In France and elsewhere, everyday insecurity hurts the poor much more than the rich.
Literally just getting a list of people from the State department and putting them in charge.
He was literally denounced by the Yugoslavian education system as a "non-marxist" so he was never a comrade, ally, or fellow traveler. Just somebody who you'd cross paths with once in a while
Well, he's pretty open about not being a Marxist and corrected, for example, Jordan Peterson incorrectly calling him one.
He's had a better case at times for being some type of non-Marxist socialist (a bit of a nazbol if you ask me), but I think that's still being too generous with him.
I wouldn't really call him a socialist as, if I'm remembering correctly, he just wants an economic system where he and anyone can totally plug out and completely exist in their own bubble while still having their needs met. Which to some would interpet him as a utopianist socialist, but I look at that and interpret it as being an opportunist who'll bit on anyone's hook should they deliver what he desires.
i want to mail zizek a framed photograph of stalin strangling him to death
Every month or so, like clockwork, somebody posts some zizek shit that seems somehow more unfathomably stupid than the last time. Somebody should do a wellness check on this fella. He’s either leaning really hard into his role as the clown contrarian of the left, or his brain is being literally devoured by some kind of ravenous fungus and he needs a doctor.
"My criticsh shay I am shuffering from a brain eating amoeba. I do not have a brain eating amoebashhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..."
why did people ever think zizek was cool
or was it just that no one could understand him but he sounded like he could be a leftist because he was unintelligible and verbose
the dude looks like he sleeps in a dumpster, went on chapo, double-fists hotdogs, has a goofy speech impediment, clearly does loads of coke and shat on america with dirty jokes - aesthetically, what's not to like?
then, those of us who read actually read his writings and immediately cringed
the dude looks like he sleeps in a dumpster, went on chapo, double-fists hotdogs, has a goofy speech impediment, clearly does loads of coke and shat on america with dirty jokes - aesthetically, what's not to like?
then, those of us who read actually read his writings and immediately cringed
on his flirting-with-fascism playthrough.
It is, I quote it (and the They Live sequence) pretty often because they are very useful perspectives for parsing living in neoliberalism.
I think he has had some good takes in the past (but I never followed him closely or saw more than the occasional excerpt of his writing), he's just become increasingly incoherent and reactionary over the past several years. Maybe he's angling to be the next Nick Land and found the New-Neo-Reactionary movement or something, or maybe his brain's just fried.
Actually I'm seeing a ton of parallels between him and Nick Land now: both were incomprehensible quasi left contrarians, and both pivoted from that into just straight up incomprehensible contrarian reactionaries.
Although even before that he was more a meme than anything.
Ironic. He could show others their unexamined ideology... but not himself.
even when I can understand him I wonder wtf he's talking about
The early 2010s were so devoid of publically leftist intellectuals that bottom of the barrel people like him were latched onto.
Also, lots of the current terminally online left were baby leftists back then.
Zizek, Chomsky, Varoufakis, Richard Wolff and the like. Is there even anyone like that today, beyond the rediscovery of Michael Parenti? It feels like the 2h lecture by a usually radlib intellectual has been replaced by the podcast with usually equally weak politics.
I would put Varoufakis and Wolff into a different category. I feel like they don’t actively harm the left like Zizek and Chomsky often do. Like, they’re good for baby leftists and understanding the problems inherent in capitalism even if their solutions (which I think both spend very little time discussing) aren’t all that great.
A Klan member may know a wonderful pie recipe.
A Scientologist may have some almost-accidentally good advice for how to break a drug addiction.
Zizek taught a lot of people about unexamined ideology.
Bad people can stumble upon good takes sometimes.
His media critique was good, everything else not so much
People saw his weirdly colorless sweaters and thought he must be an academic marxist
Jfc does this man realize that every revolution ever is technically unlawful and against the prevailing order?
No, and neither do the scratched and unscratched libs that were humping flags yesterday.
I slept on the couch all day and feel like that should earn me an order of Lenin
Jfc does this man realize that every revolution ever is technically unlawful and against the prevailing order?
As a self described utopian-socialist I don't actually think he's in favour of a violent revolution, or any revolution for that matter. The man is useless hack.
He supported the Maidan and probably the Syrian opposition lmao. Violent revolution for Nazis and Jihadists is all cool
Jfc does this man realize that every revolution ever is technically unlawful and against the prevailing order?
True but let's also not prevent what's happening in France rn is a revolution
The good kinds of protests are either CIA-backed or whitewashed versions of events.
Yep pretty positive Zizek supported the rioting in Hong Kong and in Iran over the recent color farce there. Weird how we should always reject any destabilizing or anti-establishment acts in the imperial core, but support them in colonized or developing nations. What a chauvinist oaf
Mt Zizek im pretty sure killing a teenager should be awful for law and order.
Public protests and uprisings can play a positive role if they are sustained by an emancipatory vision, such as the 2013-14 Maidan uprising in Ukraine
How is this the same guy who wrote so much based shit. Does he just have a blind spot when it comes to Russia? Or has he never been as insightful as I thought?
