What do Holla Forums think of Slavoj Zizek?

a cuck

They both support voting for socdems(or even liberals), they are both the worst.

Are you new to Holla Forums? He's been /ourguy/ for years. Some anons will dismiss him because they think he's too popular, but he's an interesting thinker and he plays an important role in today's society as a very visible public intellectual who destigmatizes Communism. I don't think anyone should go to him for their personal political line, but he's a contrarian and a gadfly, I think that's the last thing he'd want people to do. also, he hasn't written a good book in years and is getting pretty intellectually lazy, but I forgive him

This

Is he reformist though? I'm no expert, but First as Tragedy, Then as Farce seemed to be more nihilistic than anything.

All of the above.

dunno, his "suggestions" seem all to boil down to :" I have no idea, but theory is important, someone else should come up something "
which is ok imo.
I don't think he is a reformist, he just doesn't want Stalinism 2.0 21st century boogalo.

he is a fucking weirdo, sometimes he makes me cringe in his talks, and his books seem like a collection of anecdotes and witty inversions sometimes
still, I admire him tbqh

Ok but critizising and not giving solutions does not solve anything in my opinion.

He is petit-bourgeois, and by that I mean he's literally looking out for his own profits and that leads to him adopting reactionary views, either out of some autistic need to be contrarian, or more likely out of a need to opportunistically market himself to a wider readership. Not to mention his literal self plagiarizing, and his plagiarizing of that one book review in a white supremacist publication. There's also the TERFy vibe that I got from the infamous bathroom article, but I don't know nearly enough about psychoanalysis to make a sound judgement on what he was getting at, and I myself don't like it when Id-Pol types will screech TERF at the drop of a hat.

All of that said, I still like him somewhat. It's just a shame that he can be so easily dismissed by Id-Pol types because of all the weird stupid shit that he says.

i love him, we need more people like him on the left

As much as Chomsky is.

If you listen to him he spends a good amount of time defending social democracy and supports socdem candidates. Which itself isn't a bad thing as the alternatives, Neoliberal economics or "National Capitalism", is much worse. But he doesn't go beyond that in any great detail.

I want to be his next waifu.
Very intelligent man. I think he's great at turning liberals worth their salt further left.

Please give examples.
I do kind of see this, sometimes. Like what he said after Fidel's passing, about Cuba. t's good to want more, but I think he could've given more credit to Castro.
How? Book sales?
?
What article? I've seen talks from him on the subject & he only said that our priorities should be better placed & he's absolutely right about that.
Well, they do that to everyone, though.

This

Less Than Nothing was incredible user, the fuck are you on about

What kind of MoP does he own?

Whose work is he exploiting?

Literally not a thing. Also, plagiary is a bourgeois notion, its starting point that thought can be owned.

Here's his answer: critical-theory.com/i-nonetheless-deeply-regret-the-incident-zizek-responds-to-plagiarism-allegations/

TL;DR: someone else plagiarized, sent to zizek and said "use it freely." Zizek did use it freely but didn't know it was plagiarized. Much ado about nothing.

Webm is related.

These two are connected.

Not to mention Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. His Lenin 2017 is highly anticipated.

Theoretically: this is not how you "do" theory. Compared to Marx or Lenin or Bakunin, or even Deleuze or Foucault - Zizek's stuff is full of buzzwords, self-branding, unsupported assertions, discontinuous "arguments" that go nowhere. Very similar to idpol stuff in this regard. There's no real system-building in there, not much systematic critique, and he self-contradicts and says things which are just untrue, all the fucking time. Most of the interesting stuff in Zizek is lifted straight from either Lacan or Althusser. Compared to someone like Chomsky, he lacks empirical evidence and intellectual rigour, is unsystematic, and makes his work as inaccessible as possible.

Politically: far too authoritarian, and worryingly alt-right sometimes. He's written about wanting a "good terror", written stuff sympathetic to Trump and Bush, said a bunch of sexist stuff (example: women made up harassment because they want men to take risks to get them), called for NATO troops in Palestine and structural adjustment in Slovenia, supported the bombing of Yugoslavia, and pushes the idea that we can ever have a communist society because lack/antagonism is constitutive. Also, no clear political agenda. His politics boil down to the idea of the need for an "Act", which is defined in basically clinical (i.e. subjective) terms.

