but hes right about a lot of things. kind of sad that this 72 year old is one of the most influential intellectual on the left today
edit: I think this post was taken in the wrong way. You should read Zizek, he does have good ideas. I call him a "grifter" not to shut down his ideas, but rather as an acknowledgement of his limitations.
Agreed about his bad AES takes cause it seems he doesnt even read history/news from them beyond weird things he hears here and there. I have read most articles and interviews he has given about trans issues and people and while i dont think he is actualy transphobic ,him trying to overly phillosophise and hegel and lacan a subject like this into a knot makes his takes almost impossible descipher or be of value and they are much easier to be seen as reactionary, while again i dont think they foundementaly are (funnily enough some of his takes would fall in the most radical parts of trans liberation). But man, just dont even try on this
I realize I'm opening up a jar of worms by asking this - especially when you just explained how indecipherable a lot of these opinions are - but would you mind elaborating a little? I only have a passing knowledge of Zizek through memes and a few YouTube videos/internet debates.
Here is him on his own words about the subject. Goes of tangets and does some obtuse philosophy as he often does
https://zizek.uk/a-reply-to-my-critics-re-the-sexual-is-political/
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I'm sorry what part of that makes you think he "hates" NBs?
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Yeah I had to go back and read that line again. I like Zizek a lot but he could also be a cis philosopher that doesn't understand trans identity and if his Lacanian psychoanalytic terminology hurts more than helps, just throw it in the trash. I tied that back to his previous line about Marx:
Bourgeoisie economists thought of capitalism as functioning normally during the "boom", but they thought of the sock market "bust" as an aberration, unrelated to the normal functioning of capitalism. In fact, the boom and bust are two sides of the same coin. During the boom, profits are soaring because capitalists think they can make more and more money with worse and worse investments until the snap back to reality. Marx was the first to show that the crash was also a constitutive part of capitalism. If you want to understand a system fully, you also have to understand the exceptions to the rules. To return to the matter at hand, when we talk about the way that our society fails trans people, it reveals the way that our way of thinking about sexuality as a whole is a failure, but it is easier to ignore that in heteronormative culture. It only becomes apparent at the point of crisis.
The Marx reference is, I believe, a reference to the 18th Brumaire. Monarchists (who opposed voting and elections) turned out and voted for Napoleon III (to overthrow democracy). If they were true believers in monarchy, they would not have voted, and Napoleon wouldn't have won. Zizek is always interested in these sorts of contradictions. Young adults today are given more "permission" from society to engage in sexual freedom than any other time in history, but they are having less sex than their parents. He sees an anxiety that cannot be put it into words.
Zizek is adamant that sexual anxiety is never going away, and that it will always be used as cannon fodder for the reactionaries. Part of the reason sexual anxiety will never go away is because sexual desire comes from the pre-linguistic, lizard part of your brain and so it can't be expressed in definitions, language, or binaries like male and female. We cannot understand our sexuality. All attempts to understand it are pathological. It is pathological for conservatives who project their sexual anxieties on trans people. Unfortunately, it is also pathological for leftists who want to help as well.
We should do everything in our power to help our trans comrades, but in 15 years there will be another crisis of sexual anxiety. That's my take at least.
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Maybe? I think his point more than sexual anxiety and sexual fantasy are two sides of the same coin and you can't have one without the other so you should learn to live with both. I think he is accusing post-gender theorists of heading down that path. But I haven't read enough gender critical theory to say (or volcel thought lol).
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