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

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)

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.

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?

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

[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'.

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

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

(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.

should read "rac(ial)ist ideology"

oh i don't think it's the masses that are of-course racist

then who???

we should ask 'how did racism help create a petit-bourgeoisie?'

this doesn't sound very marxist to me

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

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?

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.

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.

fuck off troll

corruption inevitable

defrag

this might be the most tendentious bit:

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.

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.

defrag

― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, October 4, 2010 6:41 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

"lol"

banaka l jagger sock no

really?

wethinks you are intoxicated.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbhhjdb8qR1qdcvb4o1_1280.png?AWSAccessKeyId=0RYTHV9YYQ4W5Q3HQMG2&Expires=1289237755&Signature=%2BUE33PGej4z76lXL1lyp%2B7iGy6k%3D

lol gross

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjEtmZZvGZA

Was this posted yet? It's awesome. I love it.

"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?

"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/

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.

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.

liberalism = liberal democracy = US liberal democracy = economic neoliberalism seems like a hell of conflating imo.

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"

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks

p sure i could do zizeks job now

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.

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'

oh man this is gonna make my day

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

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...

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.

but doesn't zizek hate liberal democracy? i don't get how he now seems to be or for it

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.

y'all mad

history mayne do u think the egyptian people are "for" or "against" "liberal democracy"

or should we wait until they take a nationwide referendum

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

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

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...

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

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

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

yes, quite. he's a wind-up merchant above all.

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)

yes, quite. he's a wind-up merchant above all.

"Hey Mr. Caliban..."

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"?