or is it just me
I just don't understand how you think you can "debate" a Marxist and then admit you read the communist manifesto like once in college as your prep work. Like, was he just hoping that Zizek would be a total kook?
Most critics of Marxism haven't read any of it. They literally don't know what it is.
I saw someone post a screenshot from 4chan that said not only are public libraries communist, but that Marxism is just anything that’s anti-white and anti-male.
dam son, Marxism is literally cool af huh
to be fair I did check out the communist manifesto from the public library in my teens
American conservatives like to refer to everything they don't like as Marxism recently. Like literally.
Most conservatives are also Marxists, but they get a twisted version of it through Weber and things like modernization theory.
Classic mistake of the fascist: believing their own lies they tell about their opponents.
I can see Peterson sitting at his desk, putting down the manifesto and proudly thinking to himself "Yes, that should be enough. Good job Jordan."
In his defense, have you ever tried to study something when you’re fucked up on klonopin and have the meat sweats? Easier said than done.
What's the deal with the cider thing? This is a new wrinkle I'm not aware of.
That's what he does, that's why he's such a good interviewer for whoever comes on, awesome or shitty. Also he's attracted to fake medical advice like flies to shit.
This is revisionist history
I believe that the debate actually caused Jordan Peterson to resort to the unthinkable: trying a sip of apple cider, which in turn caused him to not sleep for 25 days, which then led to him getting addicted to benzos and slipping into a coma.
turns out sip of apple cider is just slang for cold turkey benzo cessation and withdrawal
Remember the time he cowered from a debate with Richard Wolff last-minute before going on to lie and say no Marxist would debate him?
Whatever it takes so that there is no new footage of him tearfully talking about boys.
Honestly remember this day really fondly. I was on a road trip across the state at the time and had to stream the debate to my car's bluetooth to listen. Because I was driving I couldn't read commentary everywhere. The whole time was me saying "what the fuck?" literally every time JP opened his mouth and I legitimately thought for a moment I had pulled up the wrong debate. Booked the last hour of the road trip literally just so I could read everyone's dunks on the old sub. Why the man thought a halfhearted read of the Manifesto would be enough to challenge Zizek is still beyond me.
Not to mention Zizek is a Marxist but he is a bit of an anti communist and for the most part doesn't really talk about the necessity of revolution, social justice, etc. He just likes to use Marxism as a tool to have interesting conversations about human belief
Zizek is not an anti-communist in any sense of the word, he’s a firmly very far fucking left postmodernist Maoist playing a joke on y’all cuz bourgeois hegemony
y’all still think you’re further left than daddy and it will never stop being hilarious
He is? I guess I've misinterpreted him. Recently I saw a Zizek discussion on YouTube and he said that he was "not a crazy leftist who wants revolution" and that the core struggle for the left in the U.S. was in the Democratic Party.
https://youtu.be/weB1rG9xM7k. Sorry, I don't have timestamps.
Where can I read his postmodernist Maoist stuff?
it’s honestly okay
the jokes are there but you basically need to be a bougie philosophy grad who spent a few years in deep familiarity with the academic radical left with Hegel/Lacan to get them, so it’s pretentious as shit: he’s writing them for a very small, elite audience of radicals
e.g. Zizek will write things that are meant to be read through Hegelian “negation” of his own thought as it develops through Hegelian higher forms - his introduction to Mao is written in this style - he’s posing as a reactionary where he wants to draw attention to revisionism, and often reveals these jokes in the footnotes and references where readers won’t typically be looking for them
when he “denounces” Stalin/Mao, he often includes a reference to popular revisionist biographies that are known amongst academics to be garbage, and of course he knows it too (thinking here of Jung Chang’s terrible “biography” on Mao)
like, “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”, is a joke about the real masterwork, “The Sublime Object of Ideology” - what Zizek really means is often nearly the opposite of what he says.
Huh. This actually makes a lot of sense. Zizek definitely confused me in the past.
A lot of academic writing makes sense in this context. They realised their ideas were being studied and co opted, so they became deliberately as opaque and self referency as possible.
Wait, why would he do that in his intro to Mao? Is Mao just supposed to be for elite academic radicals?
He's irony poisoned. It's just his memes are all from italian academic papers from 1996.
the academic elite radicals are pretty much all Maoists, like Althusser and so on
Still seems like a strange choice for something so foundational. Like, I feel like most people reading it are just gonna be like, "Huh, I guess Mao sucked."
Zizek doesn't really care. Even if the above comment on his facetious use of reactionary sources as jokes are true (and I think they are), they don't give a clue into what Zizek really believes. I also would not call Althusser a Maoist, or most academic radicals Maoists at all lol. Here's something that I think is zizek being closer to what he believes re: Mao, https://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm, though who knows really. Side note, the natural science references annoy me so much in that piece, really should not be used.
edit: on further looking, I think what I linked is just an abridged version of the intro with some stuff missing, and I don't think the intro is being super facetious.
Is the copy pasting paragraphs between different books (or even within the same book) part of the joke?
Zizek does this more in his later work. Yes. His reactionary GK Chesterton and Hegelian triads “Christology” references... the “eurocentrism”, the phone-it-in style - of course it’s a joke.
I’m imagining he’s been dead for a while now and they’re just saying he has the coronavirus to make him seem like a hero
Marxist debating chud: "Shit I've gotta learn how these partial differential equations work in the feedback cycles in planned integrated logistic chain software or they'll school me on the Planning calculation problem."
Chud debating Marxist: "I'll just watch some You Tube and Cliff Note the Communist Manifesto."
Can someone sum up the debate to me real quick
I watched it but didn't understand shit
Interspersed with Peterson admitting he never actually read any Marx
Basically JP didn't do any research and looked like an uneducated fool, while Zizeck spent the debate having to explain a lot of basic concepts.
JP: did you know Marx praised capitalism
Zizek: duh
JP: :O ... liberalism sucks!
Zizek: duh
JP: :O :O
Zizek very softly and non-confrontationally explained how Peterson didn't understand a lot of basic shit. Then they both complemented each other for being radical/non-mainstream and being able to talk to each other despite being on different sides of the political spectrum.
