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

actually i think enrique does dismiss nietzsche because he was an anti-democratic misogynist

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.)

I think Jacques Lacan was a bad man.

there are a lot of things people like about nietzsche

I think Jacques Lacan was a bad man.

― the pinefox, Thursday, January 29, 2009 9:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you're not wrong.

A Terrible Man!

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.

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.

I'm taking a class when him and Ronell next semester.

Preemptive fuck you to you-know-who.

Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda

my two favorite things on earth together at last

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.

"how berlusconi is a racist corrupt asshole"
he's not?

uh yes, yes he is.

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...

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.

I'm taking a class when him and Ronell next semester.

― Mordy, Tuesday, July 21, 2009 10:47 PM (Yesterday)

Jealous

My class starts in half an hour. Live blog? :P

Zizek's Twitter page is one of my favorites:

http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks

His attempts to justify (or Saint-Justify, if you prefer) Robespierre and the Terror on that documentary on the French Revolution were amusing

... and as he was up against Simon Schama, it has hard not to warm to him

Does anyone else reads his tweets imagining how he would be saying them?

i like simon schama more than PLANK zizek.

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.

Yeah but Zizek kept rubbing his nose in a funny way in that doc so all is forgiven.

# 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

# RT @sarahksilverman Syntax question: Is the word, "guzzle" exclusive to jizz? 8:56 PM Aug 5th from TwitterFox

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.

I have some doubts that it's actually Zizek.

Maybe Mordy can ask him!!

c'mon - it's obviously fake

Cheney's favorite drink- Yoo-hoo
4:45 PM Aug 17th from TwitterFox

c'mon - it's obviously fake

Probably, but it's more fun to pretend it's real.

Ha I misread as "This is the thread where we talk like Slavoj ZIzek..."
can some posters indulge me and do this?

I tried once but someone threw a tantrum.

is this not the thread where we talk about slavoj zizek?

hey mordy could you ask him why he compared israeli treatment of gaza with the holocaust via the hilarious neologism "palestinian-frei'"?

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.

(Also, I'm shocked that ILX would care about the neologism 'palestinian-frei.')

# 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

What if it's fake, but it's still authored by Zizek?

yeah pretty sure zizek's the author

what is an author?

The twitterer is dead.

il n'ya pas de hors-Twitter

http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks/statuses/4118700070

i wonder if it is german, french or american style?

'there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the subject positive-substantial being to a disposable "piece of shit."'

you charm me so, Slavoj.

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

I love the picture of him giving a lecture, where he looks like he is going to start dishing out karate chops.