But what do y'all think?
― Tim, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― alext, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― Josh, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― mark s, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
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 (10 years ago) Permalink
― anthony, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― mandee, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― the pinefox, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― Mandee, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― Momus, Thursday, 30 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― The Hegemon, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― Sterling Clover, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― mark s, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― Momus, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
― Mandee, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
*sobs* a lot
I'd tried to erase that day from my memory, thanks a lot Barley!!!
― chris, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (10 years ago) Permalink
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 (7 years ago) Permalink
― Real Goths Don't Wear Black (Enrique), Monday, 3 April 2006 10:43 (7 years ago) Permalink
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 (7 years ago) Permalink
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Monday, 3 April 2006 14:21 (7 years ago) Permalink
― Real Goths Don't Wear Black (Enrique), Monday, 3 April 2006 14:23 (7 years ago) Permalink
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 (7 years ago) Permalink
(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 (7 years ago) Permalink
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 (7 years ago) Permalink
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Monday, 3 April 2006 15:30 (7 years ago) Permalink
― Nathalie (stevie nixed), Saturday, 13 May 2006 14:08 (7 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
Plenty of Stalin apologists argued that he was only liquidating horrible reactionaries, too.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:30 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
-- 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 (5 years ago) Permalink
What do you mean by greater serbia?
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 13:57 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
-- 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 (5 years ago) Permalink
Yeah I wasn't skitting you I was just playing the comedy disinformation game.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:06 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
-- 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 (5 years ago) Permalink
state-nations do sometimes have a tendency to be constructed that way don't they!
― laxalt, Saturday, 19 April 2008 14:17 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
lol mccaine in nyt pwning tho. his constituency recognize & ignore while he cat-strings huckabees zombie cohort?
― mkcaine, Saturday, 19 April 2008 16:58 (5 years ago) Permalink
rong thred
― mkcaine, Saturday, 19 April 2008 16:59 (5 years ago) Permalink
mkcaine for presinedt
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 17:01 (5 years ago) Permalink
"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 (5 years ago) Permalink
K-Punk need somewhere to glom his ideas from.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 17:36 (5 years ago) Permalink
damn son
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 19 April 2008 18:43 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
hahahaha. don't even go there. it comes under i a richards's category of 'prudential speech'.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 18:58 (5 years ago) Permalink
-- 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 (5 years ago) Permalink
my post was meant as a zing -- britishes style.
― banriquit, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:18 (5 years ago) Permalink
http://youtube.com/watch?v=D9FXyr-LLeI
― latebloomer, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:19 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (5 years ago) Permalink
lol Lacan = mad fresh rite
omg do want xp to latebloomer
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:33 (5 years ago) Permalink
You've been Zizekrolled!
― Casuistry, Saturday, 19 April 2008 19:58 (5 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
that sounds like 70% of his output
― Jeff LeVine, Wednesday, 17 September 2008 22:18 (4 years ago) Permalink
don't get my hopes up like that
― I know, right?, Wednesday, 17 September 2008 22:20 (4 years ago) Permalink
bump, because I still haven't found it.
― I know, right?, Thursday, 18 September 2008 08:56 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
That's OTM. My greatest fear is dying and being a consciousness trapped in a dead body.
― Mordy, Thursday, 18 September 2008 09:25 (4 years ago) Permalink
http://www.jewcy.com/post/defense_zizek
Good stuff.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 09:38 (4 years ago) Permalink
Eh, I'd say he's constructing a bit of a stawn man there.
― Shacknasty (Frogman Henry), Thursday, 4 December 2008 09:56 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
naw, it was a poor gag. look at the guy's name.
― Shacknasty (Frogman Henry), Thursday, 4 December 2008 10:25 (4 years ago) Permalink
<3 u Ziz
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Thursday, 4 December 2008 10:36 (4 years ago) Permalink
Xp. Cute, you earned retroactive lolz from me.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:07 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
so sick of people calling dude a closet authoritarian
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:13 (4 years ago) Permalink
My fave Zizek clip:
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:15 (4 years ago) Permalink
Would kill for a Zizek film critic gig at the Voice (or wherever).
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:19 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
Can we make a "talk like Zizek" thread?
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 11:41 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
A long while ago.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 21:51 (4 years ago) Permalink
thought you didn't seem that new
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Thursday, 4 December 2008 21:58 (4 years ago) Permalink
I've been posting on and off since at least 2005.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 22:02 (4 years ago) Permalink
as mordy?
