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

If I were Helen Vendler I wouldn't read papers either. I got a stack of"em staring at me.

how much of academia is people saying things are interesting

ideally all of it. practically 5%?

one particular guy was writing about haunted sites and collective trauma + memory in the south which i thought was very interesting.

i'd be interested in this

not saying interesting things Mordy saying things are interesting

We didn't really learn anything from WikiLeaks we didn't already presume to be true – but it is one thing to know it in general and another to get concrete data. It is a little bit like knowing that one's sexual partner is playing around. One can accept the abstract knowledge of it, but pain arises when one learns the steamy details, when one gets pictures of what they were doing.

this is good http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/critique-of-zizek-on-kosovo-and-the-balkans-1/

reading "altai" by "wu ming" and there's a casual reference to a slavic seller of banned books called "gigek"

Yeah, ey, thanks for that, that was very interesting. Made me finally buy Badiou's Being and Event.

Frederik: you might find 'Normalizing the Balkans' by Dusan Bjelic interesting, too.

http://www.newsweek.com/did-marxist-philosophy-superstar-slavoj-zizek-plagiarize-white-nationalist-journal-258433

When Newsweek contacted Critical Inquiry, James Williams, its senior managing editor, agreed that Žižek “absolutely” borrowed from Hornbeck’s review. “We’re very sorry it happened,” he said. “If we had known Žižek was plagiarizing, we would have certainly asked him to remove the illegal passages.”

Newsweek then contacted Hornbeck, who writes under a pseudonym. “Anyone who has seen the side-by-side comparisons can have no doubt that Žižek is a plagiarist,” he said. “I know nothing about his writing habits. Maybe he does this all the time. Or it may be that as a prominent Marxist he didn’t want it known that he reads American Renaissance. In any case, what he did is contemptible, and his publisher...should certainly have a word with him.”

http://www.critical-theory.com/i-nonetheless-deeply-regret-the-incident-zizek-responds-to-plagiarism-allegations/

i dunno it seems pretty plausible that his general slovenliness explains pretty much everything

Yeah, he draws from Wikipedia regularly, so I can readily imagine him cutting and pasting text from email without bothering to see whether the email was quoting or paraphrasing a source.

Not to mention the nearly page-long passage (on The Matrix, I think?) in "On Belief" that he uses twice within the same chapter to introduce two different arguments.....

(On Leibniz and cyberspace, rather, on pages 26 and 52 of On Belief).

lol he plagiarized an anti-Semite. so zizek.

i dunno it seems pretty plausible that his general slovenliness explains pretty much everything

― j., Sunday, July 13, 2014 9:47 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is as much an alibi for him as a genuine cause of anything.

what is a genuine cause

fuck you :)

iunno. that smiley doesn't feel so genuine to me.

The first thing that such a "fundamentalist" view cannot see is how a foreign gaze is inscribed into the very establishment of "our" identity. Say, Argentinean identity formed itself in the middle of 19th century, when its main mythical motifs were established (the gaucho melancholy, etc.); however, all these motifs were already formulated in the memoirs European travelers a couple of decades earlier – what this means is that, from the very beginning, the Argentinean ideological self-identity relied on an alienating identification with the Other’s gaze. The same holds even more for modern Greece: Athens were in 1800 a provincial peasant village of 10.000 inhabitants, they were not even the first capital of independent Greece. It was under the pressure of Western powers (mostly Germany and England) that the capital was moved to Athens where a series of neoclassic government buildings were constructed by Western architects; it was also the Westerners, fascinated by the Antiquity, who installed in Greeks the sense of continuity with Ancient Greece. Modern Greece thus literally arose as the materialization of the Other’s fantasy, and, since the right of fantasy is the fundamental right, should one not draw from it the extremely non-PC conclusion that not only should Germany and England return to Greece the ancient monuments they plundered and which are now displayed in the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum – Greeks should even voluntarily offer to Germany and Greece whatever old monuments they still possess, since these monuments only have value for the Western ideological fantasy.

