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

Have any of you here seen this?

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

I've not read anything by Zizek but watching him in that video doesn't inspire me to read any of his books.

I'm willing to try, though. What book would you guys recommend?

the sublime object of ideology

"Contingency, Hegemony, Universality" is good as well i think--and you get Butler and Laclau in the bargain.

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.

as if zizek is doing anything other than preaching to the star struck converted. give me a fucking break. chomsky has a reductive understanding of historical change and causality but at least it's a coherent (if often conspicuously one-sided) set of ideas. zizek's "politics" are little but a projection of his own chauvinism/narcissism.

never not worthwhile to read ppl arguing abt chomsky vs zizek on the internet

depends on the field, obv in humanities there`s a good reason for focus on primary & secondary texts but in anything technical u can get really far without looking at anything other than textbooks. but yeah

― flopson, Sunday, July 28, 2013 3:36 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh, if you want to understand technical things at all well, there are textbooks written by the people who also wrote the papers. they tend to be good, often contain new material themselves, and be well regarded as works in the field in their own right. often they are assigned to grad courses. then there are lots of terrible textbooks written by other people, and those are mainly not going to be very good, and they will teach you things that aren't true, often. those are more the "intro texts" that i imagine the author is speaking of. after reading those you can sometimes pretend you know things, but only in the company of people who don't know things themselves. the problem is they don't want to tell you a vision of a field of study, they just want to tell you what you need to pass the course.

zizek's "politics" are little but a projection of his own chauvinism/narcissism.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Sunday, July 28, 2013 5:28 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is obv not true, but whatever.

you're precisely the sort of scatterbrained cult studies dipshit who would love zizek, sterling

still a name droppin fool after all these years

(but that puts you in good company i guess)

that's not really a substantive critique of either zizek or sterling so...

i guess it's easy to tolerate a prankster who pretends to be a neo-stalinist (and actually is one of those european folks who thinks america doesn't have a history, etc.) if he has a really bitchin' reading of hitchcock's the birds.

trust me, treeship, zizek doesn't need my "substantive critique," and neither does sterling

chomsky has a reductive understanding of historical change and causality but at least it's a coherent (if often conspicuously one-sided) set of ideas.

i dont personally think Zizek is the answer but I submit that a non-reductive understanding of "historical change and causality" would resemble Zizek more than Chomsky.

well zizek admits complexity insofar as he'll assert one thing in one article and the opposite in the next. or sometimes in the same forum. that's one way to do it.

sorry i was way too aggro up there about sterling. it's just hard for me to believe that people fall for zizek's schtick even now that he's given himself a few miles of rope with which to hang himself.

amateurist i know we have interacted for many years and i still have no idea what conversation that must be over five years ago has set you off so much that you drag out this 'cult studies dipshit' thing on me on the regular.

like w/r/t zizek he's often funny and occasionally insightful which is as much as i get from most people writing columns for lrb et al, if not more.

he's absolutely more fun to read than chomsky. more useful -- depends for what?

its also interesting to me the vituperative reactions that z elicits, which are obv intentional -- he's a troll, and a provocateur, etc. but he's also a self-declared clown who enjoys as you say like readings and rereadings of hitchcock films, etc. so you get the jon stewart effect, where pundits say "this isn't serious news, you're a joke!" and he says "well, yeah."

and my point above is really that zizek does have actual politics, and they're actually much less radical than his theoretical showmanship, not that I agree or disagree with his politics in any particular -- they're just actually there, and perfectly interpretable without dragging in our own freudian analysis of his personality traits.

i mean i guess what winds people up about zizek (and what winds you up about me?) is that he doesn't buy into this idea that serious issues and serious ideas must always and only be discussed seriously.