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Thursday, 4 December 2008 22:03 (4 years ago) Permalink
As my longer name; m0rd3ch4i sh1n3f13ld
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 22:06 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
Yes.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 23:10 (4 years ago) Permalink
― Øystein, Thursday, December 4, 2008 11:33 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark
this?
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 4 December 2008 23:13 (4 years ago) Permalink
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
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 4 December 2008 23:14 (4 years ago) Permalink
Enjoy Your Symptom! is also a Lacan primer more or less.
― Mordy, Thursday, 4 December 2008 23:16 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
"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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
ahaha
― BIG WORLD HOOS. WEBSTEEN. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 5 December 2008 00:53 (4 years ago) Permalink
:-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 (4 years ago) Permalink
a good approach to zizek is the crazier french dudes post-lacan--deleuze & guattari (anti-oedipus?) especially
― kamerad, Friday, 5 December 2008 08:40 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
^ 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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
so, you think Rorty's rep skyrocketed recently?
― Tá a fhios agam, nach bhfuil? (I know, right?), Saturday, 6 December 2008 12:36 (4 years ago) Permalink
Hells yeah.
― Mordy, Saturday, 6 December 2008 12:39 (4 years ago) Permalink
(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 (4 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (4 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
Isn't there a Pinky and the Brain about that?
― Plaxico (I know, right?), Saturday, 3 January 2009 15:52 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
Jordan, Yugoslavia was NOT part of any Russian empire!
― Gavin, Sunday, 4 January 2009 18:00 (4 years ago) Permalink
http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=c6570f94-f4b8-4b2a-b3f5-6adefe8d15ca
― Plaxico (I know, right?), Monday, 12 January 2009 23:50 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
how did you read that so fast?
― Plaxico (I know, right?), Monday, 12 January 2009 23:54 (4 years ago) Permalink
had already read it
― DANCE MUSIC STUCK AT RECOMBINANT PLATEAU (special guest stars mark bronson), Monday, 12 January 2009 23:56 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
burt_stanton is both the joker and batman
― 8====D ------ ㋡ (max), Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:04 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
that's batman.
― DANCE MUSIC STUCK AT RECOMBINANT PLATEAU (special guest stars mark bronson), Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:07 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
― Calling All Creeps! (contenderizer), Tuesday, 13 January 2009 00:36 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
Didn't we talk about this upthread somewhere?
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:23 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
MISATTRIBUTED IT FROM WHERE
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:29 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
hahahahaha this is what happens when you take slavoj zizek seriously
― max, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:34 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
he's a tool.
― Bone Thugs-N-Harmony ft Phil Collins (jim), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:36 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:37 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
ah glad to see that this is "actually" a brilliant analysis
― max, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:39 (4 years ago) Permalink
Don't take it too seriously, max. You'll sound humorless.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:44 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
And there ya go.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:45 (4 years ago) Permalink
i ~think~ mordy was kidding?
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:46 (4 years ago) Permalink
doubt it.
― the face of fashion in soho square (special guest stars mark bronson), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:46 (4 years ago) Permalink
I'm pretty sure I was kidding, dumbass.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:47 (4 years ago) Permalink
:^S
― max, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 22:48 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
Bronson, tell it to me straight. Are you a big Camille Paglia fan?
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:08 (4 years ago) Permalink
um, no. wth has that got to do with anything?
― eligible bachelor, million dollar boat (Brohan Hari), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:12 (4 years ago) Permalink
lol dual login
Because you're coming off like an inexplicably huge hard-ass.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:13 (4 years ago) Permalink
haha i was gonna say somewhere i thought brohan hari was nrq what gives. CAUGHT.
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Wednesday, 28 January 2009 23:15 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
!!!
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
actually i think enrique does dismiss nietzsche because he was an anti-democratic misogynist
― max, Thursday, 29 January 2009 16:49 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
I think Jacques Lacan was a bad man.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 29 January 2009 20:02 (4 years ago) Permalink
there are a lot of things people like about nietzsche
― max, Thursday, 29 January 2009 20:03 (4 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (4 years ago) Permalink
A Terrible Man!
― MIRV Griffin (goole), Thursday, 29 January 2009 21:08 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (4 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
I'm taking a class when him and Ronell next semester.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 21:47 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
"how berlusconi is a racist corrupt asshole"he's not?
