jools posted:

Crow posted:

jools posted:

Crow posted:

jools posted:

"Slovenes are being deprived of their enjoyment by ‘Southerners’ (Serbians, Bosnians) because of their proverbial laziness, Balkan corruption, dirty and noisy enjoyment, and because they demand bottomless economic support, stealing from Slovenes their precious accumulation by means of which Slovenia could already have caught up with Western Europe. The Slovenes themselves, on the other hand, are supposed to rob Serbs because of their unnatural diligence, stiffness and selfish calculation; instead of yielding to simple life pleasures, Slovenes perversely enjoy constantly devising means of depriving Serbs of the results of their hard labour, by commercial profiteering, by reselling what they bought cheaply in Serbia. "

i mean this could just be bad writing but how come slovenes ARE being deprived but are only SUPPOSED to be robbing serbs

maybe it's because English is not my native language, but i don't really see what you're getting at here. those aren't the realities on the ground, he's talking about ethnic fantasies structuring tension. slovenes arent actually DEPRIVED of their enjoyment by 'Southerners', just like they're not really robbing Serbs.

really, whatever silly ethnic fantasies suture his work from 23 years ago, he has consistently deployed these arguments to point out the need for a revolutionary state to traverse these ethnic fantasies: a total commitment to a Yugoslavian nation if there ever was one

lmao this owns. "yeah so what he was agitating for slovenian separatism while politically active in slovenia, NOW HE WRITES BOOKS AND GOES ON TV, THATS REAL COMMITMENT TO YUGOSLAVIA"

unlike you, joolsy boy, i try not to concern myself with the minutiae of people's personal lives, in order to start issuing moral condemnations. what i try to concern myself with, and not specifically zizek, are people's ideas and not their imperfect or incomplete, deeply personal relation to the issues surrounding their immediate lives.

what i find useful in his analysis of 'ethnic fantasies' is the psychoanalytic concept of 'traversal'. and, personally, i don't care what his emotional commitment is to Yugoslavia, because the way these arguments are deployed leads to the re-emergence of a socialist Yugoslavia. thanks

how is running for president for a party that pushed the US line in slovenia "minutiae of people's personal lives". how is writing speeches for them well into the mid-late 90s "minutiae of people's personal lives". how is the fact that he has also never actually in any full or satisfactory way addressed this one period of irl political engagement in his life not fucking suspect.

you're a god damn idealist crow, you seem to think that a some guy's cracked up half-baked ideas about "traversal of fantasies" - here deployed precisely to occlude and obscure the truth of a situation, to claim that the serb fear of slovenian separatism was foundationless bullshit even though it happened within the year - are more important than questioning what on earth this guys overall intellectual trajectory actually means.

haha because as far as i can tell it is ludicrous to reduce people to little muppet babies you can deploy to play a political cast eternal to any situation. now who's the idealist?

the 'superficial reading' is the way the goalposts are not shifted but removed from the playing field. as far as i can tell you're deploying something that doesn't make sense to the matter because it is a relation of nonrelation. rather than problematizing the "half-baked" theory against itself, betraying its contradictions (and there are plenty, though some are productive), you apply a different language to it. that's how those ideas remain and work unseen, invisibly structuring the debate: you must overcome them rather than banish them. it is the real problem of censorship, how can we overcome the material rather than banishing and forever keeping it in our orbit, just at the edge?

this is the same hauntology of the sort Derrida formulated with Marx: the fall of socialism and the attempted sidelining of Marxism will just revive it, as the issues that the designation 'Marxism' raised will be ignored and will just build themselves into apocalyptic monsters

jools posted:

okay, my attempt to parse this wall of jargon, which i'll need to do before i respond lmao (please dont do this in future, its fucking annoying for literally everyone, you dont need to use this hodgepodge of shit youve never read, some dash of massumi here, a reference to derrida here, it's dumb as hell man)

haha i don't complain about your ludicrous revolutionary posturing, so how about you just say you dont understand what i'm saying

jools posted:

so it seems you're saying that you can only critique on theoretical grounds? otherwise you're just engaging in censorship, not getting rid of a problem, just making it float around everywhere? {i dont even know what to do with the goalposts bit though because i aint moved shit}

theres a real problem here man! FIRST OF ALL you seem to be implying that practice is somehow not ideological activity?? bwwuhhhhh???? i thought we were all good marxists here! practice is if anything the determining ideological activity! see what i mean about idealism my guy? i know youre all starry-eyed with your french dudes and shit, and yes, there is a text outside the author, but there's no text outside history!

