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

His style is exactly glib enough for my taste. Connections between Marx and the Marx Brothers are CHEAP but also NECESSARY.

I like him, but then I'm a bugger for a bit of post-Althusserian Lacanian-Marxism. And anyone who hates Heidegger and can't be doing with Derrida can't be all bad. He is also responsible for my liking of Zlatko Zahovic and the Slovenian football team. Mind you, his article in the latest London Review of Books was a bit pisspoor. His one on the Matrix was ded ded good though.

Was also the day when Chesterfield wuz robbed in the FA Cup Semi- final in 1997. Memories...

*sobs* a lot

I'd tried to erase that day from my memory, thanks a lot Barley!!!

zizek is a leninist, a means-to-an-ends kind of guy, so his stance here is unexpected.

of 24: "It is here that we encounter the series' ideological lie: in spite of the CTU's ruthlessness, its agents, especially Bauer, are warm human beings - loving, caught in the emotional dilemmas of ordinary people."

which begs the question: well, can't ruthless people also be loving fathers? s/z's answer is:

"As Arendt says, the fact that they are able to retain any normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity."

i can't help finding his paradoxes (and there are umpteen more in the article) a bit fortune cookie. isn't the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity the morally depraved act itself? likewise, do we need his thoughts on 'why is cheney telling us this' -- isn't the fact of torture enough?

But the main point is fairly straightforward. The means-to-an-end argument, when it comes to torture, boils down to "do what you need to do, then pay the price later." But by implying that torture has no price for those who practice it, legal or emotional, 24 to some extent moves the issue beyond mere means-to-an-end - there's no longer any moral balancing going on at all. It simply becomes "this is what we do." Torture becomes unfortunate but no longer morally troubling. The notion that this somehow goes to a person's guilt and depravity is popularly accepted in the entrenchment of the consideration of remorse as a mitigating factor in sentencing for crimes.

It's basically the same argument w/r/t Cheney openly justifying what was formerly tacitly permitted: this does violence to the notion that there is a price to be paid for these actions, that there is a price that should be paid. The point is not merely to bring formerly hidden acts out into the open, but to disrupt and overturn the systems of understandings that necessitated the acts be hidden. A government which has to hide its torture is one which submits to the notion that, strictly speaking, what is being done is wrong. And there is always the possibility that the torture will be publicly exposed, resulting in loss of face and power for the ruling government.

The hiding at least pays lipservice to the notion that what is happening is morally reprehensible (as Mac says on Commander In Chief, "I don't want to hear that he was tortured"). What is changed in publicly announcing the use of torture is not necessarily the seriousness of the acts of torture committed (which, perhaps in the short-term, does not increase), but the system of morality within which that act is situated, and the system of power relationships. The Government says "you can no longer hold your avowed distaste for torture over me"; if the public does nothing at this stage, it effectively acknowledges "I accept your use of the torture as morally defensible."

I think that the ramifications for "society" in this are pretty huge, and that it's therefore right for Zizek to argue that the consideration of the moral depravity of an act can go beyond the act itself and extend to how it is framed in discourse.

I wouldn't go that far because I haven't really gotten to the "make your own zizekian argument" stage. But yeah his stuff (esp. these sorts of arguments) feels very familiar now, you sort of know where it's going immediately.

Yeah he is very repetitive, and not just in terms of overall approach but in terms of specific detail - the analogy of the husband and the wife who have the tacit agreement w/r/t his infidelity is in half a dozen other books by him. For me it's really all about the world-building of the first two big books (The Sublime Object and For They Know Not What They Do).

