Chomsky BTFO Zizek and Lacan

[Anonymous No.17516152]

>What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.

Is he right?

[Anonymous No.17516155]

>>17516152
yesh

[Anonymous No.17516157]

>>17516152
>But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan.

Chills every time, Noam really can be quite a ruthless guy

[Anonymous No.17516160]

>>17516152
Chomsky didn't BTFO anybody ever, quit embarrassing yourself.

[Anonymous No.17516163]

Stop reading jews

[Anonymous No.17516172]

>>17516160
he BTFO'd Buckley

[Anonymous No.17516173]

>>17516160
What about Alan Dershwitz?

[Anonymous No.17516180]

>>17516172
Literally who the fuck is Buckley

[Anonymous No.17516198]

>>17516173
Finkelstein BTFO'd him first

[Anonymous No.17516209]

>>17516180

William F Buckley, peabrain

[Anonymous No.17516224]

>>17516209
Literally who the fuck is this guy

[Anonymous No.17516231]

>>17516224
William Frank Buckley Junior, poindexter

[Anonymous No.17516234]

>>17516152
Yes. But the challenge comes when you start to ask yourself how he too is guilty of this sin

[Anonymous No.17516242]

>>17516234
Chomsky's stuff is always written in very clear, simple English with reference to empirical data.

[Anonymous No.17516247]

>>17516152
What is he specifically referring to when he says "theory"? I have an idea but want to be sure

[Anonymous No.17516263]

>>17516198
> William F. Buckley.

[Anonymous No.17516270]

>>17516247
Critical theory

[Anonymous No.17516290]

>>17516152

Reminder that:

1. This is tremendously ironic since Chomsky's own brand of "Socialism" is quite removed from the Empirical.
2. Zizek made him sound like a twitter tranny when he (Chomsky) said something to the effect of "the followers of Pol Pot are not as bad as the followers of Lacan".

[Anonymous No.17516315]

>>17516242
>"pol pot good" - chomsky
>*pol pot empirically bad*
>"uhh...UUUUUUUH...see..actually the perception in the west of the victims of communism is only useful to paint communists as like evil or something so we shouldn't really care if pol pot literally ordered a bunch of mongoloids to kill people with glasses in a forest because..like.......reagan bad........or something"

[Anonymous No.17516320]

>>17516152
Zizek BTFO'd Chomsky about his anglo retardation and lack of dialectical thinking.
https://youtu.be/ne3uZSQmXzc

[Anonymous No.17516324]

>>17516270
K that's what I thought. I've honestly read a book on it and I'm still not sure how to define Critical Theory. Foucault and a few others had some interesting ideas that were used to develop some terrible ones. Just to be clear postmodernism =/= Critical Theory right?

[Anonymous No.17516329]

>>17516320
Zizek should just drop his meandering, clumsy attempts at explaining himself in relation to the Chomsky stuff, it's embarrassing. His fans don't give a shit either way

[Anonymous No.17516345]

>Chomsky
https://youtu.be/8yj7dVFXdp8

[Anonymous No.17516353]

>>17516324
>Just to be clear postmodernism =/= Critical Theory right?

There's a lot of overlap there, someone like Foucault is regarded as an OG critical theorist these days

[Anonymous No.17516393]

>>17516242
You fail to apprehend the challenge. What is Chomsky doing?

[Anonymous No.17516396]

>>17516353
>Foucault is regarded as an OG critical theorist these days
I can sort of see why, but from what I understand, Foucault was trying to describe how language, knowledge, power, and other things worked in society. Then people came along and said "How do we apply his ideas to our shit little causes?" And from there Theory was born.

[Anonymous No.17516398]

>>17516152
nuclear level BTFO. it's over for pseuds. no one respects you. give up.

[Anonymous No.17516399]

>>17516393
Oh, sorry, I didn't realise you were a Schizo Poster

[Anonymous No.17516487]

>>17516315
Totally untrue, Noam has criticised commie totalitarianism multiple times.

https://youtu.be/jxhT9EVj9Kk

[Anonymous No.17517049]

>kike doesn't like our guy zizek
zzz

[Anonymous No.17517061]

Yes, I honestly think Chomsky was the winner of the Zizek-Peterson debate.

[Anonymous No.17517066]

>>17516152
Chomsky is high on his own farts. Zizek at least articulates the parts of Chomsky's thought he agrees with and acts in good faith, whereas Chomsky is just fueled by undergrad anglo brainlet ressentiment and meme words like "no substance" "charlatanism" that are used to cover up his lack of understanding when it comes to different intellectual contexts

[Anonymous No.17517075]

>>17516152
Yes. Zizek is one of the biggest pseuds of them all. Continental philosophy was a mistake. They're modern day sophists.

[Anonymous No.17517080]

>chomsky
>anglo
yanks aren't anglos brainlets

[F. Gardner No.17517081]

Sokal affair already btfo these academic pseuds. Read a physics textbook and learn something applicable.

[Anonymous No.17517108]

Chomsky is a linguist, not a philosopher and even then his entire theory is nothing more than what Kant had already established with his critique of Hume. Chomsky says philosophers use obfuscating language, well to refute that try to follow Chomsky or Foucault during their debate.

[Anonymous No.17517114]

>>17516180
>>17516224
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=William+F+Buckley

[Anonymous No.17517115]

A chemistry enthusiast and linguist or a philosophy professor trying to become philosophers leads to embarrassment who would've known?

[Anonymous No.17517120]

>>17517080
Yes they are

[Anonymous No.17517134]

>>17517108
Everything Chomsky writes is clear and (fairly) concise. Foucault is the opposite. He takes five pages to get to a relatively simple point, dressing it up in useless, made-up jargon to hide the fact there's not much underneath his prose.

At minimum, Foucault is the worst writer I've ever seen.

[Anonymous No.17517138]

>>17516152
Entirely correct.

I mostly disagree with Chomsky on political issues (on scientific issues we agree a lot), but at least he's very clear and focuses on the real world.

