/lit/ - Literature

>>6732683
>2015
>paying for a postgraduate degree.

You fucked up dude. Nobody is going to take the PhD that you bought seriously.

I recently purchased Zizek's Absolute Recoil to learn about dialectical materialism in depth but shit I can't understand half the shit he's talking about, and he often refers to Kant, Hegel, and Althusser as if I already know everything about their theories but shit i don't

so does anybody know some supplemental material I can read to get a fuller knowledge on materialism and dialectics, or stuff that would help me decipher whatever cryptic shit Zizek is talking about

I figured this would be the best place to ask this question.
Tolkien invented a bunch of languages for his stories. Now, while I admit that this has caused quite a few bullshit trends in the fantasy genre, my question is more about the process Tolkien used and what he threw into Elvish when he created it. Tolkien's philosophy of language is revealed in a myth in which the firstborn Elves lived in a state of unity of signified, signifier, and signifying; his terms, Lacanian though they may sound. To prove their height over the rest of Eru's creation, they constructed the first language. Ultimately, in Tolkien's lore, all languages have their roots here. I have two questions, jumping from this myth.
1) Thoughts on this concept? An Ur-language spoken by the first language-speakers that serves as the common ancestor of all language families? How does this compare to Lacanian, Heideggerian, Wittgensteinian, Chomskyan theories of language and grammer?
2) Does anyone know what languages Tolkien drew on when constructing his language? Obviously German and English and Greek, but I'm having a hard time actually finding information about this.

>...And the conclusion to be drawn here is that, for the very same reason, the Hegelian 'totality' is not 'all.'
>...So, to pursue the rather tasteless metaphor, Hegel was not a sublimated coprophagist, as the usual notion of the dialectical process would lead us to believe. he matrix of the dialectical process is not that of excrement-externalization, but, on the contrary, of appropriation followed by the excremental move of dropping it, releasing it, letting it go. What this means is that one should not equate externalization with alienation. The externalization which concludes a cycle of dialectical process is not alienation, it is the highest point of dis-alienation: one really reconciles oneself with with some objective content not when one still has to strive o master and control it, but when one still has to strive to master and control it, but when one can afford the supreme sovereign gesture of releasing this content from oneself, setting it free...
>What this means is that the hHegelian subject-substance has nothing to do with any kind of mega-subject controlling the dialectical process...The Hegelian process is in fact the most radical version of a 'process without a subject,' in the sense of an agent controlling and directing the process, be it God or humanity or class as a collective subject.

Is he right? Is there no subject in Hegel's dialectic?

WTF is "Absolute Idealism" exactly, and how does it differ from subjective idealism or transcendental idealism?

Can anyone try to explain Hegelian metaphysics to a philosophical pleb, even these dumb-downed Wiki articles I am finding difficulty understanding.

Why aren't you a continental?

I've noticed that /lit/'s Marxists really like to distance Marx's work from any attempts that have been made to build Socialism.
I'm an American, I know America has done some bad stuff, but I still love it. Why do you guys call yourselves Marxists, Socialists, or Communists if you don't like any of the forms Marxism, Socialism, or Communism have taken in history?

>>45769669
Hail Hegel