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

oh, and Julian apparently! just noticed him sitting there

yeah i saw that on saturday, kind of fun, mostly just recaps his piece in the LRB about how wikileaks has changed things and implores assange not to let wikileaks be subsumed into the "freedom of the press" thing and maintain their independence as something more than radical "journalists" and shit

this idea that censorship indicates something positive about a country bc that censorship is needed is such a stupid idea and i think it's really indicative of a failing of the left to grapple meaningfully w/ these reasonably open democratic societies such that there's this natural yearning to go back to a moment of censorship where it becomes more clear what needs to be resisted.

also a failing of zizek to stop himself from saying whatever is the craziest thing at a particular moment

goin to a conference in oct where among those in attendance will be the director of "zizek!"

have u seen the examined life by the same woman that also features zizek & is a lot better both for his segment & the rest imo?

also she is jeff mangum's girlfriend or wife

i just saw it last night, by coincidence! and yeah his segment is fun for sure

lol @ michael hardt

more like michael fardt

empire by michael fardt and antonio naglri

examined life is worse than the zizek documentary

astra taylor is cool though, she spoke at my school the semester after i graduated

rewatched zizek last night for funzies and realized that even there he was on this bead of trying not to be ~appropriated into the liberal consensus~

i always lol when he says "this, i claim,"

http://i.imgur.com/RMTRC.jpg

<3

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/706-communism-a-new-beginning-alain-badiou-and-slavoj-zizek-with-verso-books-at-cooper-union-new-york-october-14th-16th-2011

i'm gonna be in ny that weekend

kinda wanna go tbh?

i say it's worth seeing Zizek at least once just so you can confirm for yourself that he's an actual human being and not some collective psychotic hallucination

also bc as often as you think he grabs his shirt and rubs his nose? he does it more in person

The website to book your ticket is here: http://communism.eventbrite.com/

lmao

IRL every so often he grabs your shirt and wipes his nose.

x-post

definitely go see zizek

holy shit i could actually make this show.

go

damn they just sold out

i was literally about to buy my ticket

was way more excited about badiou tbh

seriously think this guy is only as famous as he is cause he has a cool name

hoos are you a hayekian or a communist or a technofuturist I can't figure it out

i believe in a thing called love

otm

i mean on the real i would say i'm an anti-statist mutualist with a pretty endless optimism for the possibilities of the web, and although i'm still working out precisely how all that fits together for me systemically i definitely kinda spontaneously feel that all those ideas mesh.

i do really like zizek's kinda bullshit rhetorical construction of "spontaneous affinity" with an idea ie "i haven't really thought about the compatibility of this idea with any of my other ideas with ~any depth at all~ but at least in a shallow way i like it"

But yeah I really dig guys like Kevin Carson & John Robb people thinking hard about how we can use the benefits of a decentralized production to build a kind of societal virtual machine inside the rapidly degrading OS we're currently running.

trying to parse that but it is breaking my rapidly degrading os

haha was abt to append a #stfu to my post

at the end of the day tho aren't we all really just lacanians? #zizekrealtalk

hegelians i think

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uh5MB17v9A

hilarious appearance on normally wretched australian TV panel discussion show 'q and a' last night.

But yeah I really dig guys like Kevin Carson & John Robb people thinking hard about how we can use the benefits of a decentralized production to build a kind of societal virtual machine inside the rapidly degrading OS we're currently running.

So we're virtualized and we have to find another host society when this one falls over?

Is there like a societal hardware server farm

oh allow me my dumb flights of fancy sometimez

I have no doubt that you could excel at spewing out platitudes and mixed metaphors on the web

But if you do that, I am gonna have to kill you because you're better than that

haha

would totally go for a pint with this dude

I would go for a few pints with his wife.

^

Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the OWS movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.

When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.

And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ . . . What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.

i kinda think this is missing Zizek's point? it seems to me that preventing appropriation by the existing consensus, radical or otherwise, is one of his hobbyhorses.

thought that say raymond liotta

xp not just missing the point but kinda incoherent itself. without articulating alternatives (utopian or otherwise) you're just articulating nihilism, no? surely zizek isn't saying that they need to fit into an already existing model, but that creating a space through dissent should (will?) ultimately produce something new/different.