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

The only thing of length I posted on this thread was about Zizek not understanding Jews - and that was in the context of an article calling him an Anti-Semite. Is that what you're referring to?

Wow, you really are an ass. I've never said "lighten up, it's only Stalinism."

yeah it was some kind of 80s postmodern apologia for s/z's creepy crypto-anti-semitism.

Seriously, dude, I think you have a fucked up impression of what I think. But I'm not going to argue with you about it. If you didn't find my "analysis" of Zizek's fuck-up funny, then maybe you're just a humorless dick. Whatever.

you doing backslips to defend this mook is not that lol tbh.

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).

this is not lol, just really depressing. you seem very ignorant of the 'traditional' left.

Bronson, tell it to me straight. Are you a big Camille Paglia fan?

um, no. wth has that got to do with anything?

lol dual login

Because you're coming off like an inexplicably huge hard-ass.

haha i was gonna say somewhere i thought brohan hari was nrq what gives. CAUGHT.

this is kind of what i mean by the frivolity of zizek stans -- who still get to pass as 'left-wing' because, well, he believes in violent revolution unlike the straights. but it's a sinister frivolity, because a lot of what he says is ugly and can't be got past by just saying 'no-one takes him seriously.' why would you put in the man-hours reading it if you didn't on some level.

It's not that no-one takes him seriously. It's that I find him valuable for certain things and not valuable for other things. There's a history of literature that we read because we find some value in it, even if we disagree on numerous fronts. This is, I believe, the trademark of a healthy reader. You seem to be unable to distinguish that tho -- which makes me wonder what you do about media that has value but you disagree in some part with. Do you just write it all off?

Ie: I find his method of thinking about film/art incredibly interesting, fun to read, and very valuable in terms of interesting ways to think about film/art (so much of it is mind-bending in ways that illuminates things I hadn't considered before). But I 90% of the time disagree with his conclusions and his positions. That doesn't invalidate the stuff I find valuable in him.

tbh after 40 years film studies could do with less lacan; he hasn't innovated at all there, and his choices of film are generally boringly canonical.

but also he doesn't write about film. he occasionally uses a story or situation from a film to illustrate something, but film? as an art-form, a medium, whatever -- not so much.

so yeah there are some writers who you read and disagree with but keep reading, but it's better if they aren't repetitive, chauvinistic, totalitarian, etc.

what you do about media that has value but you disagree in some part with. Do you just write it all off?

of course you write it off! god knows there isn't time in anyone's life to read even what is essential.

Guys Slavoj going on about Stalinism is like Kanye going on about Louis Vuitton or black metal dudes talking about Satan. On the surface it's pretty stupid but you have to realize that it's more of a stylistic element through which the ideas are expressed rather than indicative of any inherently meaningful message per se.

what ideas are slavoj/kanye getting through with their respective uses of stalin and louis vuitton?

so far as i can tell slavoj's big thing is that lacan provides a conceptual model for understanding everything and that we should give up on pluralism, liberalism, and the like and accept the all-one utopia that will follow a violent revolution. kanye's deal is that he likes fancy schmutter but sometimes feels it's a bit unfulfilling.

Zizek probably changed it to lose the Guns 'n' Roses joke-title after Chinese Democracy was so bad (and that album title was offensive to him too).

And besides: the same phrase coming out of the mouths of Berlusconi & Chomsky would have decidedly different meanings because they work in different contexts. It doesn't necessarily mean that, had Chomsky said it, it would be any less racist/distasteful/what have you, but he would have been employing it in the service of a completely different point. You're not arguing that, are you?

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 11:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

berlusconi wasn't making a point; he was making a (relatively mild) racist joke. the quote zizek made up and attributed to chomsky was "making the point" that obama isn't *really* black, which is *more* racist, really. in another beef recently he said there were only about 10 jews in slovenia, and i'm guessing there are fewer people of colour than that: it's not *that* surprising that zizek has issues with multiculturalism, since he grew up in a monoculture.

his claim (which i'm looking for still -- only seen it related secondhand) wasn't just that there are 10 jews in slovenia, but that slovenian jews were all expelled during the rennaissance, spanish style, and nothing really that bad happened in the 20th century there. apparently this isn't even a little bit true. but like i said i have to find where i read this again.

