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

If we are talking about the distinction between social theory and social criticism as being the difference between trying to come up with new ideas on how to understand culture vs using those ideas to critique culture then I find criticism be easier to read because it usually refers to things outside of philosophy but i know i have to read theory to advance my own process of becoming relatively more independent in my thinking.

"Zizek through Lacan" meaning that a good understanding of the former can only come from a good understanding of the latter.

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2008/12/quick-and-dirty.html

The truth is that I think the NR critique is speaking to something when it calls Zizek an anti-Semite. I don't think Zizek /is/ an anti-Semite, but I think there's something about the jew that he misses because he's talking about the Jew (and the Sound of Music clip I think is a good example of this). I used this quote in a different thread recently, but Celan wrote in "Conversations in the Mountain," "So it was quiet, quiet, up there in the mountains. It wasn't quiet for long, because when one Jew comes along and meets another, then it's goodbye silence, even in the mountains. Because the Jew and Nature, that's two very different things, as always, even today, even here."

That encounter (between Jew + Jew, Jew + Nature) is something that Zizek, I think, has no time for it. It is a chattering, a discussion, an exchange of words, where there is no time for Nature. And I think he doesn't want to explore that (even acknowledging the irony that he's working in a field very influenced by that sort of encounter). So the NR sees this as anti-Semitic (when he says that The only good thing Judaism has given is the idea of Messianic), but I think it's just a shifted emphasis. I mean, Zizek is all about the violent interruption of the simulcra, the moment that the facade is pulled clear. So the chatting is no good for that.

I don't know. Maybe this reading of Zizek is wrong.

the thing about that clip above is that his argument led so elegantly to the word cosmopolitan that I said it before him while watching the video. Why add the Jew part at all? To complete the inversion of values?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely instrumental in that clip. From the Democrat Versus the Nazi into the Nazi Versus the Jew. It's understandable why he does it, I just think he's missing something essential in favor of something removed and distant.

cultural critics seem to have this tendency to stretch just one tick past the destination on the map. as someone raised jewish, ie possibly biased, i think trying to examine prejudice against cosmopolitanism, urbanism, and even intellectualism is something more worthy of examination.

What or who is the love of your life?

Philosophy. I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

ahaha

:-O

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844673278/ref=s9k2a_c1_at1-rfc_p-3237_p?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=01FRRPPC0906H94KWTWV&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=463383351&pf_rd_i=507846

a good approach to zizek is the crazier french dudes post-lacan--deleuze & guattari (anti-oedipus?) especially

yeah i have been meaning to read D&G for longer than I care to admit. At least I can console myself that I will probably understand it better than I would have nine years ago; it's just that now I don't have the time. Anyways, thanks for the tips. Outside of academia, it is not always easy to figure out who you have to read to understand a particular theorist until you buy that person's book and come across all of the references you can't account for.

Sometimes I really just want to start all over at the beginning again, and go in order. I don't know how much use pre-Socratic philosophy has now, but at least I won't be reading texts that only refer to other ones!

^ I tried to do this once and lost my marbles around Leibniz

I tried as well and didn't make it nearly that far ;-( Was that due to Leibniz's writing style or just the sheer volume of material in general one has to face working on a project like that? If you read 2000 years worth of primary texts you should be proud of discipline you had to make it that far, that is unless you dropped out of St. Johns or something :-( ;-)

It was the volume of material I'd quickly processed and fruitlessly tried to retain combined with the incomprehensibility of Leibniz's Monadology that did it for me.

That era of continental philosophy is one I have not even come close to grappling with. It is pathetic. My knowledge skips from Plato to Rousseau, and then to Marx, and then to some of the German and French people trying to deal with Marx.

Yeah I mean basically I was heavily involved with Althusser & in discussions with this Badiou acolyte and I was having trouble getting it so dude was like "if you really wanna get Badiou you gotta understand that's he's rehabiliting etc etc etc and critiquing etc etc etc" basically assigning me the whole of philosophy since Plato + Freud & Lacan.

BIG HOOS and LOUIS ALTHUSSER are now in a relationship

Just don't end up like Mrs. Althusser.

Agh, this thread is making me feel like I'm drowning, all I do is get drunk and not read the things I want to read. I'm gonna go take photographs of stencils projected on the wall now, I'm wasting my life.

I can't afford to drink and I am still not reading the things I want to read. I really think Verso puts out too many books for their own good.

and routledge!

want to read that badiou thing about sarkozy tho

I like reading Badiou when he is writing about something. There are a few essays in Metapolitics where I am not so sure. Good call on Routledge.

Is Zizek taken seriously at all within academia? I'm applying to grad school right now and every time I mention him as one of the theorists I'd be focusing on in my studies, some of the professors I've been talking with react as if I'd just loudly broken wind in front of them without apology. I mean, I understand the guy's a clown, but beneath all the faux-Stalinist contrarian posturing there's a pretty awesome interpretation of Lacan-via-Hegel.

