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why is it so hard to change this system when everyone knows that it's constantly fucking people over, again and again, in the same predictable ways?

http://images2.fanpop.com/images/quiz/266000/266151_1248794026596_350_349.jpg

I just, in general, find the idea that you can stand OUTSIDE a system and criticize it ridiculous. you will always be inside the system. man is a social animal and is bound by social constructs. even the most ascetic drop-out unabomber type, living in the woods wearing handmade clothes and burning his shit for fuel or whatever, is still living in relation to some external system - the thoughts he has are ordered by a language, his actions are defined by their opposition to the existing system, etc. there is no outside. we're all in it.

criticizing a system you are inside of often makes for a more informed, nuanced critique.

have you ever read an sb thread

Read an sb thread? I've gotten multiple sb threads locked by mods as a result of my posts to them!

I just, in general, find the idea that you can stand OUTSIDE a system and criticize it ridiculous. you will always be inside the system.

frankly I don't even know what this means

like how ridiculous was black folks' criticism of the racist power structure in the american south

or are you just calling the unabomber on his shit

but regardless of questions about Althusser's philosophical persuasion (given that his most famous essay about ideology includes a detailed discussion of his thesis that "Ideology has a material existence", I'm going with "materialist"), that seems to be the view most people here are working with

yeah, maybe read some of the lit on althusser? it's fairly well established (by marxists!) that his basic outlook was idealist. been saying this on ilx for years so excuse lack of patience, but basically althusser was so comprehensively "done" in the 1970s that it is ludicrous to me that people continue to talk about him.

I think Zizek's original quote, taken in full, says exactly what it says: Weimar Germany was a nation with a lot of problems, and Hitler's solution (unifying the population around the exclusion and extermination of an ethnic minority) was an easy way to make people feel better without changing anything. whether or not you think it's legitimate to define the term "violence" broadly enough that it encompasses both genocide and social change is irrelevant; it's pretty clear that that Zizek does think it's legitimate, and the only way to arrive at the "ZOMG HE SAID HITERL SHOULD BE MORE VIOLENT!!1!" criticism is to ignore the author's intent (or to have it obscured for you by a charlatan like Adam Kirsch).

"without changing anything"? yeah, you're going with that? ok.

i think the violence he meant was probably more than "social change", wasn't it? more like violent leninist revolution? under third period comintern that would have been just lovely. probably not as bad as nazism, but "social change" -- no. i think he means rather more. why is kirsch a "charlatan"? more than zizek, the guy who extols "emancipatory violence" from various well-protected lectures halls to the children of the rich west.

"the last line about the "precise sense" of violence is just fatuous rubbish. is that what you're really offering as an argument?"

the idea that a philosopher will sometimes use a word in ways that are different from its everyday use? yes, that would be my argument. this is why e.g. the Kantian "transcendental subject" is not "maths"

well, he said "precise" didn't he? how would you "precisely" define violence to include the most-famous advocate of non-violence? (his world is altogether lacking in precision. history is messy. even the collapse of the raj.)

or are you just calling the unabomber on his shit

^^^this. but not just the unabomber basically all ivory tower academicians

lol at blanket condemnation of betrand rusell, jacques derrida, unabomber

?

stop it you are making me hungry

nah I like Derrida, he's a riot

xp question mark con carne?

Russell seems like a stand-up guy too.

Dropping my slave-name as a challenge to global capitalism btw

i thought this thread would be revived for naomi klein's in-praise-of-sex-and-the-city article in G2 this week

wasn't that naomi wolf? (a little unexpected as well but ok)

haha oops! i am actually more disappointed in naomi wolf than i was when i was skimming it and thought it was naomi klein for some reason

http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/2610/1uyunibig6st.jpg

world looks pretty good from up here tbh

klein and climate reparations.