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

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.

wonder what Zizek thinks about Calvin

I could also just keep posting quotes that I like. Like this one:

The mechanism at work here is the same as that underlying Golda Meir’s famous reply when asked whether she believed in God: “I believe in the Jewish people, and they believe in God.” This formula of transitive belief is today universalized: one does not believe oneself, but, relying on another “subject supposed to believe,” one can act as if one believes. Furthermore, one should read Meir’s statement in a very precise way: it does not imply the position of the elitist leader who feeds his naïve‐believing subjects with Platonic “beautiful lies.” The State of Israel is here exemplary: the fetishist disavowal is inscribed into its very foundations. Although it has, according to surveys, the most atheistic population in the world (more than 60 percent of the Jews in Israel do not believe in God), its basic legitimization (claiming the land given to them by God) is theological—the implicit formula is thus: “We know very well there is no God, but we nonetheless believe he gave us the holy land.”

I don't remember anything about Calvin but he does discuss Italo Calvino a bit.

my friend says that zizek is full of shit about his stats bc 60% of israeli jews observe shabbat, but that only means that at least 20% of shabbat observers don't believe in god

like, the things i "respect" about Calvin, call it the "madness" of his vision, seems like things he'd be into!

That is to say, the hegemonic ideological field imposes on us a plane of (ideological) visibility with its own “principal contradiction” (today, the opposition between market‐freedom‐democracy and fundamentalism‐terrorism‐totalitarianism—“Islamo‐Fascism,” etc.), and the first thing we must do is reject (subtract from) this opposition, recognize it as a false opposition destined to obfuscate the true line of division. Lacan’s formula for this redoubling is 1 + 1 + a: the “official” antagonism (the Two) is always supplemented by an “indivisible remainder” which indicates its foreclosed dimension. In other words, the true antagonism is always reflexive, it is the antagonism between the “official” antagonism and that which is foreclosed by it (this is why, in Lacan’s mathematics, 1 + 1 = 3). Today, again, the true antagonism is not between liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalism, but between the very field of their opposition and the excluded Third (radical emancipatory politics).

This is why Lacan’s formula of “1 + 1 + a” is best exemplified by the class struggle: the two classes plus the excess of the “Jew,” the objet a, the supplement to the antagonistic couple.

That's kinda the bullshit tho. He never exactly formulates the radical emancipatory politics. It's like Adorno holding out for someone to come up with a better idea. Maybe that's why he calls it the Jew - bc he recognizes this unsurmountable distance but (like fascist politics responding to Capitalism) displaces it onto the Jew instead of just recognizing that you can't resolve the dialectic, just rearrange it.

that's a great bit you quote because i think his whole program can be gleaned from that.

"We know very well there is no God, but we nonetheless believe he gave us the holy land.”

We know that Communism-end of history-messianic-emancipatory politics will never happen, but we nonetheless believe etc

i like when zizek admits he's talking shit
it's like when you're bullshitting w/ a friend and then you acknowledge that you're just fucking around

derrida's "messianic without messianism" (or maybe it's the other way around) is kind of a similar attempt to peal these things apart.

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.

― ryan, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 3:31 AM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If you haven't already, the best thing I've found on this issue is Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, his series of essays-in-the-round with Butler and Ernesto Laclau. I think if pressed Zizek will normally concede that the only thing he really thinks transcends its own immanent historical moment is a failure of the social field to construct itself without antoganism. This is basically the same as Laclau - notwithstanding that they spend the entire book appearing to disagree violently - except that Zizek wants to ground that failure in a particularly vague, expansive notion of "class struggle" as the first-and-last antagonism that manifests in all other antagonisms.

However my stock answer when people ask "what should I read first" is his first book The Sublime Object of Ideology - this is not the reason I normally give but perhaps the best reason being that his theoretical apparatus is mostly in place but he's not yet quite the agent provocateur that he later becomes (he would probably say he's still in thrall to liberal democratic ideology at that point), so it's much more digestible for a first-timer (or seemed so to me when I was 19).

"We know very well there is no God, but we nonetheless believe he gave us the holy land.”

We know that Communism-end of history-messianic-emancipatory politics will never happen, but we nonetheless believe etc

― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 January 2013 4:28 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I think this is spot-on, you could even say that Zizek believes in the working class and they believe in emancipation.

Which they possibly don't, even, but for Zizek's purposes they do.

yes "Contingency, Hegemony, Universality" is great. i had forgotten about that one!

you could even say that Zizek believes in the working class and they believe in emancipation.

nicely put!

this almost makes him seem touchingly sentimental.

I think he is a bit sentimental.

A lot of his challops make more sense (as performances, at least) if I conceive of him as like the number one fan for a band that used to be quite big but have been near-universally unfashionable for quite some time.