[Anonymous No.17517151]

>Yes they are

[Anonymous No.17517166]

>>17516315
you know they say pol pot was bad because he killed like half of the city-dwelling population of his entire country, but then i think about the sort of "people" city-dwellers are in my own country and i have to wonder if maybe he had a point

[Anonymous No.17517211]

>>17517134
Pretty much.

Either these guys are charlatans or extremely bad writers. Good writing is clear, very clear. Whitman, Baudelaire, Calderón, Camões, Hemingway, Tolstoy: all clear, very clear. Even symbolist and modernist writers, such as Mallarmé, are still very clear in the way they present their images, although sometimes the true meaning might be obscure for artistic (not intellectual!) reasons. If you read, say, the essays of T.S. Eliot, in which his goal was intellectual rather than artistic, they're actually extremely clear and go straight to the point - it's in fact hard to find clearer prose than Eliot's.

Scientific writing is also extremely clear: it's just that it's filled with formulas, but once any person takes the required pre-requisite courses he will be able to understand it. Even the most advanced mathematics is clear. Even the proof of Fermat's last theorem is clear: all the people who had the prerequisites understood it and there was consensus about what it meant.

So why aren't post-modernists equally clear? In the case of Plato or Heraclitus, they lived thousands of years ago, and came from semi-mystical cultures. This is not an excuse for contemporary writers to be obscure; unless, of course, they are also ready to believe in Zeus and start sacrificing animals to Artemis.

[Anonymous No.17517217]

>>17516345
>commies actually exists
>stfu bitch > arguments
t. radical centrist

[Anonymous No.17517748]

>>17517066
>noooo you have to respect my intellectual tradition many super serious german and french academics made their careers on it it's super serious
>I DESERVE RESPECT YOU'RE BEING RUDE

[Anonymous No.17517811]

Lacan and Zizek might be a mystical charlatans, but Chomsky is the ultimate mystical midwit.

[Anonymous No.17517883]

>>17516152
Fuck off with the pulpil.

[Anonymous No.17517983]

>>17516152
This is pretty much the standard Analytic critique of Continentals.

I can't make a judgement but his argument can be summed up as:
>Where's your evidence?
>The scientific community does not support this

[Anonymous No.17518011]

chomskys a liberal hack, read Michael Parenti instead

[Anonymous No.17518055]

>CHOMSKY: Foucault is an interesting case because I’m sure he honestly wants to undermine power but I think with his writings he reinforced it. The only way to understand Foucault is if you are a graduate student or you are attending a university and have been trained in this particular style of discourse. That’s a way of guaranteeing, it might not be his purpose, but that’s a way of guaranteeing that intellectuals will have power, prestige and influence. If something can be said simply, say it simply, so that the carpenter next door can understand you. Anything that is at all well understood about human affairs is pretty simple. I find Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression. I find that I have to decode him, and after I have decoded him, maybe I’m missing something. I don’t get the significance of what I am left with. I have never effectively understood what he was talking about. I mean, when I try to take the big words he uses and put them into words that I can understand and use, it is difficult for me to accomplish this task. It all strikes me as overly convoluted and very abstract. But what happens when you try to skip down to real cases? The trouble with Foucault, and with this certain kind of theory, arises when it tries to come down to earth. Really, nobody was able to explain to me the importance of his work…

Based

[Anonymous No.17518094]

>>17518055
Foucalt destroyed Chomsky in their debate. Chomsky's muh innate goodness of human nature was painful to watch and Foucalt was even right about bourgeoise and marxism. That's why most fags larping as marxist and commies are upper middle class college students from the West.

[Anonymous No.17518115]

>>17516152
>raped violently and publically by foucault

[Anonymous No.17518146]

>>17516152
Noam spent forty years insisting Israel is America's puppet, when in reality it's the other way around. He's right about Lacan but he's a charlatan himself. Arguably much worse.

Chomsky BTFO.

[Anonymous No.17518154]

>>17518146
>Noam spent forty years insisting Israel is America's puppet, when in reality it's the other way around.
You are retarded

[Anonymous No.17518156]

Stop reading Jewish CIA assets.

[Anonymous No.17518163]

>>17518055
He was absolutely right about Foucault, who is the patron saint of neoliberal capitalism.

>>17518154
You can deny reality all you want but that won't change it.

[Anonymous No.17518203]

>>17518055
Lol based and ironypilled. It always makes me laugh seeing academics larp as rebels. You retards are the ultimate conformists. You are reinforcing the power structure by making incomprehensible to outsiders, much like the priests of old who would only sermonize in Latin.

[Anonymous No.17518207]

>>17518163
>You can deny reality all you want but that won't change it.
There is no reality in a tiny country who would get totally obliterated by its neighbors without US protection being able to control anything

[Anonymous No.17518220]

>>17518163
Wasn't Foucault an actual, explicit neoliberal in his late life?

[Anonymous No.17518229]

>>17517211
Heraclitus was deliberately trying to be obscure
Plato is incredibly clear, if you struggle with Plato you might actually have braindamage

[Anonymous No.17518236]

>>17516152
>Just vote blue no matter who
damn I wish I was as smart as Chomsky

[Anonymous No.17518239]

>>17518207
Israel's power lies in the Jewish community outside its borders. Especially the jewish lobby in the USA and various organizations such as AJCommitee, ADL, B'nai B'rith etc.
These organizations have a stronghold on American politics

[Anonymous No.17518242]

>>17518220
He voiced vaguely positive views on Reagan
This has since been transformed into him being some sort of neolib esoteric Hitlerist

[Anonymous No.17518249]

>>17518055
It seems like the recent popularization of Foucauldian discourse beyond the academy ("Black bodies," "Black lives") proves Chomsky wrong.

Also, wouldn't "power, prestige and influence" depend on legibility? Truly indecipherable writing would presumably be powerless.

