Two problems with Zizek

1) due to his obsession with the dialectical method he spends most of his time circling around an issue "from one side and then the other" without ever actually hitting the issue. He likes to set up both sides and then show how they are really a part of the same thing, two sides of the same coin... so what? Make a real, true and coherent point already.

2) he does this bullshit so common now of merely invoking references without explaining why that reference is relevant, because of course we are simply supposed to know already what is meant (implied). He does this in his recent book with mention of Bernie Sanders as a defense of one of his arguments, but all he does is say Sander's name and then no further explanation as to why/how Sanders is some sort of example of his point. We are simply supposed to "get it" already and indeee this is a way of elevating himself and his "type" (in group) above everyone else who might not get the reference or might not agree with it.

This second problem I see everywhere now. Just the other day on public radio, "And coming up next we will be looking into the new administration and the various hiccups and problems with its handling of... well, you know"... what? No I'm not going to fill in the second half of your brain-fart, make your own fucking arguments, dipshit.

In his recent book, Zizek says that Islam is no more misogynistic than Christianity. He says this in a parentheses, just an offhand comment meant to be a statement off the obvious and so obvious and non-controversial that no argument or explanation need be bothered with.

See, this is what I hate about Zizek, that despite he makes plenty of decent points and is quite intellectually capable of arguing well, he resorts to these (not so) subtle rhetorical tactics. I can't decide if he is 1) supremely arrogant, 2) supremely entrenched in PC norms and academic innuendo and doesn't even notice he is doing this, or 3) deliberately constructing narratives in order to undermine real points and prevent real argumentation on certain issues.

To be honest, although I mostly like him, after studying him for a long time I think Zizek is basically a guardian against certain depths. His "job" as he sees it is to apply the intellect in favor of certain moral positions and conclusions, to point cultural thought in a certain direction, and to thus prevent critical reason from going beyond a certain depth-point. I won't go so far as to say he is doing this as part of some nefarious agenda, although that is possible, but more likely he is a closet moral ideologue who really doesn't understand that deploying reason and thought to prescribed moralistic ends is an abuse of the mind and constitutes anti-philosophy.

Actually Zizek reminds me of Milo in this way. Two clowns capable of intelligence but only using that intelligence to prescribed ends; two clowns, one from each 'side' of the aisle.

Milo and Zizek should debate each other. I would pay to see that.

Reading more of this book, I think Zizek is clearly insane. He makes a claim that is absolutely counter to what I already know he thinks as a Hegelian-Marxist; namely he wrote that there is nothing at all to be gained or learned from in horrific acts such as violent outbursts or Auschtiwz for example, as if he forgot that every situation and indeed more so for the more extreme situations presents a "historical truth" being worked out or breaking through in some way.

Zizek's own term for that is "repressed truth", yet now he is claiming that "we cannot accept that extreme or excessive acts can open our eyes to a more ultimate truth of the situation" (my paraphrase).

What?? Has he lost it? Maybe Trump made him finally collapse into madness.

Literally what Zizek just said: "the most depressing lesson of horror and suffering: there is nothing to learn from it."

Omfg. I am actually in a minor state of shock to see him say that. This speaks to a near-absolute mental collapse on his part.

R.I.P. the mind of Slavoj Zizek, 1989-2016.

ill post the video I sent you here as well

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Thrasymachus wrote:

Milo and Zizek should debate each other. I would pay to see that.

What about including Chomsky?
Id just be curious what would happen to him as he searches for the right words.

Thrasymachus wrote:

1) due to his obsession with the dialectical method he spends most of his time circling around an issue "from one side and then the other" without ever actually hitting the issue. He likes to set up both sides and then show how they are really a part of the same thing, two sides of the same coin... so what? Make a real, true and coherent point already.

Marxists tend to split their bets to a zero sum outcome, which is never the case in real life. They linger on the threshold, where no man should linger, and thereby they become unhinged from being, maybe like what Aleioster Crowley called 'black brother of the abyss'.

Quote :

2) he does this bullshit so common now of merely invoking references without explaining why that reference is relevant, because of course we are simply supposed to know already what is meant (implied). He does this in his recent book with mention of Bernie Sanders as a defense of one of his arguments, but all he does is say Sander's name and then no further explanation as to why/how Sanders is some sort of example of his point. We are simply supposed to "get it" already and indeee this is a way of elevating himself and his "type" (in group) above everyone else who might not get the reference or might not agree with it.

-Well, to start off with an important point, Bernie Sanders... I mean, right?
-Uhhah, you know it.
-So there's that, and now *nods importantly* this is how it stands.

Quote :

This second problem I see everywhere now. Just the other day on public radio, "And coming up next we will be looking into the new administration and the various hiccups and problems with its handling of... well, you know"... what? No I'm not going to fill in the second half of your brain-fart, make your own fucking arguments, dipshit.

-Basically, it's like, you know.
-that's just it.

Thats really how far it goes for most hipsters and related branches of humanity, apaths.

I don't think Chomsky is capable of debating anything, he would fumble and stutter for a full minute and then manage about five words, something like "climate earth responsibility do what?" and then maybe wander off in search of a bathroom or his next dose of medications.

Zizek would tear him a new one. Actually yeah I would love to see that. Check out Chomsky's "criticism" of Zizek, what utter insanity. The guy makes me embarrassed to be part of the same species as him, well that would be the case if I actually thought we were of the same species, which I do not.