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:04 (3 years ago) Permalink
uh yes, yes he is.
― goole, Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:05 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
― Mordy, Tuesday, July 21, 2009 10:47 PM (Yesterday)
Jealous
― ❊❁❄❆❇❃✴❈plaxico❈✴❃❇❆❄❁❊ (I know, right?), Wednesday, 22 July 2009 10:16 (3 years ago) Permalink
My class starts in half an hour. Live blog? :P
― Mordy, Thursday, 10 September 2009 19:02 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
... 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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
i like simon schama more than PLANK zizek.
― history mayne, Thursday, 10 September 2009 22:33 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
# 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 (3 years ago) Permalink
# 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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
I have some doubts that it's actually Zizek.
Maybe Mordy can ask him!!
― tokyo rosemary, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:22 (3 years ago) Permalink
c'mon - it's obviously fake
― Jeff LeVine, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:40 (3 years ago) Permalink
Cheney's favorite drink- Yoo-hoo4:45 PM Aug 17th from TwitterFox
― Jeff LeVine, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:41 (3 years ago) Permalink
Probably, but it's more fun to pretend it's real.
― Your heartbeat soun like sasquatch feet (polyphonic), Friday, 11 September 2009 22:42 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
I tried once but someone threw a tantrum.
― Mordy, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:56 (3 years ago) Permalink
is this not the thread where we talk about slavoj zizek?
― harbl, Friday, 11 September 2009 22:58 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
(Also, I'm shocked that ILX would care about the neologism 'palestinian-frei.')
― Mordy, Friday, 11 September 2009 23:17 (3 years ago) Permalink
# 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 (3 years ago) Permalink
What if it's fake, but it's still authored by Zizek?
― jaymc, Friday, 11 September 2009 23:33 (3 years ago) Permalink
yeah pretty sure zizek's the author
― cozwn, Friday, 11 September 2009 23:36 (3 years ago) Permalink
what is an author?
― ❊❁❄❆❇❃✴❈plaxico❈✴❃❇❆❄❁❊ (I know, right?), Saturday, 12 September 2009 11:33 (3 years ago) Permalink
The twitterer is dead.
― Spencer Chow, Saturday, 12 September 2009 15:59 (3 years ago) Permalink
il n'ya pas de hors-Twitter
― fleetwood (max), Saturday, 12 September 2009 16:08 (3 years ago) Permalink
http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks/statuses/4118700070
― goole, Sunday, 20 September 2009 14:41 (3 years ago) Permalink
i wonder if it is german, french or american style?
― plax (I know, right?), Sunday, 20 September 2009 14:45 (3 years ago) Permalink
'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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
— 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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
# 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 (3 years ago) Permalink
w-w-what
― goole, Friday, 2 October 2009 12:30 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html
― goole, Monday, 9 November 2009 19:53 (3 years ago) Permalink
eh...
"communism, capital. both...pretty bad!"
― goole, Monday, 9 November 2009 19:54 (3 years ago) Permalink
www.zizek.us
New site for all yr Zizek needs, apparently run by Verso.
― kshighway1, Tuesday, 10 November 2009 13:42 (3 years ago) Permalink
http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks/status/5484005532
― still think kshighway is a sock (kshighway1), Thursday, 12 November 2009 04:06 (3 years ago) Permalink
zizek vs. british douchebag
― ♖♕♖ (am0n), Monday, 4 January 2010 16:23 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
think it was about... dylan haha.
― the shart of noise (history mayne), Monday, 4 January 2010 18:34 (3 years ago) Permalink
lol yeah. it was the why don't u like dylan thread.
― Mordy, Monday, 4 January 2010 18:44 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
no logo
― ♖♕♖ (am0n), Monday, 4 January 2010 19:11 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
But maybe this: third way" between liberalism and authoritarianism
is a misstatement of his idea.
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Monday, 4 January 2010 19:34 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
Great joke shortly after 22:00
― pithfork (Hurting 2), Monday, 4 January 2010 20:05 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
and in khomeini's writing for that matter
― max, Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:45 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
― 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:
― just someone who's l o s t (history mayne), Tuesday, 5 January 2010 12:53 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
whenever i see this thread title i think it's about this guy
― doomed... to fart (cankles), Thursday, 7 January 2010 20:55 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
ok didn't turn out how i thought
― plaxico (I know, right?), Thursday, 21 January 2010 13:51 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
"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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
blah blah Morbs zing blah blah will this do?
