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

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

"not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in the illusion itself"

i can't remember where at the moment, but somewhere Zizek talks about the elephant in the room with marxism being the fact that it itself, by it's own logic, is an ideological formation determined entirely by history (and thus capitalism). can't remember how he squares that circle though.

i'm annoyed at butler these days

off-topic lol

Marxism is indeed a super-structural adjunct to the capitalist base- but that doesn't necessarily make it illogical. Pure mathematics is the same and is (to some degree) a coherent system.

right but that coherence is purchased at the cost of forming an "objective" or total description--this is essentially the idea that marxism (like anything else) constitutes a "closed" system that can only really describe itself.

yeah the q is how well it maps onto the "real world" whatever that is.

i like that video above. i do find his notions therein about some kind of exposure to trauma or libido to be really interesting--but again i'd say what id say above--it's only an openness achieved by closure first.

I don't understand why I love this guy so much, but this guy is the ultimate bullshitter and i think his genius is in selling bullshit to people know they're buying bullshit, but the aura around the bullshit is so intriguing that they're happy to buy and he's happy to sell.

Also, I love his lisp. It's perfect in every way.

haha. i can't hate him, i admit. he's a fun phantom (as this thread testifies) to argue with. and i enjoy his books.

in a world w/ more interesting, serious grappling w/ global political + economic trends zizek wouldn't be necessary, but there's a serious dearth of philosophers (or anyone really) talking about this stuff in any kind of comprehensive or extensive manner

John Gray maybe?

but yeah agreed Zizek is the only (semi-) serious left wing public intellectual of any note, with the possible exception of Perry Anderson.

"not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in the illusion itself"

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 11:32 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is one of my go-to lines for my impression/caricature of zizek

the larb article's thing on overidentification isn't bad. it's sort of shallow, but it does help to explain one of his basic rhetorical affectations.

surely every good zizek impression needs a PRESHISHELY, hurting.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/west-crisis-democracy-finance-spirit-dictators

In short, in assessing the consequences of the referendum, the court simply accepted as fact that failing to obey the dictates of international financial institutions (or to meet their expectations) can lead to political and economic crisis, and is thus unconstitutional. To put it bluntly: since meeting these dictates and expectations is the condition of maintaining the constitutional order, they have priority over the constitution (and eo ipso state sovereignty).

Slovenia may be a small country, but this decision is a symptom of a global tendency towards the limitation of democracy. The idea is that, in a complex economic situation like today's, the majority of the people are not qualified to decide – they are unaware of the catastrophic consequences that would ensue if their demands were to be met.

Zizek channeling Krugman there - though I like how he links it to distrust of democracy in general.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable

Really? One doesn't need to be a moralist, or naive about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict it neutrally – ie to neutralise this shattering dimension – is already a kind of endorsement.

Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?

would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators

I mean, wouldn't it?

http://keshek.tumblr.com/
http://i.minus.com/iixeRZllRY8MT.gif

I'll be seeing Big Žižžy give a public lecture entitled 'a reply to my critics' at the end of next month, cuz, why not I suppose.

plz liveblog

I'LL TRY. I'm perhaps more interested in seeing just how different the crowd and vibe will be from my usual philosophy events than I am in Z himself, though I also feel it's important to see him in the flesh before his inevitable and imminent coke-induced heart failure.

that's exciting! I saw Bruno Latour give a talk once at Rice but I had a hard time with his accent and almost fell asleep.

braggin hard (and also potentially laughing in the face of web anonymity) but I was at a small closed workshop featuring Latour last week, super interesting guy who I could listen to chatting away forever, even if I probably have ~deep problems~ with his thought.

braggin hard in the least hard manner of braggin imaginable, that is.

that's really cool. he's someone whose work i am passing familiar with (particularly "We Have Never Been Modern" of course) but i'd be super interested in a critique of his thought.

I don't know him particularly well either, but I'll definitely be digging deeper now. I think the kind of standard criticism is along Marxist lines - that the flattening out of networks you get in his thought doesn't allow you to think the particular form and strength of capitalist power relations and such - but the one that interests me more is a more directly philosophical one (and is maybe specific to the positive project of his major upcoming book, 'An Inquiry into Modes of Existence'), in that it feels to me that as his theory of multiple ontologies doesn't emerge from a more fundamental single ontology or some other kind of substrate, it's difficult to really say how the ontologies relate to one another. But that there is about the extent of my thought on it so far.

thanks for that!

i liked the less theoretical, more actually following people around and writing down stuff latour.

that felt much more exciting to me than anything since.

i find his status amongst the object-oriented ontology crowd (of which I am also suspicious of but can't form a solid opinion without further research) to be kinda weird and interesting.

xp yeah, and I do think it's potentially illegitimate to be thinking of him in the kind of strictly philosophical terms I am there. The stuff that he's doing with his website and crowdsourcing seems really interesting too.

(For me the OOO association had put me off reading more Latour...)

'A reply to my critics', eh? Seems to me that the whole point of a guy like Zizek is to toss out endless challops and generate his own critics, so that he can reply to them ad infinitum.

if only all challops had the quality of zizek challops

As a challops-driven entity, zizek certainly is the top dog, as it were. he's in a different league from Charlie Sheen altogether.

i can't speak to his qualities as a philosopher or political historian, but as a film critic-theorist he really strikes me as the emperor's new clothes - or rather, second-hand, shopworn clothes, indebted specifically to the kind of Lacanian-post-structuralist thought that was rife at Screen, Cahiers etc in the 1970s. And his thoughts on Hitchcock are really just a re-writing of Robin Wood's kind of Freudian 'close reading'. Serious question: am i missing where he deviates or advances from these past critical orthodoxies (the recurring film studies questions of cause and effect and representation/identification seem so crudely stated in that piece on ZERO..., but as a piece of journalism in the Guardian i wldn't hold it to the same standard as his more 'specialist' film writing.)

i'm thinking especially of his writings in this volume, btw - TERRIBLE title:

http://www.versobooks.com/system/images/355/original/9781844676217-frontcover.jpg

my recollection was that w/r/t film, Z never claimed to be more than a popularizer and practitioner of existing critical approaches. I don't know the field enough to say if there's more to him than that -- in fact my sense is more that his attitude towards that stuff is that it is useful for introducing approaches that he then wants to apply outside of film, not that he's so deeply interested in having anything new to say about hitchcock or w/e at all. Even the title of his book sort of points there -- it's pop-lacan via examples from hitchcock.

otm. and Aimless's kneejerk reaction and the challops thing... seems prevalent? where does that come from? i've only read the iraq book and seen the film where he wants to fuck mitch and from those, he can be provocative sure (sometimes in a just-throwing-things-out-there way which is not my favorite thing about his approach) but always in a v. good way imo that encourages thought instead of shutting it down.

The problem with Hitler was that he was “not violent enough,” his violence was not “essential” enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order would survive…. The true problem of Nazism is not that it “went too far” in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised.

gee where does the kneejerk reaction to this guy from from hmmmmmm

I think a lot of ppl don't really understand that quote? He's not saying that Hitler didn't kill enough Jews.

i enjoy zizek for entertainment purposes only, but his ideas are pretty much worthless in that they're not very well thought out.

i would be a lot more into that quote if he put "problem" in scare quotes like he puts everything else

to a lot of people the "true problem" of Nazism is that it implemented mass racial killing on an industrialized scale

huh really?