haven't seen this before http://www.amazon.com/The-Zizek-Dictionary-R-Butler/dp/1844655822/
― markers, Saturday, 11 May 2013 17:51 (eleven years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP6LoH3hASo
― Old Boy In Network (Michael B), Sunday, 2 June 2013 10:47 (eleven years ago) link
Man does that guy always spend so much time touching his face?
― 0808ɹƃ (silby), Sunday, 2 June 2013 18:13 (eleven years ago) link
https://www.thebaffler.com/past/camera_shy_blah_blah
My basic idea is that our times are weird times. On the one hand, they are superficially permissive. You get all the hardcore you want on the net, you can participate in orgies, blah blah blah. But at the same time it’s not even true consumerism. You have this obsession with safe sex, and so on. I think the only true consumerists that we have are, if you ask me, drug addicts, those who say, “Fuck it, I want to go to the end, I don’t care.” No, our consumerism is not dead. It’s a very strategic, calculating consumerism.
― j., Saturday, 22 June 2013 01:58 (ten years ago) link
And this, even if true, has what signifigance to anything?
― Aimless, Saturday, 22 June 2013 03:35 (ten years ago) link
glad he was able to slip in the phrase "This is ideology at its purest." it wouldn't be a zizek essay without that sentence.
― Treeship, Saturday, 22 June 2013 18:21 (ten years ago) link
Hah, that's the one phrase of his I've adopted -- it's primarily something I mutter to myself to improve my mood.He's also made me aware that some thinkers tend to use the word "precisely" just when they're being most abstruse or nebulous.
― Øystein, Saturday, 22 June 2013 19:34 (ten years ago) link
i admire his verve with blah blah blah
― j., Sunday, 23 June 2013 00:42 (ten years ago) link
I mean, even now, I am shocked. I remember one of the early movies: a plumber comes and fixes a hole in the kitchen. [And she says], “But I have another hole down there, can you also fix that for me.” And then it came to me. My god, it cannot be that they are so stupid. This is censorship. The idea is, you can either be totally emotionally identified [as in mainstream films], then you don’t see it all, or, you see it all, all the details [in porn films], but then the story has to be ridiculous, so you shouldn’t take it seriously.
― cardamon, Sunday, 23 June 2013 13:34 (ten years ago) link
I do actually really like Zizek's way of talking about pornography without lapsing into moralisms or celebrations.
I even think you could do a clever graph called 'ways people talk about porn', and it would have two axes, one running from 'moralism' to 'celebration', and the other running from 'left' to 'right' (in the political sense). And Zizek, whatever else you might think about him, would avoid the stupid areas of this graph.
― cardamon, Monday, 24 June 2013 00:10 (ten years ago) link
i agree with that. the essay isn't bad, but very short.
― Treeship, Monday, 24 June 2013 00:12 (ten years ago) link
http://esjaybe.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/zizeks-response-to-chomsky/
― what a wonderful url (Matt P), Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:03 (ten years ago) link
if nothing else, when I am older I want to talk like zizek and so on and all this
― chinavision!, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:37 (ten years ago) link
my god
― max, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:38 (ten years ago) link
i don't believe chomsky when he says that he is mystified by the success of people like zizek. he has definitely read marx before, and understands why cultural analysis and the critique of ideology have played an important role in the history of the left.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:40 (ten years ago) link
he can disagree with this kind of project, and think it has a negative or ambiguous legacy, and argue that leftists should be more focused on concrete political reality, but that is a different conversation than just saying "this is charlatanism"
― Treeship, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:41 (ten years ago) link
When I read "Here I violently disagree." I imagined a bit of spittle and headshake accenting "violently"
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:42 (ten years ago) link
So I claim that all these ‘how popular we are’ is really a mask of… remember the large majority of academia are these grey either cognitivists or historians blah blah… and you don’t see them but they are the power. They are the power.-Bob Marley
― what a wonderful url (Matt P), Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:45 (ten years ago) link
feel like an intern researched zizek's 'things I dislike about chomsky'
― iatee, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 20:52 (ten years ago) link
lol:
So as to this ‘problem’ of are we studying the facts enough I claim emphatically more than ever ‘no’ today. And as to popularity, I get a little bit annoyed with this idea that we with our deep sophisms are really hegemonic in humanities. Are people crazy? I mean we are always marginal. No, what is for me real academic hegemony: its brutal, who can get academic posts? Who can get grants, foundations, as so on? We are totally marginalised here. I mean look at my position… “oh yeah you are a mega-star in United States” well I would like to be because I would like power to brutally use it! But I am far from that. I react so like this because a couple of days ago I got a letter from a friend in United States for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation, and he told me “I didn’t get the job, not in spite of your letter but because of your letter!” He had a spy in the committee and this spy told him “you almost got it, but then somebody says ‘oh, if Zizek recommends him it must be something terribly wrong with him’”
― ryan, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 21:40 (ten years ago) link
tbf he spent most of the rec letter talking about gay pornography and transformers
― iatee, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 21:44 (ten years ago) link
i would pay good money to read that letter.
― ryan, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 21:46 (ten years ago) link
lol
― Treeship, Tuesday, 16 July 2013 22:24 (ten years ago) link
"I would like power to brutally use it!"
― max, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 00:28 (ten years ago) link
has anyone here actually read less than nothing yet
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:07 (ten years ago) link
A few chapters? It seems like one of his better books for sustained argument (at least when you take each chapter as an independent unit), but it's somewhat frustrating (at least in the parts I've read) that his reading of Hegel seems to be mostly articulated against, or on the shoulders of, a handful of Hegel's commentators. It's been a while since I read around in it, though, and I can't fairly judge it without having finished it.
