he's enjoyed his time in the spotlight by being a controversial figure by trolling everyone and rarely getting around to any real points during public speaking events.
while many leftists today reject him as an unserious pop philosopher, i find value in Zizek. for one, he was babby's first guide into critical theory, laconian theory, and german idealism.
his frenetic and eclectic style of writing, full of references, led me to seek out and read other writers like Foucault, Guy Debord, G.K. Chesterton, Marx, Engles, Mao, Badiou, and even inspired me to watch some quality feelums.
he's like an obsessive neurotic and frenetic markov bot for leftism, philosophy and psychoanalysis.
also, from time to think, i think he makes some rather interesting points and observations. i think he likes to play this socratic game of questioning things without building up positive theoretical frameworks, but i think some good things can be found in his more dense works.
anyway, i've recently been getting a lot of flak online for liking zizek, i've been called a racist, a white man, an anti-semite, a moron, and plenty other things because i tried to discuss zizek in a way that wasn't outright rejecting him.
i'm curious as to why and when this hip new anti-zizek trend started and when is it gonna be over'?
since intersectional identity is the big thing right now, it makes him into a mainstream liberal pariah and that leaks leftward a bit occasionally. you can still find people who agree with him and accept his ideas about gender and jokes about black people or whatever, but they're more quiet now. defending him at this point would (just for one example) end up forcing you to argue that transgender people are fucked-up garbage more or less, or trying to argue that he was just being facetiously provocative, or coming up with some other interpretation, and i don't think anyone has the energy or interest to go through that, at least not in some leftist forum
Edited by swampman ()
swampman posted:Also I keep hearing things baout their role in helping Nato bomb to bits Yugoslavia but a more responsible poster will have to fill in los deats bro
http://kunstradio.at/WAR/zizek.html
So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma "Bomb or not?" is: not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE. In the last decade, the West followed a Hamlet-like procrastination towards Balkan, and the present bombardment has effectively all the signs of Hamlet's final murderous outburst in which a lot of people unnecessarily die (not only the King, his true target, but also his mother, Laertius, Hamlet himelf...), because Hamlet acted too late, when the proper moment was already missed. So the West, in the present intervention which displays all the signs of a violent outburst of impotent aggressivity without a clear political goal, is now paying the price for the years of entertaining illusions that one can make a deal with Milosevic: with the recent hesitations about the ground intervention in Kosovo, the Serbian regime is, under the pretext of war, launching the final assault on Kosovo and purge it of most of the Albanians, cynically accepting bombardments as the price to be paid. When the Western forces repeat all the time that they are not fighting the Serbian people, but only their corrupted regime, they rely on the typically liberal wrong premise that the Serbian people are just victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact is that Serb aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority of the population - no, Serbs are not passive victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the bad nationalist spell.
realsubtle posted:His dumb appearance with julian assange on democracy now and all the time he wastes on dumb shit like psycho analysis and his dumb idea that saying racist shit will bring us closer together and that opposing western european cultural hegemony over muslims is 'political correctness gone amok'. hes ugly and stupid and i hate his stupid voice and i hate his dumb academic celebrity lifestyle. the perverts guide to cinema is a lot of meaningless garbage about a bunch of who-gives-a-darn movies. if you like him youve been misguided and i hope that my analysis has helped you change your mind a little bit.
Actually psychoanalysis owns
at least one good thing about zizek: people will watch this video to see him destroy a 'crazy SJW' and get to hear him say we should accept rape testimonials as a priori fact
drwhat posted:since intersectional identity is the big thing right now, it makes him into a mainstream liberal pariah and that leaks leftward a bit occasionally. you can still find people who agree with him and accept his ideas about gender and jokes about black people or whatever, but they're more quiet now. defending him at this point would (just for one example) end up forcing you to argue that transgender people are fucked-up garbage more or less, or trying to argue that he was just being facetiously provocative, or coming up with some other interpretation, and i don't think anyone has the energy or interest to go through that, at least not in some leftist forum
tpaine posted:change roseweird's username to Carly Rae Jepsen-Dataplan
lisa needs braces
Keven posted:In conclusion: everyone was unable to give you an explanation as to why Zizek is bad, because he's actually good.
