/lit/ - Literature

Can someone give me a crash course of what Zizek stands for? What are his stances/arguments?

Let us posts instances of pure ideology on 4chan.

One example is, >reddit. What exactly do we mean by this reply? Could it be a cynical reaction to democracy? Or just edgy contrarianism?

Went to see Zizek speak yesterday. Here are some observations. I'm afraid they're not in much depth as I had quite a few beers beforehand and my eyesight is poor so I struggled with some of the subtitles.

-- Half of his lecture was copied and pasted from one of his Guardian articles (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/13/capital-politics-wikileaks-democracy-market-freedom))
-- The other half was a summary of the book Flash Boys, about how the stock market is rigged in favour of frontrunners due to automated technology which plays the market far more efficiently than we could ever do manually (I need to read the book I think because I didn't exactly grasp it all, although it kinda reminded me of online betting sites' odds algorithms)
-- He did a bit on the 'anxiety of choice' -- which I'm sure he ripped-off wholesale from someone else -- and sort of used it to justify a totalitarian state apparatus, albeit a 'quiet' one that doesn't infringe too much on our day-to-day freedoms (which, come to think of it, sounds quite similar to his descriptions of our current liberal democratic governments)
-- At the end of the lecture he segued from condemning megacorporations' lack of regard for the consumer into vaguely concluding that it would take a sort of Nietzschean Master to liberate us from the chains of capitalism
-- I noticed that he was careful to hedge his bets and never concede that he sympathised with any particular school of thought, from the Frankfurt School to Stalinism, despite often using them as examples to reinforce his points
-- He dismissed Thomas Piketty quite summarily as an 'idealist' mentally trapped within the confines of the capitalist system, and basically intimated that redistributing wealth from top to bottom via tax was merely papering over the fundamental cracks in society
-- Interestingly, he claimed that he expects global upheaval to originate from within the 'capitalist bubble' (i.e. within the liberal democratic first-world) rather than from the truly disenfranchised people of the third-world
-- He also made a few edgy, borderline racist remarks about letting Somalis starve and how you don't see Europeans immigrating en masse into Africa, which went down a treat
-- The two Americans who spoke during the Q&A seemed to have never even heard of him and rambled inanely for ages before asking stupid inconsequential questions, which was funny considering what Zizek has said about American students in the past

All in all it was an alright event. I thought the lecture was shite but the Q&A with Paul Mason was interesting and amusing.

Shpook ish, sniff, pjur aidijolodgy!

Do you think great thinkers of past days would have television appearances if they were alive today, like Slavoj Zizek?

Do you think Schopenhauer and Hegel would have debated each other live on television?