No one I've worked with has taken him seriously. Or at least not seriously enough to focus on in studies. (Generally I think they want to hear that you're focusing on someone dead - I think you'd get a negative reaction to mentioning Fredrick Jameson too.)

so, you think Rorty's rep skyrocketed recently?

Hells yeah.

(Of course, I've always loved the dude. Contingency, Irony + Solidarity ftw.)

It's kinda the opposite in art theory where roping somebody like Zizek in gives you the outward appearance of contemporaneity, still you have to rope in Panofsky or someone to balance it.

I like reading Badiou when he is writing about something. There are a few essays in Metapolitics where I am not so sure. Good call on Routledge.

― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, December 5, 2008 9:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Infinite Thought is v v good in this regard and yes I tried to struggle through Metapolitics more than once before giving up.

Just don't end up like Mrs. Althusser.

― tokyo rosemary, Friday, December 5, 2008 1:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

XD

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/zize01_.html

why do left-wing people like s/z when he writes reactionary bollocks like this?

a) They think he's joking
b) They appreciate the way he thinks about things, even if they are uncomfortable about some of his conclusions (I fall into this category)
c) They don't understand what he's saying

Take your pick?

Also, in a very real sense, Zizek is incredibly left-wing in the traditional Communist sense. He's just more radicalized than most leftists today (who, it seems, have generally abandoned violent rebellion). He is very against a sort of P.C. comfortable bourgeois leftism (in the article you linked, "But there is also a ‘reflexive’, politically correct racism: the liberal, multiculturalist perception of the Balkans as a site of ethnic horrors and intolerance"). So when you say left-wing, you're talking about this kind of leftist, right?

Take the public image of Bill Gates. Gates is not a patriarchal father-master, nor even a corporate Big Brother running a rigid bureaucratic empire, surrounded on an inaccessible top floor by a host of secretaries and assistants. He is instead a kind of Small Brother, his very ordinariness an indication of a monstrousness so uncanny that it can no longer assume its usual public form. In photos and drawings he looks like anyone else, but his devious smile points to an underlying evil that is beyond representation.

Totally hysterical and awesome.

Isn't there a Pinky and the Brain about that?

I think people like Zizek are far more sinister than the Bill Gates of the world ... at least Bill Gates makes, or at least made, useful stuff. Zizek is just a blowhard irrelevant to anyone after their 23rd birthday. When your audience is a bunch of 18 year olds the more reactionary the better.

Also, in a very real sense, Zizek is incredibly left-wing in the traditional Communist sense. He's just more radicalized than most leftists today (who, it seems, have generally abandoned violent rebellion). He is very against a sort of P.C. comfortable bourgeois leftism (in the article you linked, "But there is also a ‘reflexive’, politically correct racism: the liberal, multiculturalist perception of the Balkans as a site of ethnic horrors and intolerance"). So when you say left-wing, you're talking about this kind of leftist, right?

― Mordy, Saturday, January 3, 2009 2:57 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

don't think old-style communists have a monopoly on the left, far from it. zizek is completely a symptom of the modern left you're talking about insofar as questions of revolutionary (or other) strategies are totally beyond his reach. he provided entertaining paradoxes, as in the bill gates squib, that get you precisely nowhere. the readers of the lrb evidently like being berated, but at the same time there's a creepy nostalgia for lenin, stalin, mao: 'real leftists' if you're a douchewad. it saves you from having to think through what a better society might be like.

I didn't say he had a monopoly on the left, but this is a guy who grew up under a Communist system. I wouldn't compare his affection to Stalin/Mao to college radical chic. And tbh, I don't know many under 23 year olds who read Zizek. I don't know many under 23 year olds who CAN read Zizek. But maybe I just know the wrong people?

wouldn't call the post-war russian empire communist, insofar as we want to keep communism something to aspire to. in a way it makes it even creepier that he still pretty openly admires lenin/stalin/mao, none of whose regimes would have tolerated him or his readership.

Not Communist in an idealized sense, but still, he has stronger connections to "practiced" Communism than anyone into radical chic.

Jordan, Yugoslavia was NOT part of any Russian empire!

http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=c6570f94-f4b8-4b2a-b3f5-6adefe8d15ca

it's a pretty weak comeback imo. he gets in a few points but there's all sorts of stuff in the original that s/z doesn't dispute.

how did you read that so fast?

had already read it

Zizek is the philosopher equivalent of the teenager who associates way too closely with Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker.

within that analogy, who is the joker? and who is batman?

burt_stanton is both the joker and batman

I don't know. If there's a philosopher out there who advocates for the status quo, but amending it a little to make incremental improvements over time that overall benefits everyone and creates a fairer and more equal society, there you go.

that's batman.

If there's a philosopher out there

i am loling at this and have no idea why