jools posted:

i really do not like the "intellectual toolkit" approach to thinkers, i think it almost always leads you down status-quo-supporting roads of one sort or another.

I mean, i agree to a degree that there's a kind of self-justification of philosophy departments world wide using this "intellectual toolkit" approach. they tell you to study all these people and then pick and choose what's important to you and then philosophy is basically distilled to some self-help bullshit that allows the departments to remain ideologically neutral.

that being said, i don't think it's bad thing as a kind of ad-hoc personal approach. it's okay not give a shit about the minutia of philosopher's lives. we all have only so much time in the day, and i'm fine taking what i need and leaving the rest.

well, let me maybe expand a little. i think it's one thing expecting someone to read my posts separate to the fact that i once posted my erect penis on an internet forum, and another to expect someone to buy zizek supporting a yugoslav nationalism separate from his support for slovene separatism, his involvement in USFP interests in the collapse of yugoslavia and so on. like that's a big deal. at the very least i'd expect a decent account of what this meant, why things are different now, and so on.

which leads me to the second thing - you give him a pass on his method of intellectual production, the flinging shit at the wall etc. i don't see why this doesn't need interrogating? if there is some possible reactionary significance to what you've said in light of previous statements, if you're a marxist or whatever, i think it's important to address that. especially if you are purely a theorist, as zizek is now. self-criticism or whatever.

you can always ask him? like i'm sure he's pathological enough if you send him an respectful email, that there's a decent chance he'll respond. you interrogate the living.

jools posted:

oh i wondered because the google translate subtitle is "Pussy fagots, niggers with long dicks and Gypsies in the Slovenian intellectual space", the second being a joke zizek recycles about his "big black friend" who he made "true friends" with by saying he must have a huge dick....

“Ha-HA you are black like night my friend, it is ok! My people they suffer too! Miami Vice yah?”

jools posted:

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.

no, the point is that there is a structural fantasy that people buy into, a cultural milieu and a psychological identification, when they admit to a certain ethnicity. it's why you can speak of like a black point of view or a white american bourgeois specificity, or a puerto rican national consciousness being sutured by ethnic fantasies.

like to me its amazing that you're making these kind of interventions into the space of the balkans as an english person, or telling me that i have an idealist understanding of history when i mentioned in passing the sustained ideological purge of marxism during the 90s. these are facts of my life and my identity. the place i was born and raised for a good chunk of my formative years. how i relate to people through that scope is relevant to the commonplace production of ideology, as is how you structure the conflict of the Balkans in your fantasy (and it is a fantasy, in every sense of the word). so, yes, national specificity does matter when youre talking about how someone views the nightmare dissolution of yugoslavia. of their own country

jools posted:

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?

it is casual, you dont engage with any of his actual ideas or mechanisms or what have you. you said it was just nonsense or whatever.

for my part, I think this 'traversal' model is crucial in understanding the denazification efforts of the GDR. the GDR model of denazification placed a much more pronounced emphasis on anti-fascists to help carry out purges (Western authorities treated anti-Nazis with much more suspicion). but in many instances, the anti-fascists and radicals went too far, taking unilateral actions and carrying out evictions, as well as failing to discriminate between high-ranking and small-fry Nazis. these groups had to be brought to heel in many cases, as the state and the party leadership had to mediate reprisals, indeed the relations between distinct groups of people (former Nazi leadership, Nazi rank-and-file, local communists and anti-fascists).

personally, i think this quite radical regulation of relations is perhaps a good start on the question of settler nations and native populations. this isn't a question of 'symmetrical treatment' just like the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a question of symmetrical treatment, which for all its partisanship still yet must regulate a universal justice.

NoFreeWill posted:

i like phenomenology so i'm going to read heidegger soon, but good ideas are good ideas even if they come from hitler. also i thought the lineo n nietzsche was that he never read marx, tho i don't know aobut contact with similar ideas...

there's no evidence that nietzsche read marx directly, but this is a pretty good article:

Thomas H. Brobjer
NIETZSCHE’S KNOWLEDGE OF MARX AND MARXISM

Nietzsche never mentions Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels in his writings and it is generally assumed that he had no knowledge of them and their kind of socialism. In this article I will show that this is not correct and that, in fact, he had a reasonably detailed knowledge of Marx and Marxism. Marx is referred to in at least thirteen books, by ten different authors, which Nietzsche read or possessed; in six of them he is discussed and quoted extensively, and in one of them Nietzsche has underlined Karl Marx’s name.

Political questions were never central to Nietzsche’s thinking, but he was nonetheless throughout his life a harsh critic of socialism. It is frequently argued that his knowledge of socialism was superficial and very limited, based mainly on contemporary political agitators and coloured by his personal and class prejudices. It is thus commonly assumed that he had no detailed knowledge of socialism and leftist political views, and what little he had was at best based on readings of the anti-semitic socialist Eugen Dühring, whom Engels and Marx had criticized so severely in the book Anti-Dühring (1878). Dühring is therefore often implicitly assumed to be a discredited and unreliable source of information, and the authoritative Marxist, Nietzsche-editor and -scholar Mazzino Montinari has questioned whether Nietzsche had even read the relevant text by Dühring. Furthermore, it is sometimes argued that if Nietzsche had had knowledge of Marx’s and Engels’ version of socialism, or had even just had a more multifarious knowledge of socialism, his critique would have been different and less vehement. In this paper I will present results from work on Nietzsche’s reading and library which shows that Nietzsche knew of Marx and Marxism, was reasonably well informed about the field of political economy, and that his knowledge of socialism and leftist views generally was much more detailed and had a much broader base than has commonly been assumed. Thus, the argument that Nietzsche’s critique of socialism was based on superficial and limited knowledge is severely weakened. Although Nietzsche never explicitly criticizes Karl Marx or Marxism, it is likely that he and his kind of socialism and political economy is included in some of Nietzsche’s general critique of socialism and economic thinking. I will point to a few such statements. Nietzsche’s critique of socialism concentrates on the dogma of equality, but it is also directed against economic thinking generally (homo economicus, materialism and the search for comfort), the values associated with such thinking, and against the psychological disposition which Nietzsche argued lay behind socialism, characterized by attitudes such as jealousy and resentment. Much of Nietzsche’s critique is made from a philosophical, explicitly apolitical perspective, and much of it is of interest and validity still today