― Daily Sport Stunna Yasmin Alibhai Brown (Noodle Vague), Friday, 30 April 2010 09:30 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
"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 (3 years ago) Permalink
LOL, I sort of admire that
― Football's Flocking Home (Tom D.), Friday, 30 April 2010 10:00 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
Zizek is truly one of the great trolls of our time.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:56 (3 years ago) Permalink
I'll be reading that later this year, no doubt.
― ksh, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:57 (3 years ago) Permalink
why not read s.thing that doesn't suck?
― long time listener, first time balla (history mayne), Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:57 (3 years ago) Permalink
cause this looks super entertaining
― Mordy, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 19:58 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
this is aight, for a book about... eschatology/teleology... i think those are the words i mean
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
pretty sure all new zizek books are cut and pasted from bits of old ones now.
― plax (ico), Wednesday, 19 May 2010 12:00 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (3 years ago) Permalink
ru going to review it?
give im hell imo
― long time listener, first time balla (history mayne), Wednesday, 19 May 2010 12:55 (3 years ago) Permalink
can i have the bret easton ellis one if ur not gonna read it?
― plax (ico), Sunday, 23 May 2010 20:47 (3 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
this guy has used mountains of cocaine.
― by another name (amateurist), Monday, 24 May 2010 01:58 (2 years ago) Permalink
i really hate / do not get lacan.
― toastmodernist, Monday, 24 May 2010 03:24 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
We don't really have a rolling philosophy thread (maybe we should)
let's do it up
― ksh, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:14 (2 years ago) Permalink
fwiw, that book looks super interesting
― ksh, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:15 (2 years ago) Permalink
this bro doesn't sound like he does philosophy (not a zing, js)
― ultra nate dogg (history mayne), Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:15 (2 years ago) Permalink
this bro = the guy who wrote the book, not ksh
he does conceptualize though
― max, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:16 (2 years ago) Permalink
and what is philosophy, if not conceptualizing
take it to the philosophy thread
― ultra nate dogg (history mayne), Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:17 (2 years ago) Permalink
i think you mean the conceptualizing thread
― max, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:18 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
rather, he has constructed a framework for conceptualization
making him a construction worker i guess
― max, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:19 (2 years ago) Permalink
Rolling Philosophy
― ksh, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:19 (2 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (2 years ago) Permalink
political socio-economics = philosophy!
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:25 (2 years ago) Permalink
he didnt do that work--he just constructed the synthesis--making him at best a synthesizer
― max, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:26 (2 years ago) Permalink
a synthesizer like barthes -- ROLAND
― ultra nate dogg (history mayne), Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:31 (2 years ago) Permalink
omg
― goole, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:44 (2 years ago) Permalink
― Salted gnocchimole (admrl), Saturday, 3 July 2010 16:15 (2 years ago) Permalink
i've always been a fan of this particular "zlavodge zhezhek" interview
― ksh, Saturday, 3 July 2010 16:24 (2 years ago) Permalink
"YOU'RE LIKE THE DENNIS LEARY OF SLOVENIA!""YES."
― ksh, Saturday, 3 July 2010 16:25 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
LOL
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Wednesday, 7 July 2010 13:29 (2 years ago) Permalink
I'm actually digging living in end times. it's a lot of fun
― Mordy, Wednesday, 7 July 2010 13:43 (2 years ago) Permalink
hah, see, how can you not like this guy?
― max, Wednesday, 7 July 2010 14:23 (2 years ago) Permalink
it's mainly his asswad stans i dislike
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Wednesday, 7 July 2010 14:26 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
ok @ zizek being interviewed about this bk on Newsnight...
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 7 July 2010 22:08 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
(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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
lol yes brilliant
― frap your hands say yeah yeah yeah (history mayne), Thursday, 8 July 2010 11:25 (2 years ago) Permalink
― Mordy, Monday, 9 August 2010 01:08 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
Great profile pieces about Zizek: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,705164,00.html
― Mordy, Sunday, 12 September 2010 04:36 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
there is nothing a priori wrong with praising acts of terrorism. sometimes it is absolutely necessary.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 16:47 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
we are not robots.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 16:50 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
hegemony mayne
― polytetrafluoroethylene don (am0n), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:53 (2 years ago) Permalink
DANGER WILL ROBINSON
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:54 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
memerrorism, we call it.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 16:55 (2 years ago) Permalink
we, robots
― polytetrafluoroethylene don (am0n), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:56 (2 years ago) Permalink
yeah i think dom tried that, look where it got him xp
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:56 (2 years ago) Permalink
3/5 iirc
― polytetrafluoroethylene don (am0n), Monday, 4 October 2010 16:58 (2 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
i think you 'know what he means'
― journey to the end of nyt (nakhchivan), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:25 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
i don't think slavoj even gets his facts right here. like, a lot.