"on the regular"--i can't even recall interacting w/ you on this board for years! at least not addressing you directly. if by "on the regular" you mean like once every three years or something, maybe. anyway i'm sorry i was such an asshole.

when he actually makes a coherent political observation it tends to be completely banal (or at least run-of-the-mill leftist) and not as well-articulated as the dozens of pundits who have said it before him. which is pretty revealing, i think. as you suggest, the "radicalism" of his political observations usually tends to be inextricable from his fundamental clown-like persona, even when he insists he's being serious (you didn't seem to like it when i made this observation the first time, but then you basically make a different version of it in your own post). i don't appreciate that this becomes a kind of "get out of jail free" card as when you say something genuinely insulting to a friend and when you realize you've gone too far you just back away and say "kidding! i was only kidding!"

i don't really care whether he thinks "serious" issues should be discussed "seriously" or not--that's not my beef with him, and i think you're giving him too much credit as a provocateur. i've yet to read or hear anything he's said that wasn't deliberately incendiary/useless and pedestrian/banal.

also i don't think zizek is the least bit funny. if you're looking for humor, there are some better places to look. but to each his own i guess.

deliberately incendiary/useless OR pedestrian/banal.

i think there's a number of ways to respond to that on Zizek's behalf, but i think the easiest way is to simply deny that making a "coherent political statement" is really any part of his project. if you're looking for that you're bound to be disappointed. the sorta left-hegelian/lacanian framework he is working in doesn't really even allow such a thing, if he's being true to it. if you think doing theory in this way is a waste of time, well that's another discussion. but i think he knows what he's doing.

on the other hand, see his answer to the first question in that video posted above for a good example of that tactic falling flat into banality. you can see what he's trying to do but it doesn't come off (imo).

i think we discussed it way upthread, but his admiration for "absolutists" like Paul and Lenin gives the game away i think. in this he's not too far from something like Gillian Rose's Hegel Contra Sociology. but for him i imagine trying to find the thing you can say that is "going too far" is sorta his method in a reductive nutshell.

but i dont think the problem with this is that he's not coherent enough. maybe too coherent to the extent that the "absolute violence" or whatever he will advocate for (tongue in cheek or no) isn't really as free from the hegemonic ideological field he wants to disrupt. you can keep drawing a distinction between actual, specific violence (to be shunned) and "absolute violence" all you want but that doesn't bring "absolute violence" (and any theoretical position it would be based on) into view. it is, to use a word he seems to favor to an suspicious degree, impotent.

tldr: i think if you buy into the framework of what he's doing then the form of his method has precedence over the content of his writings (or that these two things are in a dialectical relationship of mutual destabilization).

so in that sense, "i was just kidding!" --> "or was i?" isn't really bad as a summary. Lacan goes on about this sort of thing all the time, actually.

on the humor issue -- i know this was posted upthread already, but i honestly think about it maybe once a week or so: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/14/valentines-day-is-romance-dead

zizek has plenty of serious, substantive, and coherent ideas about, for starters, how political ideology functions.

the way we're talking about z. right now is a bit like the way athenians talked about socrates. they saw an ugly man, a freeloader, a defender of dictators, who postured in the city square and took impressionable young groupies to bed with him. this kind of misses out on whole swaths of the dude's thought though, no?

tldr: i think if you buy into the framework of what he's doing then the form of his method has precedence over the content of his writings (or that these two things are in a dialectical relationship of mutual destabilization).

― ryan, Monday, July 29, 2013 11:38 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i could not give a shit about the "form" of his utterances being "destabilizing" or other sorts of things academics and their avatars like to say to feel like they are doing political work when they are picking at their own asshole. like i said above, that's giving him far more credit for rocking the boat than he is due. zizek alternates between flattering and trolling a few 1,000 theoryheads and cult studies also-rans in such a way that keeps them buzzing about his sweaty brow. for everybody else he's, at best, an occasionally amusing irritant.

i don't expect to convince anyone in this thread and you won't convince me that zizek is worth the time of day.

Lacan goes on about this sort of thing all the time, actually.

tempted to write "i rest my case" TBF

what case? that you object to his demeanor on youtube?

?

it's a figure of speech

chomsky does a lot of butthole-picking too

max, did you read the part where i'm not defending chomsky? i haven't given more than half a shit about chomsky since i was 16.

also i'm not chiefly reacting to zizek's audiovisual presentation, though that certainly doesn't really aid him in my eyes. i'm reacting to the stuff i've read, which (again) is either just plain boring/heard-it-all-before or just transparently tendentious garbage. i'm referring to his film "criticism" and his political "criticism." and no, i haven't read it all or most of it. he's written like 600 books, why in god's name would i do that to myself?

i'ma leave this thread b/c i don't have much to contribute and what little i might have i'm just gonna be repeating until we're all sick to our stomachs.

xp to your question mark: well you've portrayed z as a giant troll, as though he never wrote a thing of substance, so yes it does come off like you're more familiar with his youtube clips than his books.

lol ok

no one is saying you have to care about or read in the tradition he is working in. if you care to know wtf is going on with zizek or why some people pay attention to him then it might pay some big dividends to engage in a little risky empathy and try to see what it's about.

