a richards's category of 'prudential speech'.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 18:58 (fifteen years ago) link
-- banriquit, Saturday, April 19, 2008 6:55 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Link
Yeah it's not the "fresh readings" that attract me so much as the comedy. I lol'd considerably at "Zizek!" even if the whole thing was the filmmaker's thinly disguised mash note to dude.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:14 (fifteen years ago) link
my post was meant as a zing -- britishes style.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:18 (fifteen years ago) link
http://youtube.com/watch?v=D9FXyr-LLeI
― latebloomer, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:19 (fifteen years ago) link
zizek's finest moment afaic
Oh I know dude that's why I put "fresh readings" in zingquotes. xxp
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:32 (fifteen years ago) link
lol Lacan = mad fresh rite
omg do want xp to latebloomer
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:33 (fifteen years ago) link
You've been Zizekrolled!
― Casuistry, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:58 (fifteen years ago) link
Bah! Can somebody find for me the Zizek interview/essay where he talks about atheism and the death of God. It's driving me crazy, I read it on the internet somewhere fairly recently and didn't bookmark it and I really want to find it again because I can't quite remember what he said that I thought was cool.
― I know, right?, Wednesday, 17 September 2008 22:06 (fifteen years ago) link
that sounds like 70% of his output
― Jeff LeVine, Wednesday, 17 September 2008 22:18 (fifteen years ago) link
don't get my hopes up like that
― I know, right?, Wednesday, 17 September 2008 22:20 (fifteen years ago) link
bump, because I still haven't found it.
― I know, right?, Thursday, 18 September 2008 08:56 (fifteen years ago) link
Slavoj Zizek, 59, was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's institute of sociology. He has written more than 30 books on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin and 9/11, and also presented the TV series The Pervert's Guide To Cinema.
When were you happiest?
A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it - never when it was happening.
What is your greatest fear?
To awaken after death - that's why I want to be burned immediately.
What is your earliest memory?
My mother naked. Disgusting.
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the twice-deposed president of Haiti. He is a model of what can be done for the people even in a desperate situation.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Indifference to the plights of others.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Their sleazy readiness to offer me help when I don't need or want it.
What was your most embarrassing moment?
Standing naked in front of a woman before making love.
Aside from a property, what's the most expensive thing you've bought?
The new German edition of the collected works of Hegel.
What is your most treasured possession?
See the previous answer.
What makes you depressed?
Seeing stupid people happy.
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
That it makes me appear the way I really am.
What is your most unappealing habit?
The ridiculously excessive tics of my hands while I talk.
What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
A mask of myself on my face, so people would think I am not myself but someone pretending to be me.
What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Watching embarrassingly pathetic movies such as The Sound Of Music.
What do you owe your parents?
Nothing, I hope. I didn't spend a minute bemoaning their death.
To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?
To my sons, for not being a good enough father.
What does love feel like?
Like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
What or who is the love of your life?
Philosophy. I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
What is your favourite smell?
Nature in decay, like rotten trees.
Have you ever said 'I love you' and not meant it?
All the time. When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.
Which living person do you most despise, and why?
Medical doctors who assist torturers.
What is the worst job you've done?
Teaching. I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.
What has been your biggest disappointment?
What Alain Badiou calls the 'obscure disaster' of the 20th century: the catastrophic failure of communism.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
My birth. I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.
If you could go back in time, where would you go?
To Germany in the early 19th century, to follow a university course by Hegel.
How do you relax?
Listening again and again to Wagner.
How often do you have sex?
It depends what one means by sex. If it's the usual masturbation with a living partner, I try not to have it at all.
What is the closest you've come to death?
When I had a mild heart attack. I started to hate my body: it refused to do its duty to serve me blindly.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
To avoid senility.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
The chapters where I develop what I think is a good interpretation of Hegel.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
That life is a stupid, meaningless thing that has nothing to teach you.
Tell us a secret.
Communism will win.
― Zelda Zonk, Thursday, 18 September 2008 09:22 (fifteen years ago) link
That's OTM. My greatest fear is dying and being a consciousness trapped in a dead body.
― Mordy, Thursday, 18 September 2008 09:25 (fifteen years ago) link
http://www.jewcy.com/post/defense_zizek
Good stuff.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 09:38 (fifteen years ago) link
Eh, I'd say he's constructing a bit of a stawn man there.
― Shacknasty (Frogman Henry), Thursday, 4 December 2008 09:56 (fifteen years ago) link
er, strawn man.
fuck it.
was just trying to remember, what was his point about passive-aggressive parenting being "less honest" than the "totalitarian style"? something about the glance at the room + "have you cleaned your room today?" vs. "clean your room now"
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 4 December 2008 10:06 (fifteen years ago) link
Shack, you mean the original article was a strawman, right? Cause the one I linked to is a defense of Zizek. Unless you think he was strawmanning the critics?
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 10:22 (fifteen years ago) link
naw, it was a poor gag. look at the guy's name.
― Shacknasty (Frogman Henry), Thursday, 4 December 2008 10:25 (fifteen years ago) link
<3 u Ziz
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Thursday, 4 December 2008 10:36 (fifteen years ago) link
Xp. Cute, you earned retroactive lolz from me.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:07 (fifteen years ago) link
Reading both those pieces inspired me to read Enjoy Your Symptom! Now I just need to find a copy cheap (InterLib Loan!)
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:08 (fifteen years ago) link
so sick of people calling dude a closet authoritarian
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:13 (fifteen years ago) link
My fave Zizek clip:
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:15 (fifteen years ago) link
Would kill for a Zizek film critic gig at the Voice (or wherever).
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:19 (fifteen years ago) link
this one's still my fave, this or the fragile absolute interview with the local newsman
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:24 (fifteen years ago) link
It's like the Beatles V. the Ramones. When I read Adorno, I'm blown away and shocked and awed. When I read Zizek, I feel like - hey, that's cool. I could do that too.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:29 (fifteen years ago) link
Bummer! I thought the thread title read: "This is the thread where we talk like Slavoj Zizek"
― Dan I., Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:32 (fifteen years ago) link
Is there a good intro to all those terms he uses from (I assume) Lacan? The Big Other, the Real & the Imaginary & the Symbolic, the little a etc? I always feel like I'm completely missing the point of Zizek's stuff because I don't have a proper idea what those things mean. Also, I hear Lacan's a dreadfully tough read, one I don't think I'm up to.
I'm aware that Zizek's written such an intro himself.
― Øystein, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:33 (fifteen years ago) link
Lacan, Baudrillard, Hegel... I mean those are the places to start, I guess. If you're really looking for a fun, easy opening, Baudrillard's Simulacra is really good. Tho a lot of my friends say that it's stupid and unoriginal (but I enjoyed it!).
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:35 (fifteen years ago) link
I mean, a lot of what he's talking about in those clips is kinda 'swimming in the waters of theory,' and I'm not sure I can place all of it. Certainly some of it should be accessible to any American living in a culture where Matrix was a hit flick, right?
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:36 (fifteen years ago) link
Or, ya know, this is ILX and it's 6:30 in the morning and I'm awake. Ask whatever particular question you had and I'll give my interpretation/understanding (with no promise that it's the correct one).
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:38 (fifteen years ago) link
Thanks, I don't really have any specific question at the moment though. (I'm at work, so I've not watched any of the clips, just talking about previous experiences reading him)
― Øystein, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:39 (fifteen years ago) link
Can we make a "talk like Zizek" thread?
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:41 (fifteen years ago) link
Zizek on religion is always the best, I zone out a little when he gets too "idealogical system" on me though.
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Thursday, 4 December 2008 17:22 (fifteen years ago) link
Mordy, did you used to have a longer name on this dealy?
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Thursday, 4 December 2008 21:47 (fifteen years ago) link
A long while ago.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 21:51 (fifteen years ago) link
thought you didn't seem that new
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Thursday, 4 December 2008 21:58 (fifteen years ago) link
I've been posting on and off since at least 2005.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 22:02 (fifteen years ago) link
as mordy?
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Thursday, 4 December 2008 22:03 (fifteen years ago) link
As my longer name; m0rd3ch4i sh1n3f13ld
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 22:06 (fifteen years ago) link
That seems google-proof enough, right?
Aha! that's who I was talking about, I used to really enjoy your poptimist style posts, anyway I think the Zizek I've enjoyed most is the Puppet and the Dwarf partic for this little nugget: "to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience." Which is kind of interesting because by focusing on the fetishistic, materialistic nature of christianity via the eucharist, he opens up these really interesting, if kindof oblique, intersections with Benjamin and Kierkegaard and a kind of dialectical theology.
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Thursday, 4 December 2008 22:09 (fifteen years ago) link
if i saw all same thngs in mobies can i hab book deel plz? surly if zizek is marxst i shldnt be bartend?
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Thursday, 4 December 2008 23:06 (fifteen years ago) link
Yes.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 23:10 (fifteen years ago) link
― Øystein, Thursday, December 4, 2008 11:33 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark
this?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0860915921/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 4 December 2008 23:13 (fifteen years ago) link
http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Always-Wanted-about-Lacan/dp/0860915921
or wait no i saw that one but never read it, this is the one i read
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/4102K46WXWL._SS500_.jpg
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 4 December 2008 23:14 (fifteen years ago) link
Enjoy Your Symptom! is also a Lacan primer more or less.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 23:16 (fifteen years ago) link
Seriously, where is the best place to start with Zizek? Or should I say easiest? I can read Baudrillard but all I was able to accomplish with "Specters of Marx" was removing it from its plastic.
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:05 (fifteen years ago) link
If you just want to do Zizek, do "The Sublime Object." If you want to do Lacan thru Zizek, some of those primers look good.
― Mordy, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:07 (fifteen years ago) link
But like -- I'm not sure Zizek is the best person to read if you want to do theory. There are definitely better places to start. And he's kinda -- ya know -- a parody.
― Mordy, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:08 (fifteen years ago) link
Can I just do Zizek or I do I have to do Zizek through Lacan? People seem to think the latter. So maybe "Looking Awry" is first and then "The Sublime Object"? Thanks.
XpostI don't know what I am trying to do except become smarter and maybe someday have some sort of insight on the things about the world that I find problematic so that I might be able to contribute positively towards the solution of those problems.
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:10 (fifteen years ago) link
If we are talking about the distinction between social theory and social criticism as being the difference between trying to come up with new ideas on how to understand culture vs using those ideas to critique culture then I find criticism be easier to read because it usually refers to things outside of philosophy but i know i have to read theory to advance my own process of becoming relatively more independent in my thinking.
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:17 (fifteen years ago) link
"Zizek through Lacan" meaning that a good understanding of the former can only come from a good understanding of the latter.
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:18 (fifteen years ago) link
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2008/12/quick-and-dirty.html
The truth is that I think the NR critique is speaking to something when it calls Zizek an anti-Semite. I don't think Zizek /is/ an anti-Semite, but I think there's something about the jew that he misses because he's talking about the Jew (and the Sound of Music clip I think is a good example of this). I used this quote in a different thread recently, but Celan wrote in "Conversations in the Mountain," "So it was quiet, quiet, up there in the mountains. It wasn't quiet for long, because when one Jew comes along and meets another, then it's goodbye silence, even in the mountains. Because the Jew and Nature, that's two very different things, as always, even today, even here."
That encounter (between Jew + Jew, Jew + Nature) is something that Zizek, I think, has no time for it. It is a chattering, a discussion, an exchange of words, where there is no time for Nature. And I think he doesn't want to explore that (even acknowledging the irony that he's working in a field very influenced by that sort of encounter). So the NR sees this as anti-Semitic (when he says that The only good thing Judaism has given is the idea of Messianic), but I think it's just a shifted emphasis. I mean, Zizek is all about the violent interruption of the simulcra, the moment that the facade is pulled clear. So the chatting is no good for that.
I don't know. Maybe this reading of Zizek is wrong.
― Mordy, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:23 (fifteen years ago) link
the thing about that clip above is that his argument led so elegantly to the word cosmopolitan that I said it before him while watching the video. Why add the Jew part at all? To complete the inversion of values?
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:35 (fifteen years ago) link
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely instrumental in that clip. From the Democrat Versus the Nazi into the Nazi Versus the Jew. It's understandable why he does it, I just think he's missing something essential in favor of something removed and distant.
― Mordy, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:36 (fifteen years ago) link
cultural critics seem to have this tendency to stretch just one tick past the destination on the map. as someone raised jewish, ie possibly biased, i think trying to examine prejudice against cosmopolitanism, urbanism, and even intellectualism is something more worthy of examination.
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 00:42 (fifteen years ago) link
ahaha
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 5 December 2008 00:53 (fifteen years ago) link
:-O
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844673278/ref=s9k2a_c1_at1-rfc_p-3237_p?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=01FRRPPC0906H94KWTWV&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=463383351&pf_rd_i=507846
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 5 December 2008 02:21 (fifteen years ago) link
a good approach to zizek is the crazier french dudes post-lacan--deleuze & guattari (anti-oedipus?) especially
― kamerad, Friday, 5 December 2008 08:40 (fifteen years ago) link
yeah i have been meaning to read D&G for longer than I care to admit. At least I can console myself that I will probably understand it better than I would have nine years ago; it's just that now I don't have the time. Anyways, thanks for the tips. Outside of academia, it is not always easy to figure out who you have to read to understand a particular theorist until you buy that person's book and come across all of the references you can't account for.
Sometimes I really just want to start all over at the beginning again, and go in order. I don't know how much use pre-Socratic philosophy has now, but at least I won't be reading texts that only refer to other ones!
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 09:34 (fifteen years ago) link
^ I tried to do this once and lost my marbles around Leibniz
― BIG HOOS'S poncho steencation (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 5 December 2008 09:36 (fifteen years ago) link
I tried as well and didn't make it nearly that far ;-( Was that due to Leibniz's writing style or just the sheer volume of material in general one has to face working on a project like that? If you read 2000 years worth of primary texts you should be proud of discipline you had to make it that far, that is unless you dropped out of St. Johns or something :-( ;-)
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 09:56 (fifteen years ago) link
It was the volume of material I'd quickly processed and fruitlessly tried to retain combined with the incomprehensibility of Leibniz's Monadology that did it for me.
― BIG HOOS'S poncho steencation (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 5 December 2008 10:03 (fifteen years ago) link
That era of continental philosophy is one I have not even come close to grappling with. It is pathetic. My knowledge skips from Plato to Rousseau, and then to Marx, and then to some of the German and French people trying to deal with Marx.
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 10:10 (fifteen years ago) link
Yeah I mean basically I was heavily involved with Althusser & in discussions with this Badiou acolyte and I was having trouble getting it so dude was like "if you really wanna get Badiou you gotta understand that's he's rehabiliting etc etc etc and critiquing etc etc etc" basically assigning me the whole of philosophy since Plato + Freud & Lacan.
― BIG HOOS'S poncho steencation (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 5 December 2008 10:20 (fifteen years ago) link
BIG HOOS and LOUIS ALTHUSSER are now in a relationship
Just don't end up like Mrs. Althusser.
― tokyo rosemary, Friday, 5 December 2008 13:10 (fifteen years ago) link
Agh, this thread is making me feel like I'm drowning, all I do is get drunk and not read the things I want to read. I'm gonna go take photographs of stencils projected on the wall now, I'm wasting my life.
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Friday, 5 December 2008 13:19 (fifteen years ago) link
I can't afford to drink and I am still not reading the things I want to read. I really think Verso puts out too many books for their own good.
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 21:05 (fifteen years ago) link
and routledge!
want to read that badiou thing about sarkozy tho
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Friday, 5 December 2008 21:07 (fifteen years ago) link
I like reading Badiou when he is writing about something. There are a few essays in Metapolitics where I am not so sure. Good call on Routledge.
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, 5 December 2008 21:13 (fifteen years ago) link
Is Zizek taken seriously at all within academia? I'm applying to grad school right now and every time I mention him as one of the theorists I'd be focusing on in my studies, some of the professors I've been talking with react as if I'd just loudly broken wind in front of them without apology. I mean, I understand the guy's a clown, but beneath all the faux-Stalinist contrarian posturing there's a pretty awesome interpretation of Lacan-via-Hegel.
― i fuck mathematics, Saturday, 6 December 2008 09:45 (fifteen years ago) link
No one I've worked with has taken him seriously. Or at least not seriously enough to focus on in studies. (Generally I think they want to hear that you're focusing on someone dead - I think you'd get a negative reaction to mentioning Fredrick Jameson too.)
― Mordy, Saturday, 6 December 2008 12:32 (fifteen years ago) link
so, you think Rorty's rep skyrocketed recently?
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Saturday, 6 December 2008 12:36 (fifteen years ago) link
Hells yeah.
― Mordy, Saturday, 6 December 2008 12:39 (fifteen years ago) link
(Of course, I've always loved the dude. Contingency, Irony + Solidarity ftw.)
It's kinda the opposite in art theory where roping somebody like Zizek in gives you the outward appearance of contemporaneity, still you have to rope in Panofsky or someone to balance it.
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Saturday, 6 December 2008 12:43 (fifteen years ago) link
― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, December 5, 2008 9:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark
Infinite Thought is v v good in this regard and yes I tried to struggle through Metapolitics more than once before giving up.
― BIG HOOS'S poncho steencation (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Saturday, 6 December 2008 13:52 (fifteen years ago) link
― tokyo rosemary, Friday, December 5, 2008 1:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark
XD
― BIG HOOS'S poncho steencation (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Saturday, 6 December 2008 13:53 (fifteen years ago) link
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/zize01_.html
why do left-wing people like s/z when he writes reactionary bollocks like this?
― Jordan Sarging (Brohan Hari), Saturday, 3 January 2009 14:53 (fifteen years ago) link
a) They think he's jokingb) They appreciate the way he thinks about things, even if they are uncomfortable about some of his conclusions (I fall into this category)c) They don't understand what he's saying
Take your pick?
― Mordy, Saturday, 3 January 2009 14:54 (fifteen years ago) link
Also, in a very real sense, Zizek is incredibly left-wing in the traditional Communist sense. He's just more radicalized than most leftists today (who, it seems, have generally abandoned violent rebellion). He is very against a sort of P.C. comfortable bourgeois leftism (in the article you linked, "But there is also a ‘reflexive’, politically correct racism: the liberal, multiculturalist perception of the Balkans as a site of ethnic horrors and intolerance"). So when you say left-wing, you're talking about this kind of leftist, right?
― Mordy, Saturday, 3 January 2009 14:57 (fifteen years ago) link
Take the public image of Bill Gates. Gates is not a patriarchal father-master, nor even a corporate Big Brother running a rigid bureaucratic empire, surrounded on an inaccessible top floor by a host of secretaries and assistants. He is instead a kind of Small Brother, his very ordinariness an indication of a monstrousness so uncanny that it can no longer assume its usual public form. In photos and drawings he looks like anyone else, but his devious smile points to an underlying evil that is beyond representation.
Totally hysterical and awesome.
― Mordy, Saturday, 3 January 2009 14:59 (fifteen years ago) link
Isn't there a Pinky and the Brain about that?
― Plaxico (I know, right?), Saturday, 3 January 2009 15:52 (fifteen years ago) link
I think people like Zizek are far more sinister than the Bill Gates of the world ... at least Bill Gates makes, or at least made, useful stuff. Zizek is just a blowhard irrelevant to anyone after their 23rd birthday. When your audience is a bunch of 18 year olds the more reactionary the better.
― burt_stanton, Saturday, 3 January 2009 15:58 (fifteen years ago) link
― Mordy, Saturday, January 3, 2009 2:57 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
don't think old-style communists have a monopoly on the left, far from it. zizek is completely a symptom of the modern left you're talking about insofar as questions of revolutionary (or other) strategies are totally beyond his reach. he provided entertaining paradoxes, as in the bill gates squib, that get you precisely nowhere. the readers of the lrb evidently like being berated, but at the same time there's a creepy nostalgia for lenin, stalin, mao: 'real leftists' if you're a douchewad. it saves you from having to think through what a better society might be like.
― Jordan Sarging (Brohan Hari), Saturday, 3 January 2009 16:04 (fifteen years ago) link
I didn't say he had a monopoly on the left, but this is a guy who grew up under a Communist system. I wouldn't compare his affection to Stalin/Mao to college radical chic. And tbh, I don't know many under 23 year olds who read Zizek. I don't know many under 23 year olds who CAN read Zizek. But maybe I just know the wrong people?
― Mordy, Saturday, 3 January 2009 22:33 (fifteen years ago) link
wouldn't call the post-war russian empire communist, insofar as we want to keep communism something to aspire to. in a way it makes it even creepier that he still pretty openly admires lenin/stalin/mao, none of whose regimes would have tolerated him or his readership.
― Jordan Sarging (Brohan Hari), Sunday, 4 January 2009 00:34 (fifteen years ago) link
Not Communist in an idealized sense, but still, he has stronger connections to "practiced" Communism than anyone into radical chic.
― Mordy, Sunday, 4 January 2009 02:41 (fifteen years ago) link
Jordan, Yugoslavia was NOT part of any Russian empire!
― Gavin, Sunday, 4 January 2009 18:00 (fifteen years ago) link
http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=c6570f94-f4b8-4b2a-b3f5-6adefe8d15ca
― Plaxico (I know, right?), Monday, 12 January 2009 23:50 (fifteen years ago) link
it's a pretty weak comeback imo. he gets in a few points but there's all sorts of stuff in the original that s/z doesn't dispute.
― DANCE MUSIC STUCK AT RECOMBINANT PLATEAU (special guest stars mark bronson), Monday, 12 January 2009 23:52 (fifteen years ago) link
how did you read that so fast?
― Plaxico (I know, right?), Monday, 12 January 2009 23:54 (fifteen years ago) link
had already read it
― DANCE MUSIC STUCK AT RECOMBINANT PLATEAU (special guest stars mark bronson), Monday, 12 January 2009 23:56 (fifteen years ago) link
Zizek is the philosopher equivalent of the teenager who associates way too closely with Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker.
― burt_stanton, Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:02 (fifteen years ago) link
within that analogy, who is the joker? and who is batman?
― DANCE MUSIC STUCK AT RECOMBINANT PLATEAU (special guest stars mark bronson), Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:03 (fifteen years ago) link
burt_stanton is both the joker and batman
― 8====D ------ ㋡ (max), Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:04 (fifteen years ago) link
I don't know. If there's a philosopher out there who advocates for the status quo, but amending it a little to make incremental improvements over time that overall benefits everyone and creates a fairer and more equal society, there you go.
― burt_stanton, Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:04 (fifteen years ago) link
that's batman.
― DANCE MUSIC STUCK AT RECOMBINANT PLATEAU (special guest stars mark bronson), Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:07 (fifteen years ago) link
If there's a philosopher out there
i am loling at this and have no idea why
― wtf "finding HOOS" is a hood classic (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:16 (fifteen years ago) link
http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/batmans.jpg
― Calling All Creeps! (contenderizer), Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:36 (fifteen years ago) link
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004183
did zizek put berlusconi's racist joke about obama into noam chomsky's mouth?
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:07 (fifteen years ago) link
Berlusconi’s remark dismissed Obama’s blackness as an endearing eccentricity, thus obliterating the historical meaning of the fact that an African-American was elected President, while the remark I falsely attributed to Chomsky, if accurate, would point towards the ambiguous way Obama’s blackness can be instrumentalized to obfuscate our crucial political and economic struggles.
I even love his off-hand emails! I love this dude!
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:12 (fifteen years ago) link
wait, what? he lied about noam chomsky saying something racist about obama. when pressed that the quote sounds suspiciously like berlusconi, zizek protests that it's impossible because of some date stamps in his computer, and that he'd seen the quote in "slovene media". hunting through slovene media reveals it's only zizek's own, earlier, interview in a slovene magazine that contains the remark. when pressed about that he offers some totally unconvincing wash that berlusconi is a racist, but even if chomsky had said the exact same thing, it would not be racist.
the whole thing is fucking fishy.
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:22 (fifteen years ago) link
Didn't we talk about this upthread somewhere?
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:23 (fifteen years ago) link
What's fishy? Either he made it up (and why would he make it up only to make the labrynthine point he's now been backed into making?) or he honestly misattributed it.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:26 (fifteen years ago) link
And besides: the same phrase coming out of the mouths of Berlusconi & Chomsky would have decidedly different meanings because they work in different contexts. It doesn't necessarily mean that, had Chomsky said it, it would be any less racist/distasteful/what have you, but he would have been employing it in the service of a completely different point. You're not arguing that, are you?
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:28 (fifteen years ago) link
MISATTRIBUTED IT FROM WHERE
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:29 (fifteen years ago) link
He read that Berlusconi said it and got mixed up in his head and thought Chomsky had said it, got too stupid or lazy or arrogant to check his sources and ran with it?
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:31 (fifteen years ago) link
another (meta) take:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/01/chomsky_said_wh.html
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:33 (fifteen years ago) link
I mean
First, he had written the essay before Berlusconi’s remark.
ok but dude is a doddering old philosopher i think its quite possible he remembers this wrong
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:33 (fifteen years ago) link
hahahahaha this is what happens when you take slavoj zizek seriously
― max, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:34 (fifteen years ago) link
the point is, in an earlier version of the same essay, in the LRB, zizek quoted chomsky accurately, as saying that the left should vote for obama "without illusions"
later versions, not in english, switched the quote to berlusconi's racist joke. when asked why that happened, he offers excuses, half-apologies and ultimately some kind of ideological justification. like i said, fishy.
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:36 (fifteen years ago) link
he's a tool.
― Bone Thugs-N-Harmony ft Phil Collins (jim), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:36 (fifteen years ago) link
This is actually a brilliant analysis of the role of attribution/identity in commentators versus attribution/identity in the commented. Just as Obama was destripped of identity by Berlusconi (no longer black), now Berlusconi's own words have been stripped and reattributed in a way that not only changes the meaning, but obliterates the one who said it [textually].
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:37 (fifteen years ago) link
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/columns/0005/img/lens177_04b.jpg
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:37 (fifteen years ago) link
yeah or maybe he wanted to make a rival look like a jackass and didn't get away with it
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:38 (fifteen years ago) link
ah glad to see that this is "actually" a brilliant analysis
― max, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:39 (fifteen years ago) link
Don't take it too seriously, max. You'll sound humorless.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:44 (fifteen years ago) link
This is actually a brilliant analysis of the role of attribution/identity in commentators versus attribution/identity in the commented. Just as Obama was destripped of identity by Berlusconi (no longer black), now Berlusconi's own words have been stripped and reattributed in a way that not only changes the meaning, but obliterates the one who said it (textually).
― Mordy, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 11:37 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
jesus god you're an empty-headed tool.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:44 (fifteen years ago) link
And there ya go.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:45 (fifteen years ago) link
i ~think~ mordy was kidding?
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:46 (fifteen years ago) link
doubt it.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:46 (fifteen years ago) link
I'm pretty sure I was kidding, dumbass.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:47 (fifteen years ago) link
:^S
― max, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:48 (fifteen years ago) link
really mordy? because you say some equally dunce-like shit upthread.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:49 (fifteen years ago) link
i get that you're on a 'lighten up! it's only stalinism' thing. it's just a pretty lame thing to be on.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:50 (fifteen years ago) link
The only thing of length I posted on this thread was about Zizek not understanding Jews - and that was in the context of an article calling him an Anti-Semite. Is that what you're referring to?
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:50 (fifteen years ago) link
Wow, you really are an ass. I've never said "lighten up, it's only Stalinism."
yeah it was some kind of 80s postmodern apologia for s/z's creepy crypto-anti-semitism.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:52 (fifteen years ago) link
Seriously, dude, I think you have a fucked up impression of what I think. But I'm not going to argue with you about it. If you didn't find my "analysis" of Zizek's fuck-up funny, then maybe you're just a humorless dick. Whatever.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:00 (fifteen years ago) link
you doing backslips to defend this mook is not that lol tbh.
Also, in a very real sense, Zizek is incredibly left-wing in the traditional Communist sense. He's just more radicalized than most leftists today (who, it seems, have generally abandoned violent rebellion).
this is not lol, just really depressing. you seem very ignorant of the 'traditional' left.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:07 (fifteen years ago) link
Bronson, tell it to me straight. Are you a big Camille Paglia fan?
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:08 (fifteen years ago) link
um, no. wth has that got to do with anything?
― eligible bachelor, million dollar boat (Brohan Hari), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:12 (fifteen years ago) link
lol dual login
Because you're coming off like an inexplicably huge hard-ass.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:13 (fifteen years ago) link
haha i was gonna say somewhere i thought brohan hari was nrq what gives. CAUGHT.
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:15 (fifteen years ago) link
this is kind of what i mean by the frivolity of zizek stans -- who still get to pass as 'left-wing' because, well, he believes in violent revolution unlike the straights. but it's a sinister frivolity, because a lot of what he says is ugly and can't be got past by just saying 'no-one takes him seriously.' why would you put in the man-hours reading it if you didn't on some level.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:19 (fifteen years ago) link
It's not that no-one takes him seriously. It's that I find him valuable for certain things and not valuable for other things. There's a history of literature that we read because we find some value in it, even if we disagree on numerous fronts. This is, I believe, the trademark of a healthy reader. You seem to be unable to distinguish that tho -- which makes me wonder what you do about media that has value but you disagree in some part with. Do you just write it all off?
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:22 (fifteen years ago) link
Ie: I find his method of thinking about film/art incredibly interesting, fun to read, and very valuable in terms of interesting ways to think about film/art (so much of it is mind-bending in ways that illuminates things I hadn't considered before). But I 90% of the time disagree with his conclusions and his positions. That doesn't invalidate the stuff I find valuable in him.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:23 (fifteen years ago) link
tbh after 40 years film studies could do with less lacan; he hasn't innovated at all there, and his choices of film are generally boringly canonical.
but also he doesn't write about film. he occasionally uses a story or situation from a film to illustrate something, but film? as an art-form, a medium, whatever -- not so much.
so yeah there are some writers who you read and disagree with but keep reading, but it's better if they aren't repetitive, chauvinistic, totalitarian, etc.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:29 (fifteen years ago) link
what you do about media that has value but you disagree in some part with. Do you just write it all off?
of course you write it off! god knows there isn't time in anyone's life to read even what is essential.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:37 (fifteen years ago) link
Guys Slavoj going on about Stalinism is like Kanye going on about Louis Vuitton or black metal dudes talking about Satan. On the surface it's pretty stupid but you have to realize that it's more of a stylistic element through which the ideas are expressed rather than indicative of any inherently meaningful message per se.
― i fuck mathematics, Thursday, 29 January 2009 04:44 (fifteen years ago) link
what ideas are slavoj/kanye getting through with their respective uses of stalin and louis vuitton?
so far as i can tell slavoj's big thing is that lacan provides a conceptual model for understanding everything and that we should give up on pluralism, liberalism, and the like and accept the all-one utopia that will follow a violent revolution. kanye's deal is that he likes fancy schmutter but sometimes feels it's a bit unfulfilling.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Thursday, 29 January 2009 08:57 (fifteen years ago) link
Zizek probably changed it to lose the Guns 'n' Roses joke-title after Chinese Democracy was so bad (and that album title was offensive to him too).
― Architect of the Geocities (Raw Patrick), Thursday, 29 January 2009 10:40 (fifteen years ago) link
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 11:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
berlusconi wasn't making a point; he was making a (relatively mild) racist joke. the quote zizek made up and attributed to chomsky was "making the point" that obama isn't *really* black, which is *more* racist, really. in another beef recently he said there were only about 10 jews in slovenia, and i'm guessing there are fewer people of colour than that: it's not *that* surprising that zizek has issues with multiculturalism, since he grew up in a monoculture.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Thursday, 29 January 2009 10:52 (fifteen years ago) link
his claim (which i'm looking for still -- only seen it related secondhand) wasn't just that there are 10 jews in slovenia, but that slovenian jews were all expelled during the rennaissance, spanish style, and nothing really that bad happened in the 20th century there. apparently this isn't even a little bit true. but like i said i have to find where i read this again.
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Thursday, 29 January 2009 14:56 (fifteen years ago) link
!!!
yeah i took it at face value that slovenia's jews had been removed way back when, just coz his rebuttal was published in a serious outlet, and, you know, i figured they'd wiki it or whatever. but that was probably dim of me.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Thursday, 29 January 2009 15:00 (fifteen years ago) link
That's a total misunderstanding of what Zizek is doing, but an understandable misunderstanding, if you've only read one or two articles by the guy. Personally, I wish he would stick more to pure philosophy, where I think he ultimately has more to contribute. (He's not simply (as some have suggested here) an interpreter of Lacan, any more than Lacan was simply an interpreter of Freud.) Nevertheless, his political/cultural criticism is to a certain extent an expression of that philosophy, and can only be understood in that context.
A) He's not anti-pluralism. This is less apparent in his articles than in his lectures, where he makes it pretty clear that he's in favor of multiculturalism as an idea, but critical of the specific ways that the idea is formulated and put into practice today. His real issue is with the way multiculturalism functions socially and psychologically in bourgeois liberal society -- see e.g. his critique of the idea of muticulturalism-as-"tolerance".
B) He's definitely not in favor of violent revolution. He's pretty much admitted that he has no idea how to get rid of global capitalism, but he's critical of those on the left who simply accept capitalism's permanent existence and have resigned themselves to making it "friendlier", more "tolerant", etc.
C) The whole Stalinism thing is pretty clearly a pose, coming from someone who was one of the major forces of opposition to his own totalitarian-communist government in the 80's. He uses it mostly as a way to make it harder for the bourgeois liberal establishment to recuperate his ideas, and he's admitted as much in the past.
Again, a lot of this is hard to pick up on in a two-page article about Barack Obama. If you really want to understand where he's coming from you have to read his more philosophy-oriented books (Sublime Object of Ideology's a good place to start); however as an introduction to his ideas is lectures (many of which are on YouTube) are a much better point of entry than any of his articles.
I admit that my comparison of Zizek to Kanye West/black metal upthread was sort of clumsy and wrongheaded, but I was only trying to point out how strange it is that ILXors, many of whom have no problem listening to music full of really questionable messages and imagery, would discount the contributions of a particular thinker wholesale simply because some of his positions are, on the surface, pretty unpalatable. (Perhaps a better comparison for Zizek in hip-hop would be N.W.A., whose gangster-posing was partially a response to the proto-backpacker white-liberal-friendlification of hip-hop via Public Enemy, De La Soul, etc.) After all, we don't dismiss Nietzsche just because he was an anti-democratic misogynist, do we?
― i fuck mathematics, Thursday, 29 January 2009 16:41 (fifteen years ago) link
actually i think enrique does dismiss nietzsche because he was an anti-democratic misogynist
― max, Thursday, 29 January 2009 16:49 (fifteen years ago) link
haha yep, i pretty much do. what do people like about nietzsche?
i fuck mathematics: i have read more than a couple of zizek's articles, and even one full book! i've been reading him for almost a decade now, and i know what he says, and i know what i like, and it's not him.
for me it comes down to the amount of time you're willing to invest -- i.e., i don't care if such-and-such a nuance comes across more clearly in lectures than in his many articles. and tbh i've heard people say the same of lacan, and it turned out to be bollocks -- he was a dreadful lecturer in the films i've seen.
the problem is that the 'bourgeois liberal establishment' is easy-going enough to recuperate pretty much anything, so if you try and make it hard by making edgy picks like stalin and mao, they'll end up 'recuperating' that -- it doesn't particularly matter because, being academics and the like, they have no involvement in politics as such. it's just that they infect discourse in the humanities with positions that are at bottom ugly.