!!!

yeah i took it at face value that slovenia's jews had been removed way back when, just coz his rebuttal was published in a serious outlet, and, you know, i figured they'd wiki it or whatever. but that was probably dim of me.

so far as i can tell slavoj's big thing is that lacan provides a conceptual model for understanding everything and that we should give up on pluralism, liberalism, and the like and accept the all-one utopia that will follow a violent revolution. kanye's deal is that he likes fancy schmutter but sometimes feels it's a bit unfulfilling.

That's a total misunderstanding of what Zizek is doing, but an understandable misunderstanding, if you've only read one or two articles by the guy. Personally, I wish he would stick more to pure philosophy, where I think he ultimately has more to contribute. (He's not simply (as some have suggested here) an interpreter of Lacan, any more than Lacan was simply an interpreter of Freud.) Nevertheless, his political/cultural criticism is to a certain extent an expression of that philosophy, and can only be understood in that context.

A) He's not anti-pluralism. This is less apparent in his articles than in his lectures, where he makes it pretty clear that he's in favor of multiculturalism as an idea, but critical of the specific ways that the idea is formulated and put into practice today. His real issue is with the way multiculturalism functions socially and psychologically in bourgeois liberal society -- see e.g. his critique of the idea of muticulturalism-as-"tolerance".

B) He's definitely not in favor of violent revolution. He's pretty much admitted that he has no idea how to get rid of global capitalism, but he's critical of those on the left who simply accept capitalism's permanent existence and have resigned themselves to making it "friendlier", more "tolerant", etc.

C) The whole Stalinism thing is pretty clearly a pose, coming from someone who was one of the major forces of opposition to his own totalitarian-communist government in the 80's. He uses it mostly as a way to make it harder for the bourgeois liberal establishment to recuperate his ideas, and he's admitted as much in the past.

Again, a lot of this is hard to pick up on in a two-page article about Barack Obama. If you really want to understand where he's coming from you have to read his more philosophy-oriented books (Sublime Object of Ideology's a good place to start); however as an introduction to his ideas is lectures (many of which are on YouTube) are a much better point of entry than any of his articles.

I admit that my comparison of Zizek to Kanye West/black metal upthread was sort of clumsy and wrongheaded, but I was only trying to point out how strange it is that ILXors, many of whom have no problem listening to music full of really questionable messages and imagery, would discount the contributions of a particular thinker wholesale simply because some of his positions are, on the surface, pretty unpalatable. (Perhaps a better comparison for Zizek in hip-hop would be N.W.A., whose gangster-posing was partially a response to the proto-backpacker white-liberal-friendlification of hip-hop via Public Enemy, De La Soul, etc.) After all, we don't dismiss Nietzsche just because he was an anti-democratic misogynist, do we?

actually i think enrique does dismiss nietzsche because he was an anti-democratic misogynist

haha yep, i pretty much do. what do people like about nietzsche?

i fuck mathematics: i have read more than a couple of zizek's articles, and even one full book! i've been reading him for almost a decade now, and i know what he says, and i know what i like, and it's not him.

for me it comes down to the amount of time you're willing to invest -- i.e., i don't care if such-and-such a nuance comes across more clearly in lectures than in his many articles. and tbh i've heard people say the same of lacan, and it turned out to be bollocks -- he was a dreadful lecturer in the films i've seen.

the problem is that the 'bourgeois liberal establishment' is easy-going enough to recuperate pretty much anything, so if you try and make it hard by making edgy picks like stalin and mao, they'll end up 'recuperating' that -- it doesn't particularly matter because, being academics and the like, they have no involvement in politics as such. it's just that they infect discourse in the humanities with positions that are at bottom ugly.

(i don't really care, twenty years on, if NWA had a problem with public enemy being taken up by white liberals because SURPRISE so were NWA in the end. it's a bit of a non-issue for me, though i prefer classic public enemy to NWA. perhaps if zizek was produced by the bomb squad i'd like him more. point being i do separate reading books which promise some kind of 'truth' about the world from listening to music; they do seem quite different experiences; and, maybe it's just me, but a young rapper pretending to be a drug dealer is less offensive to me than a widely heralded professor pretending to be a revolutionary.)

I think Jacques Lacan was a bad man.

there are a lot of things people like about nietzsche

I think Jacques Lacan was a bad man.

