This is the thread where we talk about Slavoj Zizek...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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?

muslim brotherhood was founded well before nasser was in power as a response to british militarism/colonialism

― 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

right now and for the next 40 minutes, zizek on "the double death of neo-liberalism" -

http://resonancefm.com

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.

this serrano bit is basically my thesis, coulda used this this time last yr ziz

ok didn't turn out how i thought

new Verso catalogue lists "Slavoj Zizek’s brand new book Living in the End Times, about the forthcoming apocalypse." Wuh oh.

"Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Alfred Hitchcock" is pretty funny too

am i right in thinking he's interviewed in the current cahiers du cinema?

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.

blah blah Morbs zing blah blah will this do?

He's also in this week's New Statesman:

http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2010/05/essay-nature-catastrophe

Pretty humdrum piece though.

"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.

oh i am... and he's now written about avatar twice without seeing it.

LOL, I sort of admire that

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

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!

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

It feels better if you put "Daily Sport Stunna" in front of their names.

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.

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.

Or, as Mao Zedong put it, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.”

classy

Zizek is truly one of the great trolls of our time.

I'll be reading that later this year, no doubt.

why not read s.thing that doesn't suck?

cause this looks super entertaining

ehh people were saying capitalism was done for 80 years ago

this is aight, for a book about... eschatology/teleology... i think those are the words i mean

http://static.letsbuyit.com/filer/images/fr/products/original/83/68/the-sense-of-an-ending-studies-in-the-theory-of-fiction-with-a-new-epilogue-8368621.jpeg

but were they finding the seeds of Communism in Heroes? i personally find Zizek very very entertaining, and sometimes I'd rather not read some dense academic text but still want to deal with provocative arguments and thoughts. Certainly more worthwhile reading Zizek than uh -- Christopher Hitchens, or Jonah Goldberg, or - le gaspe - Judith Butler.

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.

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).

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.

pretty sure all new zizek books are cut and pasted from bits of old ones now.

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.

ru going to review it?

give im hell imo

can i have the bret easton ellis one if ur not gonna read it?