(i don't really care, twenty years on, if NWA had a problem with public enemy being taken up by white liberals because SURPRISE so were NWA in the end. it's a bit of a non-issue for me, though i prefer classic public enemy to NWA. perhaps if zizek was produced by the bomb squad i'd like him more. point being i do separate reading books which promise some kind of 'truth' about the world from listening to music; they do seem quite different experiences; and, maybe it's just me, but a young rapper pretending to be a drug dealer is less offensive to me than a widely heralded professor pretending to be a revolutionary.)
― special guest stars mark bronson, Thursday, 29 January 2009 19:57 (fifteen years ago) link
I think Jacques Lacan was a bad man.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 29 January 2009 20:02 (fifteen years ago) link
there are a lot of things people like about nietzsche
― max, Thursday, 29 January 2009 20:03 (fifteen years ago) link
― the pinefox, Thursday, January 29, 2009 9:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
you're not wrong.
― special guest stars mark bronson, Thursday, 29 January 2009 21:07 (fifteen years ago) link
A Terrible Man!
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Thursday, 29 January 2009 21:08 (fifteen years ago) link
As a side note there's no point at which NWA and PE ever saw each other as in opposition as far as I remember. I don't know why Lacan was a bad man - I haven't read anything of his that's made me think it. Nietzsche seems to me to have been a long, long way from the caricature bad boy schtick that he even mocked in himself at the time of writing it. Nietzche's stupidities tend to be footnotes, asides and rhetorical flourishes. That comes with the territory with most philosophers I've read.
― Hoes Cartwright (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 29 January 2009 21:21 (fifteen years ago) link
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n14/zize01_.html
Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing.
― goole, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 21:45 (fourteen years ago) link
I'm taking a class when him and Ronell next semester.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 21:47 (fourteen years ago) link
Preemptive fuck you to you-know-who.
Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda
― rip dom passantino 3/5/09 never forget (max), Tuesday, 21 July 2009 21:48 (fourteen years ago) link
my two favorite things on earth together at last
― BIG HOOS's wacky crack variety hour (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, 21 July 2009 21:49 (fourteen years ago) link
i reproduced that quote bcz it sounded really stupid on its face -- the paragraph supporting it isn't very convincing.
it's hard to tell what that essay is even about, first segment is arguing against some strawman leftist affection for ahmadinejad that i have never seen or heard of anywhere, middle bit is a badiou book report, and then all this stuff about how berlusconi is a racist corrupt asshole. drawing a lot of lines but none of them connect.
― goole, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:01 (fourteen years ago) link
"how berlusconi is a racist corrupt asshole"he's not?
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:04 (fourteen years ago) link
uh yes, yes he is.
― goole, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:05 (fourteen years ago) link
At the empirical level multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – mirrors, registers, measures – the quantitative dispersal of people’s opinions, what they think about the parties’ proposed programmes and about their candidates etc. However, in a more radical, ‘transcendental’ sense, multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – instantiates – a certain vision of society, politics and the role of the individuals in it. Multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ a precise vision of social life in which politics is organised so that parties compete in elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus. This transcendental frame is never neutral – it privileges certain values and practices – and this becomes palpable in moments of crisis or indifference, when we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people want or think. In the UK elections of 2005, for example, despite Tony Blair’s growing unpopularity, there was no way for this disaffection to find political expression. Something was obviously very wrong here: it wasn’t that people didn’t know what they wanted, but rather that cynicism, or resignation, prevented them from acting.
This is not to say that democratic elections should be despised; the point is only to insist that they are not in themselves an indication of the true state of affairs; as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa. Take an unproblematic example: France in 1940. Even Jacques Duclos, the number two in the French Communist Party, admitted that if, at that point in time, free elections had been held in France, Marshal Pétain would have won with 90 per cent of the vote. When De Gaulle refused to acknowledge France’s capitulation and continued to resist, he claimed that only he, and not the Vichy regime, spoke on behalf of the true France (not, note, on behalf of the ‘majority of the French’). He was claiming to be speaking the truth even if it had no democratic legitimacy and was clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. There can be democratic elections which enact a moment of truth: elections in which, against its sceptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily ‘awakens’ and votes against the hegemonic opinion; however, that such elections are so exceptional shows that they are not as such a medium of truth.
dude just come out with it, if you want to be a vanguardist, just say so...
― goole, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:06 (fourteen years ago) link
I only read the kung fu panda part and it was disappointingly coherent, but I kind of take it more as criticism of kung fu panda than berlusconi.
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:13 (fourteen years ago) link
― Mordy, Tuesday, July 21, 2009 10:47 PM (Yesterday)
Jealous
― ❊❁❄❆❇❃✴❈plaxico❈✴❃❇❆❄❁❊ (I know, right?), Wednesday, 22 July 2009 10:16 (fourteen years ago) link
My class starts in half an hour. Live blog? :P
― Mordy, Thursday, 10 September 2009 19:02 (fourteen years ago) link
Zizek's Twitter page is one of my favorites:
http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks
― Your heartbeat soun like sasquatch feet (polyphonic), Thursday, 10 September 2009 19:32 (fourteen years ago) link
His attempts to justify (or Saint-Justify, if you prefer) Robespierre and the Terror on that documentary on the French Revolution were amusing
― Aw naw, no' Annoni oan an' aw noo (Tom D.), Thursday, 10 September 2009 19:39 (fourteen years ago) link
... and as he was up against Simon Schama, it has hard not to warm to him
― Aw naw, no' Annoni oan an' aw noo (Tom D.), Thursday, 10 September 2009 19:48 (fourteen years ago) link
Does anyone else reads his tweets imagining how he would be saying them?
― one boob is free with one (daavid), Thursday, 10 September 2009 22:28 (fourteen years ago) link
i like simon schama more than PLANK zizek.
― history mayne, Thursday, 10 September 2009 22:33 (fourteen years ago) link
he has a lloyd grossman thing going on but at least he 1) is erudite about history 2) is not an apologist for terrible authoritarian regimes 3) doesn't explain everything in terms of lacan's mirror theory.
― history mayne, Thursday, 10 September 2009 22:34 (fourteen years ago) link
Yeah but Zizek kept rubbing his nose in a funny way in that doc so all is forgiven.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 11 September 2009 21:41 (fourteen years ago) link
# Inglorious Basterds is the opposite of living out one's fantasy. It condemns us to the truth. The real fantasy is a world sans Auschwitz 5:13 PM Aug 27th from TwitterFox
huh interesting.
# Currently working on article comparing Irish potato famine to Cheers. I think it will be an interesting one. 10:16 AM Aug 31st from TwitterFox
lol gtfo
― goole, Friday, 11 September 2009 21:44 (fourteen years ago) link
# RT @sarahksilverman Syntax question: Is the word, "guzzle" exclusive to jizz? 8:56 PM Aug 5th from TwitterFox
― goole, Friday, 11 September 2009 21:50 (fourteen years ago) link
is this really real? I can never tell with this guy. In what's probably a common opinion, I think he's wrong about everything but love him anyway.
― Akon/Family (Merdeyeux), Friday, 11 September 2009 21:56 (fourteen years ago) link
I have some doubts that it's actually Zizek.
Maybe Mordy can ask him!!
― tokyo rosemary, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:22 (fourteen years ago) link
c'mon - it's obviously fake
― Jeff LeVine, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:40 (fourteen years ago) link
Cheney's favorite drink- Yoo-hoo4:45 PM Aug 17th from TwitterFox
― Jeff LeVine, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:41 (fourteen years ago) link
Probably, but it's more fun to pretend it's real.
― Your heartbeat soun like sasquatch feet (polyphonic), Friday, 11 September 2009 22:42 (fourteen years ago) link
Ha I misread as "This is the thread where we talk like Slavoj ZIzek..."can some posters indulge me and do this?
― Philip Nunez, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:46 (fourteen years ago) link
I tried once but someone threw a tantrum.
― Mordy, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:56 (fourteen years ago) link
is this not the thread where we talk about slavoj zizek?
― harbl, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:58 (fourteen years ago) link
hey mordy could you ask him why he compared israeli treatment of gaza with the holocaust via the hilarious neologism "palestinian-frei'"?
― history mayne, Friday, 11 September 2009 23:00 (fourteen years ago) link
I think any chatting we're going to be doing will mostly be w/r/t Hegel + Antigone. I'd be surprised if Gaza came up.
― Mordy, Friday, 11 September 2009 23:16 (fourteen years ago) link
(Also, I'm shocked that ILX would care about the neologism 'palestinian-frei.')
― Mordy, Friday, 11 September 2009 23:17 (fourteen years ago) link
# RT @sarahksilverman Syntax question: Is the word, "guzzle" exclusive to jizz? 8:56 PM Aug 5th from TwitterFox― goole, Friday, September 11, 2009 10:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
wda thought this was quite a big clue it was fake
― cozwn, Friday, 11 September 2009 23:22 (fourteen years ago) link
What if it's fake, but it's still authored by Zizek?
― jaymc, Friday, 11 September 2009 23:33 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah pretty sure zizek's the author
― cozwn, Friday, 11 September 2009 23:36 (fourteen years ago) link
what is an author?
― ❊❁❄❆❇❃✴❈plaxico❈✴❃❇❆❄❁❊ (I know, right?), Saturday, 12 September 2009 11:33 (fourteen years ago) link
The twitterer is dead.
― Spencer Chow, Saturday, 12 September 2009 15:59 (fourteen years ago) link
il n'ya pas de hors-Twitter
― fleetwood (max), Saturday, 12 September 2009 16:08 (fourteen years ago) link
http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks/statuses/4118700070
― goole, Sunday, 20 September 2009 14:41 (fourteen years ago) link
i wonder if it is german, french or american style?
― plax (I know, right?), Sunday, 20 September 2009 14:45 (fourteen years ago) link
'there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the subject positive-substantial being to a disposable "piece of shit."'
you charm me so, Slavoj.
― FC Tom Tomsk Club (Merdeyeux), Tuesday, 29 September 2009 20:19 (fourteen years ago) link
his philosophy feels like it comes from the attitude to other philosophers I would probably have if I spent 20 years working in philosophy departments
― ogmor, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 20:42 (fourteen years ago) link
I love the picture of him giving a lecture, where he looks like he is going to start dishing out karate chops.
― The Real Dirty Vicar, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 10:35 (fourteen years ago) link
— Mordy, Saturday, September 12, 2009 12:16 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
— Mordy, Saturday, September 12, 2009 12:17 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
well, actually given his reading of 'antigone' i'd imagine gaza would come up.
why are you "shocked" that ilx (or me anyway) would have a problem with his view that the israelis are trying to eradicate the palestinians just as the nazis tried to eradicate the jews? i care about this because among stupid people he's quite an influential figure.
― history mayne, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 11:00 (fourteen years ago) link
His reading of Hegel/Antigone has been mostly about contingency, comedy/tragedy, and decadence. Not so much discussion of Gaza, or really any current events (tho he did discuss health care briefly w/r/t choice/freedom).
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 17:09 (fourteen years ago) link
i care about this because among stupid people he's quite an influential figure.
― history mayne, Wednesday, September 30, 2009 7:00 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark
great way to dialogue there bro
― Neotropical pygmy squirrel, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 17:13 (fourteen years ago) link
# There is a sobering message in the failure of the Matrix series: no final solution exists on the horizon today. Capitalism is here to stay.8:13 AM Aug 14th from Echofon
so it's kind of like a dark joke...
but he really does believe in a "final solution" to what he calls "capitalism", doesn't he?
― history mayne, Friday, 2 October 2009 11:27 (fourteen years ago) link
w-w-what
― goole, Friday, 2 October 2009 12:30 (fourteen years ago) link
Yeah, that twitter is for sure not real. His latest positions (at least as he's stated them in class) have been fairly conservative and in favor of incremental changes. He even said last week that he's no longer against Capitalism.
― Mordy, Friday, 2 October 2009 14:08 (fourteen years ago) link
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html
― goole, Monday, 9 November 2009 19:53 (fourteen years ago) link
eh...
"communism, capital. both...pretty bad!"
― goole, Monday, 9 November 2009 19:54 (fourteen years ago) link
www.zizek.us
New site for all yr Zizek needs, apparently run by Verso.
― kshighway1, Tuesday, 10 November 2009 13:42 (fourteen years ago) link
http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks/status/5484005532
― still think kshighway is a sock (kshighway1), Thursday, 12 November 2009 04:06 (fourteen years ago) link
zizek vs. british douchebag
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8cIagiKwkw
― ♖♕♖ (am0n), Monday, 4 January 2010 16:23 (fourteen years ago) link
Zizek is actually great at TV though - he seems much more skilled at deflecting the "gotcha" interview than most leftists I've seen on TV.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Monday, 4 January 2010 18:25 (fourteen years ago) link
i watched his "perverts guide to cinema" off netflix and it was pretty dim
there was one good idea presented, that in hitchcock, there is something at work beneath surface details, and further beneath the deeper stuff like theme or emotion, some kind of pre-linguistic elemental desire of forms in motion against each other through time, or some shit.
but it wasn't really elaborated upon or supported or applied to anything beyond hitchcock.
― goole, Monday, 4 January 2010 18:29 (fourteen years ago) link
btw, what was the other recent thread where Zizek was being discussed at length? (it wasn't initially about zizek)
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Monday, 4 January 2010 18:31 (fourteen years ago) link
think it was about... dylan haha.
― the shart of noise (history mayne), Monday, 4 January 2010 18:34 (fourteen years ago) link
lol yeah. it was the why don't u like dylan thread.
― Mordy, Monday, 4 January 2010 18:44 (fourteen years ago) link
Why don't I like Bob Dylan?
But there was another one too, because I remember posting on one and it wasn't that.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Monday, 4 January 2010 19:08 (fourteen years ago) link
no logo
― ♖♕♖ (am0n), Monday, 4 January 2010 19:11 (fourteen years ago) link
Yeah, that's it.
I just watched all 8 parts of antisemitism, antisemite and jew, which I thought was quite good.http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zizek+antisemitism&search_type=&aq=f
I hate to use the tired saw of "doesn't offer any solutions" but there is something a bit frustrating about his successful critique of everything that doesn't quite lead to anything. I wonder if there isn't a logical fallacy in a "third way" between liberalism and authoritarianism - I mean in any sphere you either have centralized control or you don't, right? You can vary in degree of control but I'm not sure you can get outside the space between those two poles.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Monday, 4 January 2010 19:33 (fourteen years ago) link
But maybe this: third way" between liberalism and authoritarianism
is a misstatement of his idea.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Monday, 4 January 2010 19:34 (fourteen years ago) link
lol at zizek's liberal running in place motion at 7:47 in that first clip
― not really.. (killah priest), Monday, 4 January 2010 19:40 (fourteen years ago) link
Great joke shortly after 22:00https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Monday, 4 January 2010 20:05 (fourteen years ago) link
Watched parts - some of his freudian readings of hitchcock seem a little basic since the freudian ideas are so obvious in the films. I found his readings of Lynch more interesting though at times he kind of grasps to avoid not having something to say.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 5 January 2010 08:15 (fourteen years ago) link
im watching that video, and it is useful that he puts his cards on the table. all forms of "capitalism"are bad, no matter how ameliorative. (he doesn't begin to define capitalism.) rwanda (or whatever) is less important than the "anti-imperialist struggle". (i don't know where this was taking place in 1994.) we must simply reject capitalism; the rest is a side-issue. he still isn't saying what his communist utopia is, how it is organized.
ah, now capitalism is a "totality" that generates religious fundamentalism because it is responsible for the decline of the secular left in muslim countries. he's talking about female circumcision. which is a "symptom" of global capitalism. i don't think this is true, is it? female circumcision (and other barbaric practices) were part of the debate during the british empire. did the empire "produce" said practices? i can see how it's comforting to think so; but zizek here is just demonstrating his historical ignorance.
(in any case he is brutally simplifying things: can he really account for the taliban *solely* in terms of capitalism? i would have thought that the invasion of the secular leftists of the ussr had at least something to do with it too. but perhaps capitalism is also responsible, in the final analysis, for the corruption of the first communist utopia.)
21 minutes: still no definition of capitalism or explanation of "totality"; no description of his utopia. so only some of his cards on the table. (oh, a rape joke. funny!) he thinks there can be and ought to be a "total" break with "capitalism" because it's a "totality" and any change within "it" is illusory. he simply does not say what lies on the other side of the break.
(ah, just now: "historical forms of capitalism". this is naked idealism.)
― just someone who's l o s t (history mayne), Tuesday, 5 January 2010 10:29 (fourteen years ago) link
Basically Zizek's argument re the decline of secularism in the middle east is that the international success of capitalism politically and economically means that any attempt to rebel against its imposed status quo is now framed in apocalyptic terms.
Can't account entirely for female circumcision (he's being cute if he pretends otherwise) but maybe can account for the way in which communities lean on fundamentalism as a kind of bulwark against what is seen as the west's corruption.
Which is pretty much the same as Terry Eagleton's argument that the recent rise of islamic fundamentalism is due to the US jumping on any kind of left-wing government in the middle east until secular alternatives to the status quo became unviable.
Re this argument, Zizek does have this nice line about how Fukiyama's 'End of History' and Huntington's 'Clash of Civilisations' inadvertently and unwittingly add up to a whole correct picture: in a world where capitalism has "won", conflicts between different interests can only be expressed as these massive non-economic cultural clashes.
― Tim F, Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:36 (fourteen years ago) link
zizek is ott but this thing about secularism/capitalism/the middle east is borne out rather nicely in iran in the works of ali shariati and jalal al e ahmad, i think!
― max, Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:44 (fourteen years ago) link
and in khomeini's writing for that matter
― max, Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:45 (fourteen years ago) link
foucault struggled with some of the same issues when writing about iran too.
it is kind of a fascinating question, i think--to what extent is it possible to critique "the west" using its "own" tools?
― max, Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:46 (fourteen years ago) link
John Gray makes basically the same argument as Zizek and Eagleton (so now you'll all conclude it must be wrong!).
zizek is ott but
Probably worth making this some sort of automatic prefix to all posts about dude.
― Tim F, Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:47 (fourteen years ago) link
shariati, i should clarify, is not a "fundamentalist" by any stretch of the imagination, but he turns toward islam as a way of articulating a criticism of western imperialism without relying on western thought (i.e. marx)
― max, Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:50 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah, it's a fairly prevalent viewpoint. it's not 100% without merit, but it is intensely complicated. the secular left in the third world was dialectically related to the colonial project in the first place. and there's no way of re-running the post-cold war era without US influence in the third world to find out. (or, at least, only with some US interference, e.g., around medical care, but without all the bad stuff. i.e., without the cold war.)
but moreover, it is nonsense to say it was only the capitalist west that prompted the rise of fundamentalism. the communist west was just as "culpable". it's a paranoid delusion to think that the CIA (or... mossad) single-handedly created the muj or the taliban. and it's very easy to deplore everything the US did in the cold war now that it's over, but babytalk to ignore this wider context, as if the *object* of US policy was to create fundamentalist reactionaries. the cold war was real and terrible.
do we think that, had the US left the field (and allowed the communist countries free play in africa) that that scenario would not have inspired a fundamentalist reaction? it's possible to believe it, but i don't.
(sure sure, there are other possible scenarios: a perfect secular left with no soviet interference, the medical revolution, the end of barbaric practices, all achieved without relation to the rich north...)
― just someone who's l o s t (history mayne), Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:52 (fourteen years ago) link
― max, Tuesday, January 5, 2010 12:46 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark
yeah: this is a book by a non-dickweed that gets into it:
http://www.bolerium.com/bol48/images/items/125848.jpg
― just someone who's l o s t (history mayne), Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:53 (fourteen years ago) link
re-running the post-cold war
argh: just "post-war".
― just someone who's l o s t (history mayne), Tuesday, 5 January 2010 13:02 (fourteen years ago) link
but moreover, it is nonsense to say it was only the capitalist west that prompted the rise of fundamentalism. the communist west was just as "culpable". it's a paranoid delusion to think that the CIA (or... mossad) single-handedly created the muj or the taliban.
I think this is right. And it's also possible to look at the support of fundamentalisms as a poor choice rather than an inevitable outgrowth of our foreign policy. I mean you can pull the whole "unintended consequences" argument but I don't think you can project some kind of perfect symmetry onto blowback.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 5 January 2010 14:52 (fourteen years ago) link
So slowly making my way through Violence. I love his insights but at the same time I can't help but feel like it's the same old Marxism in a new package and without a program. He's so good at finding contradictions and identifying evils, but it's never clear where the "good" is in relation to those evils. In one chapter he names "love" as an alternative to solipsistic, masturbatory contemporary culture, but what the hell does he mean by love? You never find out - he's already on to the next thing by the time you ask.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Thursday, 7 January 2010 20:48 (fourteen years ago) link
whenever i see this thread title i think it's about this guy
http://www.heroestheseries.com/uploads/2008/10/zeljko-ivanek2.jpg
― doomed... to fart (cankles), Thursday, 7 January 2010 20:55 (fourteen years ago) link
in the doc they made abt him he says love is evil too tho \0_o?
― plaxico (I know, right?), Thursday, 7 January 2010 21:13 (fourteen years ago) link
Right, the whole line about love not as universal love but actually as love of one thing to exclusion of or above others.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Thursday, 7 January 2010 21:40 (fourteen years ago) link
But he also says that universal love is fake so maybe he means that real love is "evil" only in a kind of inverted way being as how everything he says is inverted.
well yeah obv
― plaxico (I know, right?), Thursday, 7 January 2010 21:54 (fourteen years ago) link
― plaxico (I know, right?), Thursday, January 7, 2010 9:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Thursday, January 7, 2010 9:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Thursday, January 7, 2010 9:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark
this sounds like some self-help bs rather than marxism dunnit?
― Patriarchy Oppression Machine (history mayne), Friday, 8 January 2010 00:29 (fourteen years ago) link
Not really. Also he's a psychoanalytic theorist and he's not always in total marxist mode.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Friday, 8 January 2010 01:24 (fourteen years ago) link
I think he'd probably agree with this. His line on fundamentalism islam is basically a descendent of his similar argument re ethnic nationalism in former Soviet states in Eastern Europe. Obv you can't say "it's the west's fault" as if the very fact of e.g. the former state of Yugoslavia being a communist state is irrelevant. The point is more like: if the struggle as expressed in eco-politico-ideological terms capitalism vs communism is won decisively by the former, the struggle itself does not end so much as mutate into another struggle expressed in non-eco-politico-ideological terms (e.g. racism/religious extremism). He's arguing with neo-liberal smugness w/r/t the triumph of the west - to which most sensible people of various political persuasions would respond, "well, duh!"
― Tim F, Friday, 8 January 2010 02:15 (fourteen years ago) link
think people need to look at a longer historical span than the "neoliberal epoch". im pretty dubious about this characterization anyway -- yes, yes, we all know about what thatcher and reagan did. but within the c. 500-600 year-long history of global capitalism, what they did was not *that* much of a change. within the c. 75-100-year history (in the UK when maggie took over) of big-state intervention, despite the privatizations, we still have an historically very large state, absolutely unthinkable within the boundaries of 19th century liberalism.
but at the same time, i don't think zizek even tries to define capitalism.
you or he would have to give an instance of this "stuggle" mutating -- a concrete example of a communist vs capitalist clash turning into something else. he can't rely on wafty ideas about some ideal struggle finding a concrete form in communism (or whatever) -- that way lies platonism. im just asking, not saying there isn't one. but really, soviet communism did not abolish racism! it was not very friendly towards muslims in central asia, or toward jews (ie in the late 40s purges).
@hurting: im just not seeing how we can found a political movement on zizek's conception of love, hard-hearted materialistic bastard that i am.
― Patriarchy Oppression Machine (history mayne), Friday, 8 January 2010 10:03 (fourteen years ago) link
if the struggle as expressed in eco-politico-ideological terms capitalism vs communism is won decisively by the former, the struggle itself does not end so much as mutate into another struggle expressed in non-eco-politico-ideological terms
Capitalism won, but the regimes in the Middle East don't look anything like Western capitalist economies, do they? Sure they're mostly client states, but the West has manipulated an authoritarianism and culture of corruption that are to some degree indigenous. Surely the fundamentalists are aiming at that as much as "The West". Bin Laden has a special hatred for the Saudi regime, which is partly a Western client state, but also partly a regional power in its own right.
― Zelda Zonk, Friday, 8 January 2010 11:01 (fourteen years ago) link
I think Tim is correct and I think the argument marxists would make and that Zizek does/would make is that capitalism by its nature must exclude many and exploit many in order to power its "freedom" and "wealth" machine. Hence, the argument would go, you have the United States propping up dictators in the middle east in order that it can maintain easy access to their oil. This is done without true regard for the democratic freedoms of those people, and thus the people of those nations become susceptible to some form of radicalization or other. Radical Islam is the form it happens to take.
It's also worth noting that our support for many of those regimes (or insurgent groups in some cases) did in fact arise out of the Cold War and our anything-but-communist foreign policy.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Friday, 8 January 2010 14:54 (fourteen years ago) link
but the roots of the muslim brotherhood -- a pretty important force in islamism -- have almost nothing to do with US influence. it started really making waves when egpyt, under nasser, was cosying up to the USSR. and im not sure that that in itself was their main beef. and besides which egypt, though important, is not an oil state. the narrative of the muslim brotherhood has very little to do with zizek's scenario. and as for "radical islam is the form it happens to take" -- happens to!? "some form of radicalization or other"? this is to ride roughshod over what actually happens in favour of what theory tells us "ought to".
no argument on the the fact that capitalism exploits people, but within the west it has also materially enriched them -- on the whole, and by comparison with other contemporary systems. so in the west you have to propose a superior, non-exploitative system, people being what they are.
― Patriarchy Oppression Machine (history mayne), Friday, 8 January 2010 17:07 (fourteen years ago) link
Enriched people in the west but arguably worsened the situations of the poorest in the "developing world." I agree with you that he doesn't seem to have a better idea, but I think the point is to respond to the argument that if you just keep letting capitalism do what it do, it will eventually make everyone better off.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Friday, 8 January 2010 17:12 (fourteen years ago) link
but the roots of the muslim brotherhood -- a pretty important force in islamism -- have almost nothing to do with US influence. it started really making waves when egpyt, under nasser, was cosying up to the USSR. and im not sure that that in itself was their main beef.
muslim brotherhood was founded well before nasser was in power as a response to british militarism/colonialism
― max, Friday, 8 January 2010 17:15 (fourteen years ago) link
uh the whole problem with this is that "capitalism" doesn't have an easy 1-to-1 relationship to what powerful, rich countries have done to poorer ones
the banal counter example is that the growing wealth of brazil, china, india, etc have done more to upset the anglo-american order than anything else
― chartres (goole), Friday, 8 January 2010 17:20 (fourteen years ago) link
It depends on whether we're talking about "capitalism" in the Adam Smith sense of an ideal free market system or "capitalism" as it actually practiced in the real world and by the US among others, in which the mantra of "free markets" as this wonderful wealth-creation engine is used to legitimate exploitation, military imperialism, and a whole host of evils.
― o. nate, Friday, 8 January 2010 17:29 (fourteen years ago) link
I do think Zizek fails to acknowledge that capitalism has ANY wealth creation power, which is a problem. Like there's actually a part where he describes capitalism as something that "steals, or 'creates' wealth."
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Friday, 8 January 2010 17:31 (fourteen years ago) link
Well, I haven't read him much, tbh. He seems a bit too un-empirical in his approach to my liking. I guess from a purely abstract, theoretical perspective one could argue that capitalism doesn't create wealth it only distributes it more unequally. I guess there's a fundamental difference of opinion about whether inequality is good because it's an incentive to innovate/work hard/etc., or whether there are more egalitarian ways of obtaining good-enough outcomes.
― o. nate, Friday, 8 January 2010 17:41 (fourteen years ago) link
Well I think it's hard to define "wealth" adequately, but I think it's pretty easy to show that there isn't a constant, finite amount of wealth in the world, and that capitalism has probably, at least in the short run, increased the total amount of it in the world, regardless of how it's been distributed. It's kind of an endless argument - I mean you can pull the "never have so many people lived so well" argument, or you can say "look how fast the favelas are growing" but I think you have to at least acknowledge that capitalism has some power to generate wealth beyond just "stealing" resources.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Friday, 8 January 2010 17:45 (fourteen years ago) link
Well I think it's hard to define "wealth" adequately, but I think it's pretty easy to show that there isn't a constant, finite amount of wealth in the world, and that capitalism has probably, at least in the short run, increased the total amount of it in the world, regardless of how it's been distributed
This parts I think iseasy to show: "there isn't a constant, finite amount of wealth in the world".
This part, not so much: "capitalism has ... increased the total amount of it in the world".
The world is not a reproducible experiment where we can add in capitalism and take it out, keeping all other variables constant, and compare the results. Maybe it's been technology that's increased wealth, which happened to coincide with increased capitalism? Or better education, health, human rights, women's suffrage, democracy, etc. Who knows which factor is predominant?
― o. nate, Friday, 8 January 2010 17:49 (fourteen years ago) link
― max, Friday, January 8, 2010 5:15 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark
and got much stronger and more militant after the british were kicked out...
it's obviously easier to think of everything from the pov of the west, but the muslim bros were about a lot more than getting rid of the brits. they were against any kind of secular government.
n e way, zizek's argument that islamism is a result of US meddling doesn't stand up. it was also the brits. but i would imagine in the early history of the muslim brotherhood, it was also the collapse of the ottoman empire, and the desire to restore it? or something like it? idk, throwing that one out there, it's important context that helps explain the brits' presence.
― Patriarchy Oppression Machine (history mayne), Friday, 8 January 2010 17:52 (fourteen years ago) link
Maybe it's been technology that's increased wealth, which happened to coincide with increased capitalism? Or better education, health, human rights, women's suffrage, democracy, etc. Who knows which factor is predominant?
― o. nate, Friday, January 8, 2010 5:49 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark
"happened to coincide"? a case could be made, but really a whole lot of technology has come out of capitalist wars. science is a pretty capital-intensive business. it's difficult to separate all these things out, of course, equally difficult to discuss their relations.
marx iirc was about superseding capitalism; zizek treats it like a supernatural evil spirit that has to be destroyed.
― Patriarchy Oppression Machine (history mayne), Friday, 8 January 2010 17:58 (fourteen years ago) link
a whole lot of technology has come out of capitalist wars
That seems like a strange way to characterize the two World Wars (if that's what you're referring to). Are you saying that only wars between capitalist countries would lead to innovation?
― o. nate, Friday, 8 January 2010 18:00 (fourteen years ago) link
im using trot-speak with a dab of irony, but don't just mean those wars. im saying that war and trade were in lockstep during the scientific revolution, which was also closely related to the advance of bourgeois democracy and protestant religion, in england. it's not a matter of "competition producing innovation" or anything glib like that, more that, unless you have global trade, you don't have much need for super-accurate navigation, or long-range communication. and trade advanced along the lines of private ownership (more or less) because idk long story but that's how it happened.
― Patriarchy Oppression Machine (history mayne), Friday, 8 January 2010 18:05 (fourteen years ago) link
Your points make sense. I would agree that in the history of the world (the only world we can observe), capitalism, free trade, etc. have gone hand in hand with lots of innovation. But innovation also happened of course before there was anything as economically sophisticated as modern capitalism. I'm not sure about the validity of conflating trade and capitalism, because trade is about as ancient as human civilization, but I don't think we can make the same point about capitalism without making our definition overly broad.
― o. nate, Friday, 8 January 2010 18:09 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah. im not sure if zizek is even thinking about these questions though! i don't know what his definition of capitalism is. im mostly thinking of britain in all this, and while for sure there's always been trade, our move to capitalism -- the concentration of capital, the institution of the large-scale firm, the notion of shareholding, the division of labour -- was intimately related to us "opening up" markets overseas (using guns). the massive profits from overseas trade stimulated industry at home. etc. the role of the state in all this became pretty controversial.
anyway -- these questions are huge and no-one can answer them once and for all. but to my mind they're going to tell us more than zizek's extolling of "love" and suchlike.
― Patriarchy Oppression Machine (history mayne), Friday, 8 January 2010 19:45 (fourteen years ago) link
Well, it's an interesting question about how we choose to organize ourselves as a society. There's an inherent conflict between our democratic ideals which say that all people are equal, and our capitalist ideals which seem to require the existence of a wealthy class, which tends to perpetuate its existence using, ahem, less than democratic means.
― o. nate, Friday, 8 January 2010 19:56 (fourteen years ago) link
right now and for the next 40 minutes, zizek on "the double death of neo-liberalism" -
http://resonancefm.com
― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 21 January 2010 13:21 (fourteen years ago) link
iirc he thinks it died once on 9/11 and once again in autumn 2008.
as, really quite obviously, it did not.
as gone over above, based on the youtube clip, he doesn't actually give a fuck whether we have "neo-liberalism", "liberalism", or (what we have) a "mized economy", or any other form of capitalism. and that pretty obviously has not gone away either.
― free the charmless but occasionally brilliant Dom Passantino (history mayne), Thursday, 21 January 2010 13:37 (fourteen years ago) link
this serrano bit is basically my thesis, coulda used this this time last yr ziz
― plaxico (I know, right?), Thursday, 21 January 2010 13:49 (fourteen years ago) link
ok didn't turn out how i thought
― plaxico (I know, right?), Thursday, 21 January 2010 13:51 (fourteen years ago) link
new Verso catalogue lists "Slavoj Zizek’s brand new book Living in the End Times, about the forthcoming apocalypse." Wuh oh.
― FC Tom Tomsk Club (Merdeyeux), Friday, 22 January 2010 21:30 (fourteen years ago) link
"Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Alfred Hitchcock" is pretty funny too
― killah priest, Friday, 22 January 2010 23:16 (fourteen years ago) link
am i right in thinking he's interviewed in the current cahiers du cinema?
― one of your top-tier posters! (history mayne), Friday, 30 April 2010 09:19 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/zizek-on-avatar.html
oh i am... and he's now written about avatar twice without seeing it.
― one of your top-tier posters! (history mayne), Friday, 30 April 2010 09:27 (thirteen years ago) link
blah blah Morbs zing blah blah will this do?
― Daily Sport Stunna Yasmin Alibhai Brown (Noodle Vague), Friday, 30 April 2010 09:30 (thirteen years ago) link
He's also in this week's New Statesman:
http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2010/05/essay-nature-catastrophe
Pretty humdrum piece though.
― Zelda Zonk, Friday, 30 April 2010 09:48 (thirteen years ago) link
"We are living in an age when we are both able to change nature and more at its mercy than ever"
spose it depends on the "we", but, hey, anyone remember the age before medical science? bubonic plague?
yeah, no, we're probably more at the mercy of nature than ever.
― one of your top-tier posters! (history mayne), Friday, 30 April 2010 09:56 (thirteen years ago) link
LOL, I sort of admire that
― Football's Flocking Home (Tom D.), Friday, 30 April 2010 10:00 (thirteen years ago) link
it's a shitty film
but basically it confirms my view that most film theorists -- exactly like what manny farber called the "plot-sociologists" of 70 years ago -- are just dealing with synopses, not films
― one of your top-tier posters! (history mayne), Friday, 30 April 2010 10:02 (thirteen years ago) link
Hi Slavoj! The piece about Rosicrucianism, Blanchot and the Tellytubbies is great, honestly. But we at the New Statesman feel our readership would appreciate something a little more.....humdrum. RSVP!
