/lit/ - Literature

Maybe.

>>7057727
>zizek>singer
>zizek=chomsky
>zizek>>>>>>dawkins (why mention him)
>zizek<rorty
Idk bout the others
So Id say hes fine until all schools of philosophy become analytical

philosophy student here

I really don't even understand what his points or positions are. whenever I read or listen to him it's all so esoteric and honestly it just sounds like nonsense

from wiki
>which disputed a Marxist interpretation of ideology as false consciousness and argued for ideology as an unconscious fantasy that structures reality. Žižek considers himself a political radical and critic of neoliberalism. His political thought represents one of two paths of a progressive alternative—either a return to the program of socialism, which Žižek and Alain Badiou advocate, or the proposal of an alternative vision of social arrangements, which is taken up by contemporaries such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger.

Like is this even philosophy? Why doesn't he go into something practical like civil engineering or city planning?

all this theoretical/ideology/unconscious fantasy/bla bla really doesn't seem to have any relation to reality, it's just like freudian nonsense

honestly I have my suspicions he's a charlatan. why is he so obsessed with marx? marx had no political experience and his ideas are basically unfalsifiable, much like frueds.

it's just babble really. a lot of talk but nothing is really being said. I can just imagine a whole bunch of 'intellectuals' discussing him and his though like a pack of pretentious faggots, arguing about interpretations etc

someone tell me, what the fuck is zizeks point? what is he trying to say? society should be structured in some way? is he saying anything at all?

>>7057727

all these people you mentioned are buffoons, so I'm not sure the point of this comparison

Sometimes I fantasize about old philosophers coming back to life and destroying these fucking hacks

>>7057865
How does it feel to be missing out on the next wave in Western philosophical history while you jerk yourself off with the rest of the anglophones about semantic clarity?

>>7057865
I agree with most of what you say but you still sound retarded.

>>7057727
Anglo's wish they could play with Zizek.

>>7057865
>>7057865
dialectical materialism is a philosophy and what don't you understand

read Althusser's Lenin and Philosophy and other essays; I know the guy strangled his wife but still

Rorty is okay, the rest are trash. What the hell are you doing OP?

>>7057890
>dialectical materialism

how does this theory deal with the yanomano? where conflicts are not caused by material needs but rather about women. somebody is cheating etc so they kill eachother. it's a very violent society but they don't lack anything (i.e. they aren't starving)

>>7057881
cool bro, do you feel like you fit in with /lit/ now? I mean it's 4chan right?! FUCK! SHIT! XD

>>7057890
>Hegelism is like a mental disease; you can't know what it is until you get
it, and then you can't know because you have got it

Chomsky is Russel Brand in a tweed jacket

a good way to think about philosophy is to do rankings of philosophers, that shows you really understand what it's all about

>>7057939
>tfw you are #1 on everybody's list

>>7057727

>>7057929
>Chomsky is Russel Brand in a tweed jacket
10/10

>>7057727
Who honestly gives a fuck about Singer. He's a nobody compared to the other intellectuals you mentioned.

>>7058016
Is he seriously taken in Oxford?

>>7057865
I agree with pretty much everything you said, although I do find Žižek's idea of cynical ideology interesting, the idea that people are aware of ideology but they nevertheless give in to ideology. Instead of "they know not what they do" Žižek claims "they know what they are doing, but they are nonetheless doing it". That being said the idea itself is fairly obvious, it's just a nice articulation.

>>7058016
agreed tbh

>>7057929
I thought of Chomksy as Bertrand Russell without the tweed

space is literally the most stupid thing that exist.

>>7058016
Based Dicky Dawkins

>>7058160
Cool things that happen when public intellectual engage with contemporary internet culture

>>7057921
You are the one who doesn't fit in on 4chan. Were you accusing him of being "lol so randum" in the reply or was that your attempt to derail the topic? What a worthless post. I hope you get raped you fat autistic faggot.

>>7057727
i think comparing philosophers doesnt usually make a whole lot of sense, except maybe when they deal with similar things in a similar way and there's a common framework within which you can point out flaws and logical errors.

zizek is a slovenian bolshevik hermit shaman-prophet /phil/ guru.
chomsky is a US-based jewy super-anal analytic mastermind.