"I'm not interested in using fancy words, polysyllables". Haha. What a fucking douche.

Zizek's response:

Thrasymachus wrote:

"I'm not interested in using fancy words, polysyllables". Haha. What a fucking douche.

what... haha

speaking of stupidities too great to come from an uneducated mind

Chomsky was in the vigor of his youth a mid-sentence hesitation.

Apparently Chomsky is a secret agent of the globalists, his primary role is to confuse and then reduce the moral significance and intellectual coherency of the US.

I actually read that once, and the more I read and hear from the guy the more sense that makes.

He manufactured the consent with the manufacture of consent. Whether that was intention, I strongly doubt that he is conscious of such things. He seems to have gained renown in the depths of postmodernism, to coin a contradiction.

You are right, he has no place in such a debate.

I wonder if Zizek can make a turn away from his blind wall, it would be something to see him rediscover the idea of merit.

I sincerely hope that Zizek can make the turn. But this is serious soul work. He may first need to learn how to not laugh.

Chomsky is a useful idiot. A pawn in games he will never understand.

Deplorable level of analysis. In fact one can barely even call this analysis or thinking. But I figured it out: Zizek has no real friends.

By that I mean he has no community of fellow thinkers. He is in academia after all. A barren wasteland.

We have here at BTL what Zizek presumably never had. So this is an open invitation to Zizek to come join BTL, where he might finally learn what it is like to have true 'colleagues'.

To be clear: I am officially inviting Zizek to join BTL.

And then once he does I want to see some live (in person or via video conference) debates between him and Fixed, and some detailed text exchanges/conversation between him and Parodites.

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With this recent book Zizek demonstrates that he is slowly starting to think. He is beginning to ask better questions, yet his answers are still mostly garbage reformulations of his same decades-old bad thinking... "class struggle" and all that nonsense still overdetermines his ideas.

Still, I recommend the book anyway, because you can see in him brief glimmers of actual thinking.

God dammit Zizek, why are you so fucking stupid? I would quote some text here but that seems like a burden on my time, maybe later.

As usual he brings us to the threshold of a real insight, and then he farts and laughs and comes to the exact opposite conclusion as he should. Jeesus.

Although I'll give him credit for a good insight, which I will translate from mindnumbing Lacanese into Value Ontological terms: a self-valuing, which is self-irreducible and self-inexhaustible, can end up assuming or acting/feeling as if another self-valuing were less self-irreducible and less self-inexhaustible. Namely we can easily act as if others have a more consistent and filled-out (less 'gaps') inner world whereas we happen to confront the inner heterogeneity and disruption of our own inner world all the time. Therefore, Zizek claims, the other person becomes someone we are jealous of because we think him in possession of some kind of undisturbed holy grail of subjectivity that we ourselves do not possess.

Zizek uses this idea of jealousy to explain why people resist each other and find their neighbors weird and "creepy". In fact, social distance and norms of interaction are entirely natural and based on the fact that a self-valuing cannot welcome another self into its own values-sphere entirely, and can only welcome the other self in to a strong degree in so far as a common relationship is formed, on which common values are identified. There is nothing pathological about the fact that neighbors do not welcome and love each other as intimate friends and family. Zizek has to interpret this in bullshit psychoanalytic terms as latent-repressed jealousy based on "joissance", when in fact it is simply a natural and necessary consequence of what it means to self-value. But Zizek at least has the decency to admit that this "limit of the neighbor" is at least helpful in some sense, and is not entirely bad, contrary to a more simplistic naive reading that it is a problem humans do not all just "get along" all the time and effortlessly---yet for Zizek this constitutes a deep and "controversial" idea, lol. Whereas for VO it is basically just a very simple logic, and any ethical implications would stem naturally from that.

Yes, Zizek is still under the impression that all humans are equal, that existence is a goo, as is consciousness, and that his task is to discern universalities in that goo, and as it is goo, the universalities tend to be goo-like, weak, feeble, sticky, dirty, not what you want, useless, unfit to build with, stinky, blubbery, etc etc.

In reality, no human subject is equal to another. Self-valuing logic is all we can be certain of as being a persons law, as this law has no content except the enforcement of itself, so as to leave the actual being free to be what he is. All psychoanalytic attempts to explain joy and frustration and fear and love in universal terms of society, are pure deathsewage.

Zizek nor any authority- or command-worshipping thinker ever arrives at the notion of the individual. He never mentions that there is such a thing. He has no clue that the individual exists, he thinks only in terms of characters in a great roleplaying game that he is puzzling over as to whether it has meaning or not.

He doesnt ask the question who the subject is, and who his neighbor is, to arrive at an idea on whether or not they do and would relate. He thinks of humans the same way he thinks of pebbles; indiscernible from one another, passive, just a remote phenomenon in which he does not partake, as he, in his writing, never appears. That is what feels so utterly dry and empty about his works - he isnt in them. He has no ground, thus he can push for no conclusions, let alone relish insights.

Haha, yes absolutely. You put that all very nicely.

Ha, I guess that's a virtue of Zizek, he allows for a lot of deconstruction.

"This is just absurdly the case"
but what is this this?
Is there more to it than its perceived absurdity?
Is Marxism perhaps simply the reification of the absurd?

I like that. I might say that Marxism is the attempt at reifying the absurd. Reducing everything to group Identity such as trying to actually explain economics and politics in terms of 'class struggle' is simply retarded. Honestly Marx was insane, I get this when I read him. He was the first transhumanist.