I've watched hours and hours of his talks, and found some of what he says to be useful or interesting. But what is he really saying?
- Most is barely intelligible, with tangents upon tangents of weird psychoanalytical jargon.
- The jokes function to disarm and disorient anti-communist talking points.
- The core message seems to usually be "idpol bad" (which is true, at least for the liberal variants), but nothing much more interesting.
???
SUBTEXT: Ex-Yugoslav lib reformer now supports COMMUNISM*! If he can, so can you!
* by which he always specifies "the big problems are not solvable by capitalism" and distances all other associations
I mean tbh you're gonna need to understand some psychoanalytic jargon to get some points of his. If you want to learn that stuff, and not get bogged down in a quagmire of Zizekian tengentiality: I'd recommend reading some Todd McGowan (or especially listening to his Why Theory podcast), Mari Ruti, or Alenka Zupancic(who I think is the most genuinely Marxist of the batch). Honestly the Lacanian shit is super interesting and I think everyone should understand it a bit, especially when there's so much you can tie back into Dialectical Materialism. Once I could start drawing lines between Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Lacan (which are actually quite intuitive), I think it helped deepen my understanding of them as really pivotal figures, and all that has helped create a more cohesive understanding of the intertwined disciplines and movements which have emanated from or responded to their bodies of work. I don't even know how I'd interpret some people differently if I hadn't sorta stumbled into the Lacanian stuff early on: I think especially Althusser and Deleuze.
I would also really recommend the podcast Red Library, they were there the reason I turned away from being overly skeptical about Lacanians. I definitely had pretty much the same opinion as you, I get thinking Zizek is a bit of a spectacle and grift. No doubt the dude pumps out reactionary hot takes. Yet I'd definitely recommend still exploring the niche to which he belongs