Hegel is not Marx. The rabble is not the proletariat, communism is not on the horizon, and revolution is not a solution ... Hegel is not prepared to see in the contradiction of civil society the death knell of class society, to identify capitalism itself as its own gravedigger, or to see in the disenfranchised masses anything more than a surge of blind, formless reaction, “elemental, irrational, barbarous, and terrifying” ... a swarm whose integration remains unrealized and unrealizable, an “ought” ... But the aporia, untypical for Hegel, points to something unfinished or already crumbling within the edifice whose construction Hegel declares to be completed, a failure of both actuality and rationality that undermines the solidity of the state he elsewhere celebrates, in Hobbesian language, as an earthly divinity.

Is Hegel thus simply constrained by his historical context, did he come too early to see the emancipatory potential of the “part of no‐part,” so that all he could have done was to honestly register the unresolved and unresolvable aporias of his rational state?

However, as the example of the temporal discord between France and Germany demonstrated, non‐contemporaneity is for Hegel a principle: Germany was politically in delay with regard to France (where the Revolution took place), which is why it could only prolong it in the domain of thought; however, the Revolution itself emerged in France only because France itself was in delay with regard to Germany, that is, because France had missed the Reformation which asserts inner freedom and thus reconciles secular and spiritual domains. So, far from being an exception or an accidental complication, anachronism is the “signature” of consciousness: “experience is continually outbidding itself, perpetually making demands that it (i.e., the world) is unequipped to realize and unprepared to recognize, and comprehension inevitably comes too late to make a difference, if only because the stakes have already changed.”

This anachronistic untimeliness holds especially for revolutions: “The ‘French’ Revolution that provides the measure of ‘German’ untimeliness is itself untimely ... There is no right time or ‘ripe time’ for revolution (or there would be no need of one). The Revolution always arrives too soon (conditions are never ready) and too late (it lags forever behind its own initiative).”

in that last bit he's quoting from this i think:
http://www.amazon.com/Mourning-Sickness-Revolution-Cultural-Present/dp/0804761272

this is all from the new one? good stuff, anyway. i like reading him on hegel.

zizek, stan for the working class

The true horror does not occur when we are abandoned by God, but when God gets too close to us.

i bet he liked prometheus

Some months before writing this, at an art round table, I was asked to comment on a painting I had seen there for the first time. I did not have any idea about it, so I engaged in total bluff, which went on something like this: the frame of the painting in front of us is not its true frame; there is another, invisible, frame, implied by the structure of the painting, the frame that enframes our perception of the painting, and these two frames do not overlap—there is an invisible gap separating the two. The pivotal content of the painting is

not rendered in its visible part, but is located in this dis‐location of the two frames, in the gap that separates them. Are we, today, in our post‐modern madness, still able to discern the traces of this gap? Perhaps more than the reading of a painting hinges on it; perhaps, the decisive dimension of humanity will be lost when we will lose the capacity to discern this gap ... To my surprise, this brief intervention was a huge success, and many following participants referred to the dimension in‐between‐the‐two‐frames, elevating it into a term. This very success made me sad, really sad. What I encountered here was not only the efficiency of a bluff, but a much more radical apathy at the very heart of today’s Cultural Studies.

my kid could of done better than that

I haven't been able to finish this discussion on the The Dark Knight Rises (just a diff kind of torture) but its basically K-Punk acting like Zizek's lapdog and seems to touch on Z's ultimate preoccupation, which form the bits I've read its a 'how can we be better at revolutionary violence'.

I think the BFI should commission Zizek to write a book on the Nolan Batman trilogy. Has a lot of potential.

However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and peasants in the other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a “subkulak,” a peasant who, although too poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak “counter‐revolutionary” attitude. “Subkulak” was thus a term without any real social content even by Stalinist standards, but merely rather unconvincingly masquerading as such. As was officially stated, “by ‘kulak,’ we mean the carrier of certain political tendencies which are most frequently discernible in the subkulak, male and female.” By this means, any peasant whatever was liable to dekulakisation; and the “subkulak” notion was widely employed, enlarging the category of victims greatly beyond the official estimate of kulaks proper even at its most strained.

The “subkulak” was thus the paradoxical intersection of species: a subspecies of the species “kulaks” whose members came from the other two species. As such, “subkulak” was the embodiment of the ideological lie (falsity) of the entire “objective” classification of farmers into three categories: its function was to account for the fact that all strata of farmers, not only the wealthy ones, resisted collectivization. No wonder that the official ideologists and economists finally gave up trying to provide an “objective” definition of kulak: “The grounds given in one Soviet comment are that ‘the old attitudes of a kulak have almost disappeared, and the new ones do not lend themselves to recognition.’" The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became the matter of a complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath their deceptive public proclamations, so that Pravda had to concede that “even the best activists often cannot spot the kulak."

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5beopX0951r8a6qso1_1280.png

The visual/physical observations are basically correct but where are:

"is <x> not precisely..."

"here I am an old-fashioned vulgar marxist"

and so on

"This, I claim..."

read a fair chunk of In Defense of Lost Causes last week; still weighing his judgments on Stalin.

"an inversion of"

"radically un-"

some of these feel much broader than just zizek.

but the "is <x> not precisely" is completely his.