[Anonymous No.17518257]

>>17516152
Chomsky is always pussyfooting around when he criticizes critical theory, leaving himself a way out. This cowardly ironical-but-maybe-not-really "Well, I'm trying very hard to find merit in all that, but I guess I'm not smart enough". Bullshit, he is smart enough, he just doesn't care to examine his assumptions/pov and devote the necessary effort. If I can do it, so can he. There is some truth to the posturing thing but there is some merit in critical theory and not all of it can be easily summarized. Sure Lacan does seem like a charlatan to me as well, but I've thought that about Derrida and I've since changed my mind, so who knows if I'm not getting filtered again? Anyone who's sufficiently well read in philosophy knows that not every insight can be expressed in neat predicate logic.
>>17516320
watch this vid if you care to learn something, it looks good, I'm out of this shit thread, discussing this topic on /lit/ is always a waste of time for everyone involved
also
>muh Sokal affair
look into it some more, it didn't prove shit

[Anonymous No.17518263]

>>17518239
yeah dude, the ADL is controlling the military-industrial complex

[Anonymous No.17518272]

>>17518257
>Chomsky is always pussyfooting around when he criticizes critical theory, leaving himself a way out. This cowardly ironical-but-maybe-not-really "Well, I'm trying very hard to find merit in all that, but I guess I'm not smart enough". Bullshit, he is smart enough, he just doesn't care to examine his assumptions/pov and devote the necessary effort.
This is my attitude towards critical theorists these days tbqh. It's literally not worth my time debating with those brainlets. A sophist will always find new ways to waste everyone's time. The best thing you can do is pretend you don't get it and just move on to do actually important things.

If you doubt this, ask yourself: has any debate with a creationist led to fewer creationists?

[Anonymous No.17518281]

>>17516152

>Singlehandledly holds back his own research field for decades, constantly and needlessly criticizing the use of heuristics and machine learning based methods to explore universality classes in languages

>Probably doesn't even fully grasp what a universality class even is

>Calls Zizek a hack for truly describing aspects of society through The Science of Logic instead of The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Bravo

[Anonymous No.17518283]

>>17518263
yes

[Anonymous No.17518287]

Zizek said Lacan was a charlatan sometimes himself, but his theory is still useful for many things.
Chomsky never comes with anything other than
>it's too hard to understand
>the content isn't scientifically proven
>it's all posturing

Its tiring and is the thing I don't like about chomsk, otherwise he is a good writer and can make interesting points.

[Anonymous No.17518305]

>>17518257
>This cowardly ironical-but-maybe-not-really "Well, I'm trying very hard to find merit in all that, but I guess I'm not smart enough"
What are you on about? He flat out says there's nothing there, it's just posturing and they're charlatans.

[Anonymous No.17518310]

>>17518272
If you're sure it's bullshit, you don't pussyfoot. You call the bullshit out. Are you suggesting you should pretend not to understand creationist arguments to take the intellectual high ground?

[Anonymous No.17518321]

>>17518305
>See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying.

[Anonymous No.17518322]

The human mind is unrestrained by the "real world", of course it is uneasy to understand and involves things subjective and verbose, how chomsky fails to accept this is strange, given philosophy and zizek largely deal with this

[Anonymous No.17518328]

>>17516152
>50 years after getting dismantled by Foucault in public
>people still take him seriously

[Anonymous No.17518337]

>>17518305
>>17518321
and yeah it's not that clear here, but it's more visible in his other quotes, especially when he addresses a more discriminating audience

[Anonymous No.17518338]

>>17518310
How do you argue with:
>you just didn't understand it

The best thing you can do is say:
>then summarize it for me
Which is precisely what Chomsky does. When he gets the inevitable variant of:
>it's not my job to educate you
Your only recourse is:
>well I guess I don't get it then

Because devoting even 1% of your time to try and understand this nonsense is a waste of your time and energy. You cannot win the sophist's game. The only winning move is to not play it at all.

[Anonymous No.17518351]

>>17516163
No.

[Anonymous No.17518372]

>>17518338
Which brings me to the rest of my point, I dabbled a little in critical theory and I did find that it's not entirely bullshit. Maybe Chomsky is the one posturing ex cathedra here, since apparently I managed to do what he "couldn't" and I'm neither a genius nor did it take me a decade of reading.

[Anonymous No.17518385]

>>17518372
Not the guy your responding to but I really do not see why so many of these professors like to claim that the field zizek is in and philosophy at large is 'done for', given that philosophy in the past has given many insights into things only directly verified by science much later, even in the recent past this is true with say nietzsche

[Anonymous No.17518390]

Zizek often says he just wrote the same book over and over again, so which version would be the best

[Anonymous No.17518393]

>>17518372
>I dabbled a little in critical theory and I did find that it's not entirely bullshit.
So what in critical theory is not bullshit? Can you summarize it for me?

[Anonymous No.17518500]

>>17518393
Can you summarise generative linguistics, real analysis or spin in a two thousand character 4chan post without making it seem like a piece of unfounded charlatanry?

[Anonymous No.17518514]

>>17518500
I'm not a linguist so no. But I can summarize any part of software engineering if you'd like. In fact, I do this on a regular basis when my boss asks for a run down.

When I do this, I don't explain in tedious detail the 40 hours of root cause analysis I did, I just give a high level summary of the problem. Surely you can do the same. Give me one (1) valuable thing that you found in critical theory and nowhere else.

[Anonymous No.17518535]

>>17518393

zizek i guess his core insight is defining idealogy as a layer of fantisy that is used to interpert reality. i guess marx kind of defined idealogy as the belief that your circumstances or ideal outcome is not simply benificial to you, but would have been benificial throughout human history, and is therefore correct. i dont think anyone before marx really articulated the self awareness of thier world view as subjective, at least not in a way that could be "transmitted" as an argument, or that could be shown as clashing, if that makes sense.

marx spends a lot of his time, esp later marx, and i guess esp engels, with trying to determine if idealogy is something that is concsious, and i think marx tends to say it is, zizek i guess splits from marx in saying that your "real idealogy" is subconcious and therefore potentially at odds with professed idealogy.