Maybe if you were looking at a certain issue or question they both dealt with it would make sense to compare their stances, but just pitching them against each other like pokemon makes little sense to me.

>>7058414

I actually think it makes a great deal of sense.

>>7057865
i'm not a phil student but from what i gathered i would assume zizek's core interest is to connect with others and share what he considers are the inner workings of a very dogmatic, hierarchically structured society, and he does so employing a certain personal mythology that dictates that power corrupts and the elite always fucks the plebs. he also has a sort of perverse interest in understanding, or almost breaking into, the psyche of individuals or groups he finds interesting, which i would say stems from his wish to connect with people. he's stated multiple times that he's depressed and that he has low self esteem, so even though he seems to easily engage and connect with people IRL i suppose he's the type who thinks he outsmarts everyone and 'feels lonely even when amongst friends'.

that's his deal. i like him though. philosophers just usually happen to be assholes.

>>7058416
to what end? i'm generally interested in your answer, i just can't see the point myself.

>>7058442
>generally
genuinely.

>>7057727
The reason why Zizek seems incoherent is because he describes things in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I tried reading the wikipedia article, yet I am still mystified by it. It's just gibberish.

I think Zizek's approach is admirable (I am going to take the guess that he aims to use psychology to explain what compels people to conform to a capitalist social order), unfortunately he fucks it all up by wasting his time on unfalsifiable psychoanalytic gibberish.

>>7057939
nailed it

>>7057865

>philosophy student here
>Why doesn't he go into something practical

>>7058511
I think it really is gibberish

literally just a bunch of random long words strung together to mystify you and make you feel dumb for not understanding, when there's nothing to understand

psychoanalysis was left behind literally decades ago

why don't philosophers just stick to the main issues. you know, what do we know? how do we know what we know? what is the nature of reality? how does language work? what is the relationship beween discourse and experience? what is morality? why ought we be good? what should I do? what am i?

>>7058511

>I tried reading the wikipedia article, yet I am still mystified by it. It's just gibberish.

Well shit, if you're such a noted scholar as to read the Wikipedia article, how can we but trust your half-baked assumptions about what makes sense and what doesn't?

>>7058511
Regardless of what anyone thinks of zizek i don't agree with the whole notion of every thought and idea has to be falsifiable, especially when it comes to highly abstract concepts that are nigh impossible to describe or deal with in a falsifiable way anyways.

There's a high level off BSing and charlatanism in psychoanalytic literature but that doesn't mean it's all bullshit. It's just based on instinct and empathy rather than strict scientific inquiry, that has its advantages as well as its disadvantages.

Human intuition is a wonderful thing and it absolutely makes sense to approach and mentally dissect something with mere intuition every so often. Creativity doesn't follow strict logic

>>7058438
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.998/9.1.r_hurley.txt

This is someone's explanation of the contents of one of his books. It's hard to follow, but here are the interesting points:

> All of those old Marxist buzz-phrases on the back-end of Rorty's parallelisms are, he argues, the unfortunate baggage of the revolutionary romanticism attached to Marx-Leninism, and speak, more than anything else, to a delusional self-importance on the part of leftists who have wanted to cast themselves as heroic players on the world-historical stage. For Rorty, this kind of discourse was never very good at achieving what it ostensibly wanted to in the first place; now that Marxism has been universally discredited, this discourse is less useful and more masturbatory than ever. But do progressive critics and theorists really have to make Rorty's severe amputational choice?

>Slavoj Zizek insists on speaking in much of the Marxist language Rorty repudiates. Beginning with his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek has produced a large and remarkable body of work, arguing (among other things) that in order for the left really to address the kinds of social inequities that Rorty enumerates, it must take into account the ways in which capitalism and its current political support system (a.k.a. "liberal democracy") attempt to maintain their smooth functioning by constructing self-naturalizing horizons of belief and practice.

