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

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.

i read a bunch of it markers. it's uneven, but there was new stuff in there.

ok cool. i should hopefully get around to it at some point.

lotsa money for a book tho

my wife gave me less than nothing for my bday.

you married well

i think i saw zizek in starbucks once, two years ago. he was teaching at princeton at the time, which is where i was, so it's conceivable. still, i doubt myself more every time i think back to it.

xp i requested it. :-) hell i even bought it myself. and had it wrapped at the store. she ceremoniously handed it to me after i blew out the candles. we're boring that way.

(btw i was going to add "if ya know what i mean" to my post above, but sometimes i'm shy with my bad jokes)

it's fun so far but i'm not deep enough into it for it to say much more to me than the expected "hegel's cooler than y'all think" line of thought.

tbh i was hoping for something more systematic, plodding even, than the usual z. but we'll see...

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/07/slavoj-zizek-act-of-killing

let us compare The Act of Killing to an incident that drew a lot of attention in the US some decades ago: a woman was beaten and slowly killed in the courtyard of a big apartment block in Brooklyn, New York; more than 70 witnesses saw what was going on from their windows but not one called the police.

Get yer facts straight, Slavoj. I like how he takes the already bogus figure of 38 witnesses and almost doubles it.

also Queens, not Brooklyn!

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/slavoj-zizek/trouble-in-paradise

http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/443/487

http://i.imgur.com/X5Ik5Ca.gif

i forgot about that chomsky misattribution. that might be the source of this recent bad blood/why chomsky's characterizaton of zizek was so hostile.

oh shit. zizek quotes at length the text where chomsky says he is skeptical of western reports of khmer rogue atrocities. this is vicious.

that link is very good. and jives with some feelings that bubble up when reading chomsky and seeing how he treats different sources.

i always found it funny how people use left-wing politics to enhance their status in the ruling class, when if there ever was a left-wing revolution they'd be among those who'd get their heads chopped off. buncha twits.

eh

i don't think marxism is anti-bourgeois, really. it is an immanent critique of bourgeois society -- measuring the culture capitalism has produced against its own professed standards of freedom and equality. the people who would be drawn to it, and the society it promises after the revolution, would precisely be middle class intellectuals.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

those would be some damn fine altruists, but i doubt you'd find them among the social climbers who use leftism as a status signifier. guess i'm just getting disillusioned here. anyway.....

how often and in what ways do "people use left-wing politics to enhance their status in the ruling class" ?

every day on ilx

I guess what are we calling the ruling class here?

white ppl

last two grafs on page 5 of that zizek pdf (copy-and-pasting fucked up the formatting and i don't have time to fix it it's my birthday today) are super super otm

happy b-day, comrade dlh

what marx is talking about in mordy's blockquote isn't altruists (people who make their own lives worse for the sake of the downtrodden) but people who perceive that the entire species is hampered by the current order, i think

thx mordy!

I think the phrase "comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole" gives a pretty decent explanation itself to why certain portions of the "ruling class" may be drawn to such ideas. That presumption *in itself* is something on the order of an object of desire, not least one that flatters your own mastery.

it's like, here's yet another way to prove your social superiority to your peers.

that guy is fun... I've seen his documentary numerous times, about the movies..

But never read much, listened to the macintalk or whatever of the reading.. hard to comprehend.

On Violence... The movies with advertisment "doubling" or commercial ironies...

watels.... his innately normal and purely good political ideology.

i will read the thread now :-)

xp i think some people have desires to acquire knowledge because they find it satisfying or enjoyable and sometimes this will lead them to adopt marxist positions. i don't think it's all about social capital.

xxp yes, which is why i think it's funny. they're using something that would strip them of status as a tool to claim status, yet they seem completely unaware of it. or if they are aware of it than they're just cunning.

it's not always about social capital, those are just the most obvious cases.

i agree that sometimes academics see themselves as existing outside the capitalist power structure in a way that is simply ridiculous when you take a look at the functions universities serve in our society

I could maybe agree with a little bit of the idea, but it just seems mostly funny to me cuz if you said "things that increase your social capital among the ruling class" I wouldn't really go "marxism!!"
xpost