The "plaigiarism" controversy seems overblown. The disputed passages are just summaries of other books, it's not like he plagiarized a white supremacist's ideas as the headlines suggest

it's been fun seeing academic types be all 'gotcha! the p-word!!!!' and just look like goobers tho

as a plagiarism controversy it's pretty dumb but i'm all for calling out his working methods. big surprise that producing like half a million words a year results in shoddy, repetitive work.

huge surprise hence the necessary calling out?

the more people point out that he produces a lot of useless shit the more chance there is of him taking any heed and ever producing anything of worth again. maybe.

but then it's kinda just the plight of every celeb academic. he just amplifies it.

I was reading an older book ("contingency, hegemony, solidarity") and his contributions are very notable for their repetitiveness -- not only within the book but within his whole body of work. he's a very formulaic writer and I think there's rapidly diminishing returns with his stuff.

or what merdeyeux said

he has a lot of books that have come out and will come out this year

he's definitely the philosopher i've read the most of at this point

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/rolling-underground-tunnels.html

"Signed by Slavoj Žižek and a friend" - whatever that means. it doesn't read like his voice at all.

ht treesh: http://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2014/oct/06/slavoj-zizek-webchat-absolute-recoil

But this is not all the truth. There are multiple signs that something new is possible. Let me conclude with one example. Free downloading. Aren't we almost entering communism there? Even DVDs are disappearing. I think capitalism will not be able to integrate so-called intellectual property. Intellectual achievements are in their very nature communists, able to circulate freely. And this free availability of products is already opening up a non-capitalist space, even if it is the product of the most advanced capitalism. Again, just look for the signs. There are signs of an alternative. We just have to be patient and wait. We should act, but not in the old Marxist way that we are instruments of higher historical necessity. We should fight all our struggles, against sexism here, racism there, and so on. But we should nonetheless keep open a sense of risk. There is always a mystery in political activity. You think you are engaged in a big project and nothing comes out of it. But often you make just a small demand, and if you insist on it, everything changes. We cannot master in advance the consequences of our acts. We should act and keep our mind open.

So let me finish with a militaristic phrase from Napoleon: on attack, then we shall see. That should be our motto.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/12390885_1667285013527796_4322619636805548179_n.jpg?oh=8db71a04a918e42fe1e2ce16b6724362&oe=56D6A09D

https://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/the-syndication-of-plagiarism-sz-for-nicole-pepperell/

I lol'd

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/14022188_10157232549005304_7999281079063552365_n.jpg?oh=944cd564e44e01afa10a3bc95d87fa5f&oe=58141E77

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/10/slavoj-zizek-we-are-all-basically-evil-egotistical-disgusting
I hate politically correct arrogance. With black friends, in contrast to politically correct white guys, I establish real contact. How? Through dirty stories, dirty jokes. When you visit a foreign country, you play PC games about your interesting food or music, but how do you become really friendly? You exchange a small obscenity.

Yes humour is important for bonding, no it doesn't have to be dick jokes. I wonder if over-generalising from personal experience is humanity's worst trait (after selfishness, xenophobia, and a bottomless capacity for violence).

Also fun: the accelerationist gets accelerated every time he touches his face

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AIWUMkKZhus

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

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DSfCzWmVQAEJSc8.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DSfDp4CWsAAtxNv.jpg

slavojpingbag

Oh no: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrSUGgfM4Q4

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QwasyxTf3q0/VgU-uPebGeI/AAAAAAAAFVM/NmFobBNrk6A/s1600/Zizek-wedding-0002.jpg

Everyone evil n egotistical: that's why I love Zizek (and Haneke). Both have a deep rooted belief that we're not that good.

the fabled backstory here -- true or not who can say! -- is that he looks as if he's beaten up bcz he had been, by the brothers of the bride when sz tried to weasel out of the wedding :D

enjoy yr symptom!

he is fumbling in his pocket with a concealed taser.

Not sure how an in-law-to-be beatdown is gonna convince you to *go thru* with a wedding

i think it also involved being frogmarched to the altar