[Anonymous No.17518541]

>>17518500
Can I, no. But a linguist, mathematician, or software engineer definitely could. The inability of certain academics to express a coherent simplified version of of their field seems to be exclusive to those who are heavily engaged with continental philosophy.

[Anonymous No.17518543]

>>17516152
analytical autistic anglos dont understand continental thought

[Anonymous No.17518553]

>>17518543
I’ve never seen any indication that continental understand continental thought.

[Anonymous No.17518571]

>>17518535
>zizek i guess his core insight is defining idealogy as a layer of fantisy that is used to interpert reality
This sounds like Stirner-lite to be honest. It's also not a new insight in the least. There's a reason we have the term "ideologue"

>zizek i guess splits from marx in saying that your "real idealogy" is subconcious and therefore potentially at odds with professed idealogy.
This is at least somewhat interesting, but it was also discussed at length by the existentialists and their discussion of the problems of bad faith (mauvaise foi).

I'm really starting to believe none of these guys are saying anything new, which is why they have to dress it up in so much jargon.

[Anonymous No.17518584]

>>17518393
Some philosophical arguments lose a lot when summarized, so it's not always fair to demand it. If you boil it down to a sentence it really has to sound something like "knowledge is a construct", which, admittedly, sounds either trivial or retarded, however you choose to interpret it. And you don't know how to interpret it, because you haven't read what's being summarized. Part of the "elitism" comes from the simple fact that you do need to get into it for a while and read around the issue to "get it". Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory can give you a shortest possible entry into critical theory, if you really care to find out.

[Anonymous No.17518601]

>>17518393
>>17518584
this right here is the guy you asked if it matters

[Anonymous No.17518611]

>>17518571
i havent really read stirner, but it makes sense bc i guess he was a student of hegel- perhaps someone else could take a crack at it.

The Z man actually makes this stuff p accesable, i feel he doesnt use much jargon and thats why young people like him, he also applies this stuff to current events and pop culture in a way that is easy to follow and makes his political stance easy to read,

i find him more interesting as a comentator about current events then a philosopher.

[Anonymous No.17518631]

>>17518584
You literally gave me a variant of:
>it's not my job to educate you

Which is asinine. People can adequately summarize Plato, Nietzsche, Stirner, Kant, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc. Why is it that modern day philosophers are the only ones who cannot be adequately summarized?

Do you know who else couldn't be summarized? The Sophists of Ancient Greece

[Anonymous No.17518664]

>>17518631
Not the guy you're replying to, but please give me your summary of Kant and Nietzche

[Anonymous No.17518697]

>>17518664
>Kant
Categorical imperative (muh wouldn't lie to save my wife) and noumena (muh unobservable phenomenon).

>Nietzsche
Genealogy of morality (master/slave morality) and the problems of living in a world where morality isn't determined by God (aka death of God)

[Anonymous No.17518708]

>>17518631
They can, you're just a midwit who doesn't want to take the time to engage with postmodernist thought or critical theory texts. People like Adorno, Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard, Zizek are not that hard to comprehend.

[Anonymous No.17518717]

>>17518708
So give me something then. List one (1) point they raise that no one else discusses that makes them worth it.

[Anonymous No.17518727]

>>17518514
Critical theory is a methodology, not an insight
In the simplest possible terms, you're trying to see what are the social (here include culture, politics, economics) ingredients of something with a particular emphasis on the assumptions it makes
Now you can take this to some pretty weird places and you also have the third man problem of critical theory (you're trying to unmask the assumptions of whatever you're critically theorising but you're doing this of your own assumptions) but it's pretty simple
Fraggots had a bad habit of using really confusing language but the accusation against Foucault in particular is really odd since his language is pretty clear
If you want to criticize Foucault, point out that his sources are bad and that he is the number one sufferer of the previously mentioned third man problem, something he realized towards the end of his life but then he kinda died only having written a few things with this recognition
Critical theory is also not a refutation of anything though it's often taken to be such a thing, take the whole heteronormativity nonsense, yes heterosexuality is assumed to be natural but then, as mentioned above, tards take this to some really weird places like claiming that heterosexuality is forced on people by society

[Anonymous No.17518752]

>>17518727
>In the simplest possible terms, you're trying to see what are the social (here include culture, politics, economics) ingredients of something with a particular emphasis on the assumptions it makes
This is basically an ideology, you realize that? Ideologies don't posit ideas, they posit methods of seeing things. You are literally arguing to become an ideologue.

There's a reason why we do these summaries of philosophers, it's a useful exercise for separating the wheat (ideas) from the chaff (ideology/biases). What are the IDEAS these guys posit? They're philosophers, not writers. No one is reading them for anything but their ideas.

[Anonymous No.17518796]

>>17518631
>People can adequately summarize Plato
No they can't, summaries have limits and, like I said, you can only really understand a summary if you know what it's summarizing. Try summarizing the Republic in a paragraph and not to make it sound like a young adult dystopian fantasy. Try to adequately convey Plato's drive for teaching virtue as a central political problem without making it sound obvious and trivial. What you learn in the proper study of the primary source is uncomparably richer than any summary. And yeah, that does happen to become more and more true the more modern a philosopher is. And your demand of a simple summary is unfair, just like I said. I didn't say that it's not my job to educate you, but I am saying it now. It's up to you if you want to figure it out or not.

[Anonymous No.17518844]

>>17518796
I'm not asking for a complete summary you dishonest hack, I'm asking for one (1) thing that is valuable about these critical theorists. Specifically a unique or original idea they posit that has never been said before.

Here, I'll do five of them for you with Plato:
>Plato's theory of forms
>Plato's cycle of governments from monarchy to democracy to tyranny
>Division of labor as described in The Republic
>Plato's dialectic
>Plato's epistemology (everyone is born knowing everything and they forget)

Now, many of these ideas are wrong given what we know, but they are identifiable as unique ideas for their time. What are some unique ideas posited by these critical theorists?