― one way street, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:19 (ten years ago) link
There's a gaping hole in Chomsky's argument against Zizek, which is: there sits Chomsky, providing us with vast amounts of empirical data as to why this or that US foreign policy is disastrous, why this commonly-held belief about history is false, why austerity is disastrous, and so on. There it is, it is all true, capitalism is terrible, Chomsky has diligently done all this research, and there it all is, to watch, read, and listen to.
And no-one gives a fuck.
Some of the people who ignore Chomsky do so because they buy the various smears about him being in allegiance with evil lefty murderous powers etc; some because they have the notion of the 'lol left wing intellectual' which means they can dismiss him; but that only accounts for the people specifically and consciously invested in right wing politics.
What about the rest of us? Why do we carry on doing all these awful things that Chomsky has so diligently shown us are wrong, with all this data he has provided us with?
Precisely because most of the ideology operates in the dark, irrational hole of our subconscious, where facts have no power. Only shamans like Zizek, who go into the hole and do their work there, can affect us on this level.
To paraphrase a section in Living in the end times, the obvious fact that only a few women were wearing burkas in France and the obvious fact that the ban was clearly a powergame of Sarkozy, are of no use whatsoever in combatting the drive against the other that Sarkozy and the rest of us were revelling in. You have to look at what the burka means to the observer; it represents the non-face, facelessness, pure Other; we remember with fear when we were 'faceless', before our identities were constructed during the mirror stage; but instead of accepting that we are essentially faceless, we deny it by attributing monstrous facelessness on to the other.
A policy that lets us do that is going to smash any empirical facts we might try to put in its way; to properly challenge it we first have to accept the contingency of identity, and recognise ourselves as 'faceless'.
― cardamon, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:20 (ten years ago) link
yeah i've just looked at it at the store. i wonder how much of it is just the same shit as his previous books. there's some stuff in there on speculative realism that's gotta be at least relatively new
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:20 (ten years ago) link
xpost
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:21 (ten years ago) link
It definitely seems more like a (surprisingly cogent) summary of his thought than a great leap forward.
― one way street, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:22 (ten years ago) link
I remember the response to spec. realism being kind of superficial, though.
― one way street, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:24 (ten years ago) link
i read a bunch of it markers. it's uneven, but there was new stuff in there.
― Mordy , Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:26 (ten years ago) link
ok cool. i should hopefully get around to it at some point.
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:30 (ten years ago) link
lotsa money for a book tho
my wife gave me less than nothing for my bday.
― collardio gelatinous, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 04:52 (ten years ago) link
you married well
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 04:54 (ten years ago) link
i think i saw zizek in starbucks once, two years ago. he was teaching at princeton at the time, which is where i was, so it's conceivable. still, i doubt myself more every time i think back to it.
― Treeship, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 04:59 (ten years ago) link
xp i requested it. :-) hell i even bought it myself. and had it wrapped at the store. she ceremoniously handed it to me after i blew out the candles. we're boring that way.
(btw i was going to add "if ya know what i mean" to my post above, but sometimes i'm shy with my bad jokes)
it's fun so far but i'm not deep enough into it for it to say much more to me than the expected "hegel's cooler than y'all think" line of thought.
― collardio gelatinous, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 05:03 (ten years ago) link
tbh i was hoping for something more systematic, plodding even, than the usual z. but we'll see...
― collardio gelatinous, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 05:11 (ten years ago) link
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/07/slavoj-zizek-act-of-killing
let us compare The Act of Killing to an incident that drew a lot of attention in the US some decades ago: a woman was beaten and slowly killed in the courtyard of a big apartment block in Brooklyn, New York; more than 70 witnesses saw what was going on from their windows but not one called the police.
Get yer facts straight, Slavoj. I like how he takes the already bogus figure of 38 witnesses and almost doubles it.
― ledge, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 08:18 (ten years ago) link
also Queens, not Brooklyn!
― ryan, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 15:02 (ten years ago) link
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/slavoj-zizek/trouble-in-paradise
― markers, Wednesday, 17 July 2013 15:54 (ten years ago) link
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/443/487
― Mordy , Friday, 26 July 2013 17:44 (ten years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/X5Ik5Ca.gif
― max, Friday, 26 July 2013 18:01 (ten years ago) link
i forgot about that chomsky misattribution. that might be the source of this recent bad blood/why chomsky's characterizaton of zizek was so hostile.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 18:15 (ten years ago) link
oh shit. zizek quotes at length the text where chomsky says he is skeptical of western reports of khmer rogue atrocities. this is vicious.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 18:36 (ten years ago) link
that link is very good. and jives with some feelings that bubble up when reading chomsky and seeing how he treats different sources.
― chinavision!, Friday, 26 July 2013 18:38 (ten years ago) link
i always found it funny how people use left-wing politics to enhance their status in the ruling class, when if there ever was a left-wing revolution they'd be among those who'd get their heads chopped off. buncha twits.
― Spectrum, Friday, 26 July 2013 18:39 (ten years ago) link
eh
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 18:39 (ten years ago) link
i don't think marxism is anti-bourgeois, really. it is an immanent critique of bourgeois society -- measuring the culture capitalism has produced against its own professed standards of freedom and equality. the people who would be drawn to it, and the society it promises after the revolution, would precisely be middle class intellectuals.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 18:41 (ten years ago) link