why dont you say "why doesnt he just say something like zizek is an honest comrade and ill defend his right to speak, if youve identified some ideological error, which i believe you may have, then you should criticize it constructively" because thats like, how you should do this shit, instead of apparently creating this set of theory bodhisattvas whose "projects" as you call them are not allowed to be read in light of their practical political activity, as if that is somehow not ideological activity.

here let me put it to you in simple language: sidelining people with some grandesque gestures as if you're some revolutionary in the field is absurd on its face. you're trying to interject your gun-ho guerilla histiography, and that's great, what a wonderful revolutionary you are, but how about some humility? and not trying to shepherd every stray sheep into your make-belief tent? the one that's just a bunch of blood-colored blankies ? for someone so engulfed in Correct practice you sure tend to police language with an incredible dearth of imagination (that means lack of imagination)

jools posted:

this is the same hauntology of the sort Derrida formulated with Marx: the fall of socialism and the attempted sidelining of Marxism will just revive it, as the issues that the designation 'Marxism' raised will be ignored and will just build themselves into apocalyptic monsters

i left this til the end because your citation of derrida is straight up fuckign wrong. the sidelining of marxism doesn't revive it, what creates the ghost is the fact that the fall of socialism doesn't suspend the Laws of History of whatever. don't cite what you ain't read.

i've likened it to the same gesture you Mother Fucker, how can you not understand that? do you think the fall of socialism wasn't confluent with that gesture? What do you think Fukuyuma does when he re-posits a right Hegelianism?

Specters of Marx is Derrida’s deconstruction and critique of the theory of the end of history, specifically in its 1989 guise developed by Francis Fukuyama. Derrida’s attack on Fukuyama is as scathing as it is simple: that through a sleight of hand, Fukuyama willfully confuses the empirical and the essential in order to make his argument work, slipping between the two as required to advance his argument. The end of history is proven by the empirical event of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but this itself is an essential historical truth that cannot be disproved by pointing to the empirical evidence that freedom (be that liberal democracy or the free market) has not yet extended across the entire globe. This is just an empirical accident that will eventually be rectified once the essential truth of the end of history is fully realised.

what do i need to do with you? Do i need to take you down the ear by the Pret a tete & smash your nonner in wtih a jerry? Fuckin innit?

jools posted:

what are we doing when we separate heidegger's philosophy from heidegger lecturing on that philosophy wearing a swastika pin with a nazi membership card in his pocket?

not narrowing down our world like a bunch of prebuscent boys in a treehouse. gettin lonely up here innit??? INNIT MATE???

Crow posted:

jools posted:

what are we doing when we separate heidegger's philosophy from heidegger lecturing on that philosophy wearing a swastika pin with a nazi membership card in his pocket?

not narrowing down our world like a bunch of prebuscent boys in a treehouse. gettin lonely up here innit??? INNIT MATE???

whats prebuscent

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

iwc play draw something with me lol

Sorry dude but I’m actually already drawing something right now…….

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:
iwc play draw something with me lol


Sorry dude but I’m actually already drawing something right now…….

A bath for your mum at our suite in the Hilton lmao

jools posted:

okay, how would "the fall of socialism being confluent with that gesture" be meaningful without an idealist conception of history

oh, i dont know, how about the millions of books that were destroyed, the shutting down of communist youth centers, the harassment of marxist professors and educators? what the hell are you talking about?

jools posted:

Crow posted:

jools posted:

okay, how would "the fall of socialism being confluent with that gesture" be meaningful without an idealist conception of history

oh, i dont know, how about the millions of books that were destroyed, the shutting down of communist youth centers, the harassment of marxist professors and educators? what the hell are you talking about?

the hell has this got to do with anything, all sounds pretty material to me

so i guess you're admitting that you dont have either a materialist or an idealist conception of eastern european history, but no conception whatsoever? do you know or don't you know what happened to the former socialist countries in eastern europe in the 90s? because those things were part & parcel of the ideological and social offensive that the new regimes took, all very fockin material, buddy

jools posted:

i'm not making a moral condemnation, i'm asking why we should read his theory apart from his practice

i guess i'm fine with this? but i'm also fine with taking out whatever you want from him if you want? like i said, i feel he has some moments of wisdom, and while I know his basic biography, i don't really care enough to inform myself on his entire history to get some sense of what he "really meant". i mean, there's a place for such deep readings, but uh, i don't really feel it's essential when you're trying to form your own ideas.

to be honest, i'm not quite sure what the argument between you and crow is.