[Anonymous No.17518861]

>>17518844
Summarize Plato's epistemology as expressed in Theaetetus, Sophist and Statesman then

[Anonymous No.17518875]

>>17518861
Wikipedia has an adequate enough summary:
>Platonic epistemology holds that knowledge of Platonic Ideas is innate, so that learning is the development of ideas buried deep in the soul, often under the midwife-like guidance of an interrogator. In several dialogues by Plato, the character Socrates presents the view that each soul existed before birth with the Form of the Good and a perfect knowledge of Ideas. Thus, when an Idea is "learned" it is actually just "recalled".[1]

I also literally just did
>everyone is born knowing everything and they forget

[Anonymous No.17518880]

>>17518727
>the third man problem of critical theory (you're trying to unmask the assumptions of whatever you're critically theorising but you're doing this of your own assumptions)
What's their answer to this anyway?

[Anonymous No.17518897]

>>17518844
The idea of deconstruction. Can't imagine how it's useful for you, given how you know nothing about it, but there you go. Also choke on a exhaust pipe for calling me a dishonest hack, I had a feeling this would be a waste of my time.

[Anonymous No.17518934]

>>17518875
That is not what I asked, that's a simple premise bound to his theory of forms
I'm asking about the epistemology of the dialogues I mentioned which concerns itself with very different things though still in the field of epistemology
>>17518880
They don't have one and act all edgy about how they admit to it, some of them anyways, others pretend it's a non problem

[Anonymous No.17518937]

>>17518897
>The idea of deconstruction

Is this Zizek's idea? You realize the critical theorists didn't come up with this idea, right?

Let's entertain this. What is the use of deconstruction outside of a methodology for writing excessively long papers? What is the core idea/takeaway from deconstruction?

[Anonymous No.17518969]

>>17518937
it's Derrida's idea, but good luck getting a definition of it. It is apparently opposed to the idea of definitions

[Anonymous No.17518988]

>>17518969
That's what I'm driving at yeah lol. I had to suffer through 4 years of this shit. There is nothing of value down that path of thought. It's also amazing how many of the retards here conflate the post structuralists with the critical theorists, despite allegedly being critical theorists themselves.

They're both groups of pseuds for what it's worth.

[Anonymous No.17519246]

>>17518094
>Chomsky's muh innate goodness of human nature was painful to watch
Because innate human nature is war of all against all, but pomo's are retarded for their anti-essentialism and reducing human identity to the sum of social relations

[Anonymous No.17519279]

>>17517114
Literally who

[Anonymous No.17519354]

>>17518571
>asking for reductionist explanations
>dismissing them by comparing the reduced explanation to reduced explanations of other philosophers
>I am very smart
Crawl up in Chomsky's ass and die

[Anonymous No.17519382]

>>17516152
Based

[Anonymous No.17519404]

>>17516152
>Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying.

Wait, are there /lit/erati that seriously don't realize Zizek is just an entertaining huckster?

[Anonymous No.17519444]

>>17518571
>interpassivity
>extended ideology
>overidentification with ideology
>reading Hegel through Lacan
>reading Marx through Hegel
>transcendental materialism (is a word his colleagues use, he insists on dialectical materialism, but its not exactly the same as what Marx meant)
>idiosyncratic analysis on contemporary culture, politics and events as he constantly shits books out
Here you go mong, how useful is this summary for you? Now summaries your education in a bulletpoint list, so I can say I have a degree in some meme field.

[Anonymous No.17519474]

>>17518207
You both get it wrong the only thing that is actually preventing Israel from effectively dominating the mideast is the USA.

[Anonymous No.17519526]

>>17519444
> Now summaries your education in a bulletpoint list, so I can say I have a degree in some meme field.

Sure, to be a software dev, you need to study:
>data structures
>recursion for the occasional tree traversal
>algorithms
>design patterns

There you go. Now you're a software dev.

>interpassivity
Only actual idea in that list. Interesting concept but I don't see the point he's trying to make. Wikipedia has this:

>An example of interpassivity, given by Žižek, in his book How To Read Lacan, uses the VCR to illustrate the concept. The VCR records a movie (presumably to be watched later). However, Žižek argues that since the VCR can record, people who own them watch fewer movies because they can record them and have them on hand. The VCR does the watching of the movie so the owner of the VCR can be free not to watch the movie. Žižek uses the VCR to demonstrate the big other's role in interpassivity. The VCR, like canned laughter in a show, functions as a tool interacting with itself so the viewer can not watch the show.

So is his point that the media complex is producing media for other media? Can someone explain what the point of interpassivity is and why anyone should care about it?

[Anonymous No.17519569]

>>17518752
>Ideologies don't posit ideas, they posit methods of seeing things
Then every discipline is an ideaology, including (and especially) physics.

[Anonymous No.17519595]

>>17519569
So you're saying Critical Theory is a discipline now? What are its standards of proof? What are it's methods of disproof? How can you show that a critical theorist is wrong or full of shit?

[Anonymous No.17519598]

>>17519595
>So you're saying Critical Theory is a discipline now?
No, I am saying
>Then every discipline is an ideology, including (and especially) physics.
(corrected the small typo along the way)

[Anonymous No.17519637]

>>17519598
No the difference between a discipline and ideology is that a discipline can show you when you're wrong. An ideology does not.

You can follow a discipline to see when you are wrong about something. For example, the discipline of engineering requires you to create fallbacks for fallbacks. This is because your system WILL fail at some point, so you exercise caution to handle those unforeseen circumstances.

Ideology is different. It only posits one way of viewing things and nothing else. Also, this is why philosophers avoid ideologies at all costs. An ideology is a totalizing notion that blinds you from the actual core ideas. Christian ideology will cause you read Sin into things which have no moral judgment, for example. Similarly, it seems Critical Theory ideology causes people to read colonialism and whatnot into places where it does not belong.

[Anonymous No.17519703]

>>17519637
Rephrasing: a discipline is more like a method of showing you when you're wrong and what to do about it. Engineering discipline teaches you how to handle uncertainty and account for it. Physics discipline teaches you how to handle and interpret statistical data to ensure you have a valid result.

