/lit/ - Literature

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OYSMWJafAI
So basically Zizek argues that ideas like the ownership of the means of production and self-government by the people aren't a desirable goal because what he wants is to read books and watch music and doesn't want to bother being an active citizen. What we really need is an effective bureaucracy that takes care of our material needs, it doesn't matter if most people have no power in this system. In fact, since bureaucracies are more effective the more centralized the power is, authoritarianism turns out to be what we need. Zizek's philosophy is essentially a glorification of a power hierarchy so extreme that a moderate conservative like Jordan Peterson would never even dream of defending.
Are the more or less "libertarian" (or at least non- authoritarian) leftists who consider him an important political theorists even understand what he is arguing for? In the video he doesn't really try to obfuscate that he is a totalitarian, he very much owns it and argues for it. Yet I barely see anyone discussing his ideas in this light.

> The most profound word to emerge from the military history of recent times is
‘overkill’; a term that registers something from the infernal core of desire. Superficially it
is irrelevant whether one is killed by a slingshot or by a stupendous quantity of high-explosive, napalm, and white phosphorous, and in this sense overkill is merely an
economic term signifying an unnecessary wastage of weaponry. Yet the Vietnam war—in whose scorched soil this word was germinated—was not merely the culmination of a
series of military and industrial tendencies leading to the quantification of destructive
power on a monetary basis, it was also a decisive point of intersection between
pharmacology and the technology of violence. Whilst a systematic tendency to overkill meant that ordnance was wasted on the already charred and blasted corpses of the
Vietnamese, a subterranean displacement of overkill meant that the demoralized soldiers
of America’s conscript army were ‘wasted’ (‘blitzed’, ‘bombed-out’) on heroin,
marijuana and LSD. This intersection implies (as can be traced by a systematic linguistic ambivalence) that the absolute lack of restraint—even according to the most cynical
criteria—in the burning, dismemberment, and general obliteration of life, was the obscure heart of an introjected craving; of a desire that found its echo in the hyperbolic dimension
of war.
damn