1. Plagiarizing from a white nationalist journal
2. Supporting NATO bombing Yugoslavia
3. Endless "my black friend said it was okay for me to call him n-r" stories
4. Anti-migrant crap
5. Really very bad writing
6. Enjoyed by standup comedians, who, if they reach the highest possible status in the standup comedian world, are allowed to shake hands with the president in front of the president's favorite journalists and very lightly roast them all with jokes the administration can handle, an extraordinary level of political influence the possibility of which motivates all comedians everywhere to become masters of both political science, and understanding short conversations like the one in this thread
2. That was good
3. Sounds like a dark mirror held up 2 society
4. Communism historically involves closed borders
5. Seems subjective to me
6. Interesting to know that you judge human worth by how close you got to stand to the president. Not how I do it, but whatever. Live your own life.
ilmdge posted:Why do people force something to do with stand-up into everything they post at Keven?
It's kind of a shorthand way of expressing their worthlessness, brain/spinelessness etc
it helps to understand the intellectual climate he came up in. SOI was published in '89... so around the fall of the USSR, and peak anti-communist/Fukuyama "end of history" triumphalism. guys like Baudrillard were popular among academics, and there was very much this idea that meta-narratives were dead, we're in a post ideological age, yadayada
so when Zizek came around, it was very much a shock. he was openly supporting Marx at a time when it seemed like Marxism was "finished," and his project enthusiastically supported unfashionable guys like Hegel and Lacan -- big ol' metanarrative thinkers. between him and Badiou, it seemed like there was a response to the potpourri of postmodernism/post-structuralist thought that didn't back down from fighting them on their own turf
but there were always problems with his work. his grand theoretical edifice, the core of his project once you strip past all the jokes and movie references, is a Lacanian reading of Hegel, which he uses to come up with a materialist conception of subjectivity. the problem is that his reading of Hegel is kind of suspect!
the early 90's doesn't seem that long ago, but there's been a HUGE transformation in the quantity and quality of Hegel scholarship since then. it was pretty rare to find English-speaking Hegel scholars who really knew their shit, say, in the 1970's. now there's quite a number of them. and they are all pretty much in agreement: Zizek's Hegel is not really up to snuff. he completely ignores the social aspect, for example, that plays a role in consciousness for Hegel. Robert Pippin has a nice long critique if you're into that. i think even the majority of Zizek fans have not really engaged with this part of his corpus much, it's the most difficult to understand. but the foundation is shaky to begin with
if Zizek had just stuck to that, he would be another philosopher who wrote many obtuse words that i don't agree with. but alas, Zizek also fancied himself a political philosopher. and why not, since he was actually a politician himself! of course, he ran for a party that helped spearhead the de-communization of Slovenia, so maybe his Marxist credentials should be viewed a tad more critically.
and as others have pointed out, he has been just awful on a wide range of issues, from racism to Roma to transgender people to "political correctness." his analysis on Arab Spring (and the middle east in general over the last 5ish years) has just been embarrassingly bad. he wrote an article about how Microsoft engineers aren't being exploited and therefore Marxism needs to be reevaluated, an article so bad i had to check it wasn't something rejected by Jacobin.
and he is just not a very good writer. he seems like an OK writer because he gets lumped into continental philosophy and compared to people like Derrida or Deleuze, he's downright readable. but he still cannot keep his ideas flowing in any sensible manner. and he's RIDICULOUSLY repetitive. i swear a good 80% of his material is recycled now. how long has he been telling that stupid toilet joke now? joking about post-ideological societies may have killed in '98, but in a world of Trump and Brexit it just seems ridiculous.
if you really find his stuff engaging, cut out the stuttering middle man and just read Hegel directly, there are plenty of good resources to help you with that now
shapes posted:
thank you for this post. this is like the slavojgelion: death & rebirth to my forthcoming, long-awaited end of slavojgelion effortpost
aerdil posted:brocialists who try the tact of "you just don't understand zizek, his context, and his irony :smug:" and im just like, buddy i understand him too well
It is a sad thing when we, the toilers who painstakingly extract and process the supply of Irony, are given no respect by consumers who undervalue the labour which goes into its production. Not to mention the hazardous working conditions (prodromal schizophrenia, doxxing, cushy Vice journalism gigs) and mistreatment by our bosses at the Agency...
I propose we go on strike.