"New to Zizek" thread

Oh wait nvm I got it wrong, he's not pomo, he's a postmarxist still don't what that is

Thanks for your contribution, bud.
That just goes without saying, but it doesn't make you an idiot. Zizek isn't just "babys first leftism" because you've only ever read a news article or watched his talks, nor would this order mean that he's shit.

I'd also say no, as the post- in most of these titles typically means having foreclosed upon the conditions of the former (postmodern having surpassed the conditions of modernity, etc etc) but Zizek is an ardent defender of Marx. I'd call him a Lacanian Marxist, if you really felt obligated to stick a title to him.

Zizek is a psy-op crypto-fash that constantly shills for imperialism and tries to pass off his batshit sophistry as "critical analysis". Anyone who tries to appeal to literal fascists as well as "communists" is a charlatan.

fuck off redkahina

Does anyone have a Zizek translated and explained volume? It's like the guy needs a team of experts to decipher what he's saying into human language.

I honestly have no problem at all understanding him.

Decades ago, Zizek used to run as a candidate for the liberal pro-privatization party. More recently, he shilled for Syriza. So, his actual political evolution is neoliberal -> socdem (I believe he's stopped with Syriza shilling, otherwise he would be neoliberal again). Publishing photos of him with a Stalin portrait is just attention-seeking shock-value marketing (aimed at students in Western Europe, in Russia Stalin is not considered the mirror image of Hitler and you just sound like everybody's grandma when you praise him). There's a book about him and his shtick from 2006 or so, it was called Reading Zizek I think.

Why don’t you actually listen to what he says? He called Syriza a “mild social democratic” party. He then said that the reaction against them shows how far right we’ve gone. He has also said numerous times that it is impossible to restrain capital and that we need revolution. Come on my dude, he is obviously the real deal.

Zizek is a hack philosopher who is only highly regarded by people who haven't read anyone better.

What's the point of making Pauline universalism the center of socialism? It has zero pragmatic basis today. yeah it sounds nice and romantic but it doesn't exist in either the imperialist countries or the global south. The only visible options are either social democratic reformism (capitalism with a human face) or tailing cultural nationalists. Islamic hate preachers have a much bigger following in the banlieue than any communist party as do black and Latinx separatist groups. PoC don't need the ramblings of a 70-year old dinosaur Lacanian in order to teach them how to fight, in fact they're probably happier relying on their own wisdom. Plus Zizek and his fellow white brocialists don't put nearly as much stake in the struggles of minorities than they do of whites. He bashes on immigrants and refugees and tries to appeal to Trump supporters because he believes those people could have become leftists had the existing left prioritized their issues instead of migrant, racial, or feminist issues.

This is satire right?

gtfo

Why would it be satire? People of color don't need whites in our movements; whites need us in order to give their movements legitimacy (in fact every time whites barge their way in we find our movements desaturated and sanitized). Universalism is a utopian pipe dream.

People who use terms like latinx are generally white folks

So where is this great unified socialist movement based on the universalism Zizek advocates? Nowhere, because no one except right-deviationists in the west desire it. The most militant radicalism isn't coming from unions or even most communist parties but black/Latinx/Muslim/Indigenous struggles. What good are white socialists when all they do is push for reforming the settler-colonial state?

This is the face of a person eating from the trashcan of ideology.

This brings to mind Stalin's famous response on being questioned whether left deviationists or right deviationists are worse

They are both equally bad
Radicalism to what end?

Where are these great movements of yours? Where are the colored bourgeoisie doing for these movements? Nobody of color besides your goofy Democrat Cops of America crackers and maybe some internet maoist buys this "settler" bullshit.

Anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism. Even if you believe these movements aren't anti-capitalist enough in their current forms, on what basis would including whites radicalize them even more? Universalism isn't what ended colonialism, it won't be what grants indigenous peoples their land, it won't stop ICE or pig brutality.

You have to play with the cards you're dealt, and if the only momentum against capitalism is coming from PoC then you have to go along with it or else all you're looking to accomplish is bourgeois reforms.

