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

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

that seems like a good book to get a structural overview of where he is coming from in a broad sense, re. his lacanian/hegelian marxism which places a lot of emphasis on teasing out paradoxes and contradictions in cultural and political texts. when i read zizek, i find him really entertaining but sometimes i get confused about what larger project his critiques are supposed to serve. i guess this project is "communism" defined as a "reawakened belief in the possibility of collective action," but that seems a bit nebulous, maybe, for a political thinker. idk, i'll bookmark that page and try to check out that book someday, thanks

maybe leaf through this at a library or something http://www.amazon.com/Zizek-Critical-Introduction-Sarah-Kay/dp/0745622089/

haven't seen this before http://www.amazon.com/The-Zizek-Dictionary-R-Butler/dp/1844655822/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP6LoH3hASo

Man does that guy always spend so much time touching his face?

https://www.thebaffler.com/past/camera_shy_blah_blah

My basic idea is that our times are weird times. On the one hand, they are superficially permissive. You get all the hardcore you want on the net, you can participate in orgies, blah blah blah. But at the same time it’s not even true consumerism. You have this obsession with safe sex, and so on. I think the only true consumerists that we have are, if you ask me, drug addicts, those who say, “Fuck it, I want to go to the end, I don’t care.” No, our consumerism is not dead. It’s a very strategic, calculating consumerism.

And this, even if true, has what signifigance to anything?

glad he was able to slip in the phrase "This is ideology at its purest." it wouldn't be a zizek essay without that sentence.

Hah, that's the one phrase of his I've adopted -- it's primarily something I mutter to myself to improve my mood.
He's also made me aware that some thinkers tend to use the word "precisely" just when they're being most abstruse or nebulous.

i admire his verve with blah blah blah

I mean, even now, I am shocked. I remember one of the early movies: a plumber comes and fixes a hole in the kitchen. [And she says], “But I have another hole down there, can you also fix that for me.” And then it came to me. My god, it cannot be that they are so stupid. This is censorship. The idea is, you can either be totally emotionally identified [as in mainstream films], then you don’t see it all, or, you see it all, all the details [in porn films], but then the story has to be ridiculous, so you shouldn’t take it seriously.

I do actually really like Zizek's way of talking about pornography without lapsing into moralisms or celebrations.

I even think you could do a clever graph called 'ways people talk about porn', and it would have two axes, one running from 'moralism' to 'celebration', and the other running from 'left' to 'right' (in the political sense). And Zizek, whatever else you might think about him, would avoid the stupid areas of this graph.

i agree with that. the essay isn't bad, but very short.

http://esjaybe.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/zizeks-response-to-chomsky/

if nothing else, when I am older I want to talk like zizek and so on and all this

my god

i don't believe chomsky when he says that he is mystified by the success of people like zizek. he has definitely read marx before, and understands why cultural analysis and the critique of ideology have played an important role in the history of the left.

he can disagree with this kind of project, and think it has a negative or ambiguous legacy, and argue that leftists should be more focused on concrete political reality, but that is a different conversation than just saying "this is charlatanism"

When I read "Here I violently disagree." I imagined a bit of spittle and headshake accenting "violently"

So I claim that all these ‘how popular we are’ is really a mask of… remember the large majority of academia are these grey either cognitivists or historians blah blah… and you don’t see them but they are the power. They are the power.
-Bob Marley

feel like an intern researched zizek's 'things I dislike about chomsky'

lol:

So as to this ‘problem’ of are we studying the facts enough I claim emphatically more than ever ‘no’ today. And as to popularity, I get a little bit annoyed with this idea that we with our deep sophisms are really hegemonic in humanities. Are people crazy? I mean we are always marginal. No, what is for me real academic hegemony: its brutal, who can get academic posts? Who can get grants, foundations, as so on? We are totally marginalised here. I mean look at my position… “oh yeah you are a mega-star in United States” well I would like to be because I would like power to brutally use it! But I am far from that. I react so like this because a couple of days ago I got a letter from a friend in United States for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation, and he told me “I didn’t get the job, not in spite of your letter but because of your letter!” He had a spy in the committee and this spy told him “you almost got it, but then somebody says ‘oh, if Zizek recommends him it must be something terribly wrong with him’”

tbf he spent most of the rec letter talking about gay pornography and transformers

i would pay good money to read that letter.

lol

"I would like power to brutally use it!"

has anyone here actually read less than nothing yet

A few chapters? It seems like one of his better books for sustained argument (at least when you take each chapter as an independent unit), but it's somewhat frustrating (at least in the parts I've read) that his reading of Hegel seems to be mostly articulated against, or on the shoulders of, a handful of Hegel's commentators. It's been a while since I read around in it, though, and I can't fairly judge it without having finished it.

There's a gaping hole in Chomsky's argument against Zizek, which is: there sits Chomsky, providing us with vast amounts of empirical data as to why this or that US foreign policy is disastrous, why this commonly-held belief about history is false, why austerity is disastrous, and so on. There it is, it is all true, capitalism is terrible, Chomsky has diligently done all this research, and there it all is, to watch, read, and listen to.

And no-one gives a fuck.

Some of the people who ignore Chomsky do so because they buy the various smears about him being in allegiance with evil lefty murderous powers etc; some because they have the notion of the 'lol left wing intellectual' which means they can dismiss him; but that only accounts for the people specifically and consciously invested in right wing politics.

What about the rest of us? Why do we carry on doing all these awful things that Chomsky has so diligently shown us are wrong, with all this data he has provided us with?

Precisely because most of the ideology operates in the dark, irrational hole of our subconscious, where facts have no power. Only shamans like Zizek, who go into the hole and do their work there, can affect us on this level.

To paraphrase a section in Living in the end times, the obvious fact that only a few women were wearing burkas in France and the obvious fact that the ban was clearly a powergame of Sarkozy, are of no use whatsoever in combatting the drive against the other that Sarkozy and the rest of us were revelling in. You have to look at what the burka means to the observer; it represents the non-face, facelessness, pure Other; we remember with fear when we were 'faceless', before our identities were constructed during the mirror stage; but instead of accepting that we are essentially faceless, we deny it by attributing monstrous facelessness on to the other.

A policy that lets us do that is going to smash any empirical facts we might try to put in its way; to properly challenge it we first have to accept the contingency of identity, and recognise ourselves as 'faceless'.

yeah i've just looked at it at the store. i wonder how much of it is just the same shit as his previous books. there's some stuff in there on speculative realism that's gotta be at least relatively new

xpost

It definitely seems more like a (surprisingly cogent) summary of his thought than a great leap forward.

I remember the response to spec. realism being kind of superficial, though.