― nakhchivan, Friday, 30 April 2010 10:08 (thirteen years ago) link
he;s used that unknown unknowns meme about a million times
basically my college's 2 most famous professors are now: this fucking clown and orlando figes
oh and daud abdullah
― one of your top-tier posters! (history mayne), Friday, 30 April 2010 10:10 (thirteen years ago) link
It feels better if you put "Daily Sport Stunna" in front of their names.
― Daily Sport Stunna Yasmin Alibhai Brown (Noodle Vague), Friday, 30 April 2010 10:12 (thirteen years ago) link
he's used everything he's ever said a million times. I read an introduction he wrote for someone else's book and 75% of it was cribbed from his past books, which seemed a weird too far extension of his self-plagiarism to me.
I, btw, like this guy lots even if/when he's very silly.
― FC Tom Tomsk Club (Merdeyeux), Friday, 30 April 2010 10:20 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.amazon.com/Living-End-Times-Slavoj-Zizek/dp/184467598X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273924795&sr=8-1/marginalrevol-20
Kinda really want to read this.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:53 (thirteen years ago) link
Or, as Mao Zedong put it, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.”
classy
― long time listener, first time balla (history mayne), Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:54 (thirteen years ago) link
Zizek is truly one of the great trolls of our time.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:56 (thirteen years ago) link
I'll be reading that later this year, no doubt.
― ksh, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:57 (thirteen years ago) link
why not read s.thing that doesn't suck?
― long time listener, first time balla (history mayne), Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:57 (thirteen years ago) link
cause this looks super entertaining
― Mordy, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:58 (thirteen years ago) link
ehh people were saying capitalism was done for 80 years ago
― long time listener, first time balla (history mayne), Tuesday, 18 May 2010 20:00 (thirteen years ago) link
this is aight, for a book about... eschatology/teleology... i think those are the words i mean
http://static.letsbuyit.com/filer/images/fr/products/original/83/68/the-sense-of-an-ending-studies-in-the-theory-of-fiction-with-a-new-epilogue-8368621.jpeg
but were they finding the seeds of Communism in Heroes? i personally find Zizek very very entertaining, and sometimes I'd rather not read some dense academic text but still want to deal with provocative arguments and thoughts. Certainly more worthwhile reading Zizek than uh -- Christopher Hitchens, or Jonah Goldberg, or - le gaspe - Judith Butler.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 20:01 (thirteen years ago) link
but were they finding the seeds of Communism in Heroes?
wd have been exciting in the 80s (maybe). but you know he won't even have seen it yeah?
wont stan for latter-day hitchens so much but, looked at over his career, he a) is much less of an idiot than zizek b) can write. wouldn't put him in the same sentence as goldberg.
― long time listener, first time balla (history mayne), Tuesday, 18 May 2010 20:07 (thirteen years ago) link
i find Hitchens generally hits the same notes over and over again. Maybe he frames them well, but dude hasn't had interesting things to say in a long time. I'm rarely bored around Zizek (tho too much exposure can tire you -- there's definitely a Zizek formula).
― Mordy, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 20:11 (thirteen years ago) link
i was about to say, he is king of hitting the same notes over and over! kind of inevitable given his quasi-religious adherence to lacan and (his version of) marx.
but yeah the hitch is mostly churning it out these days. he can still write a sentence though, and he's still serious even when wrong.
― long time listener, first time balla (history mayne), Tuesday, 18 May 2010 20:13 (thirteen years ago) link
pretty sure all new zizek books are cut and pasted from bits of old ones now.
― plax (ico), Wednesday, 19 May 2010 12:00 (thirteen years ago) link
but yeah i mean the guy is still funny
Verso sent me an advance hardcover copy of Living in the End Times today (and one proof I gave to the founder of ESM, to confuse him). It's on the pile with the new Bret Easton Ellis and DBC Pierre books.
― cleggaeton (suzy), Wednesday, 19 May 2010 12:31 (thirteen years ago) link
ru going to review it?
give im hell imo
― long time listener, first time balla (history mayne), Wednesday, 19 May 2010 12:55 (thirteen years ago) link
can i have the bret easton ellis one if ur not gonna read it?
― plax (ico), Sunday, 23 May 2010 20:47 (thirteen years ago) link
I'm rarely bored around Zizek (tho too much exposure can tire you -- there's definitely a Zizek formula).
― Mordy, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 20:11 (6 days ago)
It is not so much that Zisek has a formula, as that formulaity itself has an essential Zizekianness.
― hills like white people (Hurting 2), Monday, 24 May 2010 01:00 (thirteen years ago) link
Cute, tho the real Zizekian twist would be that it is only by expressing something in formula that one actually expresses something radical and revolutionary.
― Mordy, Monday, 24 May 2010 01:02 (thirteen years ago) link
at the end of history, all we can do is ceaselessly post about Animal Collective on an internet message board
― ksh, Monday, 24 May 2010 01:46 (thirteen years ago) link
this guy has used mountains of cocaine.
― by another name (amateurist), Monday, 24 May 2010 01:58 (thirteen years ago) link
i really hate / do not get lacan.
― toastmodernist, Monday, 24 May 2010 03:24 (thirteen years ago) link
We don't really have a rolling philosophy thread (maybe we should), so I'm not sure where to put this but:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/184467617X?ie=UTF8&tag=crookedtimb04-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=184467617X
New book that looks really interesting. Review in Crooked Timber here: http://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/16/envisioning-real-utopias-announcing-a-book-event-in-the-fall/
Hugely rich and stimulating, Envisioning Real Utopias is may books in one: an incisive diagnosis of the harms done by capitalism; a masterful synthesis of the best work in political sociology and political economy over the past thirty years; and innovative theoretical framework for conceptualizing both the goals of progressive change and the strategies for their achievement; and inspiring story of actually existing challenges to capitalism that have arisen within capitalism itself; and a compelling essay on the relation between the desirable, the viable and the achievable. Anyone interested in the future of leftist politics has to read this book.
That last bit, about actual existing challenges, is what piques my interest.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 16:59 (thirteen years ago) link
We don't really have a rolling philosophy thread (maybe we should)
let's do it up
― ksh, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:14 (thirteen years ago) link
fwiw, that book looks super interesting
― ksh, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:15 (thirteen years ago) link
this bro doesn't sound like he does philosophy (not a zing, js)
― ultra nate dogg (history mayne), Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:15 (thirteen years ago) link
this bro = the guy who wrote the book, not ksh
he does conceptualize though
― max, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:16 (thirteen years ago) link
and what is philosophy, if not conceptualizing
take it to the philosophy thread
― ultra nate dogg (history mayne), Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:17 (thirteen years ago) link
i think you mean the conceptualizing thread
― max, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:18 (thirteen years ago) link
actually it seems as tho this bro doesnt conceptualize
hm, how would you describe what he does? critical theory?
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:18 (thirteen years ago) link
rather, he has constructed a framework for conceptualization
making him a construction worker i guess
― max, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:19 (thirteen years ago) link
Rolling Philosophy
― ksh, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:19 (thirteen years ago) link
― Mordy, Wednesday, June 16, 2010 6:18 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark
"a masterful synthesis of the best work in political sociology and political economy"
=>> political socio-economics
― ultra nate dogg (history mayne), Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:23 (thirteen years ago) link
political socio-economics = philosophy!
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:25 (thirteen years ago) link
he didnt do that work--he just constructed the synthesis--making him at best a synthesizer
― max, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:26 (thirteen years ago) link
a synthesizer like barthes -- ROLAND
― ultra nate dogg (history mayne), Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:31 (thirteen years ago) link
omg
― goole, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:44 (thirteen years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjEtmZZvGZA
― Salted gnocchimole (admrl), Saturday, 3 July 2010 16:15 (thirteen years ago) link
i've always been a fan of this particular "zlavodge zhezhek" interview
― ksh, Saturday, 3 July 2010 16:24 (thirteen years ago) link
"YOU'RE LIKE THE DENNIS LEARY OF SLOVENIA!""YES."
― ksh, Saturday, 3 July 2010 16:25 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jun/27/slavoj-zizek-living-end-times
“My God, I am the last person to know the answer to these questions,” he says, looking genuinely dismayed. “But, really, I am now thinking there is so much pressure on me to perform. I am getting really bored with it. I am a thinker, but people all the time want this kind of shitty political interventions: the books, the talks, the discussions and so forth.” He sighs and closes his eyes and seems to deflate before my eyes. “I will tell you my problem openly and for this my publisher will hate me. All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this.” He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. “I will tell you the truth now,” he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. “Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah.” He flicks furiously through the pages. “Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka’s last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.” Why, then, given that he does not like most of his books and does not have any enthusiasm for the lecture circuit, does he not call a stop to the Žižek show? “I am doing that right now!” he shouts. “I am writing a mega-book about Hegel with regard to Plato, Kant and maybe Heidegger. Already, this Hegel book is 700 pages. It is a true work of love. This is my true life’s work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel,” he says, sighing again. “But people just want the shitty politics.”
He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. “I will tell you the truth now,” he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. “Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah.” He flicks furiously through the pages. “Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka’s last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.”
Why, then, given that he does not like most of his books and does not have any enthusiasm for the lecture circuit, does he not call a stop to the Žižek show? “I am doing that right now!” he shouts. “I am writing a mega-book about Hegel with regard to Plato, Kant and maybe Heidegger. Already, this Hegel book is 700 pages. It is a true work of love. This is my true life’s work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel,” he says, sighing again. “But people just want the shitty politics.”
fair enuf.
― stand under Eljero Elia, Elia, Elia (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 7 July 2010 13:20 (thirteen years ago) link
LOL
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Wednesday, 7 July 2010 13:29 (thirteen years ago) link
I'm actually digging living in end times. it's a lot of fun
― Mordy, Wednesday, 7 July 2010 13:43 (thirteen years ago) link
hah, see, how can you not like this guy?
― max, Wednesday, 7 July 2010 14:23 (thirteen years ago) link
it's mainly his asswad stans i dislike
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Wednesday, 7 July 2010 14:26 (thirteen years ago) link
even the biggest fans of his I've met fully accept that he talks shit half the time, I guess I've done well steering clear of the baduns.
― stand under Eljero Elia, Elia, Elia (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 7 July 2010 14:31 (thirteen years ago) link
his, uh, posting style, has really taken off. i guess it's not entirely him -- it's a tradition of hegelian/dialectical thought, and i get a similar vibe from some other cultural/philosophical marxist thinkers. but he's the current model. so saying something that [something completely paradoxical] is 'precisely' the case is something he and his followers do a lot, but they aren't the first.
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Wednesday, 7 July 2010 14:35 (thirteen years ago) link
ah yes, the preciselys and exactlys are always good for wtfs and lols.
― stand under Eljero Elia, Elia, Elia (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 7 July 2010 14:41 (thirteen years ago) link
ok @ zizek being interviewed about this bk on Newsnight...
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 7 July 2010 22:08 (thirteen years ago) link
wow that quote is great. i hope he titles that book "Hegel Hegel Hegel" and i will promise to read it.
― ryan, Thursday, 8 July 2010 00:30 (thirteen years ago) link
shane danielsen is a bit of a blowhard, but he's on-point here:
http://www.indiewire.com/article/shane_danielsen_among_the_grifters/
and yeah it does sort of relate to hegel and avatar
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Thursday, 8 July 2010 09:35 (thirteen years ago) link
tbf, Zizek didn't pretend to see Avatar, he admitted upfront that he didn't see it and his points on the film were about as meaningful as the arguments of a lot of people who had seen it. also, he wasn't rendering critical judgement about whether it was good or not, just discussing the incredibly obvious and well-worn plot.
― Mordy, Thursday, 8 July 2010 10:58 (thirteen years ago) link
he admitted upfront that he didn't see it
i don't think he did:
http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2010/03/avatar-reality-love-couple-sex
the point is, the plot may be transformed by the treatment (it wasn't)
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Thursday, 8 July 2010 11:04 (thirteen years ago) link
hmmm. somehow he let people know. when i saw the link to the piece, the link mentioned Zizek hadn't seen the film.
― Mordy, Thursday, 8 July 2010 11:10 (thirteen years ago) link
(nb i saw the link right when the piece came out)
he mentioned it in cahiers du cinema. dunno when that came out in relation to the new statesman piece. n e ways, it's a question of ethics. coz of course i wouldn't talk about hegel w/o having read every last word of the motherfucker.
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Thursday, 8 July 2010 11:12 (thirteen years ago) link
lol, really? cause i think everyone who has talked about hegel has done so without reading every word of his
― Mordy, Thursday, 8 July 2010 11:18 (thirteen years ago) link
no not really! jeez, srsly. have seen 'the abyss' tho.
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Thursday, 8 July 2010 11:21 (thirteen years ago) link
lol, i thought u were joking but imbedded in context of jerks who review movies without seeing them, it's hard to tell
fwiw, someone should review Zizek not yet published Hegel book
― Mordy, Thursday, 8 July 2010 11:24 (thirteen years ago) link
lol yes brilliant
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Thursday, 8 July 2010 11:25 (thirteen years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
― Mordy, Monday, 9 August 2010 01:08 (thirteen years ago) link
Argh, I fact-checked an article about Zizek the other day. I'm sure his stuff is fun to think about, but it's not easily summarized.
― jaymc, Monday, 9 August 2010 02:37 (thirteen years ago) link
watched that animation (and the David Harvey one, which was also p. good) with my friend the other day. but then we got really weirded out when we went to the website for 'Cognitive Media' (the company that produces these things) and saw a bunch of testimonials from BP and GE execs about how well their presentations went over... sorta funny.
― stuff that's what it is (bernard snowy), Monday, 9 August 2010 03:09 (thirteen years ago) link
Great profile pieces about Zizek: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,705164,00.html
― Mordy, Sunday, 12 September 2010 04:36 (thirteen years ago) link
What is increasingly emerging as the central human right in late-capitalist societies is the right not to be harassed, which is the right to be kept at a safe distance from others. A terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented belongs in Guantánamo, the empty zone exempted from the rule of law; a fundamentalist ideologist should be silenced because he spreads hatred. Such people are toxic subjects who disturb my peace.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/03/immigration-policy-roma-rightwing-europe
nice leap from 'people don't want to be blown up' to 'people want terrorists locked up without charge.'
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 09:17 (thirteen years ago) link
n e ways, kinda fatuous all round really, but interesting (in this context) to see the full-blown christian bit at the end
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 09:20 (thirteen years ago) link
I don't think Zizek is condemning the impulse to lock terrorists up, but locating these individuals in this extrageographic space, outside the country, an "empty zone exempted from the rule of law," it's that we can't even imprison them in our nation-state midst. their very proximity is "toxic" and disturbs the peace (obv this is referring to imprisonment because a terrorist act wouldn't just be 'disturbing the peace').
― Mordy, Monday, 4 October 2010 12:50 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah there's nothing wrong with criticizing guantanamo. it's a p mainstream position! but conflating the desire not to be harassed (which i don't think *is* being advanced as a 'central human right but whatevs) with guantanamo is effed up. in the real world we do lock up irl terrorists after jury trials. he's yoking two things together, but while we're there, yeah, terrorists are kind of toxic. if fundamentalist ideologists are really so hated and marginalized, how the fuck does he explain glenn beck (or, you know, himself?).
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 12:54 (thirteen years ago) link
Well, I haven't gotten a chance to read the whole thing, but Zizek's general thing is that toxicity isn't a bad thing. He's praised terrorists before for mounting serious challenges to the hegemony + stuff like that, so I imagine this will to not be bothered isn't a net "good thing."
― Mordy, Monday, 4 October 2010 16:26 (thirteen years ago) link
He's praised terrorists before for mounting serious challenges to the hegemony
ah
mm
k
hope they challenge his hegemony tbrr
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:30 (thirteen years ago) link
there is nothing a priori wrong with praising acts of terrorism. sometimes it is absolutely necessary.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 16:47 (thirteen years ago) link
you can just replace your spare parts if you get blown up though :(
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:49 (thirteen years ago) link
we are not robots.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 16:50 (thirteen years ago) link
however, we do believe that in the in the machine there is much to emulate. and soon when the technology has advanced enough we shall merge with the machine.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 16:52 (thirteen years ago) link
hegemony mayne
― polytetrafluoroethylene don (am0n), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:53 (thirteen years ago) link
DANGER WILL ROBINSON
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:54 (thirteen years ago) link
until then, terrorist acts will be occasionally be called for. not necessarily with bombs, however. nor with computer viruses. it will be a terrorism of ideas.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 16:54 (thirteen years ago) link
memerrorism, we call it.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 16:55 (thirteen years ago) link
we, robots
― polytetrafluoroethylene don (am0n), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:56 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah i think dom tried that, look where it got him xp
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:56 (thirteen years ago) link
3/5 iirc
― polytetrafluoroethylene don (am0n), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:58 (thirteen years ago) link
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 10:17 (7 hours ago)
thart's a bit of a wilful misreading.
zizek at this point is like telemann writing hundreds of subtly different concertos w/ material endlessly recycled, but that's a pretty good article.
"The others are OK, I respect them," the liberals say, "but they must not intrude too much on my own space. The moment they do, they harass me – I fully support affirmative action, but I am in no way ready to listen to loud rap music."
lol
― journey to the end of nyt (nakhchivan), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:01 (thirteen years ago) link
no it isn't, read it again
idk, seems tarded to me, i don't think many european liberals are in favour of affirmative action
not sure where zizek stands on either that or rap music
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:25 (thirteen years ago) link
i think you 'know what he means'
― journey to the end of nyt (nakhchivan), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:25 (thirteen years ago) link
i imagine zizek is in no way ready to listen to loud rap music
― journey to the end of nyt (nakhchivan), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:26 (thirteen years ago) link
when he says wanting beer without alcohol is like wanting outsiders without the danger, what does he mean?
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:30 (thirteen years ago) link
i don't think slavoj even gets his facts right here. like, a lot.
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 17:38 (thirteen years ago) link
Incidents like these have to be seen against the background of a long-term rearrangement of the political space in western and eastern Europe. Until recently, most European countries were dominated by two main parties that addressed the majority of the electorate: a right-of-centre party (Christian Democrat, liberal-conservative, people's) and a left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic), with smaller parties (ecologists, communists) addressing a narrower electorate.
Recent electoral results in the west as well as in the east signal the gradual emergence of a different polarity. There is now one predominant centrist party that stands for global capitalism, usually with a liberal cultural agenda (for example, tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities). Opposing this party is an increasingly strong anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by overtly racist neofascist groups.
i don't think this is true.
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 17:39 (thirteen years ago) link
After decades of hope held out by the welfare state, when financial cuts were sold as temporary, and sustained by a promise that things would soon return to normal,
hard to tell which events in which countries he means, but i'm p sure those anti- the welfare state were never saying things would return to normal.
we are entering a new epoch in which crisis – or, rather, a kind of economic state of emergency, with its attendant need for all sorts of austerity measures (cutting benefits, diminishing health and education services, making jobs more temporary) is permanent. Crisis is becoming a way of life.
"a kind of economic state of emergency" dude where the f have you been 08 - now. "crisis is becoming a way of life," you say? how could have possibly have happened.
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 17:42 (thirteen years ago) link
goole I think yr quibbling
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:43 (thirteen years ago) link
i ain't quibbling with shit! there's a whole pile of rong here
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 17:44 (thirteen years ago) link
also as far as how this ties into the larger body of his thought, I think maybe the more important point is that, as he writes somewhere, the 'liberal progressives' already sorta-won this fight, in the sense that it's no longer cool to be openly racist or xenophobic... but now they (we?) have trouble conceiving of effective political action on any level beyond the purely reactionary condemnation of 'populist racism'/fundamentalism/whatever, i.e. turning our attention to the messy 'structural inequalities' that somehow seem to persist without anyone (that we know of?) consciously saying "hey I wanna make sure fucktons of black kids end up in jail" or w/e
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:45 (thirteen years ago) link
I don't think zizek would, like, deny that the economic crisis was a real thing that was going on in 08, he's just saying that the character of the public response has changed as people stopped deluding themselves that it was gonna be 2001 pt.2
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:47 (thirteen years ago) link
oh sure, zizek is the only person who's noticed. no-one else has seen that there is a structural bias in society against immigrants.
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:47 (thirteen years ago) link
he's just saying that the character of the public response has changed as people stopped deluding themselves that it was gonna be 2001 pt.2
this is irrelevant in europe; 2001 wasn't anything like the recent crisis, barely a blip. in the uk this is more like the end of the 1970s. the common cliche about the continent is that they never had their thatcher, so idk how the 1970s played out for them.
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:49 (thirteen years ago) link
also I think that, from the late-70s onward (the first 401(k)s appeared in 1981), the kind of "welfare state" zizek is talking about has functioned by continually drawing a greater proportion of individual 'savings' into the financial markets, thus allowing a whole bunch of pro-business policies to pass under the "rising tide lifts all boats!" promise that booming stock market now = comfy life for you and your grandkids
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:51 (thirteen years ago) link
I'm a little fucked-up tho and just throwin' shit onto the board to see what sticks
obviously the picture I paint (in discussing this article about europe with someone from the uk...) is highly americacentric
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:52 (thirteen years ago) link
After the disintegration of the communist regimes in 1990, we entered a new era in which the predominant form of the exercise of state power became a depoliticised expert administration and the co-ordination of interests. The only way to introduce passion into this kind of politics...,
ok hold up here -- "passion" enters into politics of its own accord whether pols like it or not. what's the implication here? a basic marxian one i guess -- if folks weren't all skeered by various specters paraded by the official parties (enumerated below) they would be agitated by their basic material deprivation eg revolutionary. this is base level but i think that just isn't so. the animating passions of the electorate/the people/whatev may be gross bullshit but it's not fake
the only way to actively mobilise people, is through fear: the fear of immigrants, the fear of crime, the fear of godless sexual depravity, the fear of the excessive state (with its burden of high taxation and control), the fear of ecological catastrophe, as well as the fear of harassment (political correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear).
last sentence is a beaut -- old line marxist contempt for interest-group politicking in a polivalent social space. "political correctness" (if it exists) is not about fear, it's about power (to force the terms of how people talk about you)
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 17:54 (thirteen years ago) link
Such a politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid multitude – the frightening rallying of frightened men and women. This is why the big event of the first decade of the new millennium was when anti-immigration politics went mainstream and finally cut the umbilical cord that had connected it to far right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride in one's cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – "it is our country, love it or leave it" is the message.
eh fair enough. point seems obvious to me tho: lots of people are kinda racist and always have been.
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 17:57 (thirteen years ago) link
would you agree that 'the electorate' seems to get much more 'passionate' about whatever BLATANTLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL (or TOTALLY UNAMERICAN) shit the other side is trying to pull of than about, like, how the medicare prescription drug benefit works?
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:59 (thirteen years ago) link
point seems obvious to me tho: lots of people are kinda racist and always have been.― goole, Monday, October 4, 2010 5:57 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark
― goole, Monday, October 4, 2010 5:57 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark
[T]he development of racism within the working class (which, to committed socialists and communists, seems counter to the natural order of things) comes to be seen as the effect of a tendency allegedly inherent in the masses, Institutional racism finds itself projected into the very construction of that psycho-sociological category that is 'the masses'.
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:03 (thirteen years ago) link
idgi
to your point about people not understanding the medicare benefit, yeah, but i don't know what you're arguing by bringing it up
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 18:05 (thirteen years ago) link
Such a politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid multitude – the frightening rallying of frightened men and women. This is why the big event of the first decade of the new millennium was when anti-immigration politics went mainstream and finally cut the umbilical cord that had connected it to far right fringe parties.
in england nakedly racist rhetoric was pretty common in the 1960s iirc
From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride in one's cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – "it is our country, love it or leave it" is the message.
this is interesting: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/03/abdelkader-benali-immigration-prejudice
balibar is a fucking choad, hilariously he and zizek are both big men in my college
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:06 (thirteen years ago) link
(then he goes on to talk about how instead of asking questions like 'what made the petit-bourgeoisie racist?' we should ask 'how did racism help create a petit-bourgeoisie?')
my point (with the Balibar stuff, not the medicare benefit) is that you can't treat racism as some kind of basic social tendency, where in any society some people (the 'masses', who aren't educated enough, or in the right ways, to have it thoroughly expunged from them) end up ruining it for the rest of us by succumbing to the temptation to be racist. what you can do is look at how rac(ial)ist can work in the first place to set up and maintain class stratifications, which would seem to be pretty well-established (Bacon's Rebellion and all that shit).
my point with the medicare was, uh, I dunno, I guess that politics generally *does* seem like pretty boring technocratic stuff? which it's maybe always been, but the CONTRADICTION between this reality of government as opaque administrative technocracy and the ideal of democracy we still hold to seems to grow steadily more insoluble.
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:15 (thirteen years ago) link
should read "rac(ial)ist ideology"
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:16 (thirteen years ago) link
oh i don't think it's the masses that are of-course racist
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 18:17 (thirteen years ago) link
then who???
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:21 (thirteen years ago) link
we should ask 'how did racism help create a petit-bourgeoisie?'
this doesn't sound very marxist to me
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:25 (thirteen years ago) link
it's not a tendency that people fall into out of weakness, it's an idea that has, i dunno, a certain appeal to a lot of people, since it makes sense of the world on an emotional level. this is not a class-bound thing. it ends up being a tautological thing: who are The Racists?? i dunno, the people who believe racist shit, whoever they are...
ziz's two points seem to be a) politics isn't politics anymore since communism died and it's just mechanical tinkering and interest group jockeying and complaining, and b) liberals are to blame for racism partly because they talk about every culture being of value, presumably in its own way/space, allowing racists to say "stay in that space then, wog" or whatever.
i don't really buy either point. there's something there about the language of anti-immigration, in polite circles anyway
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 18:26 (thirteen years ago) link
he doesn't really talk about any of the concrete realities of immigration in europe. it'd be kind of novel to have no restrictions at all, and to sustain a welfare state, yes? so where do you start?
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:31 (thirteen years ago) link
other than 'communist revolution' i guess
ftr i am for the free movement of people at will, and the welfare state, and no i don't know how to get that to work out ok.
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 18:35 (thirteen years ago) link
impossible. do you believe in unicorns as well?
equality is not possible with democracy. in democracy the incorrect will always get a voice, and corruption inevitable.
the only way to improve society is to transform it totally and completely.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 18:40 (thirteen years ago) link
fuck off troll
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 18:41 (thirteen years ago) link
corruption inevitable
defrag
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:41 (thirteen years ago) link
this might be the most tendentious bit:
what was the old spirit? how was immigration treated hitherto? i guess austria has had more immigration than ever before, but the piece i linked to on holland is worth reading. 'cultural values' is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence. most people would say that immigrants would have to accommodate themselves to the law of the host nation, but is that really in the spirit of christian love? he would never lower himself to debate a specific issue, but he may on draw random anecdotes in order to tell his usual story.
― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:42 (thirteen years ago) link
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, October 4, 2010 6:41 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark
"lol"
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 18:56 (thirteen years ago) link
banaka l jagger sock no
― conrad, Monday, 4 October 2010 19:21 (thirteen years ago) link
really?
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 23:10 (thirteen years ago) link
wethinks you are intoxicated.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 23:24 (thirteen years ago) link
http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbhhjdb8qR1qdcvb4o1_1280.png?AWSAccessKeyId=0RYTHV9YYQ4W5Q3HQMG2&Expires=1289237755&Signature=%2BUE33PGej4z76lXL1lyp%2B7iGy6k%3D
― max, Sunday, 7 November 2010 17:36 (thirteen years ago) link
lol gross
― Mannsplain Steamroller (goole), Sunday, 7 November 2010 17:44 (thirteen years ago) link
Was this posted yet? It's awesome. I love it.
― Princess TamTam, Sunday, 7 November 2010 17:44 (thirteen years ago) link
"Confuses Major Philosophers" -- does this mean that Slavoj Zizek gets major philosophers mixed up, or that major philosophers who are in attendance at the lecture feel confused?
― quique da snique (bernard snowy), Sunday, 7 November 2010 20:33 (thirteen years ago) link
"when Zizek critiques liberalism, which he does a lot, he almost always uses ‘liberal’ to mean, narrowly, economic neoliberalism. Forces of economic globalization. The Washington Consensus. Liberalism is: Sarkozy trying to make France more Anglo-ish. It’s never: John Rawls. I think it’s fair to say that Zizek is hereby basically strawman-ing liberal democracy, and liberalism qua political philosophy, by identifying both with the Washington Consensus. This is not only philosophically unsatisfactory but rhetorically odd, because Zizek ends up sounding weirdly like a Fox News commentator, talking trickle-down as if it were an Iron Law of Prosperity, under any conceivable, market-based system.
There is one major exception to Zizek’s liberalism = neoliberalism tendency: namely, he not infrequently uses ‘liberalism’ to refer to academic-style, ironist-relativistic multi-culti, feel-good pc leftism. Then he sounds sort of like P.J. O’Rourke yelling in your ear at a Laibach concert"
http://crookedtimber.org/2010/12/17/zizek-on-the-financial-collapse-and-liberalism/
― e.g. delete via naivete (ledge), Friday, 17 December 2010 15:32 (thirteen years ago) link
It's a silly complaint since liberalism as it is practiced in America IS economic neoliberalism. People who oppose neoliberalism are either the detoothed hippies who cannot engage the system in a meaningful way, or the radical terrorists who move the battlefield from an economic confrontation to one of violent force. But if you're gonna take about liberal democracy in the US you have to talk about economic neoliberalism.
― Mordy, Friday, 17 December 2010 15:40 (thirteen years ago) link
I think the whole "academic-style, ironist-relativistc, multi-culti, feel-good pc leftism" thing is better to challenge Zizek on, but is it surprising that a guy who mainly associates with the academy (and particularly with departments like NYU's German Dpt, or that silly Humanities in Europe program thingie) would harp on multi-culti, feel-good pc leftism? I remember a professor in grad school defending clitoridectomies on the basis of multiculturalism, so it's definitely possible to blow the sentiment out of proportion because of close exposure to one particular institution.
― Mordy, Friday, 17 December 2010 15:42 (thirteen years ago) link
liberalism = liberal democracy = US liberal democracy = economic neoliberalism seems like a hell of conflating imo.
― e.g. delete via naivete (ledge), Friday, 17 December 2010 15:54 (thirteen years ago) link
xp
liberalism occurs today (when it occurs and has power) as economic neoliberalism. is Badiou out there fighting against the entire system? yes. but arguably is not longer a 'liberal' in any meaningful sense anyway. i think Zizek's critique that liberalism occurs within economic neoliberalism is right on and is actually essential to understanding politics, particularly US politics. otherwise you're like the guys on the US Politics thread constantly being outraged that the "liberals" in office are perpetuating capitalist inequalities. or you can dismiss the romanticization and realize, "oh, hey, this is just another performance of economic neoliberalism"
― Mordy, Friday, 17 December 2010 16:00 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks
p sure i could do zizeks job now
― plax (ico), Wednesday, 12 January 2011 21:05 (thirteen years ago) link
he should just make every political article a repeated copy and pasting of that time when he said he doesn't care about politics, only hegel. i'm down with that.
― Antoine Bugleboy (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 12 January 2011 21:19 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/blog/slavoj-zizek-on-egypt
tariq ramadan trying to keep a straight face at this gurning performance had me lollin'
― I zing the dickhole electric (haitch), Sunday, 6 February 2011 14:40 (thirteen years ago) link
oh man this is gonna make my day
― proso_Opopoeia (bernard snowy), Sunday, 6 February 2011 14:59 (thirteen years ago) link
got a big lol out of the "reader email" asking zizek to explain his mao quote.
on my facebook favorite quotes at the moment:"everything that keeps me together is falling apart. the situation is excellent." - modest mao
― proso_Opopoeia (bernard snowy), Sunday, 6 February 2011 19:43 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/feb/10/egypt-miracle-tahrir-square
truly wretched performance, but at least he's being a bit more explicit these days
but doesn't zizek hate liberal democracy? i don't get how he now seems to be or for it
or maybe he really does thing the universal realm of indivisible oneness is at hand...
― The image post from the hilarious "markers" internet persona (history mayne), Friday, 11 February 2011 10:28 (thirteen years ago) link
I thought that was mainly terrible, too, but this is very well put:
When President Obama welcomed the uprising as a legitimate expression of opinion that needs to be acknowledged by the government, the confusion was total: the crowds in Cairo and Alexandria did not want their demands to be acknowledged by the government, they denied the very legitimacy of the government. They didn't want the Mubarak regime as a partner in a dialogue, they wanted Mubarak to go. They didn't simply want a new government that would listen to their opinion, they wanted to reshape the entire state.
― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Friday, 11 February 2011 11:04 (thirteen years ago) link
if you watch that tv bit up there you'll see that he's still leaning towards blaming the "tolerant liberals" for everything that stands in the way of change, rather than putting the blame on anyone, say, vaguely right-wing or a bit dictatory.
― Antoine Bugleboy (Merdeyeux), Friday, 11 February 2011 12:28 (thirteen years ago) link
y'all mad
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, 11 February 2011 13:10 (thirteen years ago) link
history mayne do u think the egyptian people are "for" or "against" "liberal democracy"
or should we wait until they take a nationwide referendum
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, 11 February 2011 13:13 (thirteen years ago) link
zizek emerges on the academic scene duing the early- to mid-90s, at a time when ppl are getting really into this habermasian/rawlsian/fukuyaman defense of the inherent rationality of the western liberal democratic tradition. i don't think zizek necessarily disagrees that that rationality exists, or that it has value; but he would certainly dispute the idea that it is fully controlled or contained within the self-understanding of the western democracies themselves — in the egyptian case, it's closer to a kind of hegelian cunning of reason, operating behind the backs and against the wishes of the hegemonic powers
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, 11 February 2011 13:37 (thirteen years ago) link
re: "putting the blame on anyone, say, vaguely right-wing or a bit dictatory" — I p.much agree with SZ when he says that those who do not wish to address the shortcomings of liberal democracy should remain silent about fundamentalist theocracy/fascism/totalitarianism/etc
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, 11 February 2011 13:44 (thirteen years ago) link
plus, y'know, you gotta take into account that the audiences he addresses tend to be closer to the "tolerant liberal" end of the spectrum...
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, 11 February 2011 13:45 (thirteen years ago) link
I p.much agree with SZ when he says that those who do not wish to address the shortcomings of liberal democracy should remain silent about fundamentalist theocracy/fascism/totalitarianism/etc― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, February 11, 2011 1:44 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, February 11, 2011 1:44 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark
mmm, that rich straw aroma. yes indeed, those tolerant habermasian liberals never, ever address the shortcomings of their own societies, do they?
history mayne do u think the egyptian people are "for" or "against" "liberal democracy"or should we wait until they take a nationwide referendum― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, February 11, 2011 1:13 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, February 11, 2011 1:13 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark
yes i think they are for it, mutatis, mutandis, or whatever the phrase is. the democratic majority of them. but zizek is against it. he's in favour of totalitarianism iirc.
plus, y'know, you gotta take into account that the audiences he addresses tend to be closer to the "tolerant liberal" end of the spectrum...― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, February 11, 2011 1:45 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, February 11, 2011 1:45 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark
yes, quite. he's a wind-up merchant above all.