I know you think theory is a big shell game, and sometimes it is, but it is also capable of producing forms of thinking and criticism with profound effects that are very rewarding if you are willing to do the work to get there. It's not really even the same genre as something like Chomsky or whoever you presumably think is doing real "political" work. It's a way of holding what people think of as real "political work" accountable. That precisely as valuable AND silly and wasteful as it looks.

Critical theory is political in an indirect way. Socrates is a good reference point for the role it serves in the culture -- more so than contemporary analytic philosophy it's about turning over unanswerable questions and locating paradoxes in the ideological fabric of society. It's valuable in that it is a.) fun and b.) helps you learn to think more flexibly about... everything basically. It's a cultural practice, or field, that is not a substitute for political action but still "political" in the sense that open-ended, interminable questioning...thought without end or conclusion...is a hallmark of a democratic culture, or open society. If it's useless than freedom is also useless, art is useless, etc. i think critical theory is more about keeping ideas "in play" than anything else...complicating shared assumptions, etc. and this tendency is definitely a part of the progressive tradition.

Wow what a terribly written, rambling post. I should have just said "ryan otm"

nah I think that was good

amateurist, i can understand the frustration if you're sampling his essays (he does indulge in "biff! bam! pow!" antics), but the good stuff imo is in the more sustained texts (e.g., "sublime object of ideology" early on, "less than nothing" most recently).

tbh i read zizek for the action-adventure plots

philistine.

dudes i don't think theory is a "shell game."

first of all, what do you mean by "theory"? do you mean, like, people positing theories that attempt to explain stuff? if so, about what?

or like, writing in the tradition of preferred continental writers x, y, and z?

because when a lot of folks talk about "theory" they really mean the latter, i.e. "Theory"

my sense is that today a lot of people use "theory" to mean what used to be called "philosophy".

also, let's say zizek's work is a huge iceberg. if i've read some small tip of this iceberg (like some of his film-cum-politics books, a bunch of his editorials, a few youtube seminars, etc.) and found it generally without interest (and largely w/o merit), i can choose to make an assumption that the rest is mostly of the same kind. or i can just defer, leaving open the possibility that some other part of this mostly-submerged iceberg contains a significant quantity of writing that is completely at odds with that i've been exposed to. that's always possible, but i'd put it in the realm of the unlikely.

my sense is that today a lot of people use "theory" to mean what used to be called "philosophy".

― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, July 29, 2013 2:24 PM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

philosophy is still a thing, and at least in anglo-american universities very little of it relates to the postwar lineage that people with other humanities degrees refer to as "Theory"

I mean what happens to attempts to explain stuff under the conditions of modernity (in the absence of a final or "theological" holistic explanation, if you will). It's not reducible to a few continental writers (I work in American thought, for instance) but does it (unfortunately in my mind) tend to get conflated with a certain emancipatory tradition which comes from continental thinkers.

well it doesn't relate to it methodologically or doctrinally, i suppose--certainly the subject matter relates

xpost

And you are totally free to disregard zizek! You just seem to show an interest, that's all.

zizek has plenty of serious, substantive, and coherent ideas about, for starters, how political ideology functions.

― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous), Monday, July 29, 2013 1:43 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is absolutely true i think, but this thread makes it very hard to have this conversation. i mean i disagree its all about his 'form' or whatever -- honestly i don't think he tries to be cryptic so much as is just sort of discursive and rambling, and often wants to talk about things that he feels are more relevant than others might.

at least one stupid cliffs-notes takeaway that i actually get from his stuff and find useful is that frequently when someone says "how can they think this? this is obviously wrong. here are the facts:" then they're barking up the wrong tree.

the core notion being just that people don't believe things for necessarily 'logical' reasons, and 'logical' arguments won't sway them because the actual arguments and beliefs they articulate aren't a coherent system, but trappings they invent and project that have the same _effect_ as the thing they actually care about and believe. and that's why the idea of applying ideas from psychoanalysis to political texts makes some sense.

i mean you can get some of the same notions from elsewhere, but zizek actually pursues that sort of inquiry into sometimes interesting places.