You have a messianic complex with intellectuals in Eastern Europe. Nothing against it, but it becomes extremely dangerous in Slovenia when this messianic vision of intellectuals get combined with a vulgar anti- Americanism, which is a very popular political attitude of right-wingers. America for them means no national solidarity, filthy liberalism, multi-culturalism, individualism, the market. They are afraid for too much plural democracy and there is a proto-fascistic potential in it. This combination of nationalist writers, whose obsession it is how to retain national identity and a anti-capitalist, right wing movement is very dangerous.
I did something for which I lost almost all my friends, what no good leftist ever does: I fully support the ruling party in Slovenia. For this all my leftist friends hate me and of course the whole right wing. What the liberal democratic party did was a miracle. Five years ago we were the remainder of the new social movements, like feminist and ecological groups. At that time everybody thought that we would be vanishing mediators. We made some solidly corrupted, but good moves and now we are the strongest party. I think it was our party that saved Slovenia from the faith of the other former Yugoslav republics, where they have the one-party model. Either right wing like in Croatia or left wing like in Serbia, which hegemonized in the name of the national interest. With us it's a real diverse, pluralist scene, open towards foreigners (of course there are some critical cases). But the changes of a genuine pluralist society are not yet lost.
It's typical, that this position triggers an enormous hatred against me. Slovene media absolutely ignore me, there is never an article about me. On the other hand, if some nationalist poet publishes an small poem in some obscure Austrian journal, it's a big success in Slovenia. I am rather perceived as some dark, ominous, plotting, political manipulator, a role I enjoy immensely and like very much.

here, he fascisises anti-americanism. why? what? can someone please explain? what was the sudden ideological break he had to repudiate this stuff?

Do not overestimate the role of the media in the late eighties. Media were allowed to play this role in order for local communist bureaucracies to survive. The key to the Yugoslav crisis is Milosevic's strategy to maintain the power of the old nomenclatura by raking up this national question. The media did their dirty work. It was horrible to watch day by day the stories in Slovenia about Serbs raping us and in Serbia about Albanians raping them. All the news was filtered through this poisoning hatred, from everyday crime to economics. But this was not the origin of the conflict. That was the calculation from the power-elite to maintain power.

again, no question here of croat intransigence, anything. the nationalism was purely stirred up by the evil serbian ruling elites.

also, what does this mean? could it be.... Zig Raus....

With us it's a real diverse, pluralist scene, open towards foreigners (of course there are some critical cases).

babyhueypnewton posted:

Zizek is obviously a racist when speaking on other balkan ethnic groups, asians, arabs, and gypsies. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but racism usually leads to a poverty of thought and ideas like "capitalism with asian values" and "It Was Serbian Aggression Alone...That Set off the War" are dire.

However the debate over whether one can separate the practice of a philosopher with his ideas is an important one. Not just Heiddeger but how many lazy post-Marxists and feminists have dismissed Marx for his personal life and various quotes (often out of context but not always) on the Asiatic mode of production. If it has to happen over Zizek so be it, we should all be nicer to each other though ^^

again, it's interesting, because it wasn't heidegger's personal life, he didn't send private letters calling some guy trying to concubine his daughter a "jewish nigger", he was a member of the nazi party with great ambiguity hanging over his intellectual commitment to same. the issue is treating that stuff as equally important i think.

it's interesting that earlier in the thread crow made that post about how zizek is a slovene, because reading someone purely through nationality is basically the same thing as reading them purely through a equal combination of their private jerk habits and political commitments.

Crow posted:

jools posted:

i'm not making a moral condemnation, i'm asking why we should read his theory apart from his practice

because there's something called a relation to Truth that goes beyond circumstantial ploys. otherwise, one is condemned eternally for whatever youthful mistakes or follies one had to take to prove something, or save someone, or attempt to act ethically in the moment. theory is not *determined* by practice, it is codetermined.

so you've come round to my position, good. i think you mean overdetermined though?

i don't really have a problem with the points you raised about zizek's politics (twenty years ago), but i do have a problem with the attitude of casual dismissal of bodies of work. i think it's lazy, immature, and unbecoming. something maybe stupid and evil to you, but i think if even that were the case, it deserves rigorous indepth investigation.

it's not casual at all, i claim, it's borne out of deep misgivings with the possible places it takes you. like the fantasy traversal model of racism. does this not just create a liberal level playing field at its purest for racists, where the fantasies of the oppressed are treated as symmetrical to the fantasies of the oppressor? what use is this?