>Zizek, following Jacques Lacan, sees language as necessarily partial, occlusive, deformed by some "pathological twist." These deformations and blockages are for Zizek ideological, are indeed the very logic and structure of ideology

Basically, what this is saying is that Zizek thinks you can't criticize capitalism in terms of liberal democracy and conventional economics, because the terminology we use is inseparable from the prevailing ideological 'zeitgeist'. In other words, we live in a world dominated by capitalist liberal democracies; it stands to follow that our thinking and understanding of language is shaped by capitalism and liberalism. Thus, trying to mount a criticism of either one in its own terms is a futile effort, because the language we use (shaped by the ideology) functions, in part, to perpetuate the status quo. For example, a statement like 'minimum wage should be raised' presupposes several things, such as that the means of production are owned by the capitalist who is in a position to hand out wages to begin with.

At least that is my understanding of it. The link I added at the top has some further details explaining this in further detail (specifically that since the fall of the Eastern bloc, liberal democracy and capitalism have been progressively been asserted as a default, natural, 'common sense' condition) before it evolves into progressively more meaningless (to me) psychoanalytic babble.

Some more quotes from the article:

>Zizek's most recent book, The Plague of Fantasies, takes its title from a line in Petrarch, and refers, as Zizek puts it, to "images which blur one's clear reasoning"; this plague, he says, "is brought to its extreme in today's audiovisual media" (1). According to Zizek, his new book "approaches systematically, from a Lacanian viewpoint, the presuppositions of this 'plague of fantasies'"

>First, the collapse of the Stalinist Eastern bloc has brought with it the apparently across-the-board disabling of Marxism as a viable geopolitical force. Zizek suggests that this has eliminated for the capitalist West its only competing, full-scale politico-economic model of modernization, leaving it instead with a number of less monolithic adversaries it can characterize as atavistically "premodern"--the multiple fundamentalisms, nationalisms, "tribalisms," and their metonymically associated "terrorist" groups and movements--and thus demonize as wholly external forces of irrationality. The supposedly bounded liberal-democratic "inside" of the capitalist socius is then in contrast presented as a space of unambiguous progress, pragmatic reason, and "common sense"--as a "non-ideological" or "post-ideological" zone. It should go without saying that for Zizek this zone is as ideological as ever (if not more so).

> Second, accompanying this collapse of Marxism as active geopolitical presence and the concomitant move in the West to a post-ideological self-representation has been the implicit or explicit abandonment of ideology as a tool for cultural analysis by progressive Western critics (especially those in Anglo-American humanities departments)...In Zizek's view, these are modes of critique that, however well intentioned, finally work in the service of capitalist liberal democracy rather than in opposition to it.

>Finally, this ostensibly post-ideological moment is also, for Zizek, a charged economico-technological one in which new mediatic spaces and practices such as the Internet enable the Symbolic Order--i.e., ideology--to inscribe itself isotopically on and in subjects' most intimate bodily zones and deepest libidinal recesses.

From this point, you will notice, it becomes incomprehensible unless you understand Lacanian psychoanalysis (I do not), so don't even bother.

>>7058574
>>7058593
thanks m8.

>>7057865
>he doesn't understand critical theory

>>7058557
I am sorry, I will admit I am not familiar with psychoanalysis or privy to its terminology. I am not going to write off Zizek as a shit-talking hack (in fact, if you haven't noticed, I'm probably the only person in the thread that tried to elucidate what he might be trying to say) but I am skeptical of psychoanalysis, not only because it is unfalsifiable, but because it makes very specific conjectures about the human mind while simultaneously being unfalsifiable.

If I understood his intention correctly (let me know if I haven't), then I think he's going in the right direction, but ultimately I think his approach of using Freudian quackery will lead to a dead end.

>>7058617
modes and tropes, bb.
modes and tropes to reading.

>>7058623
What do you even mean?

>>7057874
It's better than jerking off about semantic obscurity.

>>7057874
Philosophy ended with Hegel. Wittgenstein made its coffin and Heidegger read its eulogy. Everything since them has been a bad joke.