(of course, he also coasts in other things too, but then that's more an element of not seeing himself as a "theoretician" so much as a sort of gadfly polemicist)

But cool that he'd thought enough about it to come up with that one perfect phrase.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n08/letters.html

excellent combination of bad faith and projection, well done.

it would be kind of interesting to see him deploy that argument w/r/t palestine though, also not an independent state pre-1948, etc etc etc

I agree that he is too understanding of China's policies, but I thought this paragraph was spot-on:

One of the main reasons so many people in the West participate in the protests against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly propagated by the Dalai Lama, is one of the chief points of reference for the hedonist New Age spirituality that has become so popular in recent times. Tibet has become a mythic entity onto which we project our dreams. When people mourn the loss of an authentic Tibetan way of life, it isn’t because they care about real Tibetans: what they want from Tibetans is that they be authentically spiritual for us, so that we can continue playing our crazy consumerist game. ‘Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre,’ Gilles Deleuze wrote, ‘vous êtes foutu.’ The protesters against China are right to counter the Beijing Olympic motto – ‘One World, One Dream’ – with ‘One World, Many Dreams’. But they should be aware that they are imprisoning Tibetans in their own dream.

There are other peoples the Chinese central government has oppressed as well, such as the Uyghurs, but since they don't have evoke similar imagery in Westerners as the Tibetans do, and don't have a charismatic leader like the Dalai Lama, they are mostly ignored. (Also, the Uyghurs happen to be mostly muslims, which of course makes them less likely to get much Western support.)

it would be kind of interesting to see him deploy that argument w/r/t palestine though, also not an independent state pre-1948, etc etc etc

The difference is, though, that the Israeli government has done little if nothing to develop the Palestinian areas. I'm not trying to defend China here, but the two situations aren't that easily comparable.

oh that bit about new-age hippies was what i meant by 'projection'; i suppose it might be true of some people who are actively pro-tibet, but most people seem to be against the occupation on more liberal grounds. just as many people who broadly support the palestinian cause might not be so keen on hamas.

zizek doesn't actually advance any evidence of this syndrome, anyway:

When people mourn the loss of an authentic Tibetan way of life, it isn’t because they care about real Tibetans: what they want from Tibetans is that they be authentically spiritual for us, so that we can continue playing our crazy consumerist game.

is just a standard zizek-y paradox. i'm sure he's used it before, conjoining it with the line from 'to be or not to be'; "the poles do the camping, we do the concentrating."

i'm not saying palestine corresponds with tibet 1:1, but zizek's take on it is likely to be 180 degress from his take here -- namely that the occupier is right, and the vocal support for a religio-nationalist cause is wrong.

Tibetan Buddhism, deftly propagated by the Dalai Lama, is one of the chief points of reference for the hedonist New Age spirituality that has become so popular in recent times.

This is bullshit as regards specifically Tibetan Buddhism, which strikes me as being way too particularist to offer much to New Age thinking. The Dalai Lama's charisma and media savvy has done far more to keep Tibet in the public consciousness of Western liberals. I'm also pretty sure that a lot of anti-Chinese government protests are grounded in issues other than Tibet. Amnesty's campaigns are one obvious example.

Plenty of Stalin apologists argued that he was only liquidating horrible reactionaries, too.

Yes to the Dalai Lama's media profile keeping it in public consciousness - linked to strong idea of Tibet as a separate occupied country, a profile that abkhazia, dagestan, kurdistan, don't have - kosovo being the anomaly here (but western govts wanted kosovar independence, rather than western people - so a bit of a red herring?)

Aren't Uyghar's in a minority in Xianjiang?

laxalt, by that i'm guessing you think none of these countries deserve independence? pretty blatantly in the case of kosovo.

bringing the opinion of 'western people' is a huge red herring, really, but i'd have thought those western people who have heard of kosovo will generally recall why its independence from serbia could be seen as a good thing for the people of kosovo.

No that isn't what I mean. (also wether Western Govt's wanted Kosovar independence or not shouldn't make that independence any more or less desirable per se)

I'm not suggesting any of these countries either deserve or don't deserve independence (just that western policy towards Kosovo was unusual as the usual state of affairs is to preseve integrity of the nation state).

Its more that I was trying to suggest that Tibet has a higher profile as an actual occupied state in western minds, whereas the others are probably thought of as regions - and that itself must be at least partially responsible for pro-Tibetan feeling in the west.

Surely one of the Kosovans' core claims to independence is that Kosova corresponds to what a nation-state is supposed to be?

