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

I like reading Badiou when he is writing about something. There are a few essays in Metapolitics where I am not so sure. Good call on Routledge.

Is Zizek taken seriously at all within academia? I'm applying to grad school right now and every time I mention him as one of the theorists I'd be focusing on in my studies, some of the professors I've been talking with react as if I'd just loudly broken wind in front of them without apology. I mean, I understand the guy's a clown, but beneath all the faux-Stalinist contrarian posturing there's a pretty awesome interpretation of Lacan-via-Hegel.

No one I've worked with has taken him seriously. Or at least not seriously enough to focus on in studies. (Generally I think they want to hear that you're focusing on someone dead - I think you'd get a negative reaction to mentioning Fredrick Jameson too.)

so, you think Rorty's rep skyrocketed recently?

Hells yeah.

(Of course, I've always loved the dude. Contingency, Irony + Solidarity ftw.)

It's kinda the opposite in art theory where roping somebody like Zizek in gives you the outward appearance of contemporaneity, still you have to rope in Panofsky or someone to balance it.

I like reading Badiou when he is writing about something. There are a few essays in Metapolitics where I am not so sure. Good call on Routledge.

― Shh! It's NOT Me!, Friday, December 5, 2008 9:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Infinite Thought is v v good in this regard and yes I tried to struggle through Metapolitics more than once before giving up.

Just don't end up like Mrs. Althusser.

― tokyo rosemary, Friday, December 5, 2008 1:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

XD

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/zize01_.html

why do left-wing people like s/z when he writes reactionary bollocks like this?

a) They think he's joking
b) They appreciate the way he thinks about things, even if they are uncomfortable about some of his conclusions (I fall into this category)
c) They don't understand what he's saying

Take your pick?

Also, in a very real sense, Zizek is incredibly left-wing in the traditional Communist sense. He's just more radicalized than most leftists today (who, it seems, have generally abandoned violent rebellion). He is very against a sort of P.C. comfortable bourgeois leftism (in the article you linked, "But there is also a ‘reflexive’, politically correct racism: the liberal, multiculturalist perception of the Balkans as a site of ethnic horrors and intolerance"). So when you say left-wing, you're talking about this kind of leftist, right?

Take the public image of Bill Gates. Gates is not a patriarchal father-master, nor even a corporate Big Brother running a rigid bureaucratic empire, surrounded on an inaccessible top floor by a host of secretaries and assistants. He is instead a kind of Small Brother, his very ordinariness an indication of a monstrousness so uncanny that it can no longer assume its usual public form. In photos and drawings he looks like anyone else, but his devious smile points to an underlying evil that is beyond representation.

Totally hysterical and awesome.

Isn't there a Pinky and the Brain about that?

I think people like Zizek are far more sinister than the Bill Gates of the world ... at least Bill Gates makes, or at least made, useful stuff. Zizek is just a blowhard irrelevant to anyone after their 23rd birthday. When your audience is a bunch of 18 year olds the more reactionary the better.

Also, in a very real sense, Zizek is incredibly left-wing in the traditional Communist sense. He's just more radicalized than most leftists today (who, it seems, have generally abandoned violent rebellion). He is very against a sort of P.C. comfortable bourgeois leftism (in the article you linked, "But there is also a ‘reflexive’, politically correct racism: the liberal, multiculturalist perception of the Balkans as a site of ethnic horrors and intolerance"). So when you say left-wing, you're talking about this kind of leftist, right?

― Mordy, Saturday, January 3, 2009 2:57 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

don't think old-style communists have a monopoly on the left, far from it. zizek is completely a symptom of the modern left you're talking about insofar as questions of revolutionary (or other) strategies are totally beyond his reach. he provided entertaining paradoxes, as in the bill gates squib, that get you precisely nowhere. the readers of the lrb evidently like being berated, but at the same time there's a creepy nostalgia for lenin, stalin, mao: 'real leftists' if you're a douchewad. it saves you from having to think through what a better society might be like.