― The image post from the hilarious "markers" internet persona (history mayne), Friday, 11 February 2011 14:05 (thirteen years ago) link
nobody is for "totalitarianism", it's a purely ideological term, come on man
(which isn't to say that you can't play devil's advocate, or that zizek doesn't do so, but seriously, grow 1 brayne)
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, 11 February 2011 14:24 (thirteen years ago) link
"Hey Mr. Caliban..."
― Tom D (Tom D.), Friday, 11 February 2011 14:30 (thirteen years ago) link
iirc zizek says totalitarianism is a "purely ideological term" used to protect liberal democracy from universal justice. you're not going to realize the "eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity" under democracy.
what is "the eternal idea of freedom"?
― The image post from the hilarious "markers" internet persona (history mayne), Friday, 11 February 2011 14:36 (thirteen years ago) link
i dunno i don't think it's written down anywhere
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, 11 February 2011 14:42 (thirteen years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/pQxPx.gif
― Princess TamTam, Friday, 18 February 2011 08:54 (thirteen years ago) link
― roy stride or die (nakhchivan), Friday, 18 February 2011 08:59 (thirteen years ago) link
lol amazing
― Mordy, Friday, 18 February 2011 17:12 (thirteen years ago) link
btw just to continue conversation from other thread:
And specifically in "Living in End Times" he writes (I don't have a page cite - PLEASE FORGIVE ME) that with Democracies there is the appearance of consent so resistance/protest in light of inequalities is v limited. By contrast a dictator knows he only rules with the consent of the people in a much more explicit manner and therefore needs to act more in their self interest. in my own words: that democracy can serve as a valve to let off steam and not let any real reforms come to the surface while dictators need to be more responsive more immediately or risk losing their heads.― Mordy, Wednesday, February 23, 2011 4:03 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark
― Mordy, Wednesday, February 23, 2011 4:03 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark
― on some outer space shit (bernard snowy), Wednesday, 23 February 2011 19:36 (thirteen years ago) link
Zizek dropping truthbombs in a footnote:
This limitation of democracy has nothing to do with the standard worry of the liberal exporters of democracy: what if the result is the victory of those who oppose democracy, and thus its self-cancellation? "This is a terrible truth that we have to face; the only thing that currently stands between us and the rolling ocean of Muslim unreason is a wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that we have helped to erect"(Sam Harris, The End of Faith, New York: Norton 2005, p.132). Here, then, isHarris's motto: "when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples becomeanother weapon in his hand" (ibid., p. 202). And, from here, predictably, he proceedsto justify torture . . . While this line of reasoning may appear convincing, it is not pursued to the end; it remains stuck in the terms of the tiresome liberal debate: "Are the Muslim masses mature enough (culturally fit) for democracy, or should we support enlightened despotism amongst their rulers?" Both terms of the underlying choice (either we impose our democracy on them or we exploit their backwardness) are false. The true question is: what if the "wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that wehave helped to erect" is precisely what sustains and generates the "rolling ocean of Muslimunreason"?
― on some outer space shit (bernard snowy), Wednesday, 23 February 2011 20:29 (thirteen years ago) link
dude should ring in to any answers?, someone basically says that every week
― Jefferson Mansplain (DG), Wednesday, 23 February 2011 20:32 (thirteen years ago) link
not always w/comedy speech impediment obv.
― Jefferson Mansplain (DG), Wednesday, 23 February 2011 20:34 (thirteen years ago) link
The true question is: what if the "wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that we have helped to erect" is precisely what sustains and generates the "rolling ocean of Muslim unreason"?
again with the misplaced 'precisely'. if the world really did fit together like a balanced equation, sure, maybe... is he talking about egypt? i think the case of egypt shows that we shouldn't accept, as zizek does, the 'ocean of muslim unreason' assumption. but it would be bad history to try to explain away the muslim brotherhood (which does meet the description of muslim and unreasonable) solely as a response to... well, someone's definition of what the US was doing in egypt in the 1970s. im pretty sure the MB was being whaled on by the egyptian government a long time before the US could really be called an ally. i dunno if this is a bit empirical sry.
― for all the fucked-up children of this world we give you 1p3 (history mayne), Thursday, 24 February 2011 00:05 (thirteen years ago) link
i think even zizek must know he cld do w/ a dose of empiricism from time to time
― ogmor, Thursday, 24 February 2011 00:33 (thirteen years ago) link
idk if zizek deals w/ his whole biography anywhere of if he's too self-involved to attempt to historicize/contextualize his own work/ideology as he does everyone else's
― ogmor, Thursday, 24 February 2011 00:38 (thirteen years ago) link
h-mayne: nah he's not talking about egypt, that's from his 2008 book — just struck me as oddly relevant.
and uh... wtf, he's obviously not accepting any kind of argument about "muslim unreason" — pretty sure he's repeating dude's absurd rhetoric in order to further mock him.
― on some outer space shit (bernard snowy), Thursday, 24 February 2011 02:17 (thirteen years ago) link
should have said: "precisely in order to" etc etc
he puts "muslim unreason" in quotes, but i don't think the sentence makes any sense whatsoever if we think he doesn't mean it in some way.
what is the true question here, if we don't believe in the "rolling ocean"? or, are we also to discount the existence of the "wall of tyranny and human rights abuses", which are also in quotes?
i get he's not talking specifically abt egypt, but, well, what is he talking about if not egypt? to which situation is he referring?
― for all the fucked-up children of this world we give you 1p3 (history mayne), Thursday, 24 February 2011 08:49 (thirteen years ago) link
right but like... the dude he's quoting is basically saying "welp, they can't have democracy because our wall of tyranny is the only thing holding back the rolling ocean of unreason, so we might as well enjoy getting our hands dirty and to hell with scruples!", to which zizek replies that, 'convincing' as this argument may appear (and it does, because it is almost tautological), it perhaps overlooks one or two things...
I mean, is it really controversial to assert that "unreason", terror, and religious fundamentalism have been promoted rather than cured by US support for repressive dictators? I thought this was like, post-cold war politics 101
― on some outer space shit (bernard snowy), Thursday, 24 February 2011 12:13 (thirteen years ago) link
or in other words, I don't think he's referring to any particular "situation" so much is he is criticizing a particular approach to american foreign policy
― on some outer space shit (bernard snowy), Thursday, 24 February 2011 12:14 (thirteen years ago) link
I mean, is it really controversial to assert that "unreason", terror, and religious fundamentalism have been promoted rather than cured by US support for repressive dictators? I thought this was like, post-cold war politics 101― on some outer space shit (bernard snowy), Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark
― on some outer space shit (bernard snowy), Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark
it's not controversial, but it's not incontrovertible in a fair number of cases, egypt being the example which i gave, as the most obviously favoured-by-the-US of all middle eastern dictators. to repeat, islamic fundamentalism there did not begin as a result of US policy.
either way, saying that it is 'precisely' US policy that actually generated (as against promoted, failed to prevent, etc) islamic fundamentalism is wrong.
his whole appeal rests on 'precise' paradoxes; he wouldn't be a big shot without them.
― for all the fucked-up children of this world we give you 1p3 (history mayne), Thursday, 24 February 2011 13:33 (thirteen years ago) link
dude I think you're conflating ideologiekritik with philosophy
what is "precise" is the way in which different aspects of the world-view in question (Harris') reinforce one another towards a definite end. there are pieces there that more-or-less correspond to certain realities (US-backed human-rights abuses on the one hand, an angry "ocean" of "unreason[able]" people [i.e. mass popular discontent?] on the other) but somehow they are not put together correctly ('maybe some of the things they're angry about are... our fault?').
but whatever we're obviously not gonna change each other's minds on this one
― on some outer space shit (bernard snowy), Thursday, 24 February 2011 15:10 (thirteen years ago) link
I haven't chimed in on this bc I think that Zizek's comment is one of his less interesting, less insightful bits, but the fact that you guys keep arguing about it makes me think that you're seeing something there that I'm not. Isn't linking our support for human rights violations to anti-American sentiment a really old argument at this point? Like Glenn Greenwald or half a dozen people on ILX make that point every week. Is he adding anything to it?
― Mordy, Thursday, 24 February 2011 17:02 (thirteen years ago) link
Why does he SNIFF so much when he's talking?
― Chelvis, Wednesday, 9 March 2011 03:16 (thirteen years ago) link
― by another name (amateurist), Sunday, May 23, 2010 9:58 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark
― ℳℴℯ ❤\(◕‿◕✿ (Princess TamTam), Wednesday, 9 March 2011 03:41 (thirteen years ago) link
In seminars, Lacan acts as analysand, he “freely associates,” improvises, jumps, addressing his public, which is thus put into the role of a kind of collective analyst. In comparison, his writings are more condensed, formulaic, and they throw at the reader unreadable ambiguous propositions which often appear like oracles, challenging the reader to start working on them, to translate them into clear theses and provide examples and logical demonstrations of them. In contrast to the usual academic procedure, where the author formulates a thesis and then tries to sustain it through arguments, Lacan not only more often than not leaves this work to the reader – the reader has often even to discern what, exactly, is Lacan’s actual thesis among the multitude of conflicting formulations or the ambiguity of a single oracle-like formulation.
zizek u have no self awareness do u
http://www.lacan.com/zizhowto.html
― HOOStory is back. Fasten your steenbelts. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Monday, 21 March 2011 21:03 (thirteen years ago) link
Zizek calls himself a Lacanian all the time
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 22:28 (thirteen years ago) link
has he weighed in on libya yet? he was super gung ho about the egyptian revolution and projected all kinds of utopian aims on to its protagonists.
― BIG GERTRUDE aka the steindriver (history mayne), Monday, 21 March 2011 22:31 (thirteen years ago) link
― Mordy, Friday, December 17, 2010 7:40 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark
so incredibly offensive on so many levels
― sleeve, Monday, 21 March 2011 22:54 (thirteen years ago) link
so be less offended
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:44 (thirteen years ago) link
omg mordman
― Godspeed HOOS! Black Steendriver (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Monday, 21 March 2011 23:45 (thirteen years ago) link
lol, are either of you going to point out to me the relevant non-neoliberal groups in America?
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:47 (thirteen years ago) link
beliebers
― max, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:47 (thirteen years ago) link
never change with your either/or simplifications. Mordy. fortunately the real world is more complex.
by the way there are friends of mine who are gonna be in jail for years to come for some serious environmental sabotage actions and I do not appreciate your spoiled liberal NYC characterizations of their motives.
― sleeve, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:48 (thirteen years ago) link
dude, take a look around. the neoliberal superstructure is more powerful than ever. how did your friends challenge the system whatsoever?
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:49 (thirteen years ago) link
and btw: environmental sabotage probably falls under the move to radical violence category so Zizek accounts for that (and kinda favorably too)
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:50 (thirteen years ago) link
+ btw sleeve, lol at you of all ppl accusing someone of simplifications
why would I bother trying to point you towards some oppositional groups when you reserve the right to define "relevancy", like you think you have the right to define the terms of every single argument you get into.
fwiw I think the farmer's market movement has done more good than the friends I reference.
― sleeve, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:51 (thirteen years ago) link
lol ok. why don't u go be angry somewhere else
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:52 (thirteen years ago) link
why don't you stop simplifying complex elements of resistance to fit your kneejerk prejudices?
― sleeve, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:53 (thirteen years ago) link
you're right. i should stop. there. i stopped. thx for changing my life.
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:54 (thirteen years ago) link
its amazing i get up to take a shit and its like the muppet babies broke loose
― Godspeed HOOS! Black Steendriver (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Monday, 21 March 2011 23:55 (thirteen years ago) link
gross
― BIG GERTRUDE aka the steindriver (history mayne), Monday, 21 March 2011 23:56 (thirteen years ago) link
think we maybe all need a reminder this isn't the US Politics thread but the This is the thread where we talk about Slavoj Zizek... thread
― Mordy, Tuesday, 22 March 2011 00:01 (thirteen years ago) link
on cspan atm talking about wikileaks
― Mordy, Wednesday, 6 July 2011 03:23 (twelve years ago) link
w/ Amy Goodman
― Mordy, Wednesday, 6 July 2011 03:27 (twelve years ago) link
oh, and Julian apparently! just noticed him sitting there
yeah i saw that on saturday, kind of fun, mostly just recaps his piece in the LRB about how wikileaks has changed things and implores assange not to let wikileaks be subsumed into the "freedom of the press" thing and maintain their independence as something more than radical "journalists" and shit
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 6 July 2011 03:30 (twelve years ago) link
this idea that censorship indicates something positive about a country bc that censorship is needed is such a stupid idea and i think it's really indicative of a failing of the left to grapple meaningfully w/ these reasonably open democratic societies such that there's this natural yearning to go back to a moment of censorship where it becomes more clear what needs to be resisted.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 6 July 2011 04:05 (twelve years ago) link
also a failing of zizek to stop himself from saying whatever is the craziest thing at a particular moment
goin to a conference in oct where among those in attendance will be the director of "zizek!"
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 7 August 2011 07:59 (twelve years ago) link
have u seen the examined life by the same woman that also features zizek & is a lot better both for his segment & the rest imo?
― uh oh whats your fantasy (flopson), Sunday, 7 August 2011 08:01 (twelve years ago) link
also she is jeff mangum's girlfriend or wife
i just saw it last night, by coincidence! and yeah his segment is fun for sure
lol @ michael hardt
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 7 August 2011 09:25 (twelve years ago) link
more like michael fardt
― max, Sunday, 7 August 2011 12:15 (twelve years ago) link
empire by michael fardt and antonio naglri
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 7 August 2011 18:23 (twelve years ago) link
examined life is worse than the zizek documentary
― markers, Sunday, 7 August 2011 18:24 (twelve years ago) link
astra taylor is cool though, she spoke at my school the semester after i graduated
rewatched zizek last night for funzies and realized that even there he was on this bead of trying not to be ~appropriated into the liberal consensus~
i always lol when he says "this, i claim,"
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 7 August 2011 18:26 (twelve years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/RMTRC.jpg
― http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKbsdMRqhcI (Princess TamTam), Monday, 8 August 2011 02:33 (twelve years ago) link
<3
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 8 August 2011 02:35 (twelve years ago) link
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/706-communism-a-new-beginning-alain-badiou-and-slavoj-zizek-with-verso-books-at-cooper-union-new-york-october-14th-16th-2011
i'm gonna be in ny that weekend
kinda wanna go tbh?
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Wednesday, 28 September 2011 14:41 (twelve years ago) link
i say it's worth seeing Zizek at least once just so you can confirm for yourself that he's an actual human being and not some collective psychotic hallucination
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 September 2011 14:43 (twelve years ago) link
also bc as often as you think he grabs his shirt and rubs his nose? he does it more in person
The website to book your ticket is here: http://communism.eventbrite.com/
lmao
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Wednesday, 28 September 2011 15:03 (twelve years ago) link
IRL every so often he grabs your shirt and wipes his nose.
x-post
― trapdoor fucking spiders (dowd), Wednesday, 28 September 2011 17:28 (twelve years ago) link
definitely go see zizek
― markers, Wednesday, 28 September 2011 17:40 (twelve years ago) link
holy shit i could actually make this show.
― fields of salmon, Friday, 30 September 2011 03:59 (twelve years ago) link
go
― markers, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:00 (twelve years ago) link
damn they just sold out
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 30 September 2011 04:03 (twelve years ago) link
i was literally about to buy my ticket
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 30 September 2011 04:04 (twelve years ago) link
was way more excited about badiou tbh
seriously think this guy is only as famous as he is cause he has a cool name
― iatee, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:06 (twelve years ago) link
hoos are you a hayekian or a communist or a technofuturist I can't figure it out
― iatee, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:07 (twelve years ago) link
i believe in a thing called love
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 30 September 2011 04:10 (twelve years ago) link
otm
― markers, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:10 (twelve years ago) link
i mean on the real i would say i'm an anti-statist mutualist with a pretty endless optimism for the possibilities of the web, and although i'm still working out precisely how all that fits together for me systemically i definitely kinda spontaneously feel that all those ideas mesh.
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 30 September 2011 04:13 (twelve years ago) link
i do really like zizek's kinda bullshit rhetorical construction of "spontaneous affinity" with an idea ie "i haven't really thought about the compatibility of this idea with any of my other ideas with ~any depth at all~ but at least in a shallow way i like it"
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 30 September 2011 04:16 (twelve years ago) link
But yeah I really dig guys like Kevin Carson & John Robb people thinking hard about how we can use the benefits of a decentralized production to build a kind of societal virtual machine inside the rapidly degrading OS we're currently running.
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 30 September 2011 04:28 (twelve years ago) link
trying to parse that but it is breaking my rapidly degrading os
― iatee, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:30 (twelve years ago) link
haha was abt to append a #stfu to my post
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 30 September 2011 04:34 (twelve years ago) link
at the end of the day tho aren't we all really just lacanians? #zizekrealtalk
― Mordy, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:38 (twelve years ago) link
hegelians i think
― max, Friday, 30 September 2011 12:13 (twelve years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uh5MB17v9A
― banana mogul (goole), Monday, 3 October 2011 21:00 (twelve years ago) link
hilarious appearance on normally wretched australian TV panel discussion show 'q and a' last night.
― australia's #2 convicted racist (haitch), Tuesday, 4 October 2011 00:15 (twelve years ago) link
So we're virtualized and we have to find another host society when this one falls over?
― so i had sex with a piñata (mh), Tuesday, 4 October 2011 03:46 (twelve years ago) link
Is there like a societal hardware server farm
oh allow me my dumb flights of fancy sometimez
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, 4 October 2011 15:52 (twelve years ago) link
I have no doubt that you could excel at spewing out platitudes and mixed metaphors on the web
But if you do that, I am gonna have to kill you because you're better than that
― so i had sex with a piñata (mh), Tuesday, 4 October 2011 15:57 (twelve years ago) link
haha
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, 4 October 2011 16:01 (twelve years ago) link
would totally go for a pint with this dude
― Michael B, Thursday, 6 October 2011 01:59 (twelve years ago) link
I would go for a few pints with his wife.
― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Thursday, 6 October 2011 02:48 (twelve years ago) link
^
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 6 October 2011 14:11 (twelve years ago) link
Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the OWS movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ . . . What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.
When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.
And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ . . . What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.
i kinda think this is missing Zizek's point? it seems to me that preventing appropriation by the existing consensus, radical or otherwise, is one of his hobbyhorses.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, 14 October 2011 19:22 (twelve years ago) link
thought that say raymond liotta
― max, Friday, 14 October 2011 19:33 (twelve years ago) link
xp not just missing the point but kinda incoherent itself. without articulating alternatives (utopian or otherwise) you're just articulating nihilism, no? surely zizek isn't saying that they need to fit into an already existing model, but that creating a space through dissent should (will?) ultimately produce something new/different.
― Mordy, Friday, 14 October 2011 23:13 (twelve years ago) link
it's annoying when people use 'capitalism' to mean 'all the aspects of capitalism that I don't like', esp people who get paid money to think about words
― iatee, Friday, 14 October 2011 23:26 (twelve years ago) link
did everybody see/read zizek @ zuccotti btw
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 15 October 2011 00:40 (twelve years ago) link
"you can imagine sex with animals""but you can not imagine the end of capitalism"
― Milton Parker, Saturday, 15 October 2011 01:11 (twelve years ago) link
Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the OWS movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, October 14, 2011 3:22 PM Bookmark
Yeah, in fact it seems like he's confirming what Zizek is saying.
― Disraeli Geirs (Hurting 2), Saturday, 15 October 2011 01:49 (twelve years ago) link
http://www.themickeymouseclub.biz/3_1.html
― Mordy, Sunday, 8 January 2012 23:50 (twelve years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d72gkdLiWfo
― Fas Ro Duh (Gukbe), Wednesday, 9 May 2012 04:33 (eleven years ago) link
http://o.onionstatic.com/images/articles/article/28/28351/onionmagazine_4821-web_jpg_445x1000_upscale_q85.jpg
― Mordy, Friday, 25 May 2012 19:45 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/10/slavoj-zizek-humanity-ok-people-boring
― Mordy, Saturday, 16 June 2012 13:35 (eleven years ago) link
ha i was going to send that to you the other day
some choice words about american students.....
― dis civilization and its contents (nakhchivan), Saturday, 16 June 2012 14:53 (eleven years ago) link
I want to hate this dude but when I see him speak he just seems so chill
― mh, Saturday, 16 June 2012 15:19 (eleven years ago) link
i don't think he was talking about me! but i bet he was talking about someone in my class
― Mordy, Saturday, 16 June 2012 18:53 (eleven years ago) link
― dis civilization and its contents (nakhchivan), Saturday, 16 June 2012 18:56 (eleven years ago) link
On the way up in the lift he volunteers that a former girlfriend used to ask him for what he called "consensual rape".
― buzza, Saturday, 16 June 2012 19:26 (eleven years ago) link
First paragraph of "Less Than Nothing" and I'm already scandalized. Actual point of "Emperor's New Clothing" myth is that children do not understand implicit social contexts of adult society??? ("...the naïve child from Andersen’s tale who publicly exclaims that the emperor is naked―thereby missing the point that, as Alphonse Allais put it, we are all naked beneath our clothes.")
― Mordy, Saturday, 4 August 2012 23:56 (eleven years ago) link
I hope you're not clinging to the foundationalist interpretation that the child who calls the emperor naked is simply "telling the truth" about the situation. In Hans Christian Andersen's tale it is clearly stated that the clothes cannot be seen by a person who is idiotic or unfit for his office. The king and all his subjects accept this property of the clothes.
All, that is, except the child. By not seeing the clothes, the child in fact proves the condition to be true, for he proves himself unfit for the office of child. Because, as we all know, it is part of a child's job (if we may speak of childhood as a contractually binding position, which it most certainly is, complete with subsistence wages in the form of bed and board) to be utterly credulous and perpetually enchanted.
This child is a kind of magic negro in the tale. By inverting the general condition of his kind - a contractual credulousness, in the child's case - he manages to intervene to "save" the city from its own inversion: the childishness of its adults, who will believe anything they're told.
But this is where we need to think a little more deeply about what clothes and nudity actually are. Is it the case that by wearing no clothes you are automatically naked? Not necessarily; as Zizek points out, people who wear clothes are also naked. But the emperor is not "wearing no clothes". He is wearing something which everyone in his city (except one deviant child) sees and defines as clothes.
We could say that the child is, philosophically speaking, a foundationalist. For him, language is not "the Big Other" (something that one believes in but does not trust, as Zizek later says of God, paraphrasing Laibach), but Truth. He has reified and hypostatized certain relations which pertain only in language: naked / clothed, for example.
But human truth is sociological, contractual. If the emperor is not naked in the eyes of 99.9% of his people, he is not naked, period. The city is not to be "saved" by the magic child (in fact an adult figure - the only one in the tale - whose lack of resemblance to real children suggests a deep-seated child-hatred). Certainly everybody in the city is "unfit for office". Even the rogues, who think they are practicing a deception, are unfit for the office of rogue, for they make the king the most remarkable clothes he has ever worn, just as promised. They also permit the city to exchange adult disenchantment for childish enchantment.
This "unfitness for office", however, is admirable: the first step in a resistance struggle against the imperialism of "the Big Other". This is how the city will be saved, not by the corrosion of its collective truth. To try to "save" the city from the thing that is actually saving it is no better than, say, carpet-bombing Vietnam to prevent the political self-determination of its people.
The "child" stands revealed, in Lacanian terms, as a war criminal.
― Grampsy, Sunday, 5 August 2012 04:44 (eleven years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/AoNi1.gif
― WheatusVEVO (Hungry4Ass), Sunday, 5 August 2012 06:04 (eleven years ago) link
xp that is essentially how i understand allais' point
― Mordy, Sunday, 5 August 2012 12:33 (eleven years ago) link
or rather zizek summarizing allais - except for the war criminal part. the child is not a terrorist in the book but a moron.
― Mordy, Sunday, 5 August 2012 12:35 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.versobooks.com/books/1161-the-year-of-dreaming-dangerously
― markers, Tuesday, 7 August 2012 02:30 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/violent-visions-slavoj-zizek/?page=2
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, 10 August 2012 23:33 (eleven years ago) link
Wow. That's a terrible article. I didn't even realize it was a takedown in the first portion, just an astonishing misreading by someone clearly not familiar with the tradition Zizek is working within. Then as it progressed into extremist-baiting I was even more taken aback. As far as I'm concerned, John Gray was successfully trolled.
― s.clover, Saturday, 11 August 2012 02:54 (eleven years ago) link
The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations.Describing mass murder in this way as an exercise in hermeneutics is repugnant and grotesque; it is also characteristic of Žižek’s work.
Describing mass murder in this way as an exercise in hermeneutics is repugnant and grotesque; it is also characteristic of Žižek’s work.
from my position as a layman who has v little interest in trying to actually read a lot of this guy but enjoys the youtubes where he wipes snot on his shirt, i think zizek is "problematic" or whatever too; but let's be fair: stalin turned mass murder into an exercise in hermeneutics, not zizek. stalin turned society into a game where you had to send your neighbors to their deaths before they sent you to yours (section 12 of article 58 of the criminal code: failure to denounce shall carry no maximum penalty) and the only way to comfort yourself without being a sociopath was to train yourself to believe that everyone was wearing an increasingly subjective series of masks that could conceal a wrecker or saboteur even from himself. the show trials and confessions made clear that "truth", the interpretation of the text of the world, was as far as the state was concerned now very malleable. (i guess how zizek Really Feels about stalin is another and more annoying matter -- that guardian piece mordy linked upthread has a totally hilarious part where it is revealed that the only decorations in zizek's room are a poster of stalin and a poster for call of duty: black ops, which, try to unpack that, or alternately decide you don't want to give zizek the satisfaction.) also,
But it is difficult to understand the claim that the identities of anti-Semites and Jewish people are in some way mutually reinforcing—which is repeated, word for word, in Less Than Nothing—except as suggesting that the only world in which anti-Semitism can cease to exist is one in which there are no longer any Jews.
legit cannot tell if the writer realizes or not that the bolded part is... true? has nothing to do specifically with jews but seems to me to be tautological. unless you believe as deeply as any communist in the possibilities of transformation for the human soul.
i agree with some of the piece's qualms, i guess, but then again i haven't yet decided what to make of this kind of trolling:
The problem with Hitler was that he was “not violent enough"
those quotes! what do they mean? slavoj! why are you smirking? why won't you blow your fucking nose?
― a hauntingly unemployed american (difficult listening hour), Saturday, 11 August 2012 03:20 (eleven years ago) link
wasn't endorsing that article btw, i started reading it out of interest cause i've never read zizek and it struck me as wildly unfair -- espe the super-strained reading of the 'anti-semite' stuff. you could prob take quotes from any philosopher out of context to 'prove' that they're dreadful immoral people. philosophers deal with terrible unspeakable stuff that polite people don't talk about, that's kind of what philosophers are for.
where would be a good place to actually start reading zizek?
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Saturday, 11 August 2012 04:59 (eleven years ago) link
i just started reading this piece and was struck by the first two sentences
"The celebration of violence is one of the most prominent strands in Žižek’s work. He finds fault with Marx for thinking that violence can be justified as part of the conflict between objectively defined social classes."
paradox! continued reading - lots of really dumb sentences sprinkled throughout.
re: actually starting to read zizek, if you're not feeling particularly ambitious can i recommend this super excellent shorter piece on intersubjectivity? it's a great breakdown on a particular idea, it has trademark zizek metaphors (the VCR bit is classic) and it's short! http://www.lacan.com/zizek-pompidou.htm
― Mordy, Saturday, 11 August 2012 14:56 (eleven years ago) link
about 1/3 of the way through and really enjoying (ha!) "The Metastases of Enjoyment" (1994) and it makes me wonder: i've only read Zizek here and there and im curious if there are like discernable stages to his career. Is there an early Zizek and a late one?
― ryan, Sunday, 19 August 2012 16:43 (eleven years ago) link
there's no paradox. author is saying that zizek objects to marx's search for objective differences between classes (but not to marx's justification of violent class conflict).
― contenderizer, Sunday, 19 August 2012 17:30 (eleven years ago) link
also: motherfucking grampsy!
― contenderizer, Sunday, 19 August 2012 17:31 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.versobooks.com/system/images/2100/original/9781781680421_Year_of_Dreaming_Dangerously.jpg
― Perfect Chicken Forever (Merdeyeux), Saturday, 13 October 2012 11:40 (eleven years ago) link
i saw that the other day. in fact if this thread had been revived for anything else then probably i would have put it here myself.
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, 13 October 2012 12:21 (eleven years ago) link
i hope that's his facebook photo
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, 13 October 2012 12:28 (eleven years ago) link
enrique blows his nose:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/lff-blog-blow-hard-slavoj-zizek-sans-handkerchief
― crazy uncle in the attic (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 25 October 2012 18:00 (eleven years ago) link
i'd like to see the new film
― Mordy, Thursday, 25 October 2012 18:05 (eleven years ago) link
When contrarians tackle contrarians, popcorn gets ate.
― Bobby Ken Doll (Eric H.), Thursday, 25 October 2012 18:05 (eleven years ago) link
there's a great bit in "Metastases of Enjoyment" where he explains why he writes about "idiotic" pop-culture: ""The idiot for whom I endeavor to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself." there's more but i can't find it right now!
― ryan, Thursday, 25 October 2012 18:08 (eleven years ago) link
enrique has negative opinions about zizek, i am SHOCKED.
i'm no huge fan of him myself but i think this article was a good defence of a philosophy behind his shtick: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=897&fulltext=1
― Perfect Chicken Forever (Merdeyeux), Friday, 26 October 2012 00:29 (eleven years ago) link
hey i loved that article! thx
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 26 October 2012 02:29 (eleven years ago) link
the article had me going almost, but casual violence-baiting over batman and the top was bogus and made me question the rest. also i feel fairly mixed vis-a-vis 'liberal homilies'. like i think the article is giving them more credit than they deserve.
― s.clover, Friday, 26 October 2012 03:34 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_global_thinkers?page=0,55#thinker92
― Mordy, Tuesday, 27 November 2012 16:53 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/capitalism
― Mordy, Tuesday, 27 November 2012 17:32 (eleven years ago) link
Also, I really hate all of this politically correct, cultural studies bullshit. If you mention the phrase “postcolonialism,” I say, “Fuck it!” Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.
― Mordy, Sunday, 30 December 2012 04:54 (eleven years ago) link
In 1918-19, Trotsky was much harsher than Stalin. And I do like this in him. But I will never forgive him for how he screwed it up in the mid-’20s. He was so stupid and arrogant. You know what he would do? He would come to party meetings carrying French classics like Flaubert, Stendhal, to signal to others: “Fuck you, I am civilized!”
― Mordy, Sunday, 30 December 2012 05:00 (eleven years ago) link
I was going to bump this to finally ask someone if zizek is antisemitic so I could determine if I'm justified in not caring about him but I think I'm going to derive my justification from his reference to the "guilt of white liberals" instead
― (panda) (gun) (wrapped gift) (silby), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 06:32 (eleven years ago) link
i've been watching bits + pieces of pervert's guide to cinema. so funny. i love the part where he's on the boat in the birds and says, "i feel like melanie. i want to fuck mitch."
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 13:35 (eleven years ago) link
Let’s run with that. You have said before: “I am a philosopher, not a prophet.” And yet, your followers are remarkably pious; many worship you as a prophet. Why?
Well, I’m ambiguous on this. On the one hand, I return to a more classical Marxism. Like: ‘It cannot last! This is all crazy! The hour of reckoning will come, blah blah blah.’
― things that are jokes pretty much (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 13:41 (eleven years ago) link
zizek otm
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 13:44 (eleven years ago) link
and where are the guiltiest liberals of all? post-colonial vienna
http://germanistik.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/ag_hfs_germ_babka/cover_cd_bhabha.JPG
― things that are jokes pretty much (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 14:39 (eleven years ago) link
i dont think zizek is an anti-semite
― max, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 14:55 (eleven years ago) link
i don't think so either
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 14:57 (eleven years ago) link
dude is so clearly just a provocateur that even if he started praising hitler or w/e I am not sure it would be grounds for any real conclusion
― iatee, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 14:58 (eleven years ago) link
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2013/1/12/1357993749882/slavoj-zizek-010.jpg
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:00 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.himho.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Lars-Von-Trier.jpg
― things that are jokes pretty much (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:00 (eleven years ago) link
I could look at ridiculous Zizek pictures all morning
― mh, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:17 (eleven years ago) link
dude is so clearly just a provocateur that even if he started praising hitler or w/e
He tried his best with Robespierre
― Designated Striver (Tom D.), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:18 (eleven years ago) link
remember he said hitler wasn't violent enough? or the violence wasn't real enough.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:19 (eleven years ago) link
o zizek you so crazy what will you say next
― iatee, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:22 (eleven years ago) link
I like Zizek as far as it goes but i am put off (to put it mildly) by the insistence on the purity of a revolutionary rhetoric and manichaeanism.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:54 (eleven years ago) link
i think his insight that radical violence is often a release valve for capitalism's ongoing success is pretty otm. i don't think of it as a promotion of more authentic violence but more description of why resistance is so often co-opted.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:55 (eleven years ago) link
fair enough. i do think however that he holds out the possibility of a more pure or authentic "violence." that he cheekily does this by rhetorical saying or supporting practice that "liberals" would find abhorrent is fine and whatever but i think his critical project depends on that authenticity and purity being in some strange sense "real"--even if only in the negative fashion of striking an abhorrent pose.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:59 (eleven years ago) link
i mean, i get his point. i think. but one questions whether his own posing gets caught up in all this as well. i mean, he's never crossed the line so firmly as to not be an academic idol.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:00 (eleven years ago) link
similar to his keeness on good old Uncle Joe- when does it stop becoming rhetorical posturing and start becoming lauding a disgusting mass murdering tyrant?
― Neil S, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:01 (eleven years ago) link
― Mordy, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 10:19 AM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark
which is true btw
― turds (Hungry4Ass), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:01 (eleven years ago) link
and this romance with theological extremism and revolutionary politics--he holds on to those legacies as a kind of resource but im not sure i agree that they hold the same potential for "resistance" that he does.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:02 (eleven years ago) link
martin jay gave a lecture at cordoza once about how adorno was turned off by benjamin's authenticity aura bc he felt there was something inherently fascist about it. i think there's a sense of that here - purity in general is troubling and zizek is kinda foreclosing incremental changes as important or necessary. at the same time tho capitalism is remarkably resilient and global and so trying to understand why violence has failed to curtail it even while bringing down totalitarian regimes is important. esp when violence becomes a mode of expressing capitalism (under the guise of challenging it). world bank protests have failed to put a dent in the world bank, even w/ all the starbucks window breaking.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:03 (eleven years ago) link
I think Adam Kotsko does a pretty good job of explaining the apparent trollin' and extremisms in this article http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=897&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:04 (eleven years ago) link
keynes would probably say that riots are good for the economy
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:05 (eleven years ago) link
lol 'apparent trolling'
this shit is nothing new, the only thing remotely interesting about zizek is that he is not a french guy doing this
― iatee, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:06 (eleven years ago) link
xxp tho I share misgivings some of you are on aboot.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:07 (eleven years ago) link
yeah that's a great read on zizek. i still think his "project" fails (for me) for the reasons i've stated above. i think ultimately i dont see the same utility in using the old frameworks (however denuded) of revolutionary marxism and eschatological christianity (a natural pair!) -- there are, or need to be, better ways forward.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:07 (eleven years ago) link
i find zizek way more compelling than badiou xxp
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:07 (eleven years ago) link
and no keynes would not say that riots are good for the economy
― iatee, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:08 (eleven years ago) link
why not? puts the window manufacturers back to work.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:10 (eleven years ago) link
well think about it like 'unbroken windows' are a part of the economy and when they get broken the economy gets smaller and people who own those windows are now poorer. I mean the broken windows thing is a typical strawman critique of keynesianism.