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 17:38 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
goole I think yr quibbling
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 17:43 (2 years ago) Permalink
i ain't quibbling with shit! there's a whole pile of rong here
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 17:44 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
(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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
oh i don't think it's the masses that are of-course racist
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 18:17 (2 years ago) Permalink
then who???
― haven't you people ever heard of theodor a-goddamn-dorno (bernard snowy), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:21 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
fuck off troll
― goole, Monday, 4 October 2010 18:41 (2 years ago) Permalink
corruption inevitable
defrag
― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, 4 October 2010 18:41 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (2 years ago) Permalink
banaka l jagger sock no
― conrad, Monday, 4 October 2010 19:21 (2 years ago) Permalink
really?
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 23:10 (2 years ago) Permalink
wethinks you are intoxicated.
― banaka, Monday, 4 October 2010 23:24 (2 years ago) Permalink
― max, Sunday, 7 November 2010 17:36 (2 years ago) Permalink
lol gross
― Mannsplain Steamroller (goole), Sunday, 7 November 2010 17:44 (2 years ago) Permalink
Was this posted yet? It's awesome. I love it.
― Princess TamTam, Sunday, 7 November 2010 17:44 (2 years ago) Permalink
"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 (2 years ago) Permalink
"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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
oh man this is gonna make my day
― proso_Opopoeia (bernard snowy), Sunday, 6 February 2011 14:59 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
y'all mad
― there is a lout that never goes "aight" (bernard snowy), Friday, 11 February 2011 13:10 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
"Hey Mr. Caliban..."
― Tom D (Tom D.), Friday, 11 February 2011 14:30 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
― Princess TamTam, Friday, 18 February 2011 08:54 (2 years ago) Permalink
― roy stride or die (nakhchivan), Friday, 18 February 2011 08:59 (2 years ago) Permalink
lol amazing
― Mordy, Friday, 18 February 2011 17:12 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
dude should ring in to any answers?, someone basically says that every week
― Jefferson Mansplain (DG), Wednesday, 23 February 2011 20:32 (2 years ago) Permalink
not always w/comedy speech impediment obv.
― Jefferson Mansplain (DG), Wednesday, 23 February 2011 20:34 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
Why does he SNIFF so much when he's talking?
― Chelvis, Wednesday, 9 March 2011 03:16 (2 years ago) Permalink
― by another name (amateurist), Sunday, May 23, 2010 9:58 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark
― ℳℴℯ ❤＼(◕‿◕✿ (Princess TamTam), Wednesday, 9 March 2011 03:41 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
Zizek calls himself a Lacanian all the time
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 22:28 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
― 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 (2 years ago) Permalink
so be less offended
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:44 (2 years ago) Permalink
omg mordman
― Godspeed HOOS! Black Steendriver (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Monday, 21 March 2011 23:45 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
beliebers
― max, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:47 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
+ 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 (2 years ago) Permalink
lol ok. why don't u go be angry somewhere else
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:52 (2 years ago) Permalink
why don't you stop simplifying complex elements of resistance to fit your kneejerk prejudices?
― sleeve, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:53 (2 years ago) Permalink
you're right. i should stop. there. i stopped. thx for changing my life.
― Mordy, Monday, 21 March 2011 23:54 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
gross
― BIG GERTRUDE aka the steindriver (history mayne), Monday, 21 March 2011 23:56 (2 years ago) Permalink
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 (2 years ago) Permalink
on cspan atm talking about wikileaks
― Mordy, Wednesday, 6 July 2011 03:23 (1 year ago) Permalink
w/ Amy Goodman
― Mordy, Wednesday, 6 July 2011 03:27 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
more like michael fardt
― max, Sunday, 7 August 2011 12:15 (1 year ago) Permalink
empire by michael fardt and antonio naglri
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 7 August 2011 18:23 (1 year ago) Permalink
examined life is worse than the zizek documentary
― markers, Sunday, 7 August 2011 18:24 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
― http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKbsdMRqhcI (Princess TamTam), Monday, 8 August 2011 02:33 (1 year ago) Permalink
<3
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 8 August 2011 02:35 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
IRL every so often he grabs your shirt and wipes his nose.
x-post
― trapdoor fucking spiders (dowd), Wednesday, 28 September 2011 17:28 (1 year ago) Permalink
definitely go see zizek
― markers, Wednesday, 28 September 2011 17:40 (1 year ago) Permalink
holy shit i could actually make this show.