The problem with Critical Theory as a discipline is that it has no rigor. There's no objective standards to ensure you're doing something right, it's just whether or not you agree/disagree with the big thinkers in that field.

[Anonymous No.17519714]

>>17519637
You said yourself
>Ideologies don't posit ideas, they posit methods of seeing things.
I just pointed out that every discipline of knowledge does this, that's how they get constituted as disciplines.
The sentence
>No the difference between a discipline and ideology is that a discipline can show you when you're wrong. An ideology does not.

is just a later addition by yourself. Your earlier point about telling ideas from ideology (with the notion that ideas = good and ideology = bad or wrong) was pretty confused and not really indicative of anything (calling bad ideas "ideology" really doesn't add anything to the argument). I personally have no stake in the critical theory debate, I'm just pointing out your way of using the word ideology is a bit confusing.

>Ideology is different. It only posits one way of viewing things and nothing else.
This is pretty vague since a "way of viewing things" can be as large as you want. I also don't see why a discipline can't posit a way of seeing things or how this is necessarily antithetical to good ideas. Every discipline has blind spots.
So I'm still not very convinced by your use of ideology, you have some terminological sorting to do imo, but that's your theory, not mine, so you do you.

[Anonymous No.17519735]

>>17519714
Fair enough. I was stuck to it because I know Critical Theorists love critiquing ideology so it was more of a debate tactic than anything. But you're right, it probably doesn't pass muster as an actual term and I prob need to think it over.

[Anonymous No.17519745]

>>17519637
What a brainlet take, you need to stop taking philosophy lessons from Ben Shapiro or whoever put this idiotic notion in your head. Critical Theory, to simplify it, is an attempt to escape these truth obscuring ideologies. You got it precisely 180 degrees ass backwards.

[Anonymous No.17519748]

>>17519526
I would advise you to read his books if you want to understand his concepts in detail. Like you just made clear here, a Wikipedia summary is not enough to understand the concept, so clearly reading the philosophers work is needed.
There you go, just proved your own point wrong about summarizing philosophers.

[Anonymous No.17519772]

>>17519745
>Ben Shapiro
Lmao, the universal boogeyman for Critical Theorists. Amazing. Not everyone who disagrees with your bullshit is a conservative. Chomsky more or less proves that.

[Anonymous No.17519779]

>>17519526
Also this is me again
>>17519748

I could explain the point of it for you, but so far all you done is dismiss philosophers you don't understand, so I'm not going to bother.

[Anonymous No.17519788]

>>17519748
>I would advise you to read his books if you want to understand his concepts in detail
No. This is like telling me I need to read the bible to understand the bible. Give me a rundown or fuck off.

[Anonymous No.17519795]

>>17519772
way to not engage with what I actually said dumbass, your favorite campus pink hair basher who lied to you about Theory is irrelevant here

[Anonymous No.17519815]

>>17519795
>our favorite campus pink hair basher who lied to you about Theory is irrelevant here
I literally took it in college, that's why I fucking despise it. All of my opinions are my own you mouthbreather.

[Anonymous No.17519823]

>>17519735
I hadn't seen >>17519703 when I wrote my answer, and I think it's a better way to start thinking about the issue. Although objective standards are hard to come by in many disciplines, even in science, and especially in philosophy.

[Anonymous No.17519838]

>>17519815
You had a whole course on it and you got it the exact opposite idea of what it actually is? Got you champ.

[Anonymous No.17519844]

>>17519823
(or rather, objective standards are easy, what's hard is objective standards that actually relate to understanding the object of study, for instance you can measure the quality of a scientist by his number of citations, that's objective, but that doesn't mean much and even encourage gaming the publication system)

[Anonymous No.17519848]

>>17519788
>This is like telling me I need to read the bible to understand the bible.
Are you trying to write a parody of yourself or was this a happy accident?

[Anonymous No.17519870]

>>17519838
The "course" was a joke, like most of my lit theory classes. Most of the class didn't even do the reading and the ones who did would pontificate on irrelevant colonialism/etc talking points.

>just your school
My university was top 20 in the nation. It's not ivy league but it's not bad, it's definitely one of the better public schools in the country.

Lit theory is a joke. New criticism was the last good critical movement. Everything after that is worthless pseudery.

[Anonymous No.17519883]

>>17519848
No, I'm literally pointing out your circular logic.
>You can't understand Lacan unless you read Lacan

is tantamount to saying
>You can't understand the bible unless you read the bible

No, both of those things can be adequately summarized without having to waste my time.

[Anonymous No.17519887]

>>17519788
>this is like telling me I need to read a book, to know what it says
>being rude
You sound like a guy who watches a summary of a book on youtube and then talk about it like a pseud
Fuck off yourself, STEMcel

[Anonymous No.17519910]

>>17519887
Yes, that's the point of philosophy you actual retard. Why else would we hire graduates to study Nietzsche if the answer to every question is:
>just read Nietzsche bro

The whole POINT of your retarded existence is so you can summarize for us WHY WE SHOULD CARE ABOUT X. If you can't do that, there's no reason to pay you to study it for 6+ years.

Your single job as a grad student is to write a fucking summary of your studies for the public. If you can't do that, you're admitting at minimum you can't do your one job in life.

[Anonymous No.17519932]

>>17519870
You don't need to tell me you didn't learn anything in that class, I already gathered that. You even took the opposite takeaways from it because of second-hand readings by your dumb classmates, now that's going the extra mile. I see how you're all about summaries ITT, you're used to other people doing your reading for you.

[Anonymous No.17519940]

>>17519932
Read
>>17519910

Your one and only job as a grad student is to summarize your studies. What did you learn? Why the fuck are we paying you to study this for 6+ years?

[Anonymous No.17519953]

>>17519883
>circular logic
you can't make that shit up

[Anonymous No.17519958]

>>17519953
What did you learn from Critical Theory? What makes it worth anyone's time? If you learned it, surely you can summarize it.