― iatee, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:18 (eleven years ago) link
that's not to say that it couldn't, in the right macroeconomic situation 'put window manufacturers back to work', it's just not something anyone would suggest
― iatee, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:19 (eleven years ago) link
yeah, i was just trying to be cute about one of the ways that resistance to capitalism might actually support capitalism.
i guess i believe in marxism - that capitalism is a part of a historical process that slowly becomes socialism through technological advancement. i don't think zizek has much time or interest in that idea tho.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:22 (eleven years ago) link
much time for, or interest in, i mean
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:23 (eleven years ago) link
I can tell you for real that the mcdonalds next to zuccotti park got a shit ton of business
― iatee, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:24 (eleven years ago) link
this is a little jargony but i think judith butler's critque of Z's notion of the "necessity of contingency" with regard to the Symbolic is pertinent--she counters with the "contingency of contingency"--essentially foreclosing the possibility of the kind of necessary, authentic, or pure rhetoric that is Z's stock in trade these days.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:27 (eleven years ago) link
when talking about the matrix zizek says that neither pills are sufficient. he wants a third pill. this third pill would not give him some kind of spiritual transcendence, some kind of real, but rather would demonstrate the essential reality of the fake construct. (this is kinda kitchsy baudrillard stuff, but i'm mentioning it bc i don't think judith is being entirely fair about how zizek uses contingency.)
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:29 (eleven years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RynFTJdyldg
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:31 (eleven years ago) link
"not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in the illusion itself"
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:32 (eleven years ago) link
i can't remember where at the moment, but somewhere Zizek talks about the elephant in the room with marxism being the fact that it itself, by it's own logic, is an ideological formation determined entirely by history (and thus capitalism). can't remember how he squares that circle though.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:36 (eleven years ago) link
i'm annoyed at butler these days
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:38 (eleven years ago) link
off-topic lol
Marxism is indeed a super-structural adjunct to the capitalist base- but that doesn't necessarily make it illogical. Pure mathematics is the same and is (to some degree) a coherent system.
― Neil S, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:40 (eleven years ago) link
right but that coherence is purchased at the cost of forming an "objective" or total description--this is essentially the idea that marxism (like anything else) constitutes a "closed" system that can only really describe itself.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:43 (eleven years ago) link
yeah the q is how well it maps onto the "real world" whatever that is.
― Neil S, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:44 (eleven years ago) link
i like that video above. i do find his notions therein about some kind of exposure to trauma or libido to be really interesting--but again i'd say what id say above--it's only an openness achieved by closure first.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:45 (eleven years ago) link
I don't understand why I love this guy so much, but this guy is the ultimate bullshitter and i think his genius is in selling bullshit to people know they're buying bullshit, but the aura around the bullshit is so intriguing that they're happy to buy and he's happy to sell.
Also, I love his lisp. It's perfect in every way.
― Poliopolice, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:46 (eleven years ago) link
haha. i can't hate him, i admit. he's a fun phantom (as this thread testifies) to argue with. and i enjoy his books.
― ryan, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:49 (eleven years ago) link
in a world w/ more interesting, serious grappling w/ global political + economic trends zizek wouldn't be necessary, but there's a serious dearth of philosophers (or anyone really) talking about this stuff in any kind of comprehensive or extensive manner
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:50 (eleven years ago) link
John Gray maybe?
― Neil S, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:51 (eleven years ago) link
but yeah agreed Zizek is the only (semi-) serious left wing public intellectual of any note, with the possible exception of Perry Anderson.
― Neil S, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:52 (eleven years ago) link
― Mordy, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 11:32 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
this is one of my go-to lines for my impression/caricature of zizek
― space phwoar (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:53 (eleven years ago) link
the larb article's thing on overidentification isn't bad. it's sort of shallow, but it does help to explain one of his basic rhetorical affectations.
― s.clover, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 20:57 (eleven years ago) link
surely every good zizek impression needs a PRESHISHELY, hurting.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 21:00 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/west-crisis-democracy-finance-spirit-dictators
In short, in assessing the consequences of the referendum, the court simply accepted as fact that failing to obey the dictates of international financial institutions (or to meet their expectations) can lead to political and economic crisis, and is thus unconstitutional. To put it bluntly: since meeting these dictates and expectations is the condition of maintaining the constitutional order, they have priority over the constitution (and eo ipso state sovereignty).Slovenia may be a small country, but this decision is a symptom of a global tendency towards the limitation of democracy. The idea is that, in a complex economic situation like today's, the majority of the people are not qualified to decide – they are unaware of the catastrophic consequences that would ensue if their demands were to be met.
Slovenia may be a small country, but this decision is a symptom of a global tendency towards the limitation of democracy. The idea is that, in a complex economic situation like today's, the majority of the people are not qualified to decide – they are unaware of the catastrophic consequences that would ensue if their demands were to be met.
― Mordy, Friday, 18 January 2013 20:56 (eleven years ago) link
Zizek channeling Krugman there - though I like how he links it to distrust of democracy in general.
― o. nate, Saturday, 19 January 2013 00:24 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable
― Mordy, Sunday, 27 January 2013 01:38 (eleven years ago) link
Really? One doesn't need to be a moralist, or naive about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict it neutrally – ie to neutralise this shattering dimension – is already a kind of endorsement.Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?
Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?
― Mordy, Sunday, 27 January 2013 01:39 (eleven years ago) link
would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators
I mean, wouldn't it?
― (panda) (gun) (wrapped gift) (silby), Sunday, 27 January 2013 02:53 (eleven years ago) link
http://keshek.tumblr.com/http://i.minus.com/iixeRZllRY8MT.gif
― a permanent mental health break (difficult listening hour), Sunday, 27 January 2013 19:51 (eleven years ago) link
I'll be seeing Big Žižžy give a public lecture entitled 'a reply to my critics' at the end of next month, cuz, why not I suppose.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Monday, 28 January 2013 16:51 (eleven years ago) link
plz liveblog
― Mordy, Monday, 28 January 2013 16:51 (eleven years ago) link
I'LL TRY. I'm perhaps more interested in seeing just how different the crowd and vibe will be from my usual philosophy events than I am in Z himself, though I also feel it's important to see him in the flesh before his inevitable and imminent coke-induced heart failure.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Monday, 28 January 2013 18:10 (eleven years ago) link
that's exciting! I saw Bruno Latour give a talk once at Rice but I had a hard time with his accent and almost fell asleep.
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 18:14 (eleven years ago) link
braggin hard (and also potentially laughing in the face of web anonymity) but I was at a small closed workshop featuring Latour last week, super interesting guy who I could listen to chatting away forever, even if I probably have ~deep problems~ with his thought.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Monday, 28 January 2013 18:19 (eleven years ago) link
braggin hard in the least hard manner of braggin imaginable, that is.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Monday, 28 January 2013 18:20 (eleven years ago) link
that's really cool. he's someone whose work i am passing familiar with (particularly "We Have Never Been Modern" of course) but i'd be super interested in a critique of his thought.
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 18:29 (eleven years ago) link
I don't know him particularly well either, but I'll definitely be digging deeper now. I think the kind of standard criticism is along Marxist lines - that the flattening out of networks you get in his thought doesn't allow you to think the particular form and strength of capitalist power relations and such - but the one that interests me more is a more directly philosophical one (and is maybe specific to the positive project of his major upcoming book, 'An Inquiry into Modes of Existence'), in that it feels to me that as his theory of multiple ontologies doesn't emerge from a more fundamental single ontology or some other kind of substrate, it's difficult to really say how the ontologies relate to one another. But that there is about the extent of my thought on it so far.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Monday, 28 January 2013 18:41 (eleven years ago) link
thanks for that!
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 18:42 (eleven years ago) link
i liked the less theoretical, more actually following people around and writing down stuff latour.
― s.clover, Monday, 28 January 2013 18:43 (eleven years ago) link
that felt much more exciting to me than anything since.
― s.clover, Monday, 28 January 2013 18:44 (eleven years ago) link
i find his status amongst the object-oriented ontology crowd (of which I am also suspicious of but can't form a solid opinion without further research) to be kinda weird and interesting.
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 18:46 (eleven years ago) link
xp yeah, and I do think it's potentially illegitimate to be thinking of him in the kind of strictly philosophical terms I am there. The stuff that he's doing with his website and crowdsourcing seems really interesting too.
(For me the OOO association had put me off reading more Latour...)
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Monday, 28 January 2013 18:48 (eleven years ago) link
'A reply to my critics', eh? Seems to me that the whole point of a guy like Zizek is to toss out endless challops and generate his own critics, so that he can reply to them ad infinitum.
― Aimless, Monday, 28 January 2013 19:14 (eleven years ago) link
if only all challops had the quality of zizek challops
― Mordy, Monday, 28 January 2013 19:17 (eleven years ago) link
As a challops-driven entity, zizek certainly is the top dog, as it were. he's in a different league from Charlie Sheen altogether.
― Aimless, Monday, 28 January 2013 19:22 (eleven years ago) link
i can't speak to his qualities as a philosopher or political historian, but as a film critic-theorist he really strikes me as the emperor's new clothes - or rather, second-hand, shopworn clothes, indebted specifically to the kind of Lacanian-post-structuralist thought that was rife at Screen, Cahiers etc in the 1970s. And his thoughts on Hitchcock are really just a re-writing of Robin Wood's kind of Freudian 'close reading'. Serious question: am i missing where he deviates or advances from these past critical orthodoxies (the recurring film studies questions of cause and effect and representation/identification seem so crudely stated in that piece on ZERO..., but as a piece of journalism in the Guardian i wldn't hold it to the same standard as his more 'specialist' film writing.)
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 28 January 2013 20:27 (eleven years ago) link
i'm thinking especially of his writings in this volume, btw - TERRIBLE title:
http://www.versobooks.com/system/images/355/original/9781844676217-frontcover.jpg
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 28 January 2013 20:29 (eleven years ago) link
my recollection was that w/r/t film, Z never claimed to be more than a popularizer and practitioner of existing critical approaches. I don't know the field enough to say if there's more to him than that -- in fact my sense is more that his attitude towards that stuff is that it is useful for introducing approaches that he then wants to apply outside of film, not that he's so deeply interested in having anything new to say about hitchcock or w/e at all. Even the title of his book sort of points there -- it's pop-lacan via examples from hitchcock.
― s.clover, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:22 (eleven years ago) link
otm. and Aimless's kneejerk reaction and the challops thing... seems prevalent? where does that come from? i've only read the iraq book and seen the film where he wants to fuck mitch and from those, he can be provocative sure (sometimes in a just-throwing-things-out-there way which is not my favorite thing about his approach) but always in a v. good way imo that encourages thought instead of shutting it down.
― Butt Trump tweet (Matt P), Monday, 28 January 2013 21:39 (eleven years ago) link
The problem with Hitler was that he was “not violent enough,” his violence was not “essential” enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order would survive…. The true problem of Nazism is not that it “went too far” in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised.
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:43 (eleven years ago) link
gee where does the kneejerk reaction to this guy from from hmmmmmm
I think a lot of ppl don't really understand that quote? He's not saying that Hitler didn't kill enough Jews.
― Mordy, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:45 (eleven years ago) link
i enjoy zizek for entertainment purposes only, but his ideas are pretty much worthless in that they're not very well thought out.
― Spectrum, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:50 (eleven years ago) link
i would be a lot more into that quote if he put "problem" in scare quotes like he puts everything else
― max, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:53 (eleven years ago) link
to a lot of people the "true problem" of Nazism is that it implemented mass racial killing on an industrialized scale
― max, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:54 (eleven years ago) link
huh really?
― Mordy, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:57 (eleven years ago) link
hi buddy
― max, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:58 (eleven years ago) link
aw you're so disarming
― Mordy, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:00 (eleven years ago) link
mordy I have a game for you, post 'The problem with Hitler was that he was “not violent enough,” his violence was not “essential” enough. ' on your fb newsfeed and try to explain to everyone what exactly zizek *really* meant
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:00 (eleven years ago) link
its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised.
has anyone ever head of Gillian Rose's Hegel Contra Sociology? this part put me in mind of that. thesis being that hegelian dialectic holds out the very possibility for an "absolute" that goes past, aufheben-style, the existing order. this is the crux, and problem, with zizek and his recent stuff. fundamentally it assumes that contradictions are limit conditions to be then overcome--rather than the idea that contradictions are not in fact threatening to the existing order but the basis of its self-reproduction, so to speak. in other words, i dont think the violence of Zizek's rhetoric gets past what he's saying about Hitler.
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:02 (eleven years ago) link
not to mention the revealing use of "impotent" in that passage--speaking of psychoanalysis!
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:04 (eleven years ago) link
funny that the 2nd post itt mentions leninism. seems like the 'big idea' with him to me.
― goole, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:05 (eleven years ago) link
all you have to do is insert "unlike lenin" after every other clause of that hitler quote
― goole, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:07 (eleven years ago) link
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:08 (eleven years ago) link
Lenin, unlike Hitler, was presumably a virile man with the capacity to act!
stikes me that deconstruction of "reaction" vs "response" in derrida's "the animal that therefore i am" is also something that zizek (much like lacan in derrida's reading!) is eliding.
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:12 (eleven years ago) link
idk i think it's simpler than that: hitler's violence was bad because he was a racist right-winger, equivalent violence by OTHER PEOPLE I COULD NAME is ok because it's by communist left-wingers.
the real "problem" of nazism, to zizek, is surely that it made mass political violence look pretty bad
― goole, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:15 (eleven years ago) link
its just sort of funny who in particular seems most able to be trolled by zizek.
― s.clover, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:26 (eleven years ago) link
oh the hitler quote. woooo
i look at it from the perspective that the actual "we just killed lots of people" is an act separate from ideology. and a bad one! always a bad one, no matter who makes the decision and for what political reasons. choosing who to kill, then murdering them, feeding the dogs or the gas chambers, just not a good look. like, he doesn't have to spell that out. so he isn't talking about the actual killing people in the quote, he's talking about the sort of strong political/social vision that might tempt one to kill dissidents and has done so historically (again, this is bad) (but a vision with this kind of strength is also what could pose a credible challenge to global capitalism), and then critiquing that vision and the impulses behind it (which leaves traces in the violence but crucially in my mind isn't really the cause of the violence, the cause of the violence is deciding "we will kill these people now lol" + a whole host of other very banal bureaucratic/industrial reasons that are actually logical endpoint capitalism).
basically i'm interested in the idea that the political impulse/vision/ideology isn't actually the cause of the killings. The cause of the killings is compromise, or deciding to kill.
have no idea if any of that is coherent at all.
― Butt Trump tweet (Matt P), Monday, 28 January 2013 22:44 (eleven years ago) link
"might tempt one to kill dissidents" should really read "might lead to the situation where one feels like it's required to kill dissidents for reasons that are actually undermining the cause"
― Butt Trump tweet (Matt P), Monday, 28 January 2013 22:45 (eleven years ago) link
n.b. i'm almost totally brainwashed \o_O/ so ymmv
― Butt Trump tweet (Matt P), Monday, 28 January 2013 22:49 (eleven years ago) link
if only all comedians had this kinda posse to defend their bad jokes
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:58 (eleven years ago) link
i'm taking that as a compliment.
― Butt Trump tweet (Matt P), Monday, 28 January 2013 23:02 (eleven years ago) link
arentya all reading iatee's NYRB book review as a quote from zizek? the quotes are zizek
― beez in the katz (zvookster), Monday, 28 January 2013 23:04 (eleven years ago) link
lol and yet people were more than willing to defend it
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 23:09 (eleven years ago) link
thats a zizek quote http://cl.ly/2g0t0H331w3K
― max, Monday, 28 January 2013 23:12 (eleven years ago) link
the quote does read differently in the original context but even there the point zizek is making seems somewhat divorced from actual history: was making sure 'the capitalist order would survive' really hitler's top priority? he prob could have done a better job of that by not invading a bunch of other countries and all that other stupid shit he did.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, 28 January 2013 23:28 (eleven years ago) link
also he might have considered having a capitalist economy
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 23:32 (eleven years ago) link
That Hilter quote is instructive, but not crucial, to understanding zizek challops. The main key is to notice how many categorical statements he makes, without the slightest hint of qualification, for which he has laid insufficent groundwork. If one simply responds, mentally with "no, you are wrong", one may look in vain to what preceded these statements to discover what chain of reasoning led to them or any basis apart from perhaps a passing allusion to some inexplicit theory, or else just dropping names.
Such baseless pronouncments then become the basis for his later castles in the air. It is rather like watching a televangelist lay out his arguments based on the idea that the Bible is the Word of God. Except zizek's gods write like Momus.
― Aimless, Monday, 28 January 2013 23:45 (eleven years ago) link
― max, Monday, 28 January 2013 17:12
oh my bad, thx. i read the nyrb review recently and misremembered it as the author's voice somehow
― beez in the katz (zvookster), Monday, 28 January 2013 23:48 (eleven years ago) link
haha momus is a good comparison actually
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 23:49 (eleven years ago) link
i think in most cases the "chain of reasoning" that leads zizek to say the things he says are pretty front and center when you see him a part of the critical tradition he explicitly adopts (ie, marx, hegel, lacan). that's not to say i agree with him, as i noted above i don't because i think that tradition has run its course, but he's not really trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. in fact, i think he's in the main admirably clear about his aims and assumptions.
― ryan, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:10 (eleven years ago) link
throw in st. paul and lenin to his list of heroes too.
― ryan, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:11 (eleven years ago) link
in fact, i think he's in the main admirably clear about his aims and assumptions.
^^
― Butt Trump tweet (Matt P), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:14 (eleven years ago) link
"was making sure 'the capitalist order would survive' really hitler's top priority?"
that's a longstanding leftist analysis.
― s.clover, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:31 (eleven years ago) link
i am not a nazi guy but nazism was in part (the part that wasn't about versailles and "stab-in-the-back") a reaction to the 20s/30s Death Of Capitalism the same way new dealism was and communism eagerly expected to be, right? hitler's solution was probably less "revolutionary" than even fdr's, hence "not violent enough" -- did not besiege any of the old fortresses of real power but instead just reanimated the economy by turning the country into a psychotic war machine. (and ironically reanimated the american economy into the bargain.) whether zizek's talking about literal violence or figurative violence or both and wtf the scare quotes are supposed to be accomplishing is a different and v zizek thing.
― a permanent mental health break (difficult listening hour), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:51 (eleven years ago) link
"not a nazi guy" = not any kind of an expert on nazism. i am also not a nazi.
dlh's understanding is the way i understand it more-or-less
― Mordy, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:52 (eleven years ago) link
uh hitler's solution was considerable more 'revolutionary' than fdrs but in any case phrasing an argument like that the way he does is 100% about getting a reaction. which, I mean, congrats, he's famous and the people making subtle historical arguments w/o references to the wire aren't.
― iatee, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:58 (eleven years ago) link
that's capitalism I guess
i think also violence is important to zizek as an action w/ transformative power that cannot easily be co-opted by capitalism. nazism obv complicates this (as does all reactionary violence which is to say all violence really) and so nazism becomes this gash/wound in reality but one that reconstitutes the previous forms, not obliterates them. obv the question is why violence needs to be preserved, but i think that makes the most intuitive sense - bc violence really is traumatizing and does break forms and does create gashes in reality and this is really why a large sense of postmodernity is living w/ trauma (ok, this is really when i read adorno into zizek, this eternal bleakness)
― Mordy, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:58 (eleven years ago) link
nazism and hitlerism were ultimately divergent results of the same reaction, neither version was a genuine critique of capitalism - they didn't see the fundamental problems of society in terms of capital/alienation
not the same thing as saying most of those idiots had a developed economic theory, but it seems fair to say that Hitler especially had no interest in removing the capitalist order
― Hermann Hesher (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:59 (eleven years ago) link
he was a keynesian
― Mordy, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:00 (eleven years ago) link
no
― iatee, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:02 (eleven years ago) link
he was not
i don't think Hitler had any developed economic ideas? his whole world view seems purely racial/mythological, he was happy to employ any technocrat who'd bankroll his military demands and wasn't obviously Jewish
― Hermann Hesher (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:05 (eleven years ago) link
it'd be closer to the truth for Zizek to say that capitalists were prepared to use Hitler to ensure their order survived
― Hermann Hesher (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:07 (eleven years ago) link
whatever economic views he did have led to a transition away from a free market economy so any 'savior of capitalism' argument requires word games, a flexible definition of capitalism, very fuzzy views of historical events etc but hey. hitler. capitalism. the wire.
― iatee, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:09 (eleven years ago) link
i don't know that hitler thought he was a keynesian, but he was
― Mordy, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:13 (eleven years ago) link
oh yeah also violence produces excess - that's important too
― Mordy, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:14 (eleven years ago) link
i'm obv not coming from the same ideological place as zizek (wherever that is -- a place where 'leninist' analysis matters, i guess) but surely hitler was at least as 'revolutionary' as any leader in history unless you define revolutionary as 'overthrows capitalism' and nothing else, which would exclude an awful lot of actual historical revolutions, including the (first) russian revolution.
defining nazi germany as 'conservative' or even 'reactionary' seems very off to me because it suggests that hitler et al were committed to preserving the status quo, which they really weren't unless you define it very narrowly. surely it wasn't really in the best interests of 'german bourgeois society' or german industry to declare war on the u.s. for no reason or to try to kill off an entire race.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:17 (eleven years ago) link
i'm pretty sure - but i'm a little tipsy and off to bed so i'll rethink this later - that one of the eventual failings of Hitler's government was its inability to mobilise a properly state-controlled economy in the way that say the Keynesian UK gov cd - Hitler never had the will or the bureaucracy to exercise proper centralised control
― Hermann Hesher (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:18 (eleven years ago) link
it wasn't really in the best interests of 'german bourgeois society' or german industry to declare war on the u.s. for no reason or to try to kill off an entire race
that's not what happened.
whatever economic views he did have led to a transition away from a free market economy so any 'savior of capitalism' argument requires word games
again, standard leftist critique distinguishes between capitalism, which is an economic system, and "free-market economy" which is an ideological apparatus as much as anything else.
germany in the 30s was sort of fascism on one side or actual reorganization of property on the other. nazis were pretty obviously the reactionary alternative.
― s.clover, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:50 (eleven years ago) link
the 'economic system' is a flexible boogeyman term that fits into whatever attention grabbing statement someone like zizek wants it to fit.
― iatee, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 02:11 (eleven years ago) link
The apotheosis of Hitler within the larger framework of Nazism prevented the party from creating an ideology uninfected by Hitler's personal quirks, idiocies, hobby-horses and interests, because it was impossible for the party to ignore or resist his personal authority. The support of capitalists such as Krupp was critical to the power the Nazi party accrued, but the industrialists and bankers were only able to steer the party to the degree that Hitler did not override them.
Hitler was interested in capitalism only as a handy engine to lend power to his own political and cultural ideas. He would have been just as glad to harness some other source of power, if it had been capable of lending an equal amount of force to the implementation of his grandiose plans. Nazism was capitalist by the chance of history, not as a founding principle.
― Aimless, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 02:13 (eleven years ago) link
could you elaborate?
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 02:15 (eleven years ago) link
just meant that germany didn't declare war on the u.s. for "no reason".
― s.clover, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:06 (eleven years ago) link
yep, no such thing as an economic system. gotcha.
― s.clover, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:07 (eleven years ago) link
why yes that's exactly what I was saying
― iatee, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:09 (eleven years ago) link
ok, it exists but we can't talk about it.
― s.clover, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:10 (eleven years ago) link
okay that sounds like a fair deal
― iatee, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:14 (eleven years ago) link
'no reason' was a bad way to put it, really just meant that hitler declaring war on the u.s. was a somewhat arbitrary decision, he wasn't required to do it by the terms of the tripartite pact since japan had struck first.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 19:10 (eleven years ago) link
if we're talking about unnecessary declarations of war not in the best interest of german bourgeois society there's always the ussr
― a permanent mental health break (difficult listening hour), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 19:39 (eleven years ago) link
Zizek on "violence" (esp. in the context of the Hitler thing) is basically a rip of Benjamin's Critique of Violence, intentional or otherwise.
I think if you read that and then go back to Zizek then the latter's more inflammatory-seeming statements become a lot more intelligible.
This also chimes in with Mordy's comments upthread about the relationship between Benjamin and Zizek's respective forms of purism and Adorno's discomfort with the former.
I tend to think Zizek usually avoids talking about Benjamin and Adorno like the plague because it's a real point of weakness from a theoretical perspective (i.e. I think Adorno would offer an excellent critique of Zizek and I suspect Zizek knows it). (disclaimer I haven't read Z's last few books so maybe he has started talking about them?)
― Tim F, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 00:38 (eleven years ago) link
This is why Hegel was right to insist that the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk; and also why the twentieth‐century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough—that is, insofar as the fundamental capitalist thrust of unleashed productivity survived in it, deprived of its concrete contradictory conditions of existence. The inadequacy of Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, and so on, lies in their abandonment of the concrete social analysis of capitalism: in their very critique or overcoming of Marx, they in a certain way repeat Marx’s mistake—like him, they take unleashed productivity as something ultimately independent of the concrete capitalist social formation. Capitalism and communism are not two different historical realizations, two species, of “instrumental reason”—instrumental reason as such is capitalist, grounded in capitalist relations, and “really existing socialism” failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to “have one’s cake and eat it,” to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient. Marx’s notion of the communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described. In other words, our wager is that, even if we take away the teleological notion of communism (the society of fully unleashed productivity) as the implicit standard by which Marx measures the alienation of existing society, the bulk of his “critique of political economy,” his insights into the self‐propelling vicious cycle of capitalist (re)production, survives.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 00:45 (eleven years ago) link
Also:
In this case, it is Adorno’s “negative dialectics” which, paradoxically, remains within the confines of “identitarian” thought: the endless critical “work of the negative” which is never done, since it presupposes Identity as its starting point and foundation. In other words, Adorno does not see how what he is looking for (a break‐out from the confines of Identity) is already at work at the very heart of the Hegelian dialectic, so that it is Adorno’s very critique which obliterates the subversive core of Hegel’s thought, retroactively cementing the figure of his dialectic as the pan‐logicist monster of the all‐consuming Absolute Notion.
These are from the new one - I haven't finished reading it.
oh, this bit is great too:
The question is not which of these two logics of the symptom is the right one—it depends on what type of universality or totality we are dealing with. In the case of capitalism, the Marxist view that crises, wars, and other “deviant” phenomena are its “truth” fully holds. Democracy is a more ambiguous case—exemplary here is the legendary study of the “authoritarian personality” in which Adorno participated. The features of the “authoritarian personality” are clearly opposed to the standard figure of the “open” democratic personality, and the underlying dilemma is whether these two types of personality are opposed in a struggle, so that we should fight for one against the other, or whether the “authoritarian” personality is in fact the symptomal “truth” of the “democratic” personality. Along these lines, the shift from Adorno to Habermas apropos modernity can itself be formulated in these terms: at the heart of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s “dialectic of enlightenment” is the idea that phenomena such as fascism are “symptoms” of modernity, its necessary consequence (which is why, as Horkheimer memorably put it, those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep silent about fascism). For Habermas, by contrast, they are “symptoms” or indicators of the fact that modernity remains an “unfinished project,” that it has not yet deployed all its potential.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 00:47 (eleven years ago) link
1. Agree with the first quote
2. Kind of see what the second one is getting at but would need to read around the quote to be certain. I suspect Adorno would counter that Zizek's resolutions are false, though he might concede that Zizek approaches questions of identity/nonidentity in a way more attractive to him than most.
3. Agree with the third quote, which is basically an example of the endless truth that whenever Habermas disagrees with Adorno, Adorno is to be preferred.
― Tim F, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 00:55 (eleven years ago) link
I think it's interesting that in the third and first quotes Adorno is used specifically to explain why Capitalism is so all-encompassing, so impossible to break with - Zizek is slowly buying into Adorno's POV about violence.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 00:59 (eleven years ago) link
In this case, it is Adorno’s “negative dialectics” which, paradoxically, remains within the confines of “identitarian” thought: the endless critical “work of the negative” which is never done, since it presupposes Identity as its starting point and foundation.
It seems easy to say that there is an unnecessary presupposition of identity in Adorno, but it seems to me that Zizek does essentially the same thing, the difference being that his conflation of identity with madness (that's unfairly simplistic but will serve for current purposes) makes it seem as if he's escaping the issue. Adorno is much more concerned with how critique can account for itself than Zizek is - if nothing else it would not be in Zizek's style to seek to establish the basis on which he can speak - which is why he seems more lost in a hall of mirrors.
Not that I want to turn this into Adorno vs Zizek, but I think that those issues are much more interesting than "zizek supports hitler y/n"
― Tim F, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 01:49 (eleven years ago) link
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 12:59 AM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Yes. I also think that Zizek's apparent disagreement in the first quote - i.e. whether it is capitalism or instrumental reason that is the problem - is really a non-issue at core. There are certain historical reasons post-dating Adorno that lie behind Zizek's insistence on making capitalism qua capitalism the problem, and I think if Adorno were in the same position he'd make the same choice. Likewise, Zizek's notion of a certain ahistorical kernel of social trauma around which different historical manifestations of (let's call it) the symbolic order organise themselves, and which he calls "class struggle", seems to me to basically approach the issue of identity/nonidentity and instrumental reason in a very consistent fashion.
― Tim F, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 01:54 (eleven years ago) link
this bit strikes me as key as well in that he's explicitly setting out to recover some version of the dialectic:
In other words, our wager is that, even if we take away the teleological notion of communism (the society of fully unleashed productivity) as the implicit standard by which Marx measures the alienation of existing society, the bulk of his “critique of political economy,” his insights into the self‐propelling vicious cycle of capitalist (re)production, survives.
of the question is then: can you do really separate those two things? likewise with the bit about the "subversive core" of Hegel's thought.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 03:31 (eleven years ago) link
i suppose in some sense he's trying to de-couple the notion of "critique" from its historical association with attempts at overcoming modernity--but id still argue that in his thought there's at least the shadow of a mechanism designed to transform contingency into necessity, and isn't that really eventually the core of the problem with this kind of thinking?
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 03:34 (eleven years ago) link
i should, trying to transform its own contingency into its necessity.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 03:37 (eleven years ago) link
Stepping into this a bit late, but has anyone read Thomas Mann's essays on Goethe? Coincidentally I checked his collected essays out of the library last week. Written around the time of his exile, they posit the Great Man as founder and apotheosis of German middle class values. The essays themselves are glosses on what is happening to writers like Mann in Nazi Germany who represented the post-Goethe type embedded in German society writing novels that unavoidably celebrate the kind of aesthetic detachment made possible only by money and of course contains within it the seeds of its own eradication.
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 30 January 2013 03:51 (eleven years ago) link
Also, where should I start with Zizek? I've read about him more than I've read him. Is Living in the End Times a good place to start?
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 30 January 2013 03:57 (eleven years ago) link
others will be better placed to answer that, but i started with Enjoy Your Symptom! not knowing much about Lacan at that point. his best that i've read is Metastases of Enjoyment but it's a little tougher going.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:08 (eleven years ago) link
more on violence (and the holocaust!):
The theological implications of this violence are unexpectedly far‐reaching: what if the ultimate addressee of the biblical commandment “Do not kill” is God (Jehovah) himself, and we fragile humans are his neighbors exposed to divine rage? How often, in the Old Testament, do we encounter God as a dark stranger who brutally intrudes into human lives and sows destruction? When Levinas wrote that our first reaction to a neighbor is to kill him, was he not implying that this originally refers to God’s relationship to humans, so that the commandment “Do not kill” is an appeal to God to control his rage? Insofar as the Jewish solution is a dead God, a God who survives only in the “dead letter” of the sacred book, of the Law to be interpreted, what dies with the death of God is precisely the God of the Real, of destructive fury and revenge. That often stated claim—God died in Auschwitz—thus has to be inverted: God came alive in Auschwitz. Recall the story from the Talmud about two rabbis debating a theological point: the one losing the debate calls upon God himself to intervene and decide the issue, but when God duly arrives, the other rabbi tells him that since his work of creation is already accomplished, he now has nothing to say and should leave, which God then does. It is as if, in Auschwitz, God came back, with catastrophic consequences. The true horror does not occur when we are abandoned by God, but when God gets too close to us.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:08 (eleven years ago) link
if you want to read something really light + funny start w/ living in the end times. his best work is the parallax view imo. or just enjoy this: http://www.lacan.com/zizek-pompidou.htm - i feel like his insight about vcrs has really transformed my life.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:10 (eleven years ago) link
wonder what Zizek thinks about Calvin
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:13 (eleven years ago) link
I could also just keep posting quotes that I like. Like this one:
The mechanism at work here is the same as that underlying Golda Meir’s famous reply when asked whether she believed in God: “I believe in the Jewish people, and they believe in God.” This formula of transitive belief is today universalized: one does not believe oneself, but, relying on another “subject supposed to believe,” one can act as if one believes. Furthermore, one should read Meir’s statement in a very precise way: it does not imply the position of the elitist leader who feeds his naïve‐believing subjects with Platonic “beautiful lies.” The State of Israel is here exemplary: the fetishist disavowal is inscribed into its very foundations. Although it has, according to surveys, the most atheistic population in the world (more than 60 percent of the Jews in Israel do not believe in God), its basic legitimization (claiming the land given to them by God) is theological—the implicit formula is thus: “We know very well there is no God, but we nonetheless believe he gave us the holy land.”
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:13 (eleven years ago) link
I don't remember anything about Calvin but he does discuss Italo Calvino a bit.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:14 (eleven years ago) link
my friend says that zizek is full of shit about his stats bc 60% of israeli jews observe shabbat, but that only means that at least 20% of shabbat observers don't believe in god
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:15 (eleven years ago) link
like, the things i "respect" about Calvin, call it the "madness" of his vision, seems like things he'd be into!
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:16 (eleven years ago) link
That is to say, the hegemonic ideological field imposes on us a plane of (ideological) visibility with its own “principal contradiction” (today, the opposition between market‐freedom‐democracy and fundamentalism‐terrorism‐totalitarianism—“Islamo‐Fascism,” etc.), and the first thing we must do is reject (subtract from) this opposition, recognize it as a false opposition destined to obfuscate the true line of division. Lacan’s formula for this redoubling is 1 + 1 + a: the “official” antagonism (the Two) is always supplemented by an “indivisible remainder” which indicates its foreclosed dimension. In other words, the true antagonism is always reflexive, it is the antagonism between the “official” antagonism and that which is foreclosed by it (this is why, in Lacan’s mathematics, 1 + 1 = 3). Today, again, the true antagonism is not between liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalism, but between the very field of their opposition and the excluded Third (radical emancipatory politics).This is why Lacan’s formula of “1 + 1 + a” is best exemplified by the class struggle: the two classes plus the excess of the “Jew,” the objet a, the supplement to the antagonistic couple.