― fields of salmon, Friday, 30 September 2011 03:59 (1 year ago) Permalink
go
― markers, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:00 (1 year ago) Permalink
damn they just sold out
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, 30 September 2011 04:03 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
hoos are you a hayekian or a communist or a technofuturist I can't figure it out
― iatee, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:07 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
otm
― markers, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:10 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
trying to parse that but it is breaking my rapidly degrading os
― iatee, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:30 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
at the end of the day tho aren't we all really just lacanians? #zizekrealtalk
― Mordy, Friday, 30 September 2011 04:38 (1 year ago) Permalink
hegelians i think
― max, Friday, 30 September 2011 12:13 (1 year ago) Permalink
― banana mogul (goole), Monday, 3 October 2011 21:00 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
haha
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, 4 October 2011 16:01 (1 year ago) Permalink
would totally go for a pint with this dude
― Michael B, Thursday, 6 October 2011 01:59 (1 year ago) Permalink
I would go for a few pints with his wife.
― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Thursday, 6 October 2011 02:48 (1 year ago) Permalink
^
― thank you BIG HOOS, you brilliant god-man (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 6 October 2011 14:11 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
thought that say raymond liotta
― max, Friday, 14 October 2011 19:33 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
did everybody see/read zizek @ zuccotti btw
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 15 October 2011 00:40 (1 year ago) Permalink
"you can imagine sex with animals""but you can not imagine the end of capitalism"
― Milton Parker, Saturday, 15 October 2011 01:11 (1 year ago) Permalink
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 (1 year ago) Permalink
http://www.themickeymouseclub.biz/3_1.html
― Mordy, Sunday, 8 January 2012 23:50 (1 year ago) Permalink
― Fas Ro Duh (Gukbe), Wednesday, 9 May 2012 04:33 (1 year ago) Permalink
― Mordy, Friday, 25 May 2012 19:45 (11 months ago) Permalink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/10/slavoj-zizek-humanity-ok-people-boring
― Mordy, Saturday, 16 June 2012 13:35 (11 months ago) Permalink
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 (11 months ago) Permalink
I want to hate this dude but when I see him speak he just seems so chill
― mh, Saturday, 16 June 2012 15:19 (11 months ago) Permalink
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 (11 months ago) Permalink
― dis civilization and its contents (nakhchivan), Saturday, 16 June 2012 18:56 (11 months ago) Permalink
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 (11 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
― WheatusVEVO (Hungry4Ass), Sunday, 5 August 2012 06:04 (9 months ago) Permalink
xp that is essentially how i understand allais' point
― Mordy, Sunday, 5 August 2012 12:33 (9 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
http://www.versobooks.com/books/1161-the-year-of-dreaming-dangerously
― markers, Tuesday, 7 August 2012 02:30 (9 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
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 (9 months ago) Permalink
also: motherfucking grampsy!
― contenderizer, Sunday, 19 August 2012 17:31 (9 months ago) Permalink
― Perfect Chicken Forever (Merdeyeux), Saturday, 13 October 2012 11:40 (7 months ago) Permalink
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 (7 months ago) Permalink
i hope that's his facebook photo
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, 13 October 2012 12:28 (7 months ago) Permalink
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 (6 months ago) Permalink
i'd like to see the new film
― Mordy, Thursday, 25 October 2012 18:05 (6 months ago) Permalink
When contrarians tackle contrarians, popcorn gets ate.