Don't shortchange your own judgement and get stuck looking for the guy who is never wrong. Zizek was great at pointing out the ways that ideology undergirds entertainment, but that doesn't necessarily translate to total political coherence. He was probably so good at recognizing ideology because he deep down knows how susceptible to it he apparently is.
Thank you. I always say, support ideas and not people. But we can't help but latch on to certain personalities.
reminder that
is still generally respected for his linguistics work(although i'm sure someone here with a bigger brain than mine will be able to criticise that effectively too)
AFAIK all of the animal language studies were trying to prove Chomsky wrong, and they all failed. His work isn't totally explanatory but it's the foundation of our current understanding of how language develops.
I mean there are many ways for Chomsky to be wrong about a lot of things even without other animals having language
Ape sign language studies mostly, but they've also tried to teach language to birds, dolphins, etc and it never works.
The old idea of language development is that when you babble as an infant, you occasionally make words, and your parents reward you for it - thus teaching you language. Chomsky argued that language is too complex to be explained by this mechanism, and it was a major debate in language development for a long time. So the way to test this theory is to try to teach simple language via this mechanism to the most intelligent non-humans we have access to.
The animal studies that looked into this were mostly done with apes and monkeys. You've probably heard of Coco the Gorilla - well she was just one of many that we tried to teach sign language too. Unfortunately, despite the hype and marketing around Coco the results reported by her trainers were never replicated, and a systematic review of all ape language studies (which were done for decades) revealed that basically no ape had ever actually learned sign language - at best they learned a couple of signs and learned to associate those signs with food and attention from their trainers (the same way a dog can learn individual words), at worst they learned basically nothing at all but the trainers (who usually were not fluent in ASL themselves) interpreted random arm movements as valid signs.
Don't think anyone would unironically say he hasn't done quite a bit for linguistics (except ironically, which I enjoy doing because it's funny), but there's a fair amount of his stuff that is fairly controversial
Why is it still surprising that zizek has shit take?
He never liked movements like BLM and what is happening in France (I let you people figure out why)
He is a pro EU person. In fact he said that even the most right wing EU policies are more socialistic than any actual socialist stalinist states in Asia
Anti-trans pro-EU pro-NATO anti-Soviet but he proudly tells a story about how he used to have a picture of Stalin in his house so he’s obviously a communist
Jordan Peterson also had a portrait of Stalin in his house for some strange suppressed psychosexual reason. Zizek and JP didn’t really have all that much to debate over
True comrades doesn't need to hang Stalin portraits in their homes as they keep Stalin in their hearts.
Likes Stalin, but only for the ethnic deportations & recriminialisation of homosexuality.
He's gone full circle.
He was a dissident in Yugoslavia after all and ran for the Liberal Democratic Party for the collective presidency in the 1990 Slovene Election.
He got fifth, and the top 4 candidates got elected.
There is a reason why Zizek is so pro EU and ultimately a Lib.
Slovenia is the most cosmopolitan republic in Yugoslavia and the earliest to leave it. They just happened to get the best cut of the deal
Sus wording. Maybe one could generously interpret that as Libbrained, like Shanghai or Honk Kong
Yet this is not the situation in France today, where violent rebellion is unlikely to end with any kind of progressive settlement for the wretched of the Earth. If law and order are not promptly restored, the final outcome may well be the election of Marine le Pen, the leader of the hard-right National Rally party, as the new president.
Seriously? Evoking Fanon to argue for a stronger France?
Oh my god
In this general situation, the left must assume the slogan of law and order as its own. One of the most depressing facts in recent history is that the only case of a violent revolutionary crowd invading the seat of power was on 6 January 2021, when Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington DC. They viewed the election as illegitimate, a theft organised by corporate elites. Left-liberals reacted with a mix of fascination and horror. Some of my friends cried, saying: “We should be doing something like this!” There was both envy and condemnation as they watched “ordinary” people breaking into the pinnacle of state sovereignty, creating a carnival that momentarily suspended the rules of public life.
Not too far above:
That is why it is crucial not just to dismiss the state as the instrument of domination. In natural disasters, public health catastrophes and periods of social unrest, progressive forces must try and seize state power and use it, not only to calm people’s fears in times of emergency, but also to fight those fears – racist, xenophobic, sexist, anti-progressive – artificially concocted to keep populations in check.
I can't with this joker
Yet if the left disregards public safety, it is conceding to the enemy an important domain of dissatisfaction that, in a time of anarchy, pushes people to the right. Everyday insecurity hurts the poor much more than the rich who live calmly in their gated communities.
Bruh you just associated the right with unrest, then associated it with law and order. It's almost like "pushing people right" doesn't have much to do with reason and doesn't require any actual opposition
I think he's making fun of Franz Fanon, folks tend not to know how deep this dudes ideological perversions go
I'll have to give that a watch. My capitalist realism brok juste a few months before the Hexbear zeitgeist rightfully turned on him, so I could use a rundown
Im starting to see how my friend who idolizes zizek became a trump supporter for a while lmao
What's that? Asymetric class warfare waged by the rich on the poor and supported by the neoliberal institutions of France? Nah, when the poors rise up they really just hurt themselves
he was always a dweeb
treatment at this rate.