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

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.

Also:

In this case, it is Adorno’s “negative dialectics” which, paradoxically, remains within the confines of “identitarian” thought: the endless critical “work of the negative” which is never done, since it presupposes Identity as its starting point and foundation. In other words, Adorno does not see how what he is looking for (a break‐out from the confines of Identity) is already at work at the very heart of the Hegelian dialectic, so that it is Adorno’s very critique which obliterates the subversive core of Hegel’s thought, retroactively cementing the figure of his dialectic as the pan‐logicist monster of the all‐consuming Absolute Notion.

These are from the new one - I haven't finished reading it.

oh, this bit is great too:

The question is not which of these two logics of the symptom is the right one—it depends on what type of universality or totality we are dealing with. In the case of capitalism, the Marxist view that crises, wars, and other “deviant” phenomena are its “truth” fully holds. Democracy is a more ambiguous case—exemplary here is the legendary study of the “authoritarian personality” in which Adorno participated. The features of the “authoritarian personality” are clearly opposed to the standard figure of the “open” democratic personality, and the underlying dilemma is whether these two types of personality are opposed in a struggle, so that we should fight for one against the other, or whether the “authoritarian” personality is in fact the symptomal “truth” of the “democratic” personality. Along these lines, the shift from Adorno to Habermas apropos modernity can itself be formulated in these terms: at the heart of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s “dialectic of enlightenment” is the idea that phenomena such as fascism are “symptoms” of modernity, its necessary consequence (which is why, as Horkheimer memorably put it, those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep silent about fascism). For Habermas, by contrast, they are “symptoms” or indicators of the fact that modernity remains an “unfinished project,” that it has not yet deployed all its potential.

1. Agree with the first quote

2. Kind of see what the second one is getting at but would need to read around the quote to be certain. I suspect Adorno would counter that Zizek's resolutions are false, though he might concede that Zizek approaches questions of identity/nonidentity in a way more attractive to him than most.

3. Agree with the third quote, which is basically an example of the endless truth that whenever Habermas disagrees with Adorno, Adorno is to be preferred.

I think it's interesting that in the third and first quotes Adorno is used specifically to explain why Capitalism is so all-encompassing, so impossible to break with - Zizek is slowly buying into Adorno's POV about violence.

In this case, it is Adorno’s “negative dialectics” which, paradoxically, remains within the confines of “identitarian” thought: the endless critical “work of the negative” which is never done, since it presupposes Identity as its starting point and foundation.

It seems easy to say that there is an unnecessary presupposition of identity in Adorno, but it seems to me that Zizek does essentially the same thing, the difference being that his conflation of identity with madness (that's unfairly simplistic but will serve for current purposes) makes it seem as if he's escaping the issue. Adorno is much more concerned with how critique can account for itself than Zizek is - if nothing else it would not be in Zizek's style to seek to establish the basis on which he can speak - which is why he seems more lost in a hall of mirrors.

Not that I want to turn this into Adorno vs Zizek, but I think that those issues are much more interesting than "zizek supports hitler y/n"

I think it's interesting that in the third and first quotes Adorno is used specifically to explain why Capitalism is so all-encompassing, so impossible to break with - Zizek is slowly buying into Adorno's POV about violence.

― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 12:59 AM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes. I also think that Zizek's apparent disagreement in the first quote - i.e. whether it is capitalism or instrumental reason that is the problem - is really a non-issue at core. There are certain historical reasons post-dating Adorno that lie behind Zizek's insistence on making capitalism qua capitalism the problem, and I think if Adorno were in the same position he'd make the same choice. Likewise, Zizek's notion of a certain ahistorical kernel of social trauma around which different historical manifestations of (let's call it) the symbolic order organise themselves, and which he calls "class struggle", seems to me to basically approach the issue of identity/nonidentity and instrumental reason in a very consistent fashion.

this bit strikes me as key as well in that he's explicitly setting out to recover some version of the dialectic:

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.

of the question is then: can you do really separate those two things? likewise with the bit about the "subversive core" of Hegel's thought.

i suppose in some sense he's trying to de-couple the notion of "critique" from its historical association with attempts at overcoming modernity--but id still argue that in his thought there's at least the shadow of a mechanism designed to transform contingency into necessity, and isn't that really eventually the core of the problem with this kind of thinking?

i should, trying to transform its own contingency into its necessity.

Stepping into this a bit late, but has anyone read Thomas Mann's essays on Goethe? Coincidentally I checked his collected essays out of the library last week. Written around the time of his exile, they posit the Great Man as founder and apotheosis of German middle class values. The essays themselves are glosses on what is happening to writers like Mann in Nazi Germany who represented the post-Goethe type embedded in German society writing novels that unavoidably celebrate the kind of aesthetic detachment made possible only by money and of course contains within it the seeds of its own eradication.

Also, where should I start with Zizek? I've read about him more than I've read him. Is Living in the End Times a good place to start?

others will be better placed to answer that, but i started with Enjoy Your Symptom! not knowing much about Lacan at that point. his best that i've read is Metastases of Enjoyment but it's a little tougher going.

more on violence (and the holocaust!):

The theological implications of this violence are unexpectedly far‐reaching: what if the ultimate addressee of the biblical commandment “Do not kill” is God (Jehovah) himself, and we fragile humans are his neighbors exposed to divine rage? How often, in the Old Testament, do we encounter God as a dark stranger who brutally intrudes into human lives and sows destruction? When Levinas wrote that our first reaction to a neighbor is to kill him, was he not implying that this originally refers to God’s relationship to humans, so that the commandment “Do not kill” is an appeal to God to control his rage? Insofar as the Jewish solution is a dead God, a God who survives only in the “dead letter” of the sacred book, of the Law to be interpreted, what dies with the death of God is precisely the God of the Real, of destructive fury and revenge. That often stated claim—God died in Auschwitz—thus has to be inverted: God came alive in Auschwitz. Recall the story from the Talmud about two rabbis debating a theological point: the one losing the debate calls upon God himself to intervene and decide the issue, but when God duly arrives, the other rabbi tells him that since his work of creation is already accomplished, he now has nothing to say and should leave, which God then does. It is as if, in Auschwitz, God came back, with catastrophic consequences. The true horror does not occur when we are abandoned by God, but when God gets too close to us.

if you want to read something really light + funny start w/ living in the end times. his best work is the parallax view imo. or just enjoy this: http://www.lacan.com/zizek-pompidou.htm - i feel like his insight about vcrs has really transformed my life.