Its more that I was trying to suggest that Tibet has a higher profile as an actual occupied state in western minds, whereas the others are probably thought of as regions - and that itself must be at least partially responsible for pro-Tibetan feeling in the west.

yeah, undeniably. though again: palestine is fairly prominent in the west. those other places barely even register as names, kurdistan excepted. i think there's some kind of insinuation threaded through this line -- i don't know what it is exactly, but my main reaction is 'so what?'

western policy towards Kosovo was unusual as the usual state of affairs is to preseve integrity of the nation state

greater serbia wasn't a nation state. plus the west had been operating in the former yugoslavia pre-1999. plus it was the west (germany) that encouraged its break-up.

I'm curious as to why Zizek is someone you guys read/talk about? Is he someone you read in school, and if so in what course of study? Or is he a big public intellectual in the UK or Australia or somewhere, and in those places public intellectuals are taken seriously? I'm just ignorant but curious, not trying to be snarky.

I'm curious as to why Zizek is someone you guys read/talk about? Is he someone you read in school, and if so in what course of study? Or is he a big public intellectual in the UK or Australia or somewhere, and in those places public intellectuals are taken seriously? I'm just ignorant but curious, not trying to be snarky.

-- Euler, Saturday, April 19, 2008 2:52 PM (7 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

he's definitely a prominent public intellectual -- ie he doesn't just address a specialist philosophy audience. (there is a q-mark over what his specialism is, perhaps.)

there've been about four films made about him, he gets new yorker profiles done on him, he gets into the LRB, guardian, etc, and he publishes a lot.

he's achieved this mostly post-9/11 and i was at uni before then and anyway he doesn't have much to say on my subject (history).

as for public intellectuals being taken seriously -- britain has often perceived itself as not giving intellectuals their due, in comparison with france where they alledgedly have a bigger public profile.

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

no shotgun no credibility

we are in agreement tbh

Feels like they watched Game of Thrones. Lol

in an alternate universe zizek plays detective crockett in miami vice

A local linguist is found dead in a puddle of black ooze. Suspicion falls on Midsomer Stanton’s ice cream van driver, angry that all-encompassing whiteness might threaten the world ending with a whimper rather than a bang.

— Midsomer Murders Bot (@midsomerplots) March 18, 2019

Important update

mesmerized by this video of slavoj žižek absolutely demolishing two hot dogs pic.twitter.com/grNOIPfEQn

— Nick Usen (@nickusen) April 16, 2019

So good..

So stoked to watch this

Not going to watch this (my masochism has limits). Sounds like they were having two monologues side by side rather than a debate.

Live debate is bullshit

lest we forget

remember in 2011 when the white radical left lined up to denounce the black riot as feral, incoherent, mindless? here’s Zizek and David Harvey back then pic.twitter.com/ZJVxWq5r5e

— hannah (@nanpansky) June 4, 2020

I had a feeling Owen Jones was often bad back then but couldn't quite remember why, but knew it was more than just his early hostility to Corbynism and his terrible books!

whenever he's actually deigned to take a concrete position on something specific it's always been some basic liberal and/or conservative bullshit, with marxist/hegelian rhetoric thrown in to appease those who still want to believe he's a revolutionary. "no message to deliver" fuck off back to the academy you pearl clutching hack

these celebrity leftists always turn out like this, he & chomsky are way more similar than different in this regard

this guy has always had seriously dodgy views on race (as well as gender, sexuality etc) which "the white radical left" has been way too keen on obfuscating/excusing

motherfuck him and hegel

Zizek. Apparently the new frontier of emancipatory philosophy is “indigenous people couldn’t understand their genocide as being wrong without western theory.” Impressive! pic.twitter.com/6chPxe3aCH

— Ben Miller (@benwritesthings) July 4, 2020

celebrity leftist here casually writing liberal-fascist defend-western-values screeds for russian state media

fox news levels of empathy for the police here

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/493408-white-racism-fight-guilty/amp/

happy international men's day pic.twitter.com/no1MZGamwU

— zo (@gramscifancam) November 19, 2020

been laughing at this for 3 days pic.twitter.com/e2XtNpKX46

— the thicc husband & father (@lukeisamazing) February 10, 2021

just saw him at a cafe in Bloomsbury, he was looking unusually dapper / kempt

get ready for your new Chief Adviser