― the pinefox, Thursday, January 29, 2009 9:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you're not wrong.

A Terrible Man!

As a side note there's no point at which NWA and PE ever saw each other as in opposition as far as I remember. I don't know why Lacan was a bad man - I haven't read anything of his that's made me think it. Nietzsche seems to me to have been a long, long way from the caricature bad boy schtick that he even mocked in himself at the time of writing it. Nietzche's stupidities tend to be footnotes, asides and rhetorical flourishes. That comes with the territory with most philosophers I've read.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n14/zize01_.html

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing.

I'm taking a class when him and Ronell next semester.

Preemptive fuck you to you-know-who.

Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda

my two favorite things on earth together at last

i reproduced that quote bcz it sounded really stupid on its face -- the paragraph supporting it isn't very convincing.

it's hard to tell what that essay is even about, first segment is arguing against some strawman leftist affection for ahmadinejad that i have never seen or heard of anywhere, middle bit is a badiou book report, and then all this stuff about how berlusconi is a racist corrupt asshole. drawing a lot of lines but none of them connect.

"how berlusconi is a racist corrupt asshole"
he's not?

uh yes, yes he is.

At the empirical level multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – mirrors, registers, measures – the quantitative dispersal of people’s opinions, what they think about the parties’ proposed programmes and about their candidates etc. However, in a more radical, ‘transcendental’ sense, multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – instantiates – a certain vision of society, politics and the role of the individuals in it. Multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ a precise vision of social life in which politics is organised so that parties compete in elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus. This transcendental frame is never neutral – it privileges certain values and practices – and this becomes palpable in moments of crisis or indifference, when we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people want or think. In the UK elections of 2005, for example, despite Tony Blair’s growing unpopularity, there was no way for this disaffection to find political expression. Something was obviously very wrong here: it wasn’t that people didn’t know what they wanted, but rather that cynicism, or resignation, prevented them from acting.

This is not to say that democratic elections should be despised; the point is only to insist that they are not in themselves an indication of the true state of affairs; as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa. Take an unproblematic example: France in 1940. Even Jacques Duclos, the number two in the French Communist Party, admitted that if, at that point in time, free elections had been held in France, Marshal Pétain would have won with 90 per cent of the vote. When De Gaulle refused to acknowledge France’s capitulation and continued to resist, he claimed that only he, and not the Vichy regime, spoke on behalf of the true France (not, note, on behalf of the ‘majority of the French’). He was claiming to be speaking the truth even if it had no democratic legitimacy and was clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. There can be democratic elections which enact a moment of truth: elections in which, against its sceptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily ‘awakens’ and votes against the hegemonic opinion; however, that such elections are so exceptional shows that they are not as such a medium of truth.

dude just come out with it, if you want to be a vanguardist, just say so...

I only read the kung fu panda part and it was disappointingly coherent, but I kind of take it more as criticism of kung fu panda than berlusconi.

I'm taking a class when him and Ronell next semester.

― Mordy, Tuesday, July 21, 2009 10:47 PM (Yesterday)

Jealous

My class starts in half an hour. Live blog? :P

Zizek's Twitter page is one of my favorites:

http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks

His attempts to justify (or Saint-Justify, if you prefer) Robespierre and the Terror on that documentary on the French Revolution were amusing

... and as he was up against Simon Schama, it has hard not to warm to him

Does anyone else reads his tweets imagining how he would be saying them?

i like simon schama more than PLANK zizek.

he has a lloyd grossman thing going on but at least he 1) is erudite about history 2) is not an apologist for terrible authoritarian regimes 3) doesn't explain everything in terms of lacan's mirror theory.

Yeah but Zizek kept rubbing his nose in a funny way in that doc so all is forgiven.

# Inglorious Basterds is the opposite of living out one's fantasy. It condemns us to the truth. The real fantasy is a world sans Auschwitz 5:13 PM Aug 27th from TwitterFox

huh interesting.

# Currently working on article comparing Irish potato famine to Cheers. I think it will be an interesting one. 10:16 AM Aug 31st from TwitterFox

lol gtfo

# RT @sarahksilverman Syntax question: Is the word, "guzzle" exclusive to jizz? 8:56 PM Aug 5th from TwitterFox