This is why Lacan’s formula of “1 + 1 + a” is best exemplified by the class struggle: the two classes plus the excess of the “Jew,” the objet a, the supplement to the antagonistic couple.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:20 (eleven years ago) link
That's kinda the bullshit tho. He never exactly formulates the radical emancipatory politics. It's like Adorno holding out for someone to come up with a better idea. Maybe that's why he calls it the Jew - bc he recognizes this unsurmountable distance but (like fascist politics responding to Capitalism) displaces it onto the Jew instead of just recognizing that you can't resolve the dialectic, just rearrange it.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:22 (eleven years ago) link
that's a great bit you quote because i think his whole program can be gleaned from that.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:24 (eleven years ago) link
"We know very well there is no God, but we nonetheless believe he gave us the holy land.”
We know that Communism-end of history-messianic-emancipatory politics will never happen, but we nonetheless believe etc
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:28 (eleven years ago) link
i like when zizek admits he's talking shitit's like when you're bullshitting w/ a friend and then you acknowledge that you're just fucking around
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:31 (eleven years ago) link
derrida's "messianic without messianism" (or maybe it's the other way around) is kind of a similar attempt to peal these things apart.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:32 (eleven years ago) link
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 3:31 AM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
If you haven't already, the best thing I've found on this issue is Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, his series of essays-in-the-round with Butler and Ernesto Laclau. I think if pressed Zizek will normally concede that the only thing he really thinks transcends its own immanent historical moment is a failure of the social field to construct itself without antoganism. This is basically the same as Laclau - notwithstanding that they spend the entire book appearing to disagree violently - except that Zizek wants to ground that failure in a particularly vague, expansive notion of "class struggle" as the first-and-last antagonism that manifests in all other antagonisms. However my stock answer when people ask "what should I read first" is his first book The Sublime Object of Ideology - this is not the reason I normally give but perhaps the best reason being that his theoretical apparatus is mostly in place but he's not yet quite the agent provocateur that he later becomes (he would probably say he's still in thrall to liberal democratic ideology at that point), so it's much more digestible for a first-timer (or seemed so to me when I was 19).
― Tim F, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:42 (eleven years ago) link
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 4:28 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
yeah I think this is spot-on, you could even say that Zizek believes in the working class and they believe in emancipation.
― Tim F, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:43 (eleven years ago) link
Which they possibly don't, even, but for Zizek's purposes they do.
yes "Contingency, Hegemony, Universality" is great. i had forgotten about that one!
you could even say that Zizek believes in the working class and they believe in emancipation.
nicely put!
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:44 (eleven years ago) link
this almost makes him seem touchingly sentimental.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:45 (eleven years ago) link
I think he is a bit sentimental.
A lot of his challops make more sense (as performances, at least) if I conceive of him as like the number one fan for a band that used to be quite big but have been near-universally unfashionable for quite some time.
― Tim F, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 05:06 (eleven years ago) link
Hegel is not Marx. The rabble is not the proletariat, communism is not on the horizon, and revolution is not a solution ... Hegel is not prepared to see in the contradiction of civil society the death knell of class society, to identify capitalism itself as its own gravedigger, or to see in the disenfranchised masses anything more than a surge of blind, formless reaction, “elemental, irrational, barbarous, and terrifying” ... a swarm whose integration remains unrealized and unrealizable, an “ought” ... But the aporia, untypical for Hegel, points to something unfinished or already crumbling within the edifice whose construction Hegel declares to be completed, a failure of both actuality and rationality that undermines the solidity of the state he elsewhere celebrates, in Hobbesian language, as an earthly divinity.Is Hegel thus simply constrained by his historical context, did he come too early to see the emancipatory potential of the “part of no‐part,” so that all he could have done was to honestly register the unresolved and unresolvable aporias of his rational state?
Is Hegel thus simply constrained by his historical context, did he come too early to see the emancipatory potential of the “part of no‐part,” so that all he could have done was to honestly register the unresolved and unresolvable aporias of his rational state?
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 05:09 (eleven years ago) link
However, as the example of the temporal discord between France and Germany demonstrated, non‐contemporaneity is for Hegel a principle: Germany was politically in delay with regard to France (where the Revolution took place), which is why it could only prolong it in the domain of thought; however, the Revolution itself emerged in France only because France itself was in delay with regard to Germany, that is, because France had missed the Reformation which asserts inner freedom and thus reconciles secular and spiritual domains. So, far from being an exception or an accidental complication, anachronism is the “signature” of consciousness: “experience is continually outbidding itself, perpetually making demands that it (i.e., the world) is unequipped to realize and unprepared to recognize, and comprehension inevitably comes too late to make a difference, if only because the stakes have already changed.”This anachronistic untimeliness holds especially for revolutions: “The ‘French’ Revolution that provides the measure of ‘German’ untimeliness is itself untimely ... There is no right time or ‘ripe time’ for revolution (or there would be no need of one). The Revolution always arrives too soon (conditions are never ready) and too late (it lags forever behind its own initiative).”
This anachronistic untimeliness holds especially for revolutions: “The ‘French’ Revolution that provides the measure of ‘German’ untimeliness is itself untimely ... There is no right time or ‘ripe time’ for revolution (or there would be no need of one). The Revolution always arrives too soon (conditions are never ready) and too late (it lags forever behind its own initiative).”
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 05:12 (eleven years ago) link
in that last bit he's quoting from this i think:http://www.amazon.com/Mourning-Sickness-Revolution-Cultural-Present/dp/0804761272
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 05:13 (eleven years ago) link
this is all from the new one? good stuff, anyway. i like reading him on hegel.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 05:14 (eleven years ago) link
zizek, stan for the working class
― max, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 12:31 (eleven years ago) link
The true horror does not occur when we are abandoned by God, but when God gets too close to us.
i bet he liked prometheus
Some months before writing this, at an art round table, I was asked to comment on a painting I had seen there for the first time. I did not have any idea about it, so I engaged in total bluff, which went on something like this: the frame of the painting in front of us is not its true frame; there is another, invisible, frame, implied by the structure of the painting, the frame that enframes our perception of the painting, and these two frames do not overlap—there is an invisible gap separating the two. The pivotal content of the painting isnot rendered in its visible part, but is located in this dis‐location of the two frames, in the gap that separates them. Are we, today, in our post‐modern madness, still able to discern the traces of this gap? Perhaps more than the reading of a painting hinges on it; perhaps, the decisive dimension of humanity will be lost when we will lose the capacity to discern this gap ... To my surprise, this brief intervention was a huge success, and many following participants referred to the dimension in‐between‐the‐two‐frames, elevating it into a term. This very success made me sad, really sad. What I encountered here was not only the efficiency of a bluff, but a much more radical apathy at the very heart of today’s Cultural Studies.
― Mordy, Friday, 1 February 2013 03:39 (eleven years ago) link
my kid could of done better than that
― Hermann Hesher (Noodle Vague), Friday, 1 February 2013 03:40 (eleven years ago) link
I haven't been able to finish this discussion on the The Dark Knight Rises (just a diff kind of torture) but its basically K-Punk acting like Zizek's lapdog and seems to touch on Z's ultimate preoccupation, which form the bits I've read its a 'how can we be better at revolutionary violence'.
I think the BFI should commission Zizek to write a book on the Nolan Batman trilogy. Has a lot of potential.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 1 February 2013 11:59 (eleven years ago) link
However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and peasants in the other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a “subkulak,” a peasant who, although too poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak “counter‐revolutionary” attitude. “Subkulak” was thus a term without any real social content even by Stalinist standards, but merely rather unconvincingly masquerading as such. As was officially stated, “by ‘kulak,’ we mean the carrier of certain political tendencies which are most frequently discernible in the subkulak, male and female.” By this means, any peasant whatever was liable to dekulakisation; and the “subkulak” notion was widely employed, enlarging the category of victims greatly beyond the official estimate of kulaks proper even at its most strained.The “subkulak” was thus the paradoxical intersection of species: a subspecies of the species “kulaks” whose members came from the other two species. As such, “subkulak” was the embodiment of the ideological lie (falsity) of the entire “objective” classification of farmers into three categories: its function was to account for the fact that all strata of farmers, not only the wealthy ones, resisted collectivization. No wonder that the official ideologists and economists finally gave up trying to provide an “objective” definition of kulak: “The grounds given in one Soviet comment are that ‘the old attitudes of a kulak have almost disappeared, and the new ones do not lend themselves to recognition.’" The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became the matter of a complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath their deceptive public proclamations, so that Pravda had to concede that “even the best activists often cannot spot the kulak."
The “subkulak” was thus the paradoxical intersection of species: a subspecies of the species “kulaks” whose members came from the other two species. As such, “subkulak” was the embodiment of the ideological lie (falsity) of the entire “objective” classification of farmers into three categories: its function was to account for the fact that all strata of farmers, not only the wealthy ones, resisted collectivization. No wonder that the official ideologists and economists finally gave up trying to provide an “objective” definition of kulak: “The grounds given in one Soviet comment are that ‘the old attitudes of a kulak have almost disappeared, and the new ones do not lend themselves to recognition.’" The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became the matter of a complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath their deceptive public proclamations, so that Pravda had to concede that “even the best activists often cannot spot the kulak."
― Mordy, Friday, 1 February 2013 19:16 (eleven years ago) link
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5beopX0951r8a6qso1_1280.png
― Women, Fire, and Dangerous Zings (silby), Monday, 11 February 2013 08:05 (eleven years ago) link
The visual/physical observations are basically correct but where are:
"is <x> not precisely..."
"here I am an old-fashioned vulgar marxist"
and so on
― Tim F, Monday, 11 February 2013 10:15 (eleven years ago) link
"This, I claim..."
― ryan, Monday, 11 February 2013 14:16 (eleven years ago) link
read a fair chunk of In Defense of Lost Causes last week; still weighing his judgments on Stalin.
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 11 February 2013 14:24 (eleven years ago) link
"an inversion of"
"radically un-"
― max, Monday, 11 February 2013 17:09 (eleven years ago) link
some of these feel much broader than just zizek.
but the "is <x> not precisely" is completely his.
― s.clover, Monday, 11 February 2013 17:28 (eleven years ago) link
It's possible that we're all overthinking this guy. I think he's basically a philosophical troll who says a lot of left-field shit to make you say, "huh...?" At first, you're like, "hey, maybe he's right..." but then the more you think about it, the more you say, "I'm not even sure what he's saying." And then you go, "Huh. Do *I* even know what *I'm* talking about?"
The guy's entire schtick is to disrupt your confidence in your critical thinking skills and educational background, and disorient you to the point where you don't even know your relationship to the world anymore.
― Poliopolice, Monday, 11 February 2013 17:54 (eleven years ago) link
imho not so
― Mordy, Monday, 11 February 2013 17:55 (eleven years ago) link
However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and peasants in the other two categories often joined poliopolices in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a “subpoliopolice,” a peasant who, although too poor to be considered a poliopolice proper, nonetheless shared the poliopolice “counter‐revolutionary” attitude. “Subpoliopolice” was thus a term without any real social content even by Stalinist standards, but merely rather unconvincingly masquerading as such. As was officially stated, “by ‘poliopolice,’ we mean the carrier of certain political tendencies which are most frequently discernible in the subpoliopolice, male and female.” By this means, any peasant whatever was liable to depoliopoliceisation; and the “subpoliopolice” notion was widely employed, enlarging the category of victims greatly beyond the official estimate of poliopolices proper even at its most strained.The “subpoliopolice” was thus the paradoxical intersection of species: a subspecies of the species “poliopolices” whose members came from the other two species. As such, “subpoliopolice” was the embodiment of the ideological lie (falsity) of the entire “objective” classification of farmers into three categories: its function was to account for the fact that all strata of farmers, not only the wealthy ones, resisted collectivization. No wonder that the official ideologists and economists finally gave up trying to provide an “objective” definition of poliopolice: “The grounds given in one Soviet comment are that ‘the old attitudes of a poliopolice have almost disappeared, and the new ones do not lend themselves to recognition.’" The art of identifying a poliopolice was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became the matter of a complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath their deceptive public proclamations, so that Pravda had to concede that “even the best activists often cannot spot the poliopolice."
The “subpoliopolice” was thus the paradoxical intersection of species: a subspecies of the species “poliopolices” whose members came from the other two species. As such, “subpoliopolice” was the embodiment of the ideological lie (falsity) of the entire “objective” classification of farmers into three categories: its function was to account for the fact that all strata of farmers, not only the wealthy ones, resisted collectivization. No wonder that the official ideologists and economists finally gave up trying to provide an “objective” definition of poliopolice: “The grounds given in one Soviet comment are that ‘the old attitudes of a poliopolice have almost disappeared, and the new ones do not lend themselves to recognition.’" The art of identifying a poliopolice was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became the matter of a complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath their deceptive public proclamations, so that Pravda had to concede that “even the best activists often cannot spot the poliopolice."
― administrator galina (Matt P), Monday, 11 February 2013 18:00 (eleven years ago) link
polio police
― Women, Fire, and Dangerous Zings (silby), Monday, 11 February 2013 18:01 (eleven years ago) link
not to be a jerk, but if your analysis begins from a point of non-comprehension and tries to critically position that confusion as being the point itself, it might be better to have some humility and work on understanding the work b4 adopting that kind of meta-hermeneutic.
― Mordy, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:02 (eleven years ago) link
all these so-called "philosophers" do is speak a bunch of mumbo jumbo!!
― Arty, Noisy, Weird, Funky, Punky Pope (crüt), Monday, 11 February 2013 18:05 (eleven years ago) link
I'm well versed in both philosophy and sociology. But it's my opinion that this guy is more an entertainer and bullshit artist than anything else. For what it's worth, he's good at both.
― Poliopolice, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:09 (eleven years ago) link
it's not always a bad interpretive move and i think writers like adorno are trying to push against comprehension (or at least entire a poetic dialectical mode that resists full comprehension) but a) zizek i found very easy to comprehend compared to idk hegel/derrida/deleuze/aforementioned adorno and b) it's a move that should be made in very limited circumstances and should not replace more traditional interpretative inquiries.
― Mordy, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:10 (eleven years ago) link
>not to be a jerk, but if your analysis begins from a point of non-comprehension and tries to critically position that confusion as being the point itself, it might be better to have some humility and work on understanding the work b4 adopting that kind of meta-hermeneutic.
your argument is based on the assumption that there is something to understand, which is 100% inconsistent with my point. I think what he does is theater.
― Poliopolice, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:13 (eleven years ago) link
i don't assume that there is something to understand. i read his works and find it very accessible and understandable.
― Mordy, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:14 (eleven years ago) link
I'm not talking about the accessibility or understandability of his words. I'm talking about the general inscrutability of the arguments that he makes. I have a hard time believing that even he believe half the stuff he says.
― Poliopolice, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:21 (eleven years ago) link
i agree that Z is admirably clear, but then maybe im not the best judge of that. i may have quoted this upthread at some point but i always liked how he explained his fascination for the "idiocy" of popular films: "The idiot for whom I endeavor to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself."
― ryan, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:26 (eleven years ago) link
again, i do not find his arguments inscrutable in the least. is there a particular argument you are having trouble - uh - scrutinizing?
― Mordy, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:27 (eleven years ago) link
i do think there's perhaps a larger point to all this about "performativity" and all that with regard to contemporary critical theory/philosophy. derrida is a good example since he basically lays out his program in first few books (albeit it's not the easiest thing in the world to grasp, but he is trying to be clear) while his later stuff (simplifying greatly) is basically "performing" that program over and over.
― ryan, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:30 (eleven years ago) link
since i'm technically a performance studies guy i think that paradigm applies to all philosophers + everyone really and that zizek is not an exception
― Mordy, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:35 (eleven years ago) link
absolutely. what's that great quine quotes? "what i am saying applies in particular to what i am saying"
― ryan, Monday, 11 February 2013 18:37 (eleven years ago) link
In any case there is a critical aspect. So much of what Z does is asking questions and undermining earlier established arguments. Fewer answers of his own, and often tentatively put forth ('is it not the case?' and so on) That doesn't neccessarily mean his dumber than other philosophers, he might just be more humble (I very much prefer to read him as an ongoing critical-philosophical performance, just as I much prefer Lacan's performative seminars to his 'grander' Ecrits)
― Frederik B, Monday, 11 February 2013 20:20 (eleven years ago) link
"is it not the case" is just an affectation.
― s.clover, Monday, 11 February 2013 20:38 (eleven years ago) link
Yeah if anything the purpose of "is it not the case" is the opposite of humility really, it's to give his conclusions the air of an unavoidable logical deduction.
Typically the only parts of Zizek books I find really difficult to decipher are when he digs deep into Hegel and German idealists, and given they're the only parts, I'm willing to assume until proven otherwise that my difficulties are really with Hegel etc. rather than with Zizek.
― Tim F, Tuesday, 12 February 2013 05:53 (eleven years ago) link
you can play the usual game of pretending to understand Hegel; iirc that's what everyone has always done
― Women, Fire, and Dangerous Zings (silby), Tuesday, 12 February 2013 07:07 (eleven years ago) link
I think one of the problems there is that Zizek renders Lacan and Hegel fundamentally indistinguishable, especially confusing cuz it's Hegel resting on Lacanian structuralism rather than vice versa. But I dunno.
Hegel himself, SIMPLE.
― hot young stalin (Merdeyeux), Tuesday, 12 February 2013 12:43 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/14/valentines-day-is-romance-dead
― markers, Thursday, 14 February 2013 14:42 (eleven years ago) link
One of these things is not like the other
― Gukbe, Thursday, 14 February 2013 15:22 (eleven years ago) link
that's so awesome.
― s.clover, Thursday, 14 February 2013 15:40 (eleven years ago) link
although, if you strip out all the stylistic tics and provocation and get down to the core argument, we're basically left with a sienfeld joke. which is awesome too, i guess.
― s.clover, Friday, 15 February 2013 14:30 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/17/free-market-fundamentalists-think-2013-best
― markers, Sunday, 17 February 2013 21:43 (eleven years ago) link
Has this (kinda nsfw) already been discussed?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36429575/A-F-2003-Back-to-School
― sktsh, Sunday, 17 March 2013 13:06 (eleven years ago) link
i hadn't seen that before but i think it's telling that by the end i was skipping through the pages of pornography in order to get to the next zizek remark; i think he would be happy to agree that the philosopher unpacking sex is- like mathematics - much sexier than the naked nudist bodies simulating sex.
― Mordy, Sunday, 17 March 2013 14:18 (eleven years ago) link
shit, why not have a cake and eat it too?
― j., Sunday, 17 March 2013 18:20 (eleven years ago) link
*fuck it
― c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le beurre (imago), Sunday, 17 March 2013 19:27 (eleven years ago) link
this just made me think about zizek having sex :-/
― ryan, Sunday, 17 March 2013 19:59 (eleven years ago) link
lol otm
― Woody Ellen (Matt P), Sunday, 17 March 2013 20:54 (eleven years ago) link
"I spent literally 10 minutes on this assignment, just free-associating. I was in theoretical despair!"
― s.clover, Monday, 18 March 2013 00:13 (eleven years ago) link
free t-shirts, no doubt
― j., Monday, 18 March 2013 00:14 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher
― markers, Wednesday, 17 April 2013 18:16 (ten years ago) link
ha it's like he basically took Critchley's critique of him and decided to make it explicit.
― ryan, Wednesday, 17 April 2013 18:18 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf5L6kwJJtA&feature=player_embedded
― crdbl (admrl), Sunday, 21 April 2013 21:32 (ten years ago) link
classic video
― markers, Sunday, 21 April 2013 21:40 (ten years ago) link
https://twitter.com/MarikaRose/status/332898683614019585
― ohmigud (Merdeyeux), Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:13 (ten years ago) link
http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=4302541&boardid=77&threadid=67478
― there is no special cathexis with mini fried donuts (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:15 (ten years ago) link
lool
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:29 (ten years ago) link
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BH5RPmLCQAA64Bd.jpg
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:30 (ten years ago) link
Cocaine users are 45% more likely to develop glaucoma (blindness) even if they’ve given up the drug.
People who take cocaine or are former users are 45 per cent more likely to develop a common form of blindness, a large study has found.
Researchers also found they developed glaucoma 20 years earlier on average than patients without a history of drug use.
A study of 5.3million people by the Veterans Health Administration, in Indianapolis, found glaucoma patients with a history of cocaine use were on average only 54-years-old. This compared to patients with no history of class A drug abuse who were around 73-years-old.
Study leader Dr Dustin French, from the Regenstrief Institute, said: ‘The association of illegal drug use with open-angle glaucoma requires further study, but if the relationship is confirmed, this understanding could lead to new strategies to prevent vision loss.’
― there is no special cathexis with mini fried donuts (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:34 (ten years ago) link
:-(
― Treeship, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:35 (ten years ago) link
do you read zizek, treeship?
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:36 (ten years ago) link
i read the sublime object of ideology and liked it, but then my friend told me that the stuff i liked about it was mostly just ripped off of althusser. i like reading interviews and things with him, and once i saw him in starbucks in princeton, nj.
― Treeship, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:39 (ten years ago) link
http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745628974
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:43 (ten years ago) link
that seems like a good book to get a structural overview of where he is coming from in a broad sense, re. his lacanian/hegelian marxism which places a lot of emphasis on teasing out paradoxes and contradictions in cultural and political texts. when i read zizek, i find him really entertaining but sometimes i get confused about what larger project his critiques are supposed to serve. i guess this project is "communism" defined as a "reawakened belief in the possibility of collective action," but that seems a bit nebulous, maybe, for a political thinker. idk, i'll bookmark that page and try to check out that book someday, thanks
― Treeship, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:48 (ten years ago) link
maybe leaf through this at a library or something http://www.amazon.com/Zizek-Critical-Introduction-Sarah-Kay/dp/0745622089/
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:50 (ten years ago) link
haven't seen this before http://www.amazon.com/The-Zizek-Dictionary-R-Butler/dp/1844655822/
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:51 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP6LoH3hASo
― Old Boy In Network (Michael B), Sunday, 2 June 2013 10:47 (ten years ago) link
Man does that guy always spend so much time touching his face?
― 0808ɹƃ (silby), Sunday, 2 June 2013 18:13 (ten years ago) link
https://www.thebaffler.com/past/camera_shy_blah_blah
My basic idea is that our times are weird times. On the one hand, they are superficially permissive. You get all the hardcore you want on the net, you can participate in orgies, blah blah blah. But at the same time it’s not even true consumerism. You have this obsession with safe sex, and so on. I think the only true consumerists that we have are, if you ask me, drug addicts, those who say, “Fuck it, I want to go to the end, I don’t care.” No, our consumerism is not dead. It’s a very strategic, calculating consumerism.
― j., Saturday, 22 June 2013 01:58 (ten years ago) link
And this, even if true, has what signifigance to anything?
― Aimless, Saturday, 22 June 2013 03:35 (ten years ago) link
glad he was able to slip in the phrase "This is ideology at its purest." it wouldn't be a zizek essay without that sentence.
― Treeship, Saturday, 22 June 2013 18:21 (ten years ago) link
Hah, that's the one phrase of his I've adopted -- it's primarily something I mutter to myself to improve my mood.He's also made me aware that some thinkers tend to use the word "precisely" just when they're being most abstruse or nebulous.
― Øystein, Saturday, 22 June 2013 19:34 (ten years ago) link
i admire his verve with blah blah blah
― j., Sunday, 23 June 2013 00:42 (ten years ago) link
I mean, even now, I am shocked. I remember one of the early movies: a plumber comes and fixes a hole in the kitchen. [And she says], “But I have another hole down there, can you also fix that for me.” And then it came to me. My god, it cannot be that they are so stupid. This is censorship. The idea is, you can either be totally emotionally identified [as in mainstream films], then you don’t see it all, or, you see it all, all the details [in porn films], but then the story has to be ridiculous, so you shouldn’t take it seriously.
― cardamon, Sunday, 23 June 2013 13:34 (ten years ago) link
I do actually really like Zizek's way of talking about pornography without lapsing into moralisms or celebrations.
I even think you could do a clever graph called 'ways people talk about porn', and it would have two axes, one running from 'moralism' to 'celebration', and the other running from 'left' to 'right' (in the political sense). And Zizek, whatever else you might think about him, would avoid the stupid areas of this graph.
― cardamon, Monday, 24 June 2013 00:10 (ten years ago) link
i agree with that. the essay isn't bad, but very short.
― Treeship, Monday, 24 June 2013 00:12 (ten years ago) link
http://esjaybe.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/zizeks-response-to-chomsky/
― what a wonderful url (Matt P), Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:03 (ten years ago) link
if nothing else, when I am older I want to talk like zizek and so on and all this
― chinavision!, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:37 (ten years ago) link
my god
― max, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:38 (ten years ago) link
i don't believe chomsky when he says that he is mystified by the success of people like zizek. he has definitely read marx before, and understands why cultural analysis and the critique of ideology have played an important role in the history of the left.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:40 (ten years ago) link
he can disagree with this kind of project, and think it has a negative or ambiguous legacy, and argue that leftists should be more focused on concrete political reality, but that is a different conversation than just saying "this is charlatanism"
― Treeship, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:41 (ten years ago) link
When I read "Here I violently disagree." I imagined a bit of spittle and headshake accenting "violently"
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:42 (ten years ago) link
So I claim that all these ‘how popular we are’ is really a mask of… remember the large majority of academia are these grey either cognitivists or historians blah blah… and you don’t see them but they are the power. They are the power.-Bob Marley
― what a wonderful url (Matt P), Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:45 (ten years ago) link
feel like an intern researched zizek's 'things I dislike about chomsky'
― iatee, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:52 (ten years ago) link
lol:
So as to this ‘problem’ of are we studying the facts enough I claim emphatically more than ever ‘no’ today. And as to popularity, I get a little bit annoyed with this idea that we with our deep sophisms are really hegemonic in humanities. Are people crazy? I mean we are always marginal. No, what is for me real academic hegemony: its brutal, who can get academic posts? Who can get grants, foundations, as so on? We are totally marginalised here. I mean look at my position… “oh yeah you are a mega-star in United States” well I would like to be because I would like power to brutally use it! But I am far from that. I react so like this because a couple of days ago I got a letter from a friend in United States for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation, and he told me “I didn’t get the job, not in spite of your letter but because of your letter!” He had a spy in the committee and this spy told him “you almost got it, but then somebody says ‘oh, if Zizek recommends him it must be something terribly wrong with him’”
― ryan, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 21:40 (ten years ago) link
tbf he spent most of the rec letter talking about gay pornography and transformers
― iatee, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 21:44 (ten years ago) link
i would pay good money to read that letter.
― ryan, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 21:46 (ten years ago) link
― Treeship, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 22:24 (ten years ago) link
"I would like power to brutally use it!"
― max, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 00:28 (ten years ago) link
has anyone here actually read less than nothing yet
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:07 (ten years ago) link
A few chapters? It seems like one of his better books for sustained argument (at least when you take each chapter as an independent unit), but it's somewhat frustrating (at least in the parts I've read) that his reading of Hegel seems to be mostly articulated against, or on the shoulders of, a handful of Hegel's commentators. It's been a while since I read around in it, though, and I can't fairly judge it without having finished it.
― one way street, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:19 (ten years ago) link
There's a gaping hole in Chomsky's argument against Zizek, which is: there sits Chomsky, providing us with vast amounts of empirical data as to why this or that US foreign policy is disastrous, why this commonly-held belief about history is false, why austerity is disastrous, and so on. There it is, it is all true, capitalism is terrible, Chomsky has diligently done all this research, and there it all is, to watch, read, and listen to.
And no-one gives a fuck.
Some of the people who ignore Chomsky do so because they buy the various smears about him being in allegiance with evil lefty murderous powers etc; some because they have the notion of the 'lol left wing intellectual' which means they can dismiss him; but that only accounts for the people specifically and consciously invested in right wing politics.
What about the rest of us? Why do we carry on doing all these awful things that Chomsky has so diligently shown us are wrong, with all this data he has provided us with?
Precisely because most of the ideology operates in the dark, irrational hole of our subconscious, where facts have no power. Only shamans like Zizek, who go into the hole and do their work there, can affect us on this level.
To paraphrase a section in Living in the end times, the obvious fact that only a few women were wearing burkas in France and the obvious fact that the ban was clearly a powergame of Sarkozy, are of no use whatsoever in combatting the drive against the other that Sarkozy and the rest of us were revelling in. You have to look at what the burka means to the observer; it represents the non-face, facelessness, pure Other; we remember with fear when we were 'faceless', before our identities were constructed during the mirror stage; but instead of accepting that we are essentially faceless, we deny it by attributing monstrous facelessness on to the other.
A policy that lets us do that is going to smash any empirical facts we might try to put in its way; to properly challenge it we first have to accept the contingency of identity, and recognise ourselves as 'faceless'.
― cardamon, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:20 (ten years ago) link
yeah i've just looked at it at the store. i wonder how much of it is just the same shit as his previous books. there's some stuff in there on speculative realism that's gotta be at least relatively new
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:20 (ten years ago) link
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:21 (ten years ago) link
It definitely seems more like a (surprisingly cogent) summary of his thought than a great leap forward.
― one way street, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:22 (ten years ago) link
I remember the response to spec. realism being kind of superficial, though.
― one way street, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:24 (ten years ago) link
i read a bunch of it markers. it's uneven, but there was new stuff in there.
― Mordy , Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:26 (ten years ago) link
ok cool. i should hopefully get around to it at some point.
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:30 (ten years ago) link
lotsa money for a book tho
my wife gave me less than nothing for my bday.
― collardio gelatinous, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 04:52 (ten years ago) link
you married well
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 04:54 (ten years ago) link
i think i saw zizek in starbucks once, two years ago. he was teaching at princeton at the time, which is where i was, so it's conceivable. still, i doubt myself more every time i think back to it.
― Treeship, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 04:59 (ten years ago) link
xp i requested it. :-) hell i even bought it myself. and had it wrapped at the store. she ceremoniously handed it to me after i blew out the candles. we're boring that way.
(btw i was going to add "if ya know what i mean" to my post above, but sometimes i'm shy with my bad jokes)
it's fun so far but i'm not deep enough into it for it to say much more to me than the expected "hegel's cooler than y'all think" line of thought.
― collardio gelatinous, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 05:03 (ten years ago) link
tbh i was hoping for something more systematic, plodding even, than the usual z. but we'll see...
― collardio gelatinous, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 05:11 (ten years ago) link
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/07/slavoj-zizek-act-of-killing
let us compare The Act of Killing to an incident that drew a lot of attention in the US some decades ago: a woman was beaten and slowly killed in the courtyard of a big apartment block in Brooklyn, New York; more than 70 witnesses saw what was going on from their windows but not one called the police.
Get yer facts straight, Slavoj. I like how he takes the already bogus figure of 38 witnesses and almost doubles it.
― ledge, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 08:18 (ten years ago) link
also Queens, not Brooklyn!
― ryan, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 15:02 (ten years ago) link
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/slavoj-zizek/trouble-in-paradise
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 15:54 (ten years ago) link
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/443/487
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 17:44 (ten years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/X5Ik5Ca.gif
― max, Friday, 26 July 2013 18:01 (ten years ago) link
i forgot about that chomsky misattribution. that might be the source of this recent bad blood/why chomsky's characterizaton of zizek was so hostile.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 18:15 (ten years ago) link
oh shit. zizek quotes at length the text where chomsky says he is skeptical of western reports of khmer rogue atrocities. this is vicious.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 18:36 (ten years ago) link
that link is very good. and jives with some feelings that bubble up when reading chomsky and seeing how he treats different sources.
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 18:38 (ten years ago) link
i always found it funny how people use left-wing politics to enhance their status in the ruling class, when if there ever was a left-wing revolution they'd be among those who'd get their heads chopped off. buncha twits.
― Spectrum, Friday, 26 July 2013 18:39 (ten years ago) link
eh
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 18:39 (ten years ago) link
i don't think marxism is anti-bourgeois, really. it is an immanent critique of bourgeois society -- measuring the culture capitalism has produced against its own professed standards of freedom and equality. the people who would be drawn to it, and the society it promises after the revolution, would precisely be middle class intellectuals.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 18:41 (ten years ago) link
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 18:46 (ten years ago) link
those would be some damn fine altruists, but i doubt you'd find them among the social climbers who use leftism as a status signifier. guess i'm just getting disillusioned here. anyway.....
― Spectrum, Friday, 26 July 2013 18:52 (ten years ago) link
how often and in what ways do "people use left-wing politics to enhance their status in the ruling class" ?
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 18:52 (ten years ago) link
every day on ilx
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 18:52 (ten years ago) link
I guess what are we calling the ruling class here?
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 18:53 (ten years ago) link
white ppl
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 18:53 (ten years ago) link
last two grafs on page 5 of that zizek pdf (copy-and-pasting fucked up the formatting and i don't have time to fix it it's my birthday today) are super super otm
― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour), Friday, 26 July 2013 18:58 (ten years ago) link
happy b-day, comrade dlh
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 19:00 (ten years ago) link
what marx is talking about in mordy's blockquote isn't altruists (people who make their own lives worse for the sake of the downtrodden) but people who perceive that the entire species is hampered by the current order, i think
― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:00 (ten years ago) link
thx mordy!
I think the phrase "comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole" gives a pretty decent explanation itself to why certain portions of the "ruling class" may be drawn to such ideas. That presumption *in itself* is something on the order of an object of desire, not least one that flatters your own mastery.
― ryan, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:26 (ten years ago) link
it's like, here's yet another way to prove your social superiority to your peers.
― ryan, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:28 (ten years ago) link
that guy is fun... I've seen his documentary numerous times, about the movies..
But never read much, listened to the macintalk or whatever of the reading.. hard to comprehend.
On Violence... The movies with advertisment "doubling" or commercial ironies...
watels.... his innately normal and purely good political ideology.
i will read the thread now :-)
― color definition point of "beyond "color, eg a transient that, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:30 (ten years ago) link
xp i think some people have desires to acquire knowledge because they find it satisfying or enjoyable and sometimes this will lead them to adopt marxist positions. i don't think it's all about social capital.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:32 (ten years ago) link
xxp yes, which is why i think it's funny. they're using something that would strip them of status as a tool to claim status, yet they seem completely unaware of it. or if they are aware of it than they're just cunning.
it's not always about social capital, those are just the most obvious cases.
― Spectrum, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:34 (ten years ago) link
i agree that sometimes academics see themselves as existing outside the capitalist power structure in a way that is simply ridiculous when you take a look at the functions universities serve in our society
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:35 (ten years ago) link
I could maybe agree with a little bit of the idea, but it just seems mostly funny to me cuz if you said "things that increase your social capital among the ruling class" I wouldn't really go "marxism!!"xpost
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:36 (ten years ago) link
xposts! sure, but I think in this particular case it's just re-inscribing aristocratic privilege through the readily available avenue of Marxist theory. It's Marxism folded into capitalism rather than vice versa.
― ryan, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:37 (ten years ago) link
like it doesn't really seem to be near the top of the list of things that are happening when people engage in leftist politics
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:37 (ten years ago) link
I feel a little out of my league here though, not really too expert in this stuff
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:38 (ten years ago) link
mostly because I shun such forms of social capital
that quote isn't talking about someone wearing a che t-shirt. its talking about like john reed. and it isn't talking about some "tool to claim status" challops you guys are the worst.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:39 (ten years ago) link
do you understand that aristocratic privilege isn't like "people think you're a clever lad" but like you own the world?
The quote IS talking about why those in the ruling party side with the revolutionary class. It's not really absurd to claim at this point that it has to do with something other than "comprehending the historical movement as a whole."
― ryan, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:41 (ten years ago) link
i'll throw down my cards here, i've spent plenty of time with upper class kids and they're all about marx, zizek, lacan, etc. and it just hit me that it's fucking absurd. yeah, i'm thinkin' bout things here.