― Bobby Ken Doll (Eric H.), Thursday, 25 October 2012 18:05 (6 months ago) Permalink
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 (6 months ago) Permalink
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 (6 months ago) Permalink
hey i loved that article! thx
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 26 October 2012 02:29 (6 months ago) Permalink
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 (6 months ago) Permalink
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_global_thinkers?page=0,55#thinker92
― Mordy, Tuesday, 27 November 2012 16:53 (5 months ago) Permalink
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/capitalism
― Mordy, Tuesday, 27 November 2012 17:32 (5 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
zizek otm
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 13:44 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
i dont think zizek is an anti-semite
― max, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 14:55 (4 months ago) Permalink
i don't think so either
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 14:57 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:00 (4 months ago) Permalink
― things that are jokes pretty much (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:00 (4 months ago) Permalink
I could look at ridiculous Zizek pictures all morning
― mh, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:17 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
remember he said hitler wasn't violent enough? or the violence wasn't real enough.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:19 (4 months ago) Permalink
o zizek you so crazy what will you say next
― iatee, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 15:22 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
― Mordy, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 10:19 AM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark
which is true btw
― turds (Hungry4Ass), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:01 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
keynes would probably say that riots are good for the economy
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:05 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
xxp tho I share misgivings some of you are on aboot.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:07 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
i find zizek way more compelling than badiou xxp
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:07 (4 months ago) Permalink
and no keynes would not say that riots are good for the economy
― iatee, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:08 (4 months ago) Permalink
why not? puts the window manufacturers back to work.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:10 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
much time for, or interest in, i mean
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:23 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:31 (4 months ago) Permalink
"not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in the illusion itself"
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:32 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
i'm annoyed at butler these days
― Mordy, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:38 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
yeah the q is how well it maps onto the "real world" whatever that is.
― Neil S, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:44 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
John Gray maybe?
― Neil S, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 16:51 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
― 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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
surely every good zizek impression needs a PRESHISHELY, hurting.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 21:00 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
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 (4 months ago) Permalink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable
― Mordy, Sunday, 27 January 2013 01:38 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
http://keshek.tumblr.com/
― a permanent mental health break (difficult listening hour), Sunday, 27 January 2013 19:51 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
plz liveblog
― Mordy, Monday, 28 January 2013 16:51 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
braggin hard in the least hard manner of braggin imaginable, that is.
― Bill Goldberg Variations (Merdeyeux), Monday, 28 January 2013 18:20 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
thanks for that!
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 18:42 (3 months ago) Permalink
i liked the less theoretical, more actually following people around and writing down stuff latour.
― s.clover, Monday, 28 January 2013 18:43 (3 months ago) Permalink
that felt much more exciting to me than anything since.
― s.clover, Monday, 28 January 2013 18:44 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
'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 (3 months ago) Permalink
if only all challops had the quality of zizek challops
― Mordy, Monday, 28 January 2013 19:17 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
i'm thinking especially of his writings in this volume, btw - TERRIBLE title:
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 28 January 2013 20:29 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
huh really?
― Mordy, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:57 (3 months ago) Permalink
hi buddy
― max, Monday, 28 January 2013 21:58 (3 months ago) Permalink
aw you're so disarming
― Mordy, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:00 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
not to mention the revealing use of "impotent" in that passage--speaking of psychoanalysis!
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:04 (3 months ago) Permalink
funny that the 2nd post itt mentions leninism. seems like the 'big idea' with him to me.
― goole, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:05 (3 months ago) Permalink
all you have to do is insert "unlike lenin" after every other clause of that hitler quote
― goole, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:07 (3 months ago) Permalink
― ryan, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:08 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
its just sort of funny who in particular seems most able to be trolled by zizek.
― s.clover, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:26 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
"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 (3 months ago) Permalink
n.b. i'm almost totally brainwashed \o_O/ so ymmv
― Butt Trump tweet (Matt P), Monday, 28 January 2013 22:49 (3 months ago) Permalink
if only all comedians had this kinda posse to defend their bad jokes
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 22:58 (3 months ago) Permalink
i'm taking that as a compliment.
― Butt Trump tweet (Matt P), Monday, 28 January 2013 23:02 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
lol and yet people were more than willing to defend it
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 23:09 (3 months ago) Permalink
thats a zizek quote http://cl.ly/2g0t0H331w3K
― max, Monday, 28 January 2013 23:12 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
also he might have considered having a capitalist economy
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 23:32 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
― 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 (3 months ago) Permalink
haha momus is a good comparison actually
― iatee, Monday, 28 January 2013 23:49 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
throw in st. paul and lenin to his list of heroes too.
