/lit/ - Literature

>>11783623
your book comes out next week slavoj, there will be at least a couple of /lit/ threads for you

keep sniffling my man

>>11783623
He stopped being promoted by the establishment and leftist media once he correctly pointed out that western Europe was going full-retard on refugees and that Americans voted for Trump because they were fed up with free-trade and associated stagnation.

>>11783637
Zizek thinks that Europe should accept even more refugees than it does now

>>11783659
I'm pretty sure I've seen him argue otherwise in recent articles. Do you have a source for that?

>>11783659
Yikes

>>11783731
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/three-variations-on-trump-chaos-europe-and-fake-news/

Reminder that Zizek is the GOAT despite what redditors will tell you!

>>11783632
aren't most of his books bullshit, I remember watching a video of him pointing out sentences from his own book saying "what the fuck does this even mean", he wrote most of them because he had a publisher deal

>>11783623
Rest easy Slavoy, there will always be 16 to 25 year olds.

>>11783772
i think he's pretty great, tbqh. he pretty much repeats himself through most of his books but any idea you can repeat through however many books over a couple of decades can't just be thrown away. this doorstopper is pretty good.

>>11783632
which book is that?

>>11783836
>In recent years, techno-scientific progress has started to utterly transform our world - changing it almost beyond recognition. In this extraordinary new book, renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek turns to look at the brave new world of Big Tech, revealing how, with each new wave of innovation, we find ourselves moving closer and closer to a bizarrely literal realisation of Marx's prediction that 'all that is solid melts into air.' With the automation of work, the virtualisation of money, the dissipation of class communities and the rise of immaterial, intellectual labour, the global capitalist edifice is beginning to crumble, more quickly than ever before-and it is now on the verge of vanishing entirely.

>But what will come next? Against a backdrop of constant socio-technological upheaval, how could any kind of authentic change take place? In such a context, Zizek argues, there can be no great social triumph - because lasting revolution has already come into the scene, like a thief in broad daylight, stealing into sight right before our very eyes. What we must do now is wake up and see it.

source:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/311080/like-a-thief-in-broad-daylight/

Parallax View is pretty good desu

>>11783623
>In Žižek, we find astonishing evidence of the fact that the “Communist hypothesis,” as Badiou calls it, will never go away. Notwithstanding Marx’s attempt to present it as the conclusion of a science, the “hypothesis” cannot be put to the test and refuted. For it is not a prediction or, in any real sense, a hypothesis. It is a statement of faith in the unknowable. Žižek unhesitatingly adds his weight to every cause that is directed, in whatever way, against the established order of the Western democracies. He even sets himself against parliamentary democracy and has no qualms in advocating terror (suitably aestheticized) as part of his glamorous detachment. But his few empty invocations of the egalitarian alternative advance no further than the clichés of the French Revolution and are soon wrapped in Lacanian spells by way of shielding them from argument. When it comes to real politics, he writes as though negation is enough. Whether it be the Palestinian intifada, the IRA, the Venezuelan Chavistas, the French sans-papiers, or the Occupy movement—whatever the radical cause, it is the attack on the “System” that matters.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/clown-prince-revolution-14632.html
zizek btfo, how will he ever recover?

>>11783882
>We should not be surprised, therefore, when Žižek writes that “the thin difference between the Stalinist gulag and the Nazi annihilation camp was also, at that moment, the difference between civilization and barbarism.” His only interest is in the state of mind of the perpetrators: Were they moved, in however oblique a manner, by utopian enthusiasms, or were they moved, on the contrary, by some discredited attachment? If you step back from Žižek’s words, and ask yourself just where the line between civilization and barbarism lay, at the time when the rival sets of death camps were competing over their body counts, you would surely put Communist Russia and Nazi Germany on one side of the line, and a few other places—Britain and America, for instance—on the other. To Žižek, that would be an outrage, a betrayal, a pathetic refusal to see what is really at stake. For what matters is what people say, not what they do, and what they say is redeemed by their theories, however stupidly or carelessly pursued, and with whatever disregard for real people. We rescue the virtual from the actual through our words, and the deeds have nothing to do with it.
>As in 1789, as in 1917, as in the Long March of Mao, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, the work of destruction feeds on itself. Žižek’s windbaggery serves one purpose: to turn attention away from the actual world, from real people, and from ordinary moral and political reasoning. It exists to promote a single and absolute cause, the cause that admits of no criticism and no compromise and that offers redemption to all who espouse it. And what is that cause? The answer is there on every page of Žižek’s writings: Nothing.