― Spectrum, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:42 (ten years ago) link
lacan isn't necessarily a left wing thinker, i don't think
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:43 (ten years ago) link
his ideas gained a lot of currency among western marxists though... sorry i am "splitting hairs" for no reason
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:45 (ten years ago) link
those upper class kids are still prob generally atypical in that regard
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:46 (ten years ago) link
no one owns the world, that's stupid
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 19:46 (ten years ago) link
plus they'll get over it when they become in charge of managing property and wealth
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:47 (ten years ago) link
estimate % upper class kids infatuated with von mises, hajek, strauss or kojeve vs % infatuated with marx & zizek vs % who just don't give a fuck
― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:49 (ten years ago) link
10%, 5%, 85&
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:50 (ten years ago) link
respectively
― ryan, Friday, July 26, 2013 3:41 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
marx isn't talking about parties, he's talking about classes there is a difference, and he's describing particularly "in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour" so like russia in 1915 maybe. Or Jarosław Dąbrowski in the paris commune.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:51 (ten years ago) link
i recently got strauss' collected essays on maimonidies - good stuff xxp
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 19:52 (ten years ago) link
― Mordy , Friday, July 26, 2013 3:46 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
then how did this dude sell it huh?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSH--SJKVQQ
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:53 (ten years ago) link
ya it's not people who find marxism compelling will leave their station to join their ideological peers and build the future so much as property owners who don't want to be killed in the revolution will preserve their heads by switching sides
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:54 (ten years ago) link
can't blame them really
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:54 (ten years ago) link
why because they raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:55 (ten years ago) link
I wonder how much that "most cited theorists" list reflects (or doesnt reflect) what undergrads are into these days.
― ryan, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:56 (ten years ago) link
when the revolution comes the capitalists will sell us the ropes that we use to hang other liberals w/
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 19:56 (ten years ago) link
i think a peaceful revolution would be chill
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:57 (ten years ago) link
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 20:50 (6 minutes ago)
this is probably about right for university age, for >2 years after university i doubt it is as high as 15% who care about any type of political philosophy
― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:58 (ten years ago) link
― ryan, Friday, July 26, 2013 3:56 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
smirnoff ice iirc
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 19:58 (ten years ago) link
hahaha. also, fair enough on your last response!
― ryan, Friday, 26 July 2013 19:59 (ten years ago) link
treeship otm in that marxist theory has typically been the product of bourgeois intellectuals, and is, in its present form, largely addressed to that group.
i.e., a fun way for those in power to fantasize about killing their parents.
a useful marxism, one defined by action as much as theory, arising from and directed to the working classes - such a movement would probably attract upper & middle class followers, but in practice have little in common with its academic cousin (e.g. bolivarianism in venzuela).
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Friday, 26 July 2013 20:15 (ten years ago) link
or uh the russian revolution or the cuban revolution or the chinese revolution or the paris commune or the vietnamese revolution or...
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 20:17 (ten years ago) link
or the history of 20th century europe basically, or the structure of current day politics in the indian subcontinent or...
i mean i get that in america its sort of easy to pretend this is just stuff that matters to a few ppl in college but
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 20:19 (ten years ago) link
russian revolution or the cuban revolution or the chinese revolution or the paris commune or the vietnamese revolution
none of which seem to have significantly elevated the socioeconomic dominance of the worker, or reduced that of the ruling class. thus not particularly useful, imo. china, ok, but only as they've begun to move toward capitalism (while retaining a massively empowered ruling class).
of course i agree that societies (and bodies) can be hideously mangled by whatever fashionable mind plague happens to be going around at the moment.
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Friday, 26 July 2013 20:23 (ten years ago) link
the history of 20th century europe basically, or the structure of current day politics in the indian subcontinent
this seems more reasonable, but has little to do with academic marxism
the provision of services by the state to the people (and the ownership by the state of service-providing organizations) preexists marxism, after all
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Friday, 26 July 2013 20:24 (ten years ago) link
i joined the YCL when I was in middle school and it was mostly filled with working class kids and minorities who had something to gain from a new order. nothing really in common with the upper middle class/upper class types I've met who are more the bourgeois academic left-wingers... who probably wouldn't enjoy having the same social status as the maid who cleaned their house growing up.
i suppose i'm the first brand ... grew up in poverty, had friends who were even poorer, and struggled to make it in this system. it's disheartening to see that the left's been co-opted by people like Zizek who probably have zero interest in actually seeing a different way of life come into being. of course personally I've dropped it all so I can survive, and have left the left to those who can munch on fancy cheeses in expensive lofts in Brooklyn.
― Spectrum, Friday, 26 July 2013 20:26 (ten years ago) link
um u do know Zizek's background?
anyway like in a world scale the ppl aware of Zizek vs. e.g. Prakash Karat or Arlette Laguiller or ffs Fidel Castro really doesn't work out in Slavoj's favor
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 21:15 (ten years ago) link
looks like he had a highly privileged upbringing. and that's his audience. makes sense.
― Spectrum, Friday, 26 July 2013 21:19 (ten years ago) link
people like Zizek who probably have zero interest in actually seeing a different way of life come into being.
Yeah whatever
― cardamon, Friday, 26 July 2013 21:22 (ten years ago) link
'People who profess left ideas but are - surprise surprise - actually members of the ruling class only doing this for status' is an interesting idea to open up.
For example, you might have an academic - someone working in, I don't know, literary theory and cultural studies - who promotes left-wing ideas and programs. And we could all point at this person and go 'Aha! Got you! You work in a university! So stfu - you're just another member of the ruling class!'
But compare and contrast this hypothetical academic with someone who runs a massive oil company, or someone who owns a huge chunk of the media. Compared to this, does our academic belong, even slightly, in 'the ruling class'? How much do academics actually get paid (it varies immensely country by country, region by region, field by field. How much actual influence do they have.
Calling our fictional academic 'a member of the ruling class' in this sarcastic, weary way: given that they are, odds are, probably not actually a member of the real ruling class, what do we actually achieve when we do this?
― cardamon, Friday, 26 July 2013 21:30 (ten years ago) link
spectrum even supposing zizek is as you say, as others have said the left hasn't been like recently 'co-opted' by academics and bourgeoise; these people have always been a part of it, and because of their access to education and relative leisure they've been an important part. there is always indeed a danger of the 'proletariat' or more generally the poor being marginalized within their supposed own movement & you are right to identify this but it doesn't happen the moment someone who's been to college objects to reagan.
saying that the [insert revolution] did nothing to elevate the worker or lower the ruling class is also weird. the ruling class in russia, w the arguable exception of the 'bourgeois specialists' maintained for their technical expertise, was liquidated (excellent soviet euphemism) or sent into exile. there was a NEW ruling class, yes, that eventually came to resemble the old one, but it wasn't the same as the old one. many of them had been workers! this stuff isn't all bunk for the same reasons it made total sense for (some of) the occupy kidz to have iphones.
― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour), Friday, 26 July 2013 21:32 (ten years ago) link
if the poor, uneducated + marginalized knew how to overthrow the hegemony, surely they would have done so. marx is not just saying that the intellegesia have a role to play in the revolution, but that they play the central role - only by understanding the history can one invent new forms
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 21:35 (ten years ago) link
ok also you realize not all working class people are 'uneducated' and 'marginalized'?
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 21:40 (ten years ago) link
not sure which is worse, people using left-wing politics to enhance their status in the ruling class or people using their class background to fortify their position in a messageboard debate
― max, Friday, 26 July 2013 21:42 (ten years ago) link
j/k, i know which one of those is worse because one of them is not a real thing and the other one is
hi wikipedia thanks: "Žižek was born in Ljubljana, People's Republic of Slovenia, Yugoslavia, to a middle-class family. His parents were both atheists.[7] His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, native of the Brda region in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise"
an economist and civil servant and an accountant, in eastern europe behind the iron curtain, in the immediate aftermath of WWII which took place across the scarred face of his country. holy shit how many butlers do you think he had
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 21:43 (ten years ago) link
yeah. and if you have a problem w capitalism you most likely have a problem w the false equality w which it pacifies its underclass; perceiving this, for the average person, requires time to think. (as soon as you're born they make you feel small / by giving you no time instead of it all, to quote a rich fuck.) there is something elitist of course in percieving the poor as a body requiring education in its own interests by the rich(er) but it isn't an elitism created by marxists; it's the elitism of capitalism, which marxists expect to abolish.
― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour), Friday, 26 July 2013 21:43 (ten years ago) link
all working class people are uneducated and marginalized
― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Friday, 26 July 2013 21:43 (ten years ago) link
― max, Friday, July 26, 2013 5:42 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
A+
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Friday, 26 July 2013 21:44 (ten years ago) link
dll otm
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 21:47 (ten years ago) link
nilmar otm
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 21:47 (ten years ago) link
i don't think so
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 21:48 (ten years ago) link
don't be so fervent
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 21:50 (ten years ago) link
i think the problem for prof. strawman is that often the model which presumes a straight line between theory and direct political action (and thus the goal of a more just society) just doesn't hold up. everyone really knows this already but rarely is it a *part* of the theory--instead we get more and more circuitous ways of circumventing that essential "problem." (marx's version is of course the classic one).
academic critique tends to lead to...more academic critique. but i would argue that this is as it should be! this doesn't mean that theory is a navel-gazing waste of time, it just means that the relationship between theory and political action isn't a direct one. and that's something that can be important and useful--it's a difference we should protect.
― ryan, Friday, 26 July 2013 22:27 (ten years ago) link
alright, i'll concede, i've definitely been using zizek as a strawman here. can't unload all my grownup disenchantment on one dude.
― Spectrum, Friday, 26 July 2013 22:35 (ten years ago) link
If you want a distinctly more fleshy and less straw-based target, there are numerous people enacting deconstructive work on Buffy The Vampire Slayer right now who definitely don't want to bring about a better society or who are at the least significantly more interested in having all the soup out of the tureen in the campus bistro. You can do whatever you'd like to them.
― cardamon, Friday, 26 July 2013 23:12 (ten years ago) link
Those ppl are harmless though.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 23:25 (ten years ago) link
those ppl are the literal embodiment of the excesses of capitalism
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 23:25 (ten years ago) link
but that's the absolute worst thing you could say about them
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 23:37 (ten years ago) link
and that they prob overrate angel
― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour), Friday, 26 July 2013 23:40 (ten years ago) link
as a boyfriend not a showt
― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour), Friday, 26 July 2013 23:41 (ten years ago) link
show
i did my high school honors english thesis on woody allen, dostoevsky, and existentialism. it was decadent as fuck.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 23:43 (ten years ago) link
I.E. people working in the arts at post-grad level for whom formalist/structuralist/deconstructionist theory, and its associated language, really has decomposed down into academic jargon, devoid of that energy you see in 'the good old days' when Propp and Shlovsky were analysing the patterns found in folk tales, and it was radical, or when Barthes was looking at photography and saying look, there's structures here, or when later people were like let's break up those structures.
They make various nominally 'left-wing' critiques of cultural items by rote. 300 is a bit racist. No shit. Greek statues are generally not of wheelchair users. Actually, Madame Bovary is a bourgeois novel. No shit.
Fuck.
Catherine Belsey's horrible book Critical Practice, which I was forced to read, pretty much epitomises this, treating literary criticism as like a very, very tedious 9-5 job, heckling Leavis and Empson as if she were someone in charge of the bananas in Costcutter, who thought the previous managers hadn't done a good job of arranging the point of sale displays, and loved to indulge in posthumous nitpicking of their ways. Whilst presuming to marshal you around the banana area, instructing you in how to sell bananas, even though you didn't actually work there and had just wandered in.
― cardamon, Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:20 (ten years ago) link
People who you can't even say are bludgeoning into the arts and treating them as a sub-project of their grand politcal idea, because they have no such idea.
― cardamon, Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:24 (ten years ago) link
i guess these are the ppl we can blame for encouraging everyone to call things 'problematic.'
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:38 (ten years ago) link
i think demonizing mediocre humanities academics is problematic. they are at worst a symptom of some other, larger problem... there is clearly a craving in our culture for critical/oppositional writing from a "leftist" perspective but no real political project available for these people to support. i think most people who get sucked into the rabbit hole of humanities academia are well-intentioned to start off with -- if often untalented -- there just isn't a productive outlet for their dissatisfaction.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:46 (ten years ago) link
also it's not like they are part of the landed gentry or even bourgeois really. most of these people are getting kicked around from adjunct job to adjunct job and barely pulling down enough money to support themselves.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:50 (ten years ago) link
lol 'problematic' r u 4 real?
― Mordy , Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:51 (ten years ago) link
that was a joke. i thought it would be funny to use "problematic" after JD just complained about its overuse.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:52 (ten years ago) link
let's unpack this
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:53 (ten years ago) link
part of the issue, i tend to think, is that we have a set of "critical practices" (some of which are very powerful and useful when applied to particular ends or effects which are carefully considered) that are very often relics of an emancipatory critical tradition which imbues them with a sense of importance they can no longer legitimately claim. at the same time, we have these tools and nowhere really to direct them except at the terrarium of a novel or tv show or whatever--essentially limited universes which can be mastered by the theoretical observer.
the implication is that if we can discern the workings of hegemony in a novel then we are one step closer to exposing it in society at large--but the result of this idea is that we've developed ever more specific practices for reading novels and not a lot of ways to achieve that larger project. it's not that these practices are useless it's that they are projects of their environment (reading and writing about literary texts) and they are not always the tools needed for, say, an analysis of racism in society at large. as i said before, it's at best an indirect relationship. the problem, in other words, is that critical practices are not general means of achieving something like "comprehending the historical movement of a whole" but in fact highly situational and pragmatic devices or tools to be used for specified ends.
― ryan, Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:54 (ten years ago) link
oh lol I missed his post but still big virtue of zizek imo is that he isn't doing these boring identity studies critiques
― Mordy , Saturday, 27 July 2013 00:54 (ten years ago) link
the ruling class in russia, w the arguable exception of the 'bourgeois specialists' maintained for their technical expertise, was liquidated (excellent soviet euphemism) or sent into exile. there was a NEW ruling class, yes, that eventually came to resemble the old one, but it wasn't the same as the old one.
― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour)
yeah, that was my point. if you're looking to overthrow capitalist tyranny under the rule of a plutocracy, then replacing it with authoritarian tyranny under the rule of an elite must be considered a complete failure. the real problem, the oppression of the proletariat, has not been solved or even addressed.
also, the attempts upthread to isolate academics from the ruling classes seem somewhat bizarre in this (marxist) context. intellectuals are the shoeshine boys of the ruling elite. you don't have to be a fatcat banker or hereditary royalty to be part of the system that oppresses those who perform the profit-generating labor. the petit bourgeoisie may include a lot of people, but surely not those who spin inscrutable fancies for the amusement only of other ivory tower academics, a "labor" that produces no profit of any kind. these are court jesters, a superfluous product of capitalist excess. their activities are either subsidized by the wealthy or paid from public coffers. though their salary comes from similar places, K-12 schoolteachers have a much better claim to separation.
^ trying out my fox news persona
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Saturday, 27 July 2013 02:15 (ten years ago) link
haven't read every single post in past few days here but i do think geography matters here. guys like zizek are coming out of a european context where intellectuals get to stand on much more elevated soap-boxes than their us counterparts. sartre is long gone, but the notion of the "public intellectual" isn't, along with its expectations of commitment and Resistance. us academics may have their feet on american soil, but their heads are swimming in europe, so they tilt at windmills as though their tilts would be published in the morning's Le Monde..... except they won't.
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Saturday, 27 July 2013 04:39 (ten years ago) link
this thread's been going twelve years and i've only read about 50 pages of zizek
― i better not get any (thomp), Saturday, 27 July 2013 06:07 (ten years ago) link
tough guy
a useful marxism, one defined by action as much as theory, arising from and directed to the working classes - such a movement would probably attract upper & middle class followers
trotsky
― wolves lacan, Saturday, 27 July 2013 06:16 (ten years ago) link
the petit bourgeoisie may include a lot of people, but surely not those who spin inscrutable fancies for the amusement only of other ivory tower academics, a "labor" that produces no profit of any kind.
see, i'd argue that it's precisely this "closure" that allows new modes of thinking or criticism to slip through. in fact i think it's only through the autonomy which seems at times frivolous (even "useless") which allows academic writing to do anything which doesn't shine the shoes of the ruling class. that "excess" is the point and the great potential of this stuff, but by that very "excess" it can be misdirected (or not directed at all). it's what you use it for.
― ryan, Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:03 (ten years ago) link
i mean, who gets to define terms like "useless" or "excess" or "profit" anyway, hmmm?? *winks and returns to reading Ecrits*
― ryan, Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:06 (ten years ago) link
otm.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:09 (ten years ago) link
although i can't really blame people struggling to make it in this brutal society being bitter toward the argument that academics shouldn't have to prove their work is valuable in order to continue getting paid for it.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:10 (ten years ago) link
well it goes without saying (i hope) that academics should be just as open to criticism as anyone else.
― ryan, Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:14 (ten years ago) link
as an academic who is heavily theory-centered, i can testify that doing this sort of thing can create a whiplash from "this is totally pointless nonsense" to "this is basically the most important way i could spend my time"--and i imagine that vacillation is similar for a lot of similar occupations (art, for one)--though maybe to less extreme degrees.
― ryan, Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:16 (ten years ago) link
also i feel compelled to point out that as i was typing that the mailman just dropped off my new copy of Ecrits!
― ryan, Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:17 (ten years ago) link
and if it makes anyone feel better, i would wager there's only a very small (and shrinking) number of people who make any real money doing this sort of thing. if you want to find the shoeshiners of the ruling elite i suggest the English department isn't where you should focus your attention.
― ryan, Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:21 (ten years ago) link
academics are slightly more immmune to capital's constant demand to PRODUCE than most people are and that's why people get pissed off with them. in america you need to justify your existence by your usefulness to capitalism and if you can't do this you can end up homeless or in prison etc.
the problem is that anyone is subject to that brutal logic. at this point in history, most of the labor that people are doing is not socially necessary and often actively destructive. things could be sorted out differently, so that people could have work that is both more socially useful and personally fulfilling and the ability to pursue intellectual or artistic projects won't be seen as the mere province of the elites.*
*i do not know exactly how this would work, obviously. but i consider myself a "leftist" insofar as i believe in the possibility of a society that makes better use of people's talents.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:22 (ten years ago) link
what is that adorno said? that he believed every person is capable of things that, in bourgeois society, would be considered genius. i believe this. what is obscene about capitalism is that it wastes people.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Saturday, 27 July 2013 16:28 (ten years ago) link
still linkable after all these years
― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour), Saturday, 27 July 2013 17:01 (ten years ago) link
i fucking love that essay
― fervently nice (Treeship), Saturday, 27 July 2013 17:01 (ten years ago) link
― ryan, Saturday, July 27, 2013 9:03 AM (2 hours ago)
of course. this is why pop celebrities are such a vitally important component of the cause. ;)
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Saturday, 27 July 2013 19:01 (ten years ago) link
christ i don't know what i was going on about here yesterday. i'm not the working class warrior i portrayed myself to be - my family's old-school upper middle class and i grew up around that shit, just had hard luck with deadbeat parents. guess i was being immature.
thinking about it a little more, my issue with ppl like zizek and other academics isn't necessarily with them, it's that there aren't any effective voices or activists on the left in the US, and it's hard watching the direction things are going in. but that's hardly the fault of academia and it's followers. and my issue with them is because an ex-girlfriend was a lefty academic. i'm a nut.
― Spectrum, Saturday, 27 July 2013 20:02 (ten years ago) link
fwiw i liked your perspective, even if i'd want to complicate it just a bit (maybe in my own defense). i think lots of leftist academia is very vulnerable to what you were saying.
― ryan, Saturday, 27 July 2013 20:23 (ten years ago) link
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/07/beware-celebrity-academia.html
― Mordy , Saturday, 27 July 2013 23:42 (ten years ago) link
be wary of people who say classic texts are difficult to summarize. but read lots of textbooks. check.
something about this exact kind of poindexter makes me wonder if maybe i shouldn't become an authoritarian
― j., Sunday, 28 July 2013 00:05 (ten years ago) link
"In fact, it is hard to do better than just sitting in a university bookstore and just reading all the intro texts they have. I spent many days in the Stanford bookstore doing just that. Once you are done with textbooks, review articles are the next most robust option."
confirms precisely how obnoxious these ppl are in my mind. cf rationalism AI cultist creeps
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Sunday, 28 July 2013 01:08 (ten years ago) link
in the future all ideas will be bite sized.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Sunday, 28 July 2013 01:09 (ten years ago) link
order your education off the dollar menu
i mean that sort of advice can only come from someone who hasn't ever actually understood anything ever
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Sunday, 28 July 2013 01:12 (ten years ago) link
depends on the field, obv in humanities there`s a good reason for focus on primary & secondary texts but in anything technical u can get really far without looking at anything other than textbooks. but yeah
― flopson, Sunday, 28 July 2013 19:36 (ten years ago) link
Have any of you here seen this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhAMgVFKokk
I've not read anything by Zizek but watching him in that video doesn't inspire me to read any of his books.
I'm willing to try, though. What book would you guys recommend?
― c21m50nh3x460n, Sunday, 28 July 2013 19:44 (ten years ago) link
the sublime object of ideology
― markers, Sunday, 28 July 2013 20:15 (ten years ago) link
"Contingency, Hegemony, Universality" is good as well i think--and you get Butler and Laclau in the bargain.
― ryan, Sunday, 28 July 2013 20:54 (ten years ago) link
There's a gaping hole in Chomsky's argument against Zizek, which is: there sits Chomsky, providing us with vast amounts of empirical data as to why this or that US foreign policy is disastrous, why this commonly-held belief about history is false, why austerity is disastrous, and so on. There it is, it is all true, capitalism is terrible, Chomsky has diligently done all this research, and there it all is, to watch, read, and listen to.And no-one gives a fuck.
as if zizek is doing anything other than preaching to the star struck converted. give me a fucking break. chomsky has a reductive understanding of historical change and causality but at least it's a coherent (if often conspicuously one-sided) set of ideas. zizek's "politics" are little but a projection of his own chauvinism/narcissism.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Sunday, 28 July 2013 21:28 (ten years ago) link
never not worthwhile to read ppl arguing abt chomsky vs zizek on the internet
― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Sunday, 28 July 2013 21:59 (ten years ago) link
― flopson, Sunday, July 28, 2013 3:36 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
eh, if you want to understand technical things at all well, there are textbooks written by the people who also wrote the papers. they tend to be good, often contain new material themselves, and be well regarded as works in the field in their own right. often they are assigned to grad courses. then there are lots of terrible textbooks written by other people, and those are mainly not going to be very good, and they will teach you things that aren't true, often. those are more the "intro texts" that i imagine the author is speaking of. after reading those you can sometimes pretend you know things, but only in the company of people who don't know things themselves. the problem is they don't want to tell you a vision of a field of study, they just want to tell you what you need to pass the course.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Sunday, 28 July 2013 23:34 (ten years ago) link
zizek's "politics" are little but a projection of his own chauvinism/narcissism.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Sunday, July 28, 2013 5:28 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
this is obv not true, but whatever.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Sunday, 28 July 2013 23:35 (ten years ago) link
you're precisely the sort of scatterbrained cult studies dipshit who would love zizek, sterling
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 14:38 (ten years ago) link
still a name droppin fool after all these years
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 14:39 (ten years ago) link
(but that puts you in good company i guess)
that's not really a substantive critique of either zizek or sterling so...
― fervently nice (Treeship), Monday, 29 July 2013 14:39 (ten years ago) link
i guess it's easy to tolerate a prankster who pretends to be a neo-stalinist (and actually is one of those european folks who thinks america doesn't have a history, etc.) if he has a really bitchin' reading of hitchcock's the birds.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 14:41 (ten years ago) link
trust me, treeship, zizek doesn't need my "substantive critique," and neither does sterling
chomsky has a reductive understanding of historical change and causality but at least it's a coherent (if often conspicuously one-sided) set of ideas.
i dont personally think Zizek is the answer but I submit that a non-reductive understanding of "historical change and causality" would resemble Zizek more than Chomsky.
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 14:47 (ten years ago) link
well zizek admits complexity insofar as he'll assert one thing in one article and the opposite in the next. or sometimes in the same forum. that's one way to do it.
sorry i was way too aggro up there about sterling. it's just hard for me to believe that people fall for zizek's schtick even now that he's given himself a few miles of rope with which to hang himself.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 14:59 (ten years ago) link
amateurist i know we have interacted for many years and i still have no idea what conversation that must be over five years ago has set you off so much that you drag out this 'cult studies dipshit' thing on me on the regular.
like w/r/t zizek he's often funny and occasionally insightful which is as much as i get from most people writing columns for lrb et al, if not more.
he's absolutely more fun to read than chomsky. more useful -- depends for what?
its also interesting to me the vituperative reactions that z elicits, which are obv intentional -- he's a troll, and a provocateur, etc. but he's also a self-declared clown who enjoys as you say like readings and rereadings of hitchcock films, etc. so you get the jon stewart effect, where pundits say "this isn't serious news, you're a joke!" and he says "well, yeah."
and my point above is really that zizek does have actual politics, and they're actually much less radical than his theoretical showmanship, not that I agree or disagree with his politics in any particular -- they're just actually there, and perfectly interpretable without dragging in our own freudian analysis of his personality traits.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Monday, 29 July 2013 15:19 (ten years ago) link
i mean i guess what winds people up about zizek (and what winds you up about me?) is that he doesn't buy into this idea that serious issues and serious ideas must always and only be discussed seriously.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Monday, 29 July 2013 15:21 (ten years ago) link
"on the regular"--i can't even recall interacting w/ you on this board for years! at least not addressing you directly. if by "on the regular" you mean like once every three years or something, maybe. anyway i'm sorry i was such an asshole.
when he actually makes a coherent political observation it tends to be completely banal (or at least run-of-the-mill leftist) and not as well-articulated as the dozens of pundits who have said it before him. which is pretty revealing, i think. as you suggest, the "radicalism" of his political observations usually tends to be inextricable from his fundamental clown-like persona, even when he insists he's being serious (you didn't seem to like it when i made this observation the first time, but then you basically make a different version of it in your own post). i don't appreciate that this becomes a kind of "get out of jail free" card as when you say something genuinely insulting to a friend and when you realize you've gone too far you just back away and say "kidding! i was only kidding!"
i don't really care whether he thinks "serious" issues should be discussed "seriously" or not--that's not my beef with him, and i think you're giving him too much credit as a provocateur. i've yet to read or hear anything he's said that wasn't deliberately incendiary/useless and pedestrian/banal.
also i don't think zizek is the least bit funny. if you're looking for humor, there are some better places to look. but to each his own i guess.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 16:01 (ten years ago) link
deliberately incendiary/useless OR pedestrian/banal.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 16:02 (ten years ago) link
i think there's a number of ways to respond to that on Zizek's behalf, but i think the easiest way is to simply deny that making a "coherent political statement" is really any part of his project. if you're looking for that you're bound to be disappointed. the sorta left-hegelian/lacanian framework he is working in doesn't really even allow such a thing, if he's being true to it. if you think doing theory in this way is a waste of time, well that's another discussion. but i think he knows what he's doing.
on the other hand, see his answer to the first question in that video posted above for a good example of that tactic falling flat into banality. you can see what he's trying to do but it doesn't come off (imo).
i think we discussed it way upthread, but his admiration for "absolutists" like Paul and Lenin gives the game away i think. in this he's not too far from something like Gillian Rose's Hegel Contra Sociology. but for him i imagine trying to find the thing you can say that is "going too far" is sorta his method in a reductive nutshell.
but i dont think the problem with this is that he's not coherent enough. maybe too coherent to the extent that the "absolute violence" or whatever he will advocate for (tongue in cheek or no) isn't really as free from the hegemonic ideological field he wants to disrupt. you can keep drawing a distinction between actual, specific violence (to be shunned) and "absolute violence" all you want but that doesn't bring "absolute violence" (and any theoretical position it would be based on) into view. it is, to use a word he seems to favor to an suspicious degree, impotent.
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 16:30 (ten years ago) link
tldr: i think if you buy into the framework of what he's doing then the form of his method has precedence over the content of his writings (or that these two things are in a dialectical relationship of mutual destabilization).
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 16:38 (ten years ago) link
so in that sense, "i was just kidding!" --> "or was i?" isn't really bad as a summary. Lacan goes on about this sort of thing all the time, actually.
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 16:39 (ten years ago) link
on the humor issue -- i know this was posted upthread already, but i honestly think about it maybe once a week or so: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/14/valentines-day-is-romance-dead
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Monday, 29 July 2013 17:18 (ten years ago) link
zizek has plenty of serious, substantive, and coherent ideas about, for starters, how political ideology functions.
the way we're talking about z. right now is a bit like the way athenians talked about socrates. they saw an ugly man, a freeloader, a defender of dictators, who postured in the city square and took impressionable young groupies to bed with him. this kind of misses out on whole swaths of the dude's thought though, no?
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 17:43 (ten years ago) link
― ryan, Monday, July 29, 2013 11:38 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
i could not give a shit about the "form" of his utterances being "destabilizing" or other sorts of things academics and their avatars like to say to feel like they are doing political work when they are picking at their own asshole. like i said above, that's giving him far more credit for rocking the boat than he is due. zizek alternates between flattering and trolling a few 1,000 theoryheads and cult studies also-rans in such a way that keeps them buzzing about his sweaty brow. for everybody else he's, at best, an occasionally amusing irritant.
i don't expect to convince anyone in this thread and you won't convince me that zizek is worth the time of day.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 18:52 (ten years ago) link
Lacan goes on about this sort of thing all the time, actually.
tempted to write "i rest my case" TBF
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 18:54 (ten years ago) link
what case? that you object to his demeanor on youtube?
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:00 (ten years ago) link
?
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:01 (ten years ago) link
it's a figure of speech
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:02 (ten years ago) link
chomsky does a lot of butthole-picking too
― max, Monday, 29 July 2013 19:03 (ten years ago) link
max, did you read the part where i'm not defending chomsky? i haven't given more than half a shit about chomsky since i was 16.
also i'm not chiefly reacting to zizek's audiovisual presentation, though that certainly doesn't really aid him in my eyes. i'm reacting to the stuff i've read, which (again) is either just plain boring/heard-it-all-before or just transparently tendentious garbage. i'm referring to his film "criticism" and his political "criticism." and no, i haven't read it all or most of it. he's written like 600 books, why in god's name would i do that to myself?
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:04 (ten years ago) link
i'ma leave this thread b/c i don't have much to contribute and what little i might have i'm just gonna be repeating until we're all sick to our stomachs.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:06 (ten years ago) link
xp to your question mark: well you've portrayed z as a giant troll, as though he never wrote a thing of substance, so yes it does come off like you're more familiar with his youtube clips than his books.
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:07 (ten years ago) link
lol ok
― max, Monday, 29 July 2013 19:08 (ten years ago) link
no one is saying you have to care about or read in the tradition he is working in. if you care to know wtf is going on with zizek or why some people pay attention to him then it might pay some big dividends to engage in a little risky empathy and try to see what it's about.
I know you think theory is a big shell game, and sometimes it is, but it is also capable of producing forms of thinking and criticism with profound effects that are very rewarding if you are willing to do the work to get there. It's not really even the same genre as something like Chomsky or whoever you presumably think is doing real "political" work. It's a way of holding what people think of as real "political work" accountable. That precisely as valuable AND silly and wasteful as it looks.
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 19:09 (ten years ago) link
Critical theory is political in an indirect way. Socrates is a good reference point for the role it serves in the culture -- more so than contemporary analytic philosophy it's about turning over unanswerable questions and locating paradoxes in the ideological fabric of society. It's valuable in that it is a.) fun and b.) helps you learn to think more flexibly about... everything basically. It's a cultural practice, or field, that is not a substitute for political action but still "political" in the sense that open-ended, interminable questioning...thought without end or conclusion...is a hallmark of a democratic culture, or open society. If it's useless than freedom is also useless, art is useless, etc. i think critical theory is more about keeping ideas "in play" than anything else...complicating shared assumptions, etc. and this tendency is definitely a part of the progressive tradition.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:10 (ten years ago) link
Wow what a terribly written, rambling post. I should have just said "ryan otm"
― fervently nice (Treeship), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:11 (ten years ago) link
nah I think that was good
― chinavision!, Monday, 29 July 2013 19:13 (ten years ago) link
amateurist, i can understand the frustration if you're sampling his essays (he does indulge in "biff! bam! pow!" antics), but the good stuff imo is in the more sustained texts (e.g., "sublime object of ideology" early on, "less than nothing" most recently).
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:14 (ten years ago) link
tbh i read zizek for the action-adventure plots
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:18 (ten years ago) link
philistine.
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:20 (ten years ago) link
dudes i don't think theory is a "shell game."
first of all, what do you mean by "theory"? do you mean, like, people positing theories that attempt to explain stuff? if so, about what?
or like, writing in the tradition of preferred continental writers x, y, and z? because when a lot of folks talk about "theory" they really mean the latter, i.e. "Theory"
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:20 (ten years ago) link
my sense is that today a lot of people use "theory" to mean what used to be called "philosophy".
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:24 (ten years ago) link
also, let's say zizek's work is a huge iceberg. if i've read some small tip of this iceberg (like some of his film-cum-politics books, a bunch of his editorials, a few youtube seminars, etc.) and found it generally without interest (and largely w/o merit), i can choose to make an assumption that the rest is mostly of the same kind. or i can just defer, leaving open the possibility that some other part of this mostly-submerged iceberg contains a significant quantity of writing that is completely at odds with that i've been exposed to. that's always possible, but i'd put it in the realm of the unlikely.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:24 (ten years ago) link
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, July 29, 2013 2:24 PM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
philosophy is still a thing, and at least in anglo-american universities very little of it relates to the postwar lineage that people with other humanities degrees refer to as "Theory"
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:25 (ten years ago) link
I mean what happens to attempts to explain stuff under the conditions of modernity (in the absence of a final or "theological" holistic explanation, if you will). It's not reducible to a few continental writers (I work in American thought, for instance) but does it (unfortunately in my mind) tend to get conflated with a certain emancipatory tradition which comes from continental thinkers.
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 19:25 (ten years ago) link
well it doesn't relate to it methodologically or doctrinally, i suppose--certainly the subject matter relates
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:26 (ten years ago) link
And you are totally free to disregard zizek! You just seem to show an interest, that's all.
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 19:27 (ten years ago) link
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, July 29, 2013 1:43 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
this is absolutely true i think, but this thread makes it very hard to have this conversation. i mean i disagree its all about his 'form' or whatever -- honestly i don't think he tries to be cryptic so much as is just sort of discursive and rambling, and often wants to talk about things that he feels are more relevant than others might.
at least one stupid cliffs-notes takeaway that i actually get from his stuff and find useful is that frequently when someone says "how can they think this? this is obviously wrong. here are the facts:" then they're barking up the wrong tree.
the core notion being just that people don't believe things for necessarily 'logical' reasons, and 'logical' arguments won't sway them because the actual arguments and beliefs they articulate aren't a coherent system, but trappings they invent and project that have the same _effect_ as the thing they actually care about and believe. and that's why the idea of applying ideas from psychoanalysis to political texts makes some sense.
i mean you can get some of the same notions from elsewhere, but zizek actually pursues that sort of inquiry into sometimes interesting places.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:29 (ten years ago) link
why should theory (lowercase) be limited to "attempts to explain stuff under the conditions of modernity"? shouldn't you call it "modernity theory" or "modernity studies" or something? to call it "theory" tout court seems an imperialist gesture to me (and I do find that Theory-capital-T in the American academy functions, w/in the humanities anyhow, in an imperialistic manner).
clover, if you need zizek to tell you that...