[Anonymous No.17519959]

>>17519940
>Your one and only job as a grad student is to summarize your studies.
this is what this anon actually believes

[Anonymous No.17519970]

>>17519959
>this is what this anon actually believes
Tell me what a masters' student in a lit theory class does then.

[Anonymous No.17519972]

>>17519958
>If you learned it, surely you can summarize it.
nigger you had a whole class on it and you didn't learn shit, how can I be of any assistance to your dumb ass?

[Anonymous No.17519992]

>>17519910
Do you also want me to wipe your ass for you, you fucking mongoloid baby?
How fucking hard is it to read a fucking book? I could summarize a bunch of shit for you right now, but youre going to dismiss every single thing I dish up with, like you already did with "hurr all ideology is just watered down Stirner and spooks hehe".
There is no fucking point in me spoonfeeding you or any fucking retard who can't pick up a fucking book or the multiple 200 page introductions out there. Those are written for people who get paid to educate the public, meanwhile I'm browsing this fucking board in my spare time and faggots like you expect me to do cognitive labor for them because they're lazy. Why don't you program my new app idea for free bro, that's what we fucking pay you computer guys to do.

[Anonymous No.17519994]

>>17519972
So enlighten everyone else as to what I should have learned. Because if you can't do that, your studies were basically worthless, you realize that right?

[Anonymous No.17520003]

>>17519970
He keeps the machine running (and hopefully bangs qties).

[Anonymous No.17520006]

>>17519992
>meanwhile I'm browsing this fucking board in my spare time and faggots like you expect me to do cognitive labor for them because they're lazy
>cognitive labor

This is what brainlets actually believe. If this is "labor" to you, no wonder you're a critical theorist.

I can write summaries of Nietzsche all day. It is not "cognitive labor" to do so because I actually understand Nietzsche. If summarizing is cognitive labor to you, you're either a retard or you don't actually understand the thing you're summarizing.

[Anonymous No.17520032]

>>17519994
>So enlighten everyone else as to what I should have learned.
You should have learned something else than the exact opposite of what Critical Theory is lmao. And I actually summarized it pretty well in my first post, which you still conveniently neglect to address.

[Anonymous No.17520064]

>>17517134
The points they're making are original and interesting. But yes, the style is not enjoyable.

[Anonymous No.17520075]

>>17520006
You can shit out half assed opinions on Nietszche all day, and you're allowed to. Just like I'm allowed to refuse to spoonfeed faggots like you, because they want a watered down version to dismiss.

[Anonymous No.17520080]

>>17520032
>interpassivity
Already discussed, what's the point?
>extended ideology
From what I gather, he's giving a basic bitch explanation of a memeplex, except he uses the term ideology. Care to correct me?
>overidentification with ideology
Just people identifying too much with their memeplexes.
>reading Hegel through Lacan
Worthless, not an idea. This is just literary criticism.
>reading Marx through Hegel
Worthless, not an idea. This is just literary criticism.
>transcendental materialism (is a word his colleagues use, he insists on dialectical materialism, but its not exactly the same as what Marx meant)
Literally an oxymoron. I know what they're trying to do (reconcile Kant's noumena with Marx's materialism) but it will never work. It's garbage.

I do enjoy how they're trying to appropriate programming jargon into their lexicon. "Object-oriented ontology" It's cute and very pseudy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism

>idiosyncratic analysis on contemporary culture, politics and events as he constantly shits books out
That's literally just his opinion, man.

Give me an actual original idea or expound upon these.

[Anonymous No.17520151]

>>17520080
That's my post, not the guy you're replying to moron.
Also its impressive how you can dismiss all of Zizeks ideas in a single 4chan post, when chomsky can't dismiss them in a single interview, besides reductionism.
You're acting like a cuck, expecting others to write elaborate posts in response to your shitposting. Your entitlement is cute though, you're confirming the bugman stereotype.

[Anonymous No.17520163]

>>17520080
Programming is just coding programs the computer then runs.
There you go, saved you 3 years at university fag, bet you feel dumb now.

[Anonymous No.17520172]

>>17520151
The point, dear Watson, is to illustrate why it's a complete waste of time to argue with critical theorist pseuds and why I said, long ago, that my current attitude is to just say, "Oh I don't understand that" and ignore them instead of engaging with them.

When it comes to sophists like yourself, there is no end to your bad faith arguments. So it is a complete waste of time. You are better off doing literally anything else than talking with a retard who worships Zizek.

[Anonymous No.17520199]

>>17520172
>bad faith arguments
>entire thread is reductionism to the absurd
>ticks all the boxes for the bugman stereotype
I honestly thought people in STEM weren't just office drones, but you proved me otherwise.

[Anonymous No.17520202]

>>17520172
>The point, dear Watson, is to illustrate why it's a complete waste of time to argue with critical theorist pseuds and why I said, long ago, that my current attitude is to just say, "Oh I don't understand that" and ignore them instead of engaging with them.
lmao the irony

[Anonymous No.17520210]

>>17516157
>Lacan was a total charlatan.
Zizek would of course agree with this.

[Anonymous No.17520211]

>>17519404
Based post
Nazbol gang praxis now

[Anonymous No.17520241]

>>17516152
>Chomsky
Dude get destroyed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, he couldn’t stand up to the nomadic force of constant variation

[Anonymous No.17520255]

>>17517120
>Jewish Americans are Anglo

You must be the guy who called Nietzsche Anglo yesterday

[Anonymous No.17520260]

>>17518055
>I find that I have to decode him, and after I have decoded him, maybe I’m missing something. I don’t get the significance of what I am left with. I have never effectively understood what he was talking about. I mean, when I try to take the big words he uses and put them into words that I can understand and use, it is difficult for me to accomplish this task. I
Imagine getting filtered by Foucault lmao dude would get slaughtered by Derrida

[Anonymous No.17522134]

>>17516345
There's nothing that makes me appreciate Chomsky more than the retards to try to gut him