and there's some pretty good evidence for a couple pages (though alot of the quotations are in untranslated German). not sure where i could upload pdf's but i have a copy

edit:

Nietzsche did, in fact, know of Marx and Engels, and he is likely to have read at least thirteen books (by ten different authors) in which Marx is mentioned, six of which contain relatively detailed accounts of Marxism (by an enthusiastic follower, a hostile socialist opponent, a leading socialist proponent, a hostile anti-capitalist critic, a sympathetic professor of political economy, and a socialist-sympathizing philosopher whom Nietzsche much respected). Furthermore, several of them paraphrase long sections and/or give many pages of selected quotations from Marx’s and Engels’ writings, including the Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital and several other works. This knowledge does not appear to have made Nietzsche’s attitude towards socialism milder. On the contrary, it is likely that Marx is included in much of his critique of socialism and left-wing values. Nietzsche’s knowledge of Marx’s thinking was certainly limited, but it was far from being as insignificant as has been assumed.

The ten authors who mention or discuss Marx, and whom we know that Nietzsche had read, are Jörg, Lange, Dühring, Meysenbug, Frantz, Schäffle, Frary, Bahnsen, Bebel and Jacoby. Of these, the books by Lange, Dühring, Frantz, Schäffle, Bebel and Jacoby contain extensive discussions and long quotations.

Nietzsche claimed to read little, but mostly this claim was a false one. Even during the last ten years of his career, when he was without a permanent residence, he carried with him 104 kg of books, and later stored books in Nizza, Sils-Maria and Turin, to which he returned yearly. He frequently used libraries and bought, on average, one new book every second week over the last years of his active life

woa nelly!!

Edited by Crow (Feb. 21, 2013 06:16:51)

tpaine posted:

crow

tpaine

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

lol

elemennop posted:

my slovenian is bad,

you def used google translate bro don't lie

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?

The author is dead, you cant read heidegger and color every word with the thought of his beliefs. the text stands for itself.

jools posted:

swampman 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?

The author is dead, you cant read heidegger and color every word with the thought of his beliefs. the text stands for itself.

what, outside history?

no, outside the hypothesized intent of the author.

swampman posted:

no, outside the hypothesized intent of the author.

this has absolutely nothing to do with the point jools is making, 'intent' has never had anything to do with this argument. if, in an alternate universe, we had a completely apolitical figure in heidegger, and a posthumous interview was suddenly released in which we discover he harbored fascist sympathies all along, yeah, it would be foolish to use that to repudiate his body of theoretical work. that's not the reality of the situation tho. the reality is the heidegger consciously and actively worked in support of the academic arm of the nazi regime. we aren't speculating about what he thought while he was doing this, who cares, if we found out his 'intent' throughout was to bring down the regime from the inside or whatever that wouldn't make a difference either. the problem is that he did it. if you start seeing the theoretical work as a more legitimate 'text' than political intervention, you have just neatly strolled into idealism. material action is as legitimate a site for critique as thought is, practice has as much to do with the development of knowledge as the intellectual world does, this is the fundamental point marxism makes. the issue isn't that perhaps all along zizek is a genocidal psychopath in his internal existence, that's irrelevant, the issue is that zizek worked for a party that institutionalized racist violence against the roma, and i agree completely with jools that this is an area that begs interrogation

i think the defense that can be mobilized towards thinkers like heidegger or zizek walks dangerously close to the idea that 'intent matters' itself - that oh, they did not really care about politics, they were taking the path of least resistance in order to pursue what their concerns really were... any of this is irrelevant, all that matters is that these actions occurred

Indeed, the only open question here seems to be where, precisely, we should
locate Heidegger on the spectrum delineated by the two extremes of committed
Nazism and political naïveté: was Heidegger (as Emmanuel Faye claims) a fully
fledged Nazi, did he directly “introduce Nazism into philosophy,” or was he simply
politically naïve, becoming caught up in a political game with no direct links to his
thought? I propose to follow a different line: neither to assert a direct link
between Heidegger’s thought and Nazism, nor to emphasize the gap that divides
them (that is, to sacrifice Heidegger as a naïve or corrupt person in order to save
the purity of his thought), but to transpose this gap into the heart of his thought
itself, to demonstrate how the space for the Nazi engagement was opened up by
the immanent failure or inconsistency of his thought, by the jumps and passages
which are “illegitimate” in terms of this thought itself. In any serious philosophical
analysis, external critique has to be grounded in immanent critique: hence we
must show how Heidegger’s external failure (his Nazi involvement) reflects the fact
that he fell short as measured by his own aims and standards.