Likely because Zizek's project, which is seemingly geared towards articulating the question of how to articulate a new socialism in the 21st century, is absolutely unfinished.

>>11783772
>a video of him pointing out sentences from his own book saying "what the fuck does this even mean"
Based

>>11783913
rekt

>>11783913
>attacking someone for not making the false equivalence between the Gulag and the concentration camp instead of the real, documented, and blatant intellectual dishonesty they commit
Is this the true power of radical centrism? Nazi apologetics?

>>11783882
>>11783913
Wonderfully written criticism
>>11784037
Remarkable how quick your broken reasoning jumps to defend your intuition. Or you might just be deliberately misrepresenting what you just read. Zizek didn't simply refuse to equate the Gulag and the concentration camp. He went much further than that by saying that the "thin" difference (he has the vulgar impudence to joke about this and then deliver the punchline) between the two was equivalent to that between civilisation and barbarism. That is not the same as simply not equating the two.

>>11783772
he "writes" a lot of books for money by copypasting the same paragraphs from old articles in different order. you just need to pick the ones where he's actually trying, like parallax view.

>>11783848
Excellent thanks anon

>>11783623
(and that's a good thing!)

>>11784095
right and this has to do with universalism (e.g. stalinist prisoners were forced to sign birthday cards to stalin). It's a formal point which is totally mischaracterized here as being a justification of the gulags. He also said Ghandi was more violent than Hitler, might as well get on writing an article taking that in bad faith too, make a quick buck

>>11783659
Yes, but he also says that we should be stalin-tier demanding of them

>plagiarizes himself

*sniffs* notheeng personal keed

>>11783882
>>11783913
Man, I was feeling a bit ambivalent about Zizek recently, but after reading this I'm back on the Z-train. It's just a description of a person with real political convictions written for an audience that considers nothing more passe than legitimate belief, so that all you have to do is mention something like the notion of redemption or the ideals of the French Revolution and they will sneer like they've been trained to sneer. Notice the repeated references to "real" politics as opposed to outdated idealism when of course Zizek's entire project hinges on the fact that, when you examine what lies behind such unassuming "apolitical" language, you discover utopias more deranged, ideology more insidious than any 20th century totalitarianism. Fuck this guy and the horseshoe theory he rode in on.

>>11785417
>I was feeling a bit ambivalent about Zizek recently
no you weren't.

>>11785543
i think he means he's bisexual and wanted to fuck Zizek..

y'know.. am- bi- valent...
i'll see myself out

>>11785212
based Slavoj

>>11783994
unironically this. wtf I love philosophy now.

>>11783623
slavo c-section

>>11783751
That's not what he was saying in the article.

>>11784037
It's even dumber because Zizek supports Rojava's Libertarian Socialism and he's not a fucking tankie.

>>11783623
People don't actually take orthodox Marxists seriously dude. They haven't since the 1960s.

well he tricked me into reading Hegel but I've forgotten most of it

>>11787519
>because Zizek supports Rojava's Libertarian Socialism and he's not a fucking tankie.