I don't even like Chomsky that much, but the reality is he does good work, gives good talks, mostly knows what he's talking about and gives historical sources and bases for the things he talks about. Worshipping or degrading Chomsky is such a childish, pathetic thing to do - point to specific things he says that you think are wrong, or are just obfuscating more important points that you think you should make, or GTFO

It's such a mark of being a worshipful, immature spastic that you think "the man himself" is the problem rather than just taking people for what they're worth and disagreeing with them in places and agreeing with them in other places. People who want you to stop paying attention to things people have to say are just charlatans. You don't have to agree with people to listen to them, or you can just say you're not interested in them

[Anonymous No.17522152]

>>17520260
>He then asks, reasonably, why I am "dismissive" of it. Take, say, Derrida. Let me begin by saying that I dislike making the kind of comments that follow without providing evidence, but I doubt that participants want a close analysis of de Saussure, say, in this forum, and I know that I'm not going to undertake it. I wouldn't say this if I hadn't been explicitly asked for my opinion --- and if asked to back it up, I'm going to respond that I don't think it merits the time to do so.
>So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted. Again, sorry to make unsupported comments, but I was asked, and therefore am answering.

[Anonymous No.17522155]

Chimpsky is just mad he got btfo by Foucault

[Anonymous No.17522185]

>>17518249
>It seems like the recent popularization of Foucauldian discourse beyond the academy ("Black bodies," "Black lives")

This does the complete opposite and perfectly demonstrates Chomsky's model of state/corporate propaganda influencing public discourse through its general uniformity.

[Anonymous No.17522266]

>>17518220
>>17518242
He was an oligarchist. But he did have very smart —if terribly abstract— things to say about power.

That he said nothing of note is Chomsky's error. That he said nothing specific is Chomsky's insight.

[Anonymous No.17522304]

>>17516152
Chomsky got filtered hard, and I don't even like Zizek

[Anonymous No.17522359]

>>17522304
I don't think he did. I've never seen a single person, here or elsewhere, ever defend or explain the value of the continental tradition. All they do is get aggressive and start insulting people when questioned. It's something unique to this one field of study, and I'm not sure why that is.

[Anonymous No.17522391]

>>17522359
He literally admits it is too abstract for him to comprehend. That is the definition of being filtered in my mind. He hasn't even launched an attack that we can defend, he has plainly admitted he is too dumb to understand abstraction.

[Anonymous No.17522410]

>>17516152
>. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.
this

[Anonymous No.17522443]

>>17522152
>I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood.
Wow, I couldn’t imagine admitting to being filtered this hard, and people being able to quote it for years to come on 4chan.

[Anonymous No.17522459]

>>17522359
>. I've never seen a single person, here or elsewhere, ever defend or explain the value of the continental tradition.
You're clearly a newfag. It's a pretty common topic here.
>It's something unique to this one field of study, and I'm not sure why that is.
Not at all.

[Anonymous No.17522594]

>>17522459
>You're clearly a newfag. It's a pretty common topic here.
Yeah, that's what makes the complete inability to even attempt defending it all the more shocking.
>Not at all.
No, it really is. Fans of continental philosophy and theory are by far the rudest, most aggressive, and least substantial, and most dismissive of other realms of thought posters on this board. If you look at it honestly, you have to conclude that it is a problem with the discipline.

[Anonymous No.17522738]

>>17522594
>Fans of continental philosophy and theory are by far the rudest,
That's how fans of analytic philosophy appear to me too. It's just the nature of forums like this. No one has time to present full arguments of every continental philosopher, and likewise analytics can't be bothered posting massive refutations. So it turns into an ad hom fight on both sides. I've seen it all too often, and the analytics are by no means innocent.

[Anonymous No.17523006]

>>17516345
>you suck and look stupid

[Anonymous No.17523177]

>>17519887
It's perfectly normal, rational and good to be highly selective with what you choose to read in the modern world. There are literally tens of dozens of books. If you want to convince me to take 10 hours of my life to read your book it's better be worth it compared to other books. Especially when you work in stems we have 1000 page math or physics book which take a long time to read but contrary to certain obfuscated books in which in 1000 pages you Have, if you are lucky, 1 insight in the whole book, in stem books you have at least 1 interesting insight per page or even paragraph.
Every discussion I see about critical theory makes the critical theorists seem more and more stupid and pathetic to me.

[Anonymous No.17523233]

>>17516157
You're falling for the Anglo rhetoric. There's nothing significant being said here.

[Anonymous No.17523265]

>>17516242
Chomsky's writing is so dry and autistic that it constipates your mind. Whenever I read him I would provisionally accept a point he had made with some evidence. Chomsky then proceeds to write several more paragraphs on the topic describing why he is right. Incredibly grating.

[Anonymous No.17523530]

>>17516152
I can't say he's wrong.

[Anonymous No.17523815]

>>17516152
Strong analytic energy emanating from this post.
I agree, fuck Zizek and his obscurantist ramblings. Modern Continental Philosophers should stick to cultural criticism, Metaphysics clearly aren't for them.

[Anonymous No.17523939]

>>17516152
im thinkin hes right

[Anonymous No.17524078]

>>17516345
these guys are fucking retards

[Anonymous No.17524097]

My favorite meme is when postmodernists appropriate subjects from actual scientific fields to use in analogies that show they don't even understand what they're appropriating

[Anonymous No.17524556]

>>17524097
Same. This book goes into more detail

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fashionable-Nonsense-Postmodern-Intellectuals-Science/dp/0312204078

[Anonymous No.17525543]

So much fighting here
Is it ever possible to resolve the analytic-continental split?

[Anonymous No.17526119]

>>17525543
it is resolved by post analytic philosophers such as Brandom

[Anonymous No.17527041]

Chumpsky needs to stick to linguists

[Anonymous No.17527310]

>>17517983
how about >how does apply to reality

[Anonymous No.17527361]

>>17518239
>stronghold
strong hold, which would be a little odd, or stranglehold, which is the phrase I think you were looking for