Who said anything about siding with the national bourgeoise? You're making a huge false dichotomy. If anything the NB tends to be the most "white-ofied" of PoC.

And yet you still can't point to a single example of a genuine Pauline universalist socialist movement which exists today and is demanding something other than reforms.

You really think you can make a truly revolutionary socialist movement out of exclusively colored proles, most of which don't subscribe to your settler bullshit? That's delusional.

The biggest social movement in Latin America, the Brazilian MST chock full with liberation theology priests, not to mention the indigenous rights people here being composed by mostly catholic priest working in conjunction with the indigenous people. Due to their nature they tend to have mostly focal demands, but more often than not they are composed by revolutionaries.
Frankly, shove your anglo-centrism in up in your ass.

...

I'm not even Anglo nor do I live in an Anglo country. I'm well aware of Latin American land struggles. Liberation Theology has always been detested by the rest of the Vatican so linking bottom-up land movements to the Church in general is s huge leap for you.

You are so fucking anglo it hurts. Stop trying to get pity points and rping as a "poc".
Also, stop moving goalposts.

Including white people in radical left movements only serves to make the movements less radical. Look at what happened to BLM when whites started getting involved, or what happened at Standing Rock.

Either way, you still can't show a single successful "Zizekian" movement which exists today. Why not? Perhaps it's because Zizek's platform is ultimately Euro-chauvinist and denies the ability of non-Euros to determine their own destinies?

Not Anglo. Sorry.

This is some seriously reactionary shit dude.

Black Lives Matter was always a fairly liberal org with little to no revolutionary potential. It was doomed from the start to be co-opted by the national bourgeoisie, as disliking police brutality is a very acceptable position since the Civil Rights Movement.
Even Standing Rock was more about ecology, which took the typical liberal route of a "innocent mother earth to be loved" with a slight AnPrim edge, rather than "natives property". Neither of those groups were ever ready for armed combat or any revolutionary activity.
Maybe you should have cited the Black Panthers, or a Canadian native group who actually fought against state repression.

Also, I'm not even a "Zizekian" whatever the fuck that means lmao
Zizeks politics are just okay, but I read him because I'm interested in psychoanalysis and enjoyed the memes.

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Do americans really reason like this? Why should I support americans? Dugin is right about you guys

Americans don't, liberals do.

she's right though

I think I can help to specify his stance further: while he doesn't think that social democracy is the answer or even a working thing, he views that through social democracy we can expose issues that the current capitalist order can't address. The next step would be to propose modest reforms to fix these (this is why he frequently endorses socdems). These reforms will ultimately fail at least in some sense according to him which will force people towards radical solutions.

destruction or unheroic compromise: not by finding some kind of ‘proper
measure’ between the two extremes but by focusing on what one might call the
‘point of the impossible’ of a certain field. The great art of politics is to detect
such points locally, in a series of modest demands which appear as possible
although they are de facto impossible. The situation is like that in science-
fiction stories where the hero opens the wrong door (or presses the wrong
button) and all of a sudden the entire reality around him disintegrates. In the
United States, universal healthcare is obviously such a point of the impossible;
in Europe, it seems to be the cancellation of the Greek debt, and so on. It is
something you can, in principle, do, but de facto you cannot or should not do –
you are free to choose it on condition that you do not actually choose it.
surgit de la méprise, of how the wrong choice has to precede the right choice.
In principle, the choice facing leftist politics is between social-democratic
reformism and radical revolution, but the latter choice, although abstractly
correct and true, is self-defeating and gets stuck in Beautiful Soul immobility:
in the developed Western societies, calls for a radical revolution have no
mobilising power. Only a modest ‘wrong’ choice can create the subjective
conditions for an actual communist perspective: whether it fails or succeeds, it
sets in motion a series of further demands (‘in order to really have universal
healthcare, we also need …’) which will lead to the right choice. There is no
shortcut here, the need for a radical universal change has to emerge by way of
mediation with particular demands. To begin straightaway with the right choice
is therefore even worse than making a wrong choice, as it amounts to saying ‘I
am right and the misery of the world which got it wrong just confirms how
right I am.’ Such a stance relies on a faulty (‘contemplative’) notion of truth,
totally neglecting the practical dimension.
choices, but to make the right mistakes, to select the appropriate wrong
choice.

