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

"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.

http://i.imgur.com/AoNi1.gif

xp that is essentially how i understand allais' point

or rather zizek summarizing allais - except for the war criminal part. the child is not a terrorist in the book but a moron.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1161-the-year-of-dreaming-dangerously

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/violent-visions-slavoj-zizek/?page=2

Wow. That's a terrible article. I didn't even realize it was a takedown in the first portion, just an astonishing misreading by someone clearly not familiar with the tradition Zizek is working within. Then as it progressed into extremist-baiting I was even more taken aback. As far as I'm concerned, John Gray was successfully trolled.

The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations.

Describing mass murder in this way as an exercise in hermeneutics is repugnant and grotesque; it is also characteristic of Žižek’s work.

from my position as a layman who has v little interest in trying to actually read a lot of this guy but enjoys the youtubes where he wipes snot on his shirt, i think zizek is "problematic" or whatever too; but let's be fair: stalin turned mass murder into an exercise in hermeneutics, not zizek. stalin turned society into a game where you had to send your neighbors to their deaths before they sent you to yours (section 12 of article 58 of the criminal code: failure to denounce shall carry no maximum penalty) and the only way to comfort yourself without being a sociopath was to train yourself to believe that everyone was wearing an increasingly subjective series of masks that could conceal a wrecker or saboteur even from himself. the show trials and confessions made clear that "truth", the interpretation of the text of the world, was as far as the state was concerned now very malleable. (i guess how zizek Really Feels about stalin is another and more annoying matter -- that guardian piece mordy linked upthread has a totally hilarious part where it is revealed that the only decorations in zizek's room are a poster of stalin and a poster for call of duty: black ops, which, try to unpack that, or alternately decide you don't want to give zizek the satisfaction.) also,

But it is difficult to understand the claim that the identities of anti-Semites and Jewish people are in some way mutually reinforcing—which is repeated, word for word, in Less Than Nothing—except as suggesting that the only world in which anti-Semitism can cease to exist is one in which there are no longer any Jews.

legit cannot tell if the writer realizes or not that the bolded part is... true? has nothing to do specifically with jews but seems to me to be tautological. unless you believe as deeply as any communist in the possibilities of transformation for the human soul.

i agree with some of the piece's qualms, i guess, but then again i haven't yet decided what to make of this kind of trolling:

The problem with Hitler was that he was “not violent enough"

those quotes! what do they mean? slavoj! why are you smirking? why won't you blow your fucking nose?

wasn't endorsing that article btw, i started reading it out of interest cause i've never read zizek and it struck me as wildly unfair -- espe the super-strained reading of the 'anti-semite' stuff. you could prob take quotes from any philosopher out of context to 'prove' that they're dreadful immoral people. philosophers deal with terrible unspeakable stuff that polite people don't talk about, that's kind of what philosophers are for.

where would be a good place to actually start reading zizek?

i just started reading this piece and was struck by the first two sentences

"The celebration of violence is one of the most prominent strands in Žižek’s work. He finds fault with Marx for thinking that violence can be justified as part of the conflict between objectively defined social classes."

paradox! continued reading - lots of really dumb sentences sprinkled throughout.

re: actually starting to read zizek, if you're not feeling particularly ambitious can i recommend this super excellent shorter piece on intersubjectivity? it's a great breakdown on a particular idea, it has trademark zizek metaphors (the VCR bit is classic) and it's short! http://www.lacan.com/zizek-pompidou.htm

about 1/3 of the way through and really enjoying (ha!) "The Metastases of Enjoyment" (1994) and it makes me wonder: i've only read Zizek here and there and im curious if there are like discernable stages to his career. Is there an early Zizek and a late one?

"The celebration of violence is one of the most prominent strands in Žižek’s work. He finds fault with Marx for thinking that violence can be justified as part of the conflict between objectively defined social classes."

paradox! continued reading - lots of really dumb sentences sprinkled throughout.

there's no paradox. author is saying that zizek objects to marx's search for objective differences between classes (but not to marx's justification of violent class conflict).

also: motherfucking grampsy!

http://www.versobooks.com/system/images/2100/original/9781781680421_Year_of_Dreaming_Dangerously.jpg

i saw that the other day. in fact if this thread had been revived for anything else then probably i would have put it here myself.

i hope that's his facebook photo

enrique blows his nose:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/lff-blog-blow-hard-slavoj-zizek-sans-handkerchief

i'd like to see the new film

When contrarians tackle contrarians, popcorn gets ate.

there's a great bit in "Metastases of Enjoyment" where he explains why he writes about "idiotic" pop-culture: ""The idiot for whom I endeavor to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself." there's more but i can't find it right now!

enrique has negative opinions about zizek, i am SHOCKED.

i'm no huge fan of him myself but i think this article was a good defence of a philosophy behind his shtick: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=897&fulltext=1

hey i loved that article! thx

the article had me going almost, but casual violence-baiting over batman and the top was bogus and made me question the rest. also i feel fairly mixed vis-a-vis 'liberal homilies'. like i think the article is giving them more credit than they deserve.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_global_thinkers?page=0,55#thinker92

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/capitalism

Also, I really hate all of this politically correct, cultural studies bullshit. If you mention the phrase “postcolonialism,” I say, “Fuck it!” Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

In 1918-19, Trotsky was much harsher than Stalin. And I do like this in him. But I will never forgive him for how he screwed it up in the mid-’20s. He was so stupid and arrogant. You know what he would do? He would come to party meetings carrying French classics like Flaubert, Stendhal, to signal to others: “Fuck you, I am civilized!”

I was going to bump this to finally ask someone if zizek is antisemitic so I could determine if I'm justified in not caring about him but I think I'm going to derive my justification from his reference to the "guilt of white liberals" instead

i've been watching bits + pieces of pervert's guide to cinema. so funny. i love the part where he's on the boat in the birds and says, "i feel like melanie. i want to fuck mitch."

Let’s run with that. You have said before: “I am a philosopher, not a prophet.” And yet, your followers are remarkably pious; many worship you as a prophet. Why?

Well, I’m ambiguous on this. On the one hand, I return to a more classical Marxism. Like: ‘It cannot last! This is all crazy! The hour of reckoning will come, blah blah blah.’

Also, I really hate all of this politically correct, cultural studies bullshit. If you mention the phrase “postcolonialism,” I say, “Fuck it!” Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

zizek otm

and where are the guiltiest liberals of all? post-colonial vienna

http://germanistik.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/ag_hfs_germ_babka/cover_cd_bhabha.JPG

i dont think zizek is an anti-semite

i don't think so either

dude is so clearly just a provocateur that even if he started praising hitler or w/e I am not sure it would be grounds for any real conclusion

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2013/1/12/1357993749882/slavoj-zizek-010.jpg

http://www.himho.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Lars-Von-Trier.jpg

I could look at ridiculous Zizek pictures all morning