Zizek "supports" Rojava in the same way your parents supported you when you drew a scribbly picture as a child. He's made it clear many, many times he does not for a second have any hope in these types of decentralized or libertarian attempts at Socialism to work. He keeps a picture of Stalin beside him for a reason and its not simple "epig troll" purposes. He earnestly believes that an Authoritarian Communism is the only feasible way forward and all his work goes towards trying to reframe that totalitarian bent in language that will be paletable for the Left.
No he won't identify himself as a """tankie""" as you call it, but Stalinists never do.

>>11787625
Based zizek

>>11787625
>He earnestly believes that an Authoritarian Communism is the only feasible way forward
why?

only a moron would´ve held Zizek in high regard

>>11787519
>Rojava's Libertarian Socialism
Rojava are cringey social democrats and complete puppets to the US. Read On Contradictions by Mao Tse Tung

>>11789132
cringe

>>11789132
cringe!

Will Self bodied this fool

>>11789132
Based

>>11789482
>>11789490

what do you expect from left wing menes

>>11789132

>>11789839
Marxism is a science and Marx was wrong about a lot of shit. If Marxism was correct every country would be at about the same level of economic development by now, among other wrong predictions, including that the proletariat of an industrliazed state will rise up in revolution (when all examples of revolutions happened in third world countries). Marxism doesn’t stop with Marx. Bakunin was a pol tier retard who wanted to skip to anarchism and blamed the jews for everyone’s problems without first undergoing the developmental process that Lenin came up with and Mao critiqued and edited. The USSR and China brought serfs and peasants into word superpower status. Anarkiddies cant even last five minutes before they get btfod by a developed superpower

>>11790103
>If Marxism was correct every country would be at about the same level of economic development by now
Isn't this a ricardian theory more than anything? Pls no bully

>>11783913
> If you step back from Žižek’s words, and ask yourself just where the line between civilization and barbarism lay, at the time when the rival sets of death camps were competing over their body counts, you would surely put Communist Russia and Nazi Germany on one side of the line, and a few other places—Britain and America, for instance—on the other.

> Western democracies that gave us such heroes as Captain America!
> It can't happen here!

It's pathetic to consider yourself a thinker and disregard the differences between Nazist and Stalinist atrocities. While both were executed by secularized masses influenced by scientific revelations — economical creatures who simply did what they ought to according to the customs of their societies, so to speak, — their reasons and discourses were radically different. Also, you have to study what perpetrators thought and told as is was THE thing that made the whole amusement park move — as many have shown, you can't reason about German or Soviet camps in regular terms of utility, gain and political conflict. There was no practical point in killing Untermenschen and switching it to the top gear when defeat was near; the whole German nation was supposed to follow its leader when all was lost, as there would be no future and no point for it to exist further. Some Gulag camps were useful for industry, some simply killed people with hard work and harsh conditions. Identifying and shooting as many enemies of the people as Moscow demanded to be shot in your region, and show trials, and torture that made people who would've been found guilty anyway plead guilty make no sense outside of dominant ideology, no matter how twisted and warped it really was.

See The Communist Postscript by Groys, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? by Zhizhek, the list goes on...

>>11790103
This image conveniently portrays that even sympathetic researcher who tries to apply common reasoning to Soviet Union utterly fails.

>>11785316
Underrated post.

>>11790103
>The USSR and China brought serfs and peasants into word superpower status
how is that working for them now?

>>11791998
they are both top 10 in GDP, Vhina is probably first

>>11792011
But they aren't communist.

>>11792077
>not knowing Xi's "socialism in 20 years."
ffs Not even a tankie but China is Leninist/Maoist and they are in state capitalism as planned. None of them pretended that they were socialist let alone communist

>>11792077
Who do you mean by "they"? China is still run by the communist party, they are even still doing 5 year plans. Neither the USSR or China ever called themselves a communist country (this is a semantic point, communism comes at the end of history, socialism comes before). Russia isn't run by communists anymore but they were a lot more powerful when they were.

>>11792077
>>11792102
not even a tankie btw. fuck Lenin and Mao. this is just a shit point to try and btfo tankies with.