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

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.

^^

"was making sure 'the capitalist order would survive' really hitler's top priority?"

that's a longstanding leftist analysis.

i am not a nazi guy but nazism was in part (the part that wasn't about versailles and "stab-in-the-back") a reaction to the 20s/30s Death Of Capitalism the same way new dealism was and communism eagerly expected to be, right? hitler's solution was probably less "revolutionary" than even fdr's, hence "not violent enough" -- did not besiege any of the old fortresses of real power but instead just reanimated the economy by turning the country into a psychotic war machine. (and ironically reanimated the american economy into the bargain.) whether zizek's talking about literal violence or figurative violence or both and wtf the scare quotes are supposed to be accomplishing is a different and v zizek thing.

"not a nazi guy" = not any kind of an expert on nazism. i am also not a nazi.

dlh's understanding is the way i understand it more-or-less

uh hitler's solution was considerable more 'revolutionary' than fdrs but in any case phrasing an argument like that the way he does is 100% about getting a reaction. which, I mean, congrats, he's famous and the people making subtle historical arguments w/o references to the wire aren't.

that's capitalism I guess

i think also violence is important to zizek as an action w/ transformative power that cannot easily be co-opted by capitalism. nazism obv complicates this (as does all reactionary violence which is to say all violence really) and so nazism becomes this gash/wound in reality but one that reconstitutes the previous forms, not obliterates them. obv the question is why violence needs to be preserved, but i think that makes the most intuitive sense - bc violence really is traumatizing and does break forms and does create gashes in reality and this is really why a large sense of postmodernity is living w/ trauma (ok, this is really when i read adorno into zizek, this eternal bleakness)

nazism and hitlerism were ultimately divergent results of the same reaction, neither version was a genuine critique of capitalism - they didn't see the fundamental problems of society in terms of capital/alienation

not the same thing as saying most of those idiots had a developed economic theory, but it seems fair to say that Hitler especially had no interest in removing the capitalist order

he was a keynesian

no

he was not

i don't think Hitler had any developed economic ideas? his whole world view seems purely racial/mythological, he was happy to employ any technocrat who'd bankroll his military demands and wasn't obviously Jewish

it'd be closer to the truth for Zizek to say that capitalists were prepared to use Hitler to ensure their order survived

whatever economic views he did have led to a transition away from a free market economy so any 'savior of capitalism' argument requires word games, a flexible definition of capitalism, very fuzzy views of historical events etc but hey. hitler. capitalism. the wire.

i don't know that hitler thought he was a keynesian, but he was

oh yeah also violence produces excess - that's important too

i'm obv not coming from the same ideological place as zizek (wherever that is -- a place where 'leninist' analysis matters, i guess) but surely hitler was at least as 'revolutionary' as any leader in history unless you define revolutionary as 'overthrows capitalism' and nothing else, which would exclude an awful lot of actual historical revolutions, including the (first) russian revolution.

defining nazi germany as 'conservative' or even 'reactionary' seems very off to me because it suggests that hitler et al were committed to preserving the status quo, which they really weren't unless you define it very narrowly. surely it wasn't really in the best interests of 'german bourgeois society' or german industry to declare war on the u.s. for no reason or to try to kill off an entire race.

i'm pretty sure - but i'm a little tipsy and off to bed so i'll rethink this later - that one of the eventual failings of Hitler's government was its inability to mobilise a properly state-controlled economy in the way that say the Keynesian UK gov cd - Hitler never had the will or the bureaucracy to exercise proper centralised control

it wasn't really in the best interests of 'german bourgeois society' or german industry to declare war on the u.s. for no reason or to try to kill off an entire race

that's not what happened.

whatever economic views he did have led to a transition away from a free market economy so any 'savior of capitalism' argument requires word games

again, standard leftist critique distinguishes between capitalism, which is an economic system, and "free-market economy" which is an ideological apparatus as much as anything else.

germany in the 30s was sort of fascism on one side or actual reorganization of property on the other. nazis were pretty obviously the reactionary alternative.

the 'economic system' is a flexible boogeyman term that fits into whatever attention grabbing statement someone like zizek wants it to fit.

The apotheosis of Hitler within the larger framework of Nazism prevented the party from creating an ideology uninfected by Hitler's personal quirks, idiocies, hobby-horses and interests, because it was impossible for the party to ignore or resist his personal authority. The support of capitalists such as Krupp was critical to the power the Nazi party accrued, but the industrialists and bankers were only able to steer the party to the degree that Hitler did not override them.

Hitler was interested in capitalism only as a handy engine to lend power to his own political and cultural ideas. He would have been just as glad to harness some other source of power, if it had been capable of lending an equal amount of force to the implementation of his grandiose plans. Nazism was capitalist by the chance of history, not as a founding principle.

that's not what happened.

could you elaborate?

just meant that germany didn't declare war on the u.s. for "no reason".

the 'economic system' is a flexible boogeyman term that fits into whatever attention grabbing statement someone like zizek wants it to fit.

yep, no such thing as an economic system. gotcha.

why yes that's exactly what I was saying

ok, it exists but we can't talk about it.

okay that sounds like a fair deal

'no reason' was a bad way to put it, really just meant that hitler declaring war on the u.s. was a somewhat arbitrary decision, he wasn't required to do it by the terms of the tripartite pact since japan had struck first.

if we're talking about unnecessary declarations of war not in the best interest of german bourgeois society there's always the ussr

Zizek on "violence" (esp. in the context of the Hitler thing) is basically a rip of Benjamin's Critique of Violence, intentional or otherwise.

I think if you read that and then go back to Zizek then the latter's more inflammatory-seeming statements become a lot more intelligible.

This also chimes in with Mordy's comments upthread about the relationship between Benjamin and Zizek's respective forms of purism and Adorno's discomfort with the former.

I tend to think Zizek usually avoids talking about Benjamin and Adorno like the plague because it's a real point of weakness from a theoretical perspective (i.e. I think Adorno would offer an excellent critique of Zizek and I suspect Zizek knows it). (disclaimer I haven't read Z's last few books so maybe he has started talking about them?)

This is why Hegel was right to insist that the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk; and also why the twentieth‐century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough—that is, insofar as the fundamental capitalist thrust of unleashed productivity survived in it, deprived of its concrete contradictory conditions of existence. The inadequacy of Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, and so on, lies in their abandonment of the concrete social analysis of capitalism: in their very critique or overcoming of Marx, they in a certain way repeat Marx’s mistake—like him, they take unleashed productivity as something ultimately independent of the concrete capitalist social formation. Capitalism and communism are not two different historical realizations, two species, of “instrumental reason”—instrumental reason as such is capitalist, grounded in capitalist relations, and “really existing socialism” failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to “have one’s cake and eat it,” to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient. Marx’s notion of the communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described. In other words, our wager is that, even if we take away the teleological notion of communism (the society of fully unleashed productivity) as the implicit standard by which Marx measures the alienation of existing society, the bulk of his “critique of political economy,” his insights into the self‐propelling vicious cycle of capitalist (re)production, survives.