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

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?

hi buddy

aw you're so disarming

mordy I have a game for you, post 'The problem with Hitler was that he was “not violent enough,” his violence was not “essential” enough. ' on your fb newsfeed and try to explain to everyone what exactly zizek *really* meant

its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised.

has anyone ever head of Gillian Rose's Hegel Contra Sociology? this part put me in mind of that. thesis being that hegelian dialectic holds out the very possibility for an "absolute" that goes past, aufheben-style, the existing order. this is the crux, and problem, with zizek and his recent stuff. fundamentally it assumes that contradictions are limit conditions to be then overcome--rather than the idea that contradictions are not in fact threatening to the existing order but the basis of its self-reproduction, so to speak. in other words, i dont think the violence of Zizek's rhetoric gets past what he's saying about Hitler.

not to mention the revealing use of "impotent" in that passage--speaking of psychoanalysis!

funny that the 2nd post itt mentions leninism. seems like the 'big idea' with him to me.

all you have to do is insert "unlike lenin" after every other clause of that hitler quote

haha

Lenin, unlike Hitler, was presumably a virile man with the capacity to act!

stikes me that deconstruction of "reaction" vs "response" in derrida's "the animal that therefore i am" is also something that zizek (much like lacan in derrida's reading!) is eliding.

idk i think it's simpler than that: hitler's violence was bad because he was a racist right-winger, equivalent violence by OTHER PEOPLE I COULD NAME is ok because it's by communist left-wingers.

the real "problem" of nazism, to zizek, is surely that it made mass political violence look pretty bad

its just sort of funny who in particular seems most able to be trolled by zizek.

oh the hitler quote. woooo

i look at it from the perspective that the actual "we just killed lots of people" is an act separate from ideology. and a bad one! always a bad one, no matter who makes the decision and for what political reasons. choosing who to kill, then murdering them, feeding the dogs or the gas chambers, just not a good look. like, he doesn't have to spell that out. so he isn't talking about the actual killing people in the quote, he's talking about the sort of strong political/social vision that might tempt one to kill dissidents and has done so historically (again, this is bad) (but a vision with this kind of strength is also what could pose a credible challenge to global capitalism), and then critiquing that vision and the impulses behind it (which leaves traces in the violence but crucially in my mind isn't really the cause of the violence, the cause of the violence is deciding "we will kill these people now lol" + a whole host of other very banal bureaucratic/industrial reasons that are actually logical endpoint capitalism).

basically i'm interested in the idea that the political impulse/vision/ideology isn't actually the cause of the killings. The cause of the killings is compromise, or deciding to kill.

have no idea if any of that is coherent at all.

"might tempt one to kill dissidents" should really read "might lead to the situation where one feels like it's required to kill dissidents for reasons that are actually undermining the cause"

n.b. i'm almost totally brainwashed \o_O/ so ymmv

if only all comedians had this kinda posse to defend their bad jokes

i'm taking that as a compliment.

arentya all reading iatee's NYRB book review as a quote from zizek? the quotes are zizek

lol and yet people were more than willing to defend it

thats a zizek quote http://cl.ly/2g0t0H331w3K

the quote does read differently in the original context but even there the point zizek is making seems somewhat divorced from actual history: was making sure 'the capitalist order would survive' really hitler's top priority? he prob could have done a better job of that by not invading a bunch of other countries and all that other stupid shit he did.

also he might have considered having a capitalist economy

That Hilter quote is instructive, but not crucial, to understanding zizek challops. The main key is to notice how many categorical statements he makes, without the slightest hint of qualification, for which he has laid insufficent groundwork. If one simply responds, mentally with "no, you are wrong", one may look in vain to what preceded these statements to discover what chain of reasoning led to them or any basis apart from perhaps a passing allusion to some inexplicit theory, or else just dropping names.

Such baseless pronouncments then become the basis for his later castles in the air. It is rather like watching a televangelist lay out his arguments based on the idea that the Bible is the Word of God. Except zizek's gods write like Momus.

thats a zizek quote http://cl.ly/2g0t0H331w3K

― max, Monday, 28 January 2013 17:12

oh my bad, thx. i read the nyrb review recently and misremembered it as the author's voice somehow

haha momus is a good comparison actually

i think in most cases the "chain of reasoning" that leads zizek to say the things he says are pretty front and center when you see him a part of the critical tradition he explicitly adopts (ie, marx, hegel, lacan). that's not to say i agree with him, as i noted above i don't because i think that tradition has run its course, but he's not really trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. in fact, i think he's in the main admirably clear about his aims and assumptions.

throw in st. paul and lenin to his list of heroes too.

in fact, i think he's in the main admirably clear about his aims and assumptions.

^^