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

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/706-communism-a-new-beginning-alain-badiou-and-slavoj-zizek-with-verso-books-at-cooper-union-new-york-october-14th-16th-2011

i'm gonna be in ny that weekend

kinda wanna go tbh?

i say it's worth seeing Zizek at least once just so you can confirm for yourself that he's an actual human being and not some collective psychotic hallucination

also bc as often as you think he grabs his shirt and rubs his nose? he does it more in person

The website to book your ticket is here: http://communism.eventbrite.com/

lmao

IRL every so often he grabs your shirt and wipes his nose.

x-post

definitely go see zizek

holy shit i could actually make this show.

go

damn they just sold out

i was literally about to buy my ticket

was way more excited about badiou tbh

seriously think this guy is only as famous as he is cause he has a cool name

hoos are you a hayekian or a communist or a technofuturist I can't figure it out

i believe in a thing called love

otm

i mean on the real i would say i'm an anti-statist mutualist with a pretty endless optimism for the possibilities of the web, and although i'm still working out precisely how all that fits together for me systemically i definitely kinda spontaneously feel that all those ideas mesh.

i do really like zizek's kinda bullshit rhetorical construction of "spontaneous affinity" with an idea ie "i haven't really thought about the compatibility of this idea with any of my other ideas with ~any depth at all~ but at least in a shallow way i like it"

But yeah I really dig guys like Kevin Carson & John Robb people thinking hard about how we can use the benefits of a decentralized production to build a kind of societal virtual machine inside the rapidly degrading OS we're currently running.

trying to parse that but it is breaking my rapidly degrading os

haha was abt to append a #stfu to my post

at the end of the day tho aren't we all really just lacanians? #zizekrealtalk

hegelians i think

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uh5MB17v9A

hilarious appearance on normally wretched australian TV panel discussion show 'q and a' last night.

But yeah I really dig guys like Kevin Carson & John Robb people thinking hard about how we can use the benefits of a decentralized production to build a kind of societal virtual machine inside the rapidly degrading OS we're currently running.

So we're virtualized and we have to find another host society when this one falls over?

Is there like a societal hardware server farm

oh allow me my dumb flights of fancy sometimez

I have no doubt that you could excel at spewing out platitudes and mixed metaphors on the web

But if you do that, I am gonna have to kill you because you're better than that

haha

would totally go for a pint with this dude

I would go for a few pints with his wife.

^

Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the OWS movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.

When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.

And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ . . . What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.

i kinda think this is missing Zizek's point? it seems to me that preventing appropriation by the existing consensus, radical or otherwise, is one of his hobbyhorses.

thought that say raymond liotta

xp not just missing the point but kinda incoherent itself. without articulating alternatives (utopian or otherwise) you're just articulating nihilism, no? surely zizek isn't saying that they need to fit into an already existing model, but that creating a space through dissent should (will?) ultimately produce something new/different.

it's annoying when people use 'capitalism' to mean 'all the aspects of capitalism that I don't like', esp people who get paid money to think about words

did everybody see/read zizek @ zuccotti btw

"you can imagine sex with animals"
"but you can not imagine the end of capitalism"

Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the OWS movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.

When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.

And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ . . . What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.

i kinda think this is missing Zizek's point? it seems to me that preventing appropriation by the existing consensus, radical or otherwise, is one of his hobbyhorses.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, October 14, 2011 3:22 PM Bookmark

Yeah, in fact it seems like he's confirming what Zizek is saying.

http://www.themickeymouseclub.biz/3_1.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d72gkdLiWfo

http://o.onionstatic.com/images/articles/article/28/28351/onionmagazine_4821-web_jpg_445x1000_upscale_q85.jpg

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/10/slavoj-zizek-humanity-ok-people-boring

ha i was going to send that to you the other day

some choice words about american students.....

I want to hate this dude but when I see him speak he just seems so chill

i don't think he was talking about me! but i bet he was talking about someone in my class

lol

On the way up in the lift he volunteers that a former girlfriend used to ask him for what he called "consensual rape".

First paragraph of "Less Than Nothing" and I'm already scandalized. Actual point of "Emperor's New Clothing" myth is that children do not understand implicit social contexts of adult society??? ("...the naïve child from Andersen’s tale who publicly exclaims that the emperor is naked―thereby missing the point that, as Alphonse Allais put it, we are all naked beneath our clothes.")

I hope you're not clinging to the foundationalist interpretation that the child who calls the emperor naked is simply "telling the truth" about the situation. In Hans Christian Andersen's tale it is clearly stated that the clothes cannot be seen by a person who is idiotic or unfit for his office. The king and all his subjects accept this property of the clothes.

All, that is, except the child. By not seeing the clothes, the child in fact proves the condition to be true, for he proves himself unfit for the office of child. Because, as we all know, it is part of a child's job (if we may speak of childhood as a contractually binding position, which it most certainly is, complete with subsistence wages in the form of bed and board) to be utterly credulous and perpetually enchanted.

This child is a kind of magic negro in the tale. By inverting the general condition of his kind - a contractual credulousness, in the child's case - he manages to intervene to "save" the city from its own inversion: the childishness of its adults, who will believe anything they're told.

But this is where we need to think a little more deeply about what clothes and nudity actually are. Is it the case that by wearing no clothes you are automatically naked? Not necessarily; as Zizek points out, people who wear clothes are also naked. But the emperor is not "wearing no clothes". He is wearing something which everyone in his city (except one deviant child) sees and defines as clothes.

We could say that the child is, philosophically speaking, a foundationalist. For him, language is not "the Big Other" (something that one believes in but does not trust, as Zizek later says of God, paraphrasing Laibach), but Truth. He has reified and hypostatized certain relations which pertain only in language: naked / clothed, for example.

But human truth is sociological, contractual. If the emperor is not naked in the eyes of 99.9% of his people, he is not naked, period. The city is not to be "saved" by the magic child (in fact an adult figure - the only one in the tale - whose lack of resemblance to real children suggests a deep-seated child-hatred). Certainly everybody in the city is "unfit for office". Even the rogues, who think they are practicing a deception, are unfit for the office of rogue, for they make the king the most remarkable clothes he has ever worn, just as promised. They also permit the city to exchange adult disenchantment for childish enchantment.

This "unfitness for office", however, is admirable: the first step in a resistance struggle against the imperialism of "the Big Other". This is how the city will be saved, not by the corrosion of its collective truth. To try to "save" the city from the thing that is actually saving it is no better than, say, carpet-bombing Vietnam to prevent the political self-determination of its people.

The "child" stands revealed, in Lacanian terms, as a war criminal.