>itt: I don't understand it, therefore it must be bullshit

quotes from Zizek's "Living in the End Times":

"To the question "If capitalism is really so much better then socialism, why are our lives still miserable?" it provides a simple answer: it is because we are not yet really in capitalism, for the Communists are still ruling, only now wearing the masks of new owners and managers... "

"In contemporary society, the predominant stance is rather: "I believe (that the repeated hedonistic transgressions are what makes life worth living), but nonetheless... (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but are just artificial coloring serving to re-emphasize the grayness of social reality).""

"Austria in 'the Sound of Music' is not the Austrian's Austria, but the mythic Hollywood image of Austria. And yet, over the last few decades, the Austrian themselves have started to "play Austrians," as if identifying with the Hollywood image of their own country."

"There is, however, something deceptively reassuring in our readiness to assume guilt for the threats to our environment: we like to be guilty, since, if we are guilty, then it all depends on us,..."

>>7058063
yes, but you are not

Zizek is just jealous that he's not smart enough to be cognitivist.

>>7057865
Also a phil student, Zizek is literally not taught at all because most of what he says is completely worthless, whereas at least most the other philosophers the OP listed actually contributed to interesting areas of philosophy

except chalmers who im pretty sure is an autistic retard

>>7058951
I'm not sure where you live but he's taught in eastern Europe.

>>7057929
ayy lmao

the rest of this shit thread was worth it for this description

>>7058574
pretty good summary tbh, thanks for effortposting

>>7057727
>Big Boys of English Speaking academia
>Singer
The philosophical equivalent of Judge Judy, Singer's self-contradictory pap ("abortion and infanticide are acceptable because these immature humans are incapable or rational preference" vs. "rationality is not a requirement for ethical conduct. Any irrational being will avoid pain, which is why cruelty to animals is unethical", which are flatly contradictory positions). Makes money by writing books that tell Liberals 'doing what you want is A-OK"
A buffoon.
>Chomsky
A decent linguist, his work in every other field is no more (or less) than self-serving rent seeking which he publicly admits that he, himself, does not believe.
Darn good at making a buck of gullible college students, but (unless you are speaking of linguistics, where he is very good) not a big academic.
>Dawkins
A mediocre-at-best scientist who will leave exactly zero mark on actual science, he became popular as a writer of PopSci books. When that income source dried up (because his theories were soundly thrashed by scientists) he switched to a series of popular books trashing what he thinks religious people might believe.
Never was a great thinker, never will be.
>Rorty
A man who counted on his readers having never heard of Gorgias, Rorty took facile rhetoric, relabeled it neopragmatism, and sold it like snake oil.
>Chalmers
About time an actual academic appeared. although, to be fair, while he does a fine job of reminding everyone of the hard problem, he has no answers. Which is no one's fault.
>Dennett
Refuses to use proper terms, mainly to hide that, deep down, he he knows any clear statement of his theories leads to eye-rolling
Not a serious academic.
.
This list is a list of "People that stupid people think are smart"

>>7059743
is this like an autistic nabokov imitation but for all of pop academia

>>7058414
>chomsky
>analytic mastermind

Maybe when it comes to linguistics, but when it comes to political analysis, his thinking game is piss poor. Chomsky is the intellectual equivalent of Krysten Ritter's feet.

>>7059743
>"abortion and infanticide are acceptable because these immature humans are incapable or rational preference"

rationalism worship at its most hideous. academia day of the rope when

>>7059788
Getting mad at Singer is like getting mad at a schizophrenic.
He can't help it, he's off in the head.

>>7058842
>If capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still miserable?

...what?

who thought that was a good or profound question to pose?

>>7059788

>rationalism worship

Yeah, no. You're using words at random.

>>7059824
>mfw instead of getting butthurt i decide to just take it and accept sometimes Im not as smart as I think I am

i-im gonna make it /lit/

>>7057873

Would love to see Kierkegaard ironically tear him a new one

>>7057865
top kek do you go to community college or something?

>>7057727
>singer

Stopped reading there

>>7059847

That's very mature of you.

>>7059743
>A decent linguist, his work in every other field...
lol

http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/decoding-chomsky-european-review.pdf

>>7059743

>i have no idea what i'm talking about, can you tell?