What's with this idpol shit we always get here? I can't tell if it's newfagging, a redditor or what.

...

But it's everything the board stands for. Have you even read the FAQ? That's why I'm calling you out as a newfag, newfag.

I'm not that poster. Where is his idpol?

>cancer

If someone says
And someone else says
Is the second person guilty of idpol?
How are you defining idpol?

I'd like to see a source and not from some intellectually bankrupt, idpol website like buzzfeed.

see:

A source for what?

Okay…here we go. The guy said that Zizek said something sexist. I'd like to see what he said and the context. It's not that hard to figure out.

You didn't imply that he didn't say anything sexist, but that part of the other poster's post complaining about sexism invalidated his whole post.
If there is something resembling idpol here, it is from you.

this is entirely incorrect. particularly in the parallax view, he spends the entire book developing his system of thought (which basically is to say his interpretation of hegel). granted, he doesn't do this directly, and rather via example by demonstrating his method in various areas, but he's a lacanian so you can't really expect anything else. regardless, there is a distinctly 'zizekian' approach to interpretation.

your liberalism is showing here. first off, virtually all of the historically important leftist thinkers (marx/lenin/benjamin included) have understood terror as an integral aspect of establishing communism, as it was for liberalism. the bit about social antagonism not allowing for a communist society should not be read as an endorsement of capitalism because of the necessary antagonism, but rather as an insight into how we formulate the fundamental idea of a communist society will be flawed due to the antagonism implicit in the thought of the subject under capitalism.

the rest of this post is such a blatant misreading that i wont give it attention

What the holy fuck?! Do you have brain cancer? I'm done arguing with you.

Bazinga. You still haven't told me what identity politics is.

this is a(n intentional) misrepresentation of zizek's argument. no where has he ever explicitly endorsed harassment.

Thank you! I'm not sure if this will satisfy my mentally challenged friend.

...

cont'd,

it's not that your argument here is idpol as much as the position you're arguing from is rooted in the same surface-level view identity politics is:

zizek has, at least in my own personal reading, never made an argument which can be legitimately construed as racist or sexist or TERF-y or what the fuck ever. rather, these indictments of his thought seem to be an indication of how we baselessly politically slander people in this age rather than anything else.

Explain

how does it not? If everyone is too afraid to criticize out of fear for being called a contrarian people will never question the current system in the first place.

I'm starting to think that everyone who criticizes zizek hasn't read a word by him. It's always the same two or three sentences. is there some kind of zizek hate club

Zizek talks about this stuff a lot… I broadly agree with his position that "harassment" today is used to cover any kind of disconcerting presence of other people, especially for idpols, but he does seem to think that women invent sexual harassment rules so men have to break them to seduce women, and take a risk.

The Fragile Absolute, p. 111:
This is why assertive women often despise "weak" men - because they fear to expose themselves, to take the necessary risk. And perhaps this is even more true in our PC times: are not PC prohibitions rules which, in one way or another, are to be violated in the seduction process?

Ticklish Subject, p. 285.
"his parado x also explain s th e blin d spo t o f the
topi c o f sexua l harassment : there is no sex without an element of 'harassment'
( o f the perplexe d gaz e violently shocked , traumatized , by th e uncann y
characte r o f wha t is goin g on) . Th e protest against sexua l harassment ,
against violently impose d sex, is thus ultimatel y the protest against sex as
such, if on e subtracts from th e sexua l interpla y its painfully traumati c
character, the remainde r is simply n o longe r sexual."
ia800509.us.archive.org/14/items/WoEsWarSlavojZizekTheTicklishSubjectTheAbsentCentreOfPoliticalOntologyVerso2000/(Wo es war) Slavoj Zizek-The Ticklish Subject The Absent Centre of Political Ontology-Verso (2000).pdf

A similar tension between rights and prohibitions determines heterosexual seduction in our politically correct times. Or, to put it differently, there is no seduction which cannot at some point be construed as intrusion or harassment because there will always be a point when one has to expose oneself and ‘make a pass’. But, of course, seduction doesn’t involve incorrect harassment throughout. When you make a pass, you expose yourself to the Other (the potential partner), and her reaction will determine whether what you just did was harassment or a successful act of seduction. There is no way to tell in advance what her response will be (which is why assertive women often despise ‘weak