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:30 (ten years ago) link
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:31 (ten years ago) link
That's a totally fair point about "theory." I think in some ways though that we'd want to hold on to the "tout court" for complicated reasons that have to do with acknowledging the tradition you're working in. It's holding out for the infinite, to use a "theory" kind of phrase.
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 19:36 (ten years ago) link
totally agree. my sense is that in the anglo world, speculative thought of the type associated with continental philosophy was more heartily embraced at first within literary theory than within philosophy departments. but this "theory" thing really has a lot of good old philosophizing going on, and maintains a dialogue with that tradition going all the way back to the pre-socratics.
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:43 (ten years ago) link
by "at first" i mean postwar 20th c., not all-time, obv.
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 19:44 (ten years ago) link
there is a "modernity theory"/"modernity studies" trend w/in film studies btw, it made a lot of converts in the 90s. but the last chapter of this book is kind of a unrecoverable blow to those arguments, i think.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 20:08 (ten years ago) link
now i'm intrigued.
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 20:12 (ten years ago) link
well you'd want to read some of tom gunning's articles on the subject, going back to mid-80s, i guess. he was supposed to have an anthology of those out a few years ago but LOL academic presses.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 20:15 (ten years ago) link
this is also worth browsing: http://www.amazon.com/Cinema-Invention-Modern-Life-Charney/dp/0520201124/
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 20:17 (ten years ago) link
and the lineage traces back to http://www.amazon.com/Techniques-Observer-Modernity-Century-October/dp/0262531070/
nice, thanks. that last book has a beautiful cover!
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, 29 July 2013 20:23 (ten years ago) link
ooooh I'm gonna read that last one. good stuff.
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 20:25 (ten years ago) link
to put my own cards on the table, when i talk about "modernity" i usually have some variation of what niklas luhmann suggested in mind: http://www.amazon.com/Observations-Modernity-Writing-Science-Luhmann/dp/0804732353/ref=pd_sim_b_5
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 20:36 (ten years ago) link
well, the crary book's argument is extremely dubious i think, but it's not a bad read
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 20:49 (ten years ago) link
also sorry people i forgot that it was
dontbeadickday.com
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 20:52 (ten years ago) link
Amateurist if you dislike all Theory then having a debate specifically about Zizek seems kinda pointless? Like "I object to the notion of chilli chocolate ice cream. BTW I hate chilli, chocolate and ice cream."
― Tim F, Monday, 29 July 2013 22:15 (ten years ago) link
― flopson, Monday, 29 July 2013 22:16 (ten years ago) link
― Tim F, Monday, July 29, 2013 5:15 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
but zizek is read (and, apparently, appreciated) by people who aren't devoted only to Theory. and I don't recall where I said I object to everything Theory--I just don't enjoy the conflation of theory and Theory.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 22:25 (ten years ago) link
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Sunday, July 28, 2013 7:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
i don't what technical fields you're referring to but i know some undergraduate math textbooks that are straight up masterpieces of exposition that give a rich vision of a field of study, if not as up-to-date in terms of current research as you'd expect in a grad textbook. sometimes they are even almost valuable as literature, like gouvea's p-adic numbers for example, which has this really friendly kinda gregarious jewish uncle tone, so readable and perfectly sustained. i used to work at my campus bookstore in the textbook dept and would read other science textbooks and they were usually pretty cool. i think your post is a good characterization of a lot of arts textbooks though. like a prof at my school literally puts out a textbook called "dinner-party economics"
― flopson, Monday, 29 July 2013 22:26 (ten years ago) link
Amateurist if you dislike all Theory then having a debate specifically about Zizek seems kinda pointless? Like "I object to the notion of chilli chocolate ice cream. BTW I hate chilli, chocolate and ice cream."― Tim F, Monday, July 29, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― Tim F, Monday, July 29, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― c21m50nh3x460n, Monday, 29 July 2013 22:27 (ten years ago) link
of/in the end result*.
― c21m50nh3x460n, Monday, 29 July 2013 22:28 (ten years ago) link
huh
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Monday, 29 July 2013 22:29 (ten years ago) link
chilli chocolate ice cream not equal to the sum of its parts, basically
― flopson, Monday, 29 July 2013 22:30 (ten years ago) link
is zizek a big deal among Theory ppl, or he is more, like, niche with disproportionate rep among outsiders?
― flopson, Monday, 29 July 2013 22:39 (ten years ago) link
iirc, he was pretty high on that "most cited" list that was circulating a while back.
― ryan, Monday, 29 July 2013 22:43 (ten years ago) link
we need to pause for a moment and ask ourselves, "why are we avoiding diacritics?"
the name is Žižek, people.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 22:46 (ten years ago) link
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 22:25 (56 minutes ago) Permalink
is there any that you like?
― Tim F, Monday, 29 July 2013 23:24 (ten years ago) link
― flopson, Monday, July 29, 2013 6:26 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
see something like gouvea's book is, i'd imagine, the sort of "good" textbook i was describing: "textbooks written by the people who also wrote the papers. they tend to be good, often contain new material themselves, and be well regarded as works in the field in their own right. often they are assigned to grad courses". i don't know the field well enough to talk about gouvea's book in particular, but the dude has papers on the topic with barry mazur, so his credentials seem pretty top-notch. and obviously its assigned at a grad level. this is the sort of textbook a mathematician who works in a different field might be recommended, i imagine. p-adic numbers also are appear to me to be really open to a straightforward exposition because they're just a special construction with special properties as i understand it, not a field unto themselves. (you can correct me here!)
i was thinking about e.g. the way maclane's algebra or feller's books on probability theory tower above other books ostensibly on the same topic. and those are particularly strong examples because 'algebra' and 'probability theory' are the sorts of things you can get a really trimmed down 'intro' textbook for advanced undergrads for.
math is an interesting field in this regard to because textbooks of the right sort are so essential to it. notation, conventions, etc. change so much that you almost need a translator's guide to delve into lots of the original stuff -- it becomes an exercise in history of science as much as anything. but think of something like the bourbaki group -- writing a 'systematic' account often becomes a way of redefining the questions you're asking in the field and wrestling it into a new shape. along the way, often new questions are asked and answered, new results are systematized, etc. and now bourbaki, like maclane or feller, _is_ considered the "classic" source, as opposed to the "intro" textbook. or consider something like "sketches of an elephant" or EGA. (not that i'm laying claim to owning/understanding them, but by reputation, etc...) an element here is that while people might think they're engaging in "proof irrelevant" math where you can throw away the proof and keep the result, once you're past a certain level, what you care about, maybe even more than the results, _are_ the proof techniques, overall architecture of knowledge, etc.
in my reading of that article though, i really can't imagine that those were the sorts of "textbooks" he had in mind. rather i think he was encouraging readers to learn the results and throw away the work that went into them -- the exact opposite of what one wants to do in math!
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 00:05 (ten years ago) link
sorry for the lengthy reply. this is the sort of thing i actually spend much more time thinking about than zizek.
"just a special construction"
"just" in the mathematical sense obv, not the usual one.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 00:08 (ten years ago) link
bourbaki are fucking impossible to read
― flopson, Tuesday, 30 July 2013 00:48 (ten years ago) link
finney, i don't know if this fits into "theory" for you, but there's plenty of interesting stuff in barthes, althusser, etc.
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 00:50 (ten years ago) link
(understatement of the year award there)
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 00:51 (ten years ago) link
flopson, what are the names of some of those textbooks? they sound interesting.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 00:51 (ten years ago) link
i mostly come at this via interests in film/literature/poetry. the formalists and structuralists are important to me. again, not sure if that overlaps with your understanding of Theory (or theory).
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 00:54 (ten years ago) link
also the idea that i can't or shouldn't critique Zizek (however sophomorically) if I don't already admire/accept all of the intellectual underpinnings of his work is kind of o_O honestly.
i mean, that just reinforces my notion of Theory as this kind of self-reproducing thing that only substantively engages itself
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 00:57 (ten years ago) link
whoa xposts.
i love the topic, sterling. not exactly textbooks, but: i really get into how-to books that are "masterpieces of exposition", to use flopson's phrase.
these are underappreciated genres, imo. and one of the reasons i always loved the whole earth catalog, with all its utopian utilitarianism.
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 01:01 (ten years ago) link
amateurist, c'mon man, now you're playing the victim a bit.
nobody's saying you can't critique z. b/c you haven't read his heavier tomes. what i was responding to wasn't the fact that you were critiquing him, but the fact that a major point of your critique was that you saw in zizek a lot of hot air and posturing without substance, and i'm saying, well, there are these books of his where, um, i do think there's a lot of substance.
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 01:06 (ten years ago) link
but i will concede that we could use more diacritical marks.
― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 01:12 (ten years ago) link
"not a field unto themselves"
except of course for the field of p-adic numbers given rise to by any prime p. whoops!
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 01:32 (ten years ago) link
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, July 30, 2013 12:50 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I would definitely put both of those in the camp of Theory for the purpose of the conversation - at least to the extent that, if someone was going to object to Theory outright on the basis of it being a whole lot of obtuse hot air, I would imagine Barthes and Althusser as being among the first 100 against the wall.
When I was first really getting into post-marxist theory, and before I realised that I'm basically an Adorno stan, I really liked Althusser, but subsequently found that my favourite Zizek (specifically The Sublime Object of Ideology) felt like a smarter* and funnier version of him.
("smarter" in the sense of having smarts, not in the sense of intellect or profundity or etc.)
I would definitely recommend both TSOI and Contingency, Hegemony, Universality as both incredibly thoughtful and highly readable (though with the latter the credit is as much with Laclau and Butler).
Also this nice little book I found really squared the circle for me b/w Zizek as serious worldbuilder and Zizek as the popular Socrates figure:
http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Conversations_with_Zizek.html?id=ExMYKdVRjHIC&redir_esc=y
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, July 30, 2013 12:54 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
To be clear, this wasn't my point.
A critique in the sense of "this falls short of (insert)" is difficult to decode if it's not clear what (insert) is - self-evidently, someone who likes some Zizek but feels he mostly doesn't live up to his best work (or the claims he wants to make for it) will have a different take from someone who admires Zizek's influences but finds him to be a shallow blend of them, who will have a very different take from someone who dislikes those influences but likes other vaguely related modes of thought, who will have a different take again from someone who dismisses that whole field.
Any one of those takes might be quite reasonable, but the more the vantage point of critique zooms out, the more those levels of disappointment become conflated with each other.
But then in basically any area of critique I'm a zoom-in-ist so am probably biased towards what I tend to do reflexively.
― Tim F, Tuesday, 30 July 2013 04:44 (ten years ago) link
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, July 29, 2013 8:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
i've really enjoyed armstrong basic topology, munkres topology, kolmogorov intro to theory of functions and functional analysis, gouvea p-adic numbers, needham visual complex analysis. you need a pretty solid foundation of algebra & analysis to read any of those though, like the equivalent of a standard first year course. also a really fun thing to read is proofs from the book
― flopson, Tuesday, 30 July 2013 19:20 (ten years ago) link
http://critical-theory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/perverts-guide-to-ideology.jpg
― j., Thursday, 1 August 2013 07:44 (ten years ago) link
i don't even know what these 104 new answers are about, i just wanna post this https://twitter.com/zizek_ebooks/status/362997937116160000
― Merdeyeux, Thursday, 1 August 2013 18:13 (ten years ago) link
thanks for the list!
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, 1 August 2013 18:20 (ten years ago) link
zizek ebooks is prob one of my favorite feeds tbh
― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 1 August 2013 21:33 (ten years ago) link
np! (xp)
― flopson, Thursday, 1 August 2013 21:33 (ten years ago) link
r. pippin sez 'srs book is srs', writes ginormous review to demonstrate
http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/back-to-hegel
― j., Saturday, 3 August 2013 10:37 (ten years ago) link
interesting review. funny how it seems Zizek has sorta come around to Sartre's notion of consciousness as a "hole in Being."
― ryan, Saturday, 3 August 2013 15:52 (ten years ago) link
Hasn't he been saying something along those lines since at least Tarrying With The Negative?
― Tim F, Saturday, 3 August 2013 23:08 (ten years ago) link
https://twitter.com/angstravaganza/status/381110626632085504
― opie dead eyed piece of shit (Merdeyeux), Tuesday, 24 September 2013 15:21 (ten years ago) link
damn
― j., Tuesday, 24 September 2013 17:32 (ten years ago) link
www.youtube.com/embed/bRTdDyXM3VM
― Mordy , Tuesday, 1 October 2013 22:42 (ten years ago) link
http://critical-theory.com/zizek-vice/
― Mordy , Sunday, 6 October 2013 05:37 (ten years ago) link
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/11/who-responsible-us-shutdown-2008-meltdown-slavoj-zizek
― Mordy , Friday, 11 October 2013 17:37 (ten years ago) link
They reject the concept of fruit
― wmlynch, Friday, 11 October 2013 18:53 (ten years ago) link
uh he's doing a lot of interviews
― markers, Monday, 14 October 2013 07:45 (ten years ago) link
i just found a bunch more
shocking for a man who seems pretty prominent most of the time and also has a movie out lol
― the Shearer of simulated snowsex etc. (Dwight Yorke), Monday, 14 October 2013 10:35 (ten years ago) link
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/mandelas-socialist-failure/
― Mordy , Monday, 9 December 2013 05:21 (ten years ago) link
And was this also not the truth about the whole of the Mandela memorial ceremony? All the crocodile tears of the dignitaries were a self-congratulatory exercise, and Jangtjie translated them into what they effectively were: nonsense. What the world leaders were celebrating was the successful postponement of the true crisis which will explode when poor, black South Africans effectively become a collective political agent. They were the Absent One to whom Jantjie was signalling, and his message was: the dignitaries really don't care about you. Through his fake translation, Jantjie rendered palpable the fake of the entire ceremony.
This article was amended on 16 December 2013 to comply with our editorial guidelines
― A Skanger Barkley (nakhchivan), Thursday, 19 December 2013 03:53 (ten years ago) link
hahahaha <3
― VENIET IMBER (imago), Thursday, 19 December 2013 03:54 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQsZMzcfYa0
brotherhood, unity, etc.
― j., Monday, 6 January 2014 21:34 (ten years ago) link
omg that doctor story at the end
― Mordy , Monday, 6 January 2014 21:56 (ten years ago) link
lot of books coming out this year
― markers, Friday, 14 February 2014 19:47 (ten years ago) link
like, at least four
he just does a word scramble of all his other books though
― sent from my butt (harbl), Friday, 14 February 2014 19:48 (ten years ago) link
I like the Philip Kaufman version, with Donald Sutherland. The ending, when the world is already occupied by body snatchers, you remember how the snatchers react when they see still humans? [Imitates Donald Sutherland’s gaping jaw howl] For years it became fashion among my friends to greet each other like this.
http://thephantomcountry.blogspot.de/2014/02/release-from-ideology-is-painful.html
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Friday, 28 February 2014 20:41 (ten years ago) link
heh seeing his initials like that made me think of
http://conversationalreading.com/images/S-Z-roland-barthes.jpg
― Ward Fowler, Friday, 28 February 2014 21:02 (ten years ago) link
My last revisionism: I quite liked—and I know this is the lowest of the lowest—the last two seasons of 24. You have Jack Bauer torturing, blah, blah, and you have Alison Taylor, good liberal president. They both got in the bad luck and break down. It shows very honestly how, within today’s universe, there is no way to be noble.
SF: You make me want to see it now.
SŽ: It’s not that good, I have to tell you. Life is too short. Fuck, even if you count out the publicity, it’s 24 times 45 minutes! Unless you are freak with nothing but time, it’s just too much.
― difficult listening hour, Saturday, 1 March 2014 06:31 (ten years ago) link
SF: I like it, but it’s sort of falling back on titties.
― j., Saturday, 1 March 2014 14:30 (ten years ago) link
Please Stop Worshipping the Superstar Professor Who Calls Students “Boring Idiots”
― Van Horn Street, Monday, 2 June 2014 22:10 (nine years ago) link
done
― mattresslessness, Monday, 2 June 2014 22:32 (nine years ago) link
would like to hear the opinions of his students rather than some journalist with an agenda
― everyday sheeple (Michael B), Monday, 2 June 2014 22:34 (nine years ago) link
when i took him for a class in grad school he was always polite + thoughtful when students spoke to him. i vaguely remember him complaining about US students v. european students who he felt were more respectful + humble v. US students who were kinda loud children. i thought he was otm.
― Mordy, Monday, 2 June 2014 23:18 (nine years ago) link
She's just confirming the stereotypes that Americans have no sense of irony and consider good customer service to be the most important quality.
― ₴HABΔZZ ¶IZZΔ (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:30 (nine years ago) link
Mordy: did he ask for papers though?
― ryan, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:38 (nine years ago) link
Ironically, she sounds like a boring idiot.
― ₴HABΔZZ ¶IZZΔ (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:39 (nine years ago) link
when i took him for a class in grad school
have you ever mentioned this?
― markers, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:40 (nine years ago) link
I watched Pervert's Guide to Ideology recently and enjoyed it, although I felt like it came apart toward the end. Also, I have a problem with "They Live"/red pill-type metaphors about ideology. I mean, I think they're useful to an extent because they explain ideology as the default mode of seeing rather than something that's only there when you deliberately employ it. However, these metaphors seem to give people the idea that one can just take the "truth pill" or put on the "truth glasses" and suddenly be free of ideology, which is bullshit.
― ₴HABΔZZ ¶IZZΔ (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:46 (nine years ago) link
read the sublime object if you're interested in a decent explanation of his notion of ideology
― markers, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:51 (nine years ago) link
he contrasts it with marx's and althusser's early on
i feel like you're snarking me, markers bc surely i've mentioned that xp
also liked pervert's guide to ideology
and no, he didn't read the papers. avital ronell did. or one of her grad students. idk. who cares? papers are boring.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:51 (nine years ago) link
seeing isn't being free it's only seeing; i can't remember but i'm sure "they know but still they are doing" was in there somewhere.
i was kinda disappointed by this after pervert's guide to cinema, felt a lil thinner/glibber? v easy to stare at for 2.5 hours tho.
― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:54 (nine years ago) link
I generally get IA when people act like fucking babies about their professors.
― ₴HABΔZZ ¶IZZΔ (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:55 (nine years ago) link
xp I agree pervert's guide to cinema was better and a little more challenging too.
I thought maybe this one was meant to be a little bit more introductory.
I knew Mordy had taken a class by Zizek, so he's not making it up.
― Try Leuchars More! (dowd), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:07 (nine years ago) link
what can i say? i'm pretty valueless + empty w/ little to contribute or share beyond this one course i took more than half a decade ago. i'll never mention it again.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:26 (nine years ago) link
what was it about. did he assign his own books. were you radicalized. tell us stories.
― ryan, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:27 (nine years ago) link
helen vendler came to my masters program once and tough a class. that is my one brush with academic fame.
it was mostly about antigone, the family and the state. he assigned parallax from himself. the coolest thing i read in the course was derrida's glas. i wasn't radicalized. he told lots of filthy jokes that were very funny. some of the students in the course were doing some cool work. one particular guy was writing about haunted sites and collective trauma + memory in the south which i thought was very interesting.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:29 (nine years ago) link
if you have i don't remember. no snark.
― markers, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:30 (nine years ago) link
If I were Helen Vendler I wouldn't read papers either. I got a stack of"em staring at me.
― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:31 (nine years ago) link
how much of academia is people saying things are interesting
― conrad, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:31 (nine years ago) link
ideally all of it. practically 5%?
― Mordy, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:32 (nine years ago) link
one particular guy was writing about haunted sites and collective trauma + memory in the south which i thought was very interesting.
i'd be interested in this
― macklin' rosie (crüt), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:32 (nine years ago) link
not saying interesting things Mordy saying things are interesting
― conrad, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:33 (nine years ago) link
We didn't really learn anything from WikiLeaks we didn't already presume to be true – but it is one thing to know it in general and another to get concrete data. It is a little bit like knowing that one's sexual partner is playing around. One can accept the abstract knowledge of it, but pain arises when one learns the steamy details, when one gets pictures of what they were doing.
― Mordy, Friday, 20 June 2014 02:48 (nine years ago) link
this is good http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/critique-of-zizek-on-kosovo-and-the-balkans-1/
― ey, Thursday, 10 July 2014 06:12 (nine years ago) link
reading "altai" by "wu ming" and there's a casual reference to a slavic seller of banned books called "gigek"
― max, Thursday, 10 July 2014 14:01 (nine years ago) link
Yeah, ey, thanks for that, that was very interesting. Made me finally buy Badiou's Being and Event.
― Frederik B, Thursday, 10 July 2014 14:09 (nine years ago) link
Frederik: you might find 'Normalizing the Balkans' by Dusan Bjelic interesting, too.
― ey, Thursday, 10 July 2014 14:59 (nine years ago) link
http://www.newsweek.com/did-marxist-philosophy-superstar-slavoj-zizek-plagiarize-white-nationalist-journal-258433
When Newsweek contacted Critical Inquiry, James Williams, its senior managing editor, agreed that Žižek “absolutely” borrowed from Hornbeck’s review. “We’re very sorry it happened,” he said. “If we had known Žižek was plagiarizing, we would have certainly asked him to remove the illegal passages.”
Newsweek then contacted Hornbeck, who writes under a pseudonym. “Anyone who has seen the side-by-side comparisons can have no doubt that Žižek is a plagiarist,” he said. “I know nothing about his writing habits. Maybe he does this all the time. Or it may be that as a prominent Marxist he didn’t want it known that he reads American Renaissance. In any case, what he did is contemptible, and his publisher...should certainly have a word with him.”
― orchestra_hit, Monday, 14 July 2014 01:46 (nine years ago) link
http://www.critical-theory.com/i-nonetheless-deeply-regret-the-incident-zizek-responds-to-plagiarism-allegations/
― everybody loves lana del raymond (s.clover), Monday, 14 July 2014 01:59 (nine years ago) link
i dunno it seems pretty plausible that his general slovenliness explains pretty much everything
― j., Monday, 14 July 2014 02:47 (nine years ago) link
Yeah, he draws from Wikipedia regularly, so I can readily imagine him cutting and pasting text from email without bothering to see whether the email was quoting or paraphrasing a source.
― one way street, Monday, 14 July 2014 03:07 (nine years ago) link
Not to mention the nearly page-long passage (on The Matrix, I think?) in "On Belief" that he uses twice within the same chapter to introduce two different arguments.....
― one way street, Monday, 14 July 2014 03:09 (nine years ago) link
(On Leibniz and cyberspace, rather, on pages 26 and 52 of On Belief).
― one way street, Monday, 14 July 2014 03:19 (nine years ago) link
lol he plagiarized an anti-Semite. so zizek.
― Mordy, Monday, 14 July 2014 04:23 (nine years ago) link
i dunno it seems pretty plausible that his general slovenliness explains pretty much everything― j., Sunday, July 13, 2014 9:47 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― j., Sunday, July 13, 2014 9:47 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
this is as much an alibi for him as a genuine cause of anything.
― I dunno. (amateurist), Monday, 14 July 2014 05:04 (nine years ago) link
what is a genuine cause
― everybody loves lana del raymond (s.clover), Monday, 14 July 2014 15:33 (nine years ago) link
fuck you :)
― I dunno. (amateurist), Monday, 14 July 2014 23:55 (nine years ago) link
iunno. that smiley doesn't feel so genuine to me.
― everybody loves lana del raymond (s.clover), Tuesday, 15 July 2014 02:07 (nine years ago) link
The first thing that such a "fundamentalist" view cannot see is how a foreign gaze is inscribed into the very establishment of "our" identity. Say, Argentinean identity formed itself in the middle of 19th century, when its main mythical motifs were established (the gaucho melancholy, etc.); however, all these motifs were already formulated in the memoirs European travelers a couple of decades earlier – what this means is that, from the very beginning, the Argentinean ideological self-identity relied on an alienating identification with the Other’s gaze. The same holds even more for modern Greece: Athens were in 1800 a provincial peasant village of 10.000 inhabitants, they were not even the first capital of independent Greece. It was under the pressure of Western powers (mostly Germany and England) that the capital was moved to Athens where a series of neoclassic government buildings were constructed by Western architects; it was also the Westerners, fascinated by the Antiquity, who installed in Greeks the sense of continuity with Ancient Greece. Modern Greece thus literally arose as the materialization of the Other’s fantasy, and, since the right of fantasy is the fundamental right, should one not draw from it the extremely non-PC conclusion that not only should Germany and England return to Greece the ancient monuments they plundered and which are now displayed in the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum – Greeks should even voluntarily offer to Germany and Greece whatever old monuments they still possess, since these monuments only have value for the Western ideological fantasy.
― Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (nakhchivan), Sunday, 20 July 2014 22:44 (nine years ago) link
The "plaigiarism" controversy seems overblown. The disputed passages are just summaries of other books, it's not like he plagiarized a white supremacist's ideas as the headlines suggest
― Treeship, Thursday, 7 August 2014 02:49 (nine years ago) link
it's been fun seeing academic types be all 'gotcha! the p-word!!!!' and just look like goobers tho
― mattresslessness, Thursday, 7 August 2014 03:06 (nine years ago) link
as a plagiarism controversy it's pretty dumb but i'm all for calling out his working methods. big surprise that producing like half a million words a year results in shoddy, repetitive work.
― Merdeyeux, Thursday, 7 August 2014 03:20 (nine years ago) link
huge surprise hence the necessary calling out?
― mattresslessness, Thursday, 7 August 2014 03:28 (nine years ago) link
the more people point out that he produces a lot of useless shit the more chance there is of him taking any heed and ever producing anything of worth again. maybe.
― Merdeyeux, Thursday, 7 August 2014 03:37 (nine years ago) link
but then it's kinda just the plight of every celeb academic. he just amplifies it.
― Merdeyeux, Thursday, 7 August 2014 03:38 (nine years ago) link
I was reading an older book ("contingency, hegemony, solidarity") and his contributions are very notable for their repetitiveness -- not only within the book but within his whole body of work. he's a very formulaic writer and I think there's rapidly diminishing returns with his stuff.
― ryan, Thursday, 7 August 2014 11:42 (nine years ago) link
or what merdeyeux said
he has a lot of books that have come out and will come out this year
― markers, Thursday, 7 August 2014 15:49 (nine years ago) link
he's definitely the philosopher i've read the most of at this point
― markers, Thursday, 7 August 2014 15:50 (nine years ago) link
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/rolling-underground-tunnels.html
"Signed by Slavoj Žižek and a friend" - whatever that means. it doesn't read like his voice at all.
― Mordy, Monday, 25 August 2014 21:57 (nine years ago) link
ht treesh: http://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2014/oct/06/slavoj-zizek-webchat-absolute-recoil
But this is not all the truth. There are multiple signs that something new is possible. Let me conclude with one example. Free downloading. Aren't we almost entering communism there? Even DVDs are disappearing. I think capitalism will not be able to integrate so-called intellectual property. Intellectual achievements are in their very nature communists, able to circulate freely. And this free availability of products is already opening up a non-capitalist space, even if it is the product of the most advanced capitalism. Again, just look for the signs. There are signs of an alternative. We just have to be patient and wait. We should act, but not in the old Marxist way that we are instruments of higher historical necessity. We should fight all our struggles, against sexism here, racism there, and so on. But we should nonetheless keep open a sense of risk. There is always a mystery in political activity. You think you are engaged in a big project and nothing comes out of it. But often you make just a small demand, and if you insist on it, everything changes. We cannot master in advance the consequences of our acts. We should act and keep our mind open.So let me finish with a militaristic phrase from Napoleon: on attack, then we shall see. That should be our motto.
So let me finish with a militaristic phrase from Napoleon: on attack, then we shall see. That should be our motto.
― Mordy, Saturday, 25 October 2014 22:05 (nine years ago) link
https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/12390885_1667285013527796_4322619636805548179_n.jpg?oh=8db71a04a918e42fe1e2ce16b6724362&oe=56D6A09D
― big WHOIS aka the nameserver (s.clover), Friday, 25 December 2015 00:28 (eight years ago) link
https://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/the-syndication-of-plagiarism-sz-for-nicole-pepperell/
― flopson, Wednesday, 17 February 2016 14:15 (eight years ago) link
I lol'd
https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/14022188_10157232549005304_7999281079063552365_n.jpg?oh=944cd564e44e01afa10a3bc95d87fa5f&oe=58141E77
― socka flocka-jones (man alive), Monday, 22 August 2016 16:17 (seven years ago) link
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/10/slavoj-zizek-we-are-all-basically-evil-egotistical-disgustingI hate politically correct arrogance. With black friends, in contrast to politically correct white guys, I establish real contact. How? Through dirty stories, dirty jokes. When you visit a foreign country, you play PC games about your interesting food or music, but how do you become really friendly? You exchange a small obscenity.
Yes humour is important for bonding, no it doesn't have to be dick jokes. I wonder if over-generalising from personal experience is humanity's worst trait (after selfishness, xenophobia, and a bottomless capacity for violence).
― the year of diving languorously (ledge), Sunday, 11 December 2016 14:16 (seven years ago) link
Also fun: the accelerationist gets accelerated every time he touches his face
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AIWUMkKZhus
― THE SKURJ OF FAKE NEWS. (kingfish), Tuesday, 20 December 2016 17:26 (seven years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIWUMkKZhus
― THE SKURJ OF FAKE NEWS. (kingfish), Tuesday, 20 December 2016 17:39 (seven years ago) link
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DSfCzWmVQAEJSc8.jpg
― mark s, Monday, 1 January 2018 23:37 (six years ago) link
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DSfDp4CWsAAtxNv.jpg
― global tetrahedron, Tuesday, 2 January 2018 00:00 (six years ago) link
slavojpingbag
― mark s, Tuesday, 2 January 2018 00:03 (six years ago) link
Oh no: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrSUGgfM4Q4
― Glower, Disruption & Pies (kingfish), Sunday, 11 March 2018 09:08 (six years ago) link
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QwasyxTf3q0/VgU-uPebGeI/AAAAAAAAFVM/NmFobBNrk6A/s1600/Zizek-wedding-0002.jpg
― calzino, Sunday, 24 March 2019 10:06 (five years ago) link
Everyone evil n egotistical: that's why I love Zizek (and Haneke). Both have a deep rooted belief that we're not that good.
― nathom, Sunday, 24 March 2019 10:37 (five years ago) link
the fabled backstory here -- true or not who can say! -- is that he looks as if he's beaten up bcz he had been, by the brothers of the bride when sz tried to weasel out of the wedding :D
enjoy yr symptom!
― mark s, Sunday, 24 March 2019 10:42 (five years ago) link
he is fumbling in his pocket with a concealed taser.
― calzino, Sunday, 24 March 2019 10:49 (five years ago) link
Not sure how an in-law-to-be beatdown is gonna convince you to *go thru* with a wedding
― Helel Cool J (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 24 March 2019 10:55 (five years ago) link
i think it also involved being frogmarched to the altar
― mark s, Sunday, 24 March 2019 11:07 (five years ago) link
no shotgun no credibility
― Helel Cool J (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 24 March 2019 11:08 (five years ago) link
we are in agreement tbh
― mark s, Sunday, 24 March 2019 11:27 (five years ago) link
Feels like they watched Game of Thrones. Lol
― nathom, Sunday, 24 March 2019 15:12 (five years ago) link
in an alternate universe zizek plays detective crockett in miami vice
― affects breves telnet (Gummy Gummy), Sunday, 24 March 2019 15:28 (five years ago) link
A local linguist is found dead in a puddle of black ooze. Suspicion falls on Midsomer Stanton’s ice cream van driver, angry that all-encompassing whiteness might threaten the world ending with a whimper rather than a bang.— Midsomer Murders Bot (@midsomerplots) March 18, 2019
― mark s, Sunday, 24 March 2019 16:57 (five years ago) link
Important update
mesmerized by this video of slavoj žižek absolutely demolishing two hot dogs pic.twitter.com/grNOIPfEQn— Nick Usen (@nickusen) April 16, 2019
― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, 18 April 2019 12:31 (four years ago) link
So good..
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 18 April 2019 12:40 (four years ago) link
So stoked to watch this
― flappy bird, Saturday, 20 April 2019 05:14 (four years ago) link
Not going to watch this (my masochism has limits). Sounds like they were having two monologues side by side rather than a debate.
― Leaghaidh am brón an t-anam bochd (dowd), Saturday, 20 April 2019 07:29 (four years ago) link
Live debate is bullshit
― findom haddie (jim in vancouver), Saturday, 20 April 2019 07:31 (four years ago) link
lest we forget
remember in 2011 when the white radical left lined up to denounce the black riot as feral, incoherent, mindless? here’s Zizek and David Harvey back then pic.twitter.com/ZJVxWq5r5e— hannah (@nanpansky) June 4, 2020
― hip posts without flaggadocio (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 4 June 2020 11:35 (three years ago) link
I had a feeling Owen Jones was often bad back then but couldn't quite remember why, but knew it was more than just his early hostility to Corbynism and his terrible books!
― calzino, Thursday, 4 June 2020 12:39 (three years ago) link
whenever he's actually deigned to take a concrete position on something specific it's always been some basic liberal and/or conservative bullshit, with marxist/hegelian rhetoric thrown in to appease those who still want to believe he's a revolutionary. "no message to deliver" fuck off back to the academy you pearl clutching hack
these celebrity leftists always turn out like this, he & chomsky are way more similar than different in this regard
― 1312 (Left), Thursday, 4 June 2020 13:18 (three years ago) link
this guy has always had seriously dodgy views on race (as well as gender, sexuality etc) which "the white radical left" has been way too keen on obfuscating/excusing
― 1312 (Left), Thursday, 4 June 2020 13:22 (three years ago) link
motherfuck him and hegel
Zizek. Apparently the new frontier of emancipatory philosophy is “indigenous people couldn’t understand their genocide as being wrong without western theory.” Impressive! pic.twitter.com/6chPxe3aCH— Ben Miller (@benwritesthings) July 4, 2020
― If you choose too long a name, your new display name will be truncated in (Left), Saturday, 4 July 2020 19:03 (three years ago) link
celebrity leftist here casually writing liberal-fascist defend-western-values screeds for russian state media
fox news levels of empathy for the police here
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/493408-white-racism-fight-guilty/amp/
― If you choose too long a name, your new display name will be truncated in (Left), Saturday, 4 July 2020 19:24 (three years ago) link
happy international men's day pic.twitter.com/no1MZGamwU— zo (@gramscifancam) November 19, 2020
― early-Woolf semantic prosody (Hadrian VIII), Thursday, 19 November 2020 19:28 (three years ago) link
been laughing at this for 3 days pic.twitter.com/e2XtNpKX46— the thicc husband & father (@lukeisamazing) February 10, 2021
― John Wesley Glasscock (Hadrian VIII), Thursday, 11 February 2021 17:55 (three years ago) link
just saw him at a cafe in Bloomsbury, he was looking unusually dapper / kempt
― Sudden Birdnet Thus (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, 7 July 2022 11:57 (one year ago) link
get ready for your new Chief Adviser
― big movers, hot steppers + long shaker intros (breastcrawl), Thursday, 7 July 2022 13:03 (one year ago) link