I didn't say he had a monopoly on the left, but this is a guy who grew up under a Communist system. I wouldn't compare his affection to Stalin/Mao to college radical chic. And tbh, I don't know many under 23 year olds who read Zizek. I don't know many under 23 year olds who CAN read Zizek. But maybe I just know the wrong people?

wouldn't call the post-war russian empire communist, insofar as we want to keep communism something to aspire to. in a way it makes it even creepier that he still pretty openly admires lenin/stalin/mao, none of whose regimes would have tolerated him or his readership.

Not Communist in an idealized sense, but still, he has stronger connections to "practiced" Communism than anyone into radical chic.

Jordan, Yugoslavia was NOT part of any Russian empire!

http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=c6570f94-f4b8-4b2a-b3f5-6adefe8d15ca

it's a pretty weak comeback imo. he gets in a few points but there's all sorts of stuff in the original that s/z doesn't dispute.

how did you read that so fast?

had already read it

Zizek is the philosopher equivalent of the teenager who associates way too closely with Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker.

within that analogy, who is the joker? and who is batman?

burt_stanton is both the joker and batman

I don't know. If there's a philosopher out there who advocates for the status quo, but amending it a little to make incremental improvements over time that overall benefits everyone and creates a fairer and more equal society, there you go.

that's batman.

If there's a philosopher out there

i am loling at this and have no idea why

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/batmans.jpg

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004183

did zizek put berlusconi's racist joke about obama into noam chomsky's mouth?

Berlusconi’s remark dismissed Obama’s blackness as an endearing eccentricity, thus obliterating the historical meaning of the fact that an African-American was elected President, while the remark I falsely attributed to Chomsky, if accurate, would point towards the ambiguous way Obama’s blackness can be instrumentalized to obfuscate our crucial political and economic struggles.

I even love his off-hand emails! I love this dude!

wait, what? he lied about noam chomsky saying something racist about obama. when pressed that the quote sounds suspiciously like berlusconi, zizek protests that it's impossible because of some date stamps in his computer, and that he'd seen the quote in "slovene media". hunting through slovene media reveals it's only zizek's own, earlier, interview in a slovene magazine that contains the remark. when pressed about that he offers some totally unconvincing wash that berlusconi is a racist, but even if chomsky had said the exact same thing, it would not be racist.

the whole thing is fucking fishy.

Didn't we talk about this upthread somewhere?

What's fishy? Either he made it up (and why would he make it up only to make the labrynthine point he's now been backed into making?) or he honestly misattributed it.

And besides: the same phrase coming out of the mouths of Berlusconi & Chomsky would have decidedly different meanings because they work in different contexts. It doesn't necessarily mean that, had Chomsky said it, it would be any less racist/distasteful/what have you, but he would have been employing it in the service of a completely different point. You're not arguing that, are you?

MISATTRIBUTED IT FROM WHERE

He read that Berlusconi said it and got mixed up in his head and thought Chomsky had said it, got too stupid or lazy or arrogant to check his sources and ran with it?

another (meta) take:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/01/chomsky_said_wh.html

I mean

First, he had written the essay before Berlusconi’s remark.

ok but dude is a doddering old philosopher i think its quite possible he remembers this wrong

hahahahaha this is what happens when you take slavoj zizek seriously

the point is, in an earlier version of the same essay, in the LRB, zizek quoted chomsky accurately, as saying that the left should vote for obama "without illusions"

later versions, not in english, switched the quote to berlusconi's racist joke. when asked why that happened, he offers excuses, half-apologies and ultimately some kind of ideological justification. like i said, fishy.

he's a tool.

This is actually a brilliant analysis of the role of attribution/identity in commentators versus attribution/identity in the commented. Just as Obama was destripped of identity by Berlusconi (no longer black), now Berlusconi's own words have been stripped and reattributed in a way that not only changes the meaning, but obliterates the one who said it [textually].

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/columns/0005/img/lens177_04b.jpg

yeah or maybe he wanted to make a rival look like a jackass and didn't get away with it

ah glad to see that this is "actually" a brilliant analysis

Don't take it too seriously, max. You'll sound humorless.

This is actually a brilliant analysis of the role of attribution/identity in commentators versus attribution/identity in the commented. Just as Obama was destripped of identity by Berlusconi (no longer black), now Berlusconi's own words have been stripped and reattributed in a way that not only changes the meaning, but obliterates the one who said it (textually).

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 11:37 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

jesus god you're an empty-headed tool.