I know I am asking a lot but can someone put zizek's ideology in stupid people language so I can understand how and what this mad slovakian lad thinks?

thanks

he's slovenian though

Hegelian and Lacanian as far as philosophical tendencies go. He's pretty nebulous about his specific political tendencies apart from "communist" though. Then again, he's a philosopher, not a political theorist.

Ever notice this board doesn't have a plain communist flag?

I'm not sure what you're getting at? It does have socialist and hammer&siccle flags.

not showering

Why do some people dislike zizek?

Because they are fucking retarded.

Are his films good

yes.

zizek gay

I've seen Pervert's Guide to Ideology multiple times, it's a really fun film.

This.

hey anyone remember which lecture of zizeks it is that he talks about sign-value

There are plenty of Communist / Socialist parties that exist in "white" countries you absolute Tard

Zizek is a postmodernist liberal who's a prime example of a "safe" western academia kind of "marxist", whose castrated "marxism" doesn't offend or threaten the system. Literally a charlatan for people who are ignorant of the work of soviet marxists like Vaziulin

Take off that flair, you bumbling retard. Attempting to parse emancipatory philosophy while simultaneously critiquing its function as part of the whole shows how disingenuous you're being. You've afforded no site for difference between the context of Zizek and Vaziulin, which is itself grounds for dismissal of this line of criticism. Why did you choose Vaziulin of all people - his line of thought in The Logic of Capital is remarkably similar to Zizek' Less Than Nothing in their establishment of a distinct social process for the establishment of common relation to essence (Maturity vs. Symbolic order). If anything could be levied in the use of this comparison, it would probably be that Vaziulin, for all the clarifications of possible processes of dialectical development, remained nigh monistic in his fervor (he's almost a determinist)

Oh, forgive me. I actually didnt need to write anything. That, alone, shows you don't know what the fuck you're talking about

he is though. where does he advocate scientific marxism or dialectical materialism? point to one example.

He's a Hegelian. He's not post modern at all.

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Hegel was postmodernist tbh
the whole master/slave dialectic is textbook postmodernism

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Living in The End Times, The Parallax View, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. In practically every single one of his major works.

You're not actually a leftist, are you…?

ok but where though
what passage of those books does he say he's for materialism

>"So why a return to Plato?…This, then, isourbasic philosophico-political choice (decision) today: either repeat in a materialist vein Plato's assertion of the meta-physical dimension of "eternal Ideas:' or continue to dwell in the postmodern universe of "democratic­ materialist" historicist relativism, caught in the vicious cycle of the eternal struggle with "premodern" fundamentalisms. How is this gesture possible, thinkable even? Let us begin with the surprising fact that Badiou identifies the "principal contradiction:' the predominant antagonism, of today's ideological situation not as the struggle between idealism and materialism, but as the strug­ gle between two forms ofmaterialism (democratic and dialectical). Plus, to add insult to injury, "democratic materialism" stands for the reduction of all there is to the historical reality of bodies and languages (the twins of Darwinism, brain science, etc., and of discursive historicism), while "materialist dialectics" adds the "Platonic" ("idealist") dimension of"eternal" Truths. To anyone acquainted with the dialectics of history, however, there should be no surprise here." (Less Than Nothing, p.41-42)

That is the opening section of the first book, dealing with contradiction between non-emancipatory democratic materialisms, which are fundamentally scientistic (not unlike some of the work of the Soviet corpus writer you mentioned) and the fundamentally communist dialectical materialism

Looks like he's trying to sneak idealism into materialism to me.

Your opinion on the matter has been noted.