― ryan, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:11 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
"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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
"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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
he was a keynesian
― Mordy, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:00 (3 months ago) Permalink
no
― iatee, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:02 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
i don't know that hitler thought he was a keynesian, but he was
― Mordy, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:13 (3 months ago) Permalink
oh yeah also violence produces excess - that's important too
― Mordy, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 01:14 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
could you elaborate?
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, 29 January 2013 02:15 (3 months ago) Permalink
just meant that germany didn't declare war on the u.s. for "no reason".
― s.clover, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:06 (3 months ago) Permalink
yep, no such thing as an economic system. gotcha.
― s.clover, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:07 (3 months ago) Permalink
why yes that's exactly what I was saying
― iatee, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:09 (3 months ago) Permalink
ok, it exists but we can't talk about it.
― s.clover, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:10 (3 months ago) Permalink
okay that sounds like a fair deal
― iatee, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 03:14 (3 months ago) Permalink
'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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
― 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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
i should, trying to transform its own contingency into its necessity.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 03:37 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
wonder what Zizek thinks about Calvin
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:13 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
I don't remember anything about Calvin but he does discuss Italo Calvino a bit.
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:14 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
"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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
― 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 (3 months ago) Permalink
― 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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
this almost makes him seem touchingly sentimental.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:45 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
this is all from the new one? good stuff, anyway. i like reading him on hegel.
― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 05:14 (3 months ago) Permalink
zizek, stan for the working class
― max, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 12:31 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
my kid could of done better than that
― Hermann Hesher (Noodle Vague), Friday, 1 February 2013 03:40 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
― Women, Fire, and Dangerous Zings (silby), Monday, 11 February 2013 08:05 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
"This, I claim..."
― ryan, Monday, 11 February 2013 14:16 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
"an inversion of"
"radically un-"
― max, Monday, 11 February 2013 17:09 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
imho not so
― Mordy, Monday, 11 February 2013 17:55 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
polio police
― Women, Fire, and Dangerous Zings (silby), Monday, 11 February 2013 18:01 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
>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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
"is it not the case" is just an affectation.
― s.clover, Monday, 11 February 2013 20:38 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/14/valentines-day-is-romance-dead
― markers, Thursday, 14 February 2013 14:42 (3 months ago) Permalink
One of these things is not like the other
― Gukbe, Thursday, 14 February 2013 15:22 (3 months ago) Permalink
that's so awesome.
― s.clover, Thursday, 14 February 2013 15:40 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (3 months ago) Permalink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/17/free-market-fundamentalists-think-2013-best
― markers, Sunday, 17 February 2013 21:43 (3 months ago) Permalink
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 (2 months ago) Permalink
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 (2 months ago) Permalink
shit, why not have a cake and eat it too?
― j., Sunday, 17 March 2013 18:20 (2 months ago) Permalink
*fuck it
― c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le beurre (imago), Sunday, 17 March 2013 19:27 (2 months ago) Permalink
this just made me think about zizek having sex :-/
― ryan, Sunday, 17 March 2013 19:59 (2 months ago) Permalink
lol otm
― Woody Ellen (Matt P), Sunday, 17 March 2013 20:54 (2 months ago) Permalink
"I spent literally 10 minutes on this assignment, just free-associating. I was in theoretical despair!"
― s.clover, Monday, 18 March 2013 00:13 (2 months ago) Permalink
free t-shirts, no doubt
― j., Monday, 18 March 2013 00:14 (2 months ago) Permalink
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher
― markers, Wednesday, 17 April 2013 18:16 (1 month ago) Permalink
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 (1 month ago) Permalink
― crdbl (admrl), Sunday, 21 April 2013 21:32 (1 month ago) Permalink
classic video
― markers, Sunday, 21 April 2013 21:40 (1 month ago) Permalink
https://twitter.com/MarikaRose/status/332898683614019585
― ohmigud (Merdeyeux), Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:13 (1 week ago) Permalink
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 (1 week ago) Permalink
lool
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:29 (1 week ago) Permalink
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:30 (1 week ago) Permalink
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 (1 week ago) Permalink
:-(
― Treeship, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:35 (1 week ago) Permalink
do you read zizek, treeship?
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:36 (1 week ago) Permalink
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 (1 week ago) Permalink
http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745628974
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:43 (1 week ago) Permalink
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 (1 week ago) Permalink
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 (1 week ago) Permalink
haven't seen this before http://www.amazon.com/The-Zizek-Dictionary-R-Butler/dp/1844655822/
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:51 (1 week ago) Permalink