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

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.

It's possible that we're all overthinking this guy. I think he's basically a philosophical troll who says a lot of left-field shit to make you say, "huh...?" At first, you're like, "hey, maybe he's right..." but then the more you think about it, the more you say, "I'm not even sure what he's saying." And then you go, "Huh. Do *I* even know what *I'm* talking about?"

The guy's entire schtick is to disrupt your confidence in your critical thinking skills and educational background, and disorient you to the point where you don't even know your relationship to the world anymore.

imho not so

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 poliopolices in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a “subpoliopolice,” a peasant who, although too poor to be considered a poliopolice proper, nonetheless shared the poliopolice “counter‐revolutionary” attitude. “Subpoliopolice” 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 ‘poliopolice,’ we mean the carrier of certain political tendencies which are most frequently discernible in the subpoliopolice, male and female.” By this means, any peasant whatever was liable to depoliopoliceisation; and the “subpoliopolice” notion was widely employed, enlarging the category of victims greatly beyond the official estimate of poliopolices proper even at its most strained.

The “subpoliopolice” was thus the paradoxical intersection of species: a subspecies of the species “poliopolices” whose members came from the other two species. As such, “subpoliopolice” 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 poliopolice: “The grounds given in one Soviet comment are that ‘the old attitudes of a poliopolice have almost disappeared, and the new ones do not lend themselves to recognition.’" The art of identifying a poliopolice 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 poliopolice."

polio police

not to be a jerk, but if your analysis begins from a point of non-comprehension and tries to critically position that confusion as being the point itself, it might be better to have some humility and work on understanding the work b4 adopting that kind of meta-hermeneutic.

all these so-called "philosophers" do is speak a bunch of mumbo jumbo!!

I'm well versed in both philosophy and sociology. But it's my opinion that this guy is more an entertainer and bullshit artist than anything else. For what it's worth, he's good at both.

it's not always a bad interpretive move and i think writers like adorno are trying to push against comprehension (or at least entire a poetic dialectical mode that resists full comprehension) but a) zizek i found very easy to comprehend compared to idk hegel/derrida/deleuze/aforementioned adorno and b) it's a move that should be made in very limited circumstances and should not replace more traditional interpretative inquiries.

>not to be a jerk, but if your analysis begins from a point of non-comprehension and tries to critically position that confusion as being the point itself, it might be better to have some humility and work on understanding the work b4 adopting that kind of meta-hermeneutic.

your argument is based on the assumption that there is something to understand, which is 100% inconsistent with my point. I think what he does is theater.

i don't assume that there is something to understand. i read his works and find it very accessible and understandable.

I'm not talking about the accessibility or understandability of his words. I'm talking about the general inscrutability of the arguments that he makes. I have a hard time believing that even he believe half the stuff he says.

i agree that Z is admirably clear, but then maybe im not the best judge of that. i may have quoted this upthread at some point but i always liked how he explained his fascination for the "idiocy" of popular films: "The idiot for whom I endeavor to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself."

again, i do not find his arguments inscrutable in the least. is there a particular argument you are having trouble - uh - scrutinizing?

i do think there's perhaps a larger point to all this about "performativity" and all that with regard to contemporary critical theory/philosophy. derrida is a good example since he basically lays out his program in first few books (albeit it's not the easiest thing in the world to grasp, but he is trying to be clear) while his later stuff (simplifying greatly) is basically "performing" that program over and over.

since i'm technically a performance studies guy i think that paradigm applies to all philosophers + everyone really and that zizek is not an exception

absolutely. what's that great quine quotes? "what i am saying applies in particular to what i am saying"

In any case there is a critical aspect. So much of what Z does is asking questions and undermining earlier established arguments. Fewer answers of his own, and often tentatively put forth ('is it not the case?' and so on) That doesn't neccessarily mean his dumber than other philosophers, he might just be more humble (I very much prefer to read him as an ongoing critical-philosophical performance, just as I much prefer Lacan's performative seminars to his 'grander' Ecrits)

"is it not the case" is just an affectation.

Yeah if anything the purpose of "is it not the case" is the opposite of humility really, it's to give his conclusions the air of an unavoidable logical deduction.

Typically the only parts of Zizek books I find really difficult to decipher are when he digs deep into Hegel and German idealists, and given they're the only parts, I'm willing to assume until proven otherwise that my difficulties are really with Hegel etc. rather than with Zizek.

you can play the usual game of pretending to understand Hegel; iirc that's what everyone has always done

I think one of the problems there is that Zizek renders Lacan and Hegel fundamentally indistinguishable, especially confusing cuz it's Hegel resting on Lacanian structuralism rather than vice versa. But I dunno.

Hegel himself, SIMPLE.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/14/valentines-day-is-romance-dead

One of these things is not like the other

that's so awesome.

although, if you strip out all the stylistic tics and provocation and get down to the core argument, we're basically left with a sienfeld joke. which is awesome too, i guess.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/17/free-market-fundamentalists-think-2013-best

Has this (kinda nsfw) already been discussed?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/36429575/A-F-2003-Back-to-School

i hadn't seen that before but i think it's telling that by the end i was skipping through the pages of pornography in order to get to the next zizek remark; i think he would be happy to agree that the philosopher unpacking sex is- like mathematics - much sexier than the naked nudist bodies simulating sex.

shit, why not have a cake and eat it too?

*fuck it

this just made me think about zizek having sex :-/

lol otm

"I spent literally 10 minutes on this assignment, just free-associating. I was in theoretical despair!"

free t-shirts, no doubt

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher

ha it's like he basically took Critchley's critique of him and decided to make it explicit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf5L6kwJJtA&feature=player_embedded

classic video

https://twitter.com/MarikaRose/status/332898683614019585

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=4302541&boardid=77&threadid=67478

lool

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BH5RPmLCQAA64Bd.jpg

Cocaine users are 45% more likely to develop glaucoma (blindness) even if they’ve given up the drug.

People who take cocaine or are former users are 45 per cent more likely to develop a common form of blindness, a large study has found.

Researchers also found they developed glaucoma 20 years earlier on average than patients without a history of drug use.

A study of 5.3million people by the Veterans Health Administration, in Indianapolis, found glaucoma patients with a history of cocaine use were on average only 54-years-old. This compared to patients with no history of class A drug abuse who were around 73-years-old.

Study leader Dr Dustin French, from the Regenstrief Institute, said: ‘The association of illegal drug use with open-angle glaucoma requires further study, but if the relationship is confirmed, this understanding could lead to new strategies to prevent vision loss.’

:-(

do you read zizek, treeship?

i read the sublime object of ideology and liked it, but then my friend told me that the stuff i liked about it was mostly just ripped off of althusser. i like reading interviews and things with him, and once i saw him in starbucks in princeton, nj.

http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745628974