Comment on *sniff* *mumbles*

• Juice@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  If you’re on the right you think he’s a Marxist commie, and don’t like commies.

  If you’re a commie you don’t think he’s a commie, you think he’s full of shit and uses left wing intellectual language to hide that he’s an apologist for liberal social democracy.

  If you’re an anarchist probably think he’s an avatar for a certain kind of former Soviet bloc intellectualist elitism, and he actively discourages direct action (I’ve never spoken to an anarchist about him, I might have to ask one.)

  Gender critics and feminists don’t like him because he’s more than a little chauvinistic, and a vocal critic of Judith Butler.

  If you’re apolitical you think he’s annoying and incomprehensible.

  I think he appeals to a certain sort of budding or wannabe left intellectual. Someone who doesn’t completely understand his work as a decades-long project, probably because they are still discovering it, and the political consequences of that project. Like he says things that are interesting and sort of novel because he’s a Hegelian and Hegelian analysis can be full of all kinds of cool insights. When you assemble his arguments together as a body of work though it has a much different character than some of his more interesting points taken in isolation, which takes on a different character when put together so that one can see the arc of his work. But as a moderate Hegelian he neither fits with the right Fukuyamist Hegelians or the left Marxist Hegelians, and he is critical of both groups.

  I think he understands intellectualism as a social force, and likes to bother different stripes of intellectuals. He’s controversial enough to stay relevant, and good at working the media. I think he is very intentional with all this stuff.

  But he broke Jordan Peterson when they debated, and got him out of the spotlight for like a year or two and that was pretty funny

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  • KTJ_microbes@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    There is an interesting interpretation of Zizek saying that he is practicing an unusual, if not new, form of rhetoric/reasoning which is aiming exactly at this kind of dissonance. I’ve seen it in the Philosophize This podcast, but they might have gotten it from elsewhere. It goes like this:

    1. Start with a point that the public/target group generally agrees to. Or at least it is clearly understandable. It can even be a fact. Like: there is a huge industry around automatizing sex activities, sex toys could basically have sex with each other.
    2. Arrive at a point when an obvious opinion is expect. For example: There is an expectation to hear that sex toys having sex with each other is just absurd and dehumanizing and shows their futile purpose.
    3. Put a twist on it, when you come to a logical yet unobvious conclusion. For example: Sex toys can relieve performance pressure, and people can enjoy their love life more (while Zizek’s example is absurd, sex toys actually help many couples with that in much more plain ways).

    Now it usually shows some kind of absurd. For example, sexual puritanism usually lauds calm love life practices - like a chat over a tea with no sexual pressure - but they might be easier to achieve with the help of obscene technology or practices, which release the performance pressure.

    His style at least provokes (some) people to think and question dogmas. But it will make any movement aiming at radical coherence or agreement within a group have a beef with him. And you can find incoherence or incompleteness in any way of thinking (summoning the ghost of Gödel for the ultimate proof). And the attitude towards its own shortcomings tells you something about the movement.

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