There is no evidence that this really works. The whole history of Eurocommunism and Social Democracy basically demonstrates that these so-called "Socialist" movements will not popularize Communism simply because they ostensibly strive for similar ends.
You could point to any marginally "Progressive" figure like Jill Stein or Bernie or Jesus or Che T-shirts or Nader or (somehow) Zizek, the only thing that the popularity of of these people are indicative of is people's misdirected discontent, not some hypothetical future socialist/communist movement.
shapes posted:if you took all the thousands of pages that Zizek has written (plus interviews, lectures, debates), you could condense it into one book on ideology that would be decent. that is why The Sublime Object of Ideology is his best book, because it's the closest to that.
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
Wow thank you
drwhat posted:he said some unpalatable things about religion and race and gender all the intersectional identity leftists got mad, and the radical leftists always thought he was a cryptofascist anyway but for different reasons (i think).
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
more or less. if zizek would stop regurgitating the same jokes and references for every single fucking verso book he wrote, fewer people would dislike him. if he was an out-and-out fascist and wrote a coherent piece on carl schmidt, something real magnum opus-tier, then he'd actually be of use to the left.
zizek is fundamentally a gateway drug to better thinkers.
- steampunk wedding - ongoing
what is trotskyism- solveda real explanation as to why Zizek is bad- solved- schizophrenia - ongoing
- secret pdf forum - ███████████
- why are the posts so bad - very carefully
shriekingviolet posted:welp, that's one more mystery solved. updating tHE rHizzonE mysteries master list:
- steampunk wedding - ongoing
what is trotskyism- solveda real explanation as to why Zizek is bad- solved- schizophrenia - ongoing
- secret pdf forum - ███████████
- why are the posts so bad - very carefully
peak Sam Kriss, solved
Caesura109 posted:i dont get the secret pdf forum bit, if there's a pdf forum of leftist documents i want in so i can flush the stupid robert dahl book out of my head after exams
in time all will be revealed like the last Xmen movie, where the people behind it desperately wanted to let people know they know what the second word in the title used to mean. me too bryan..
Caesura109 posted:i dont get the secret pdf forum bit, if there's a pdf forum of leftist documents i want in so i can flush the stupid robert dahl book out of my head after exams
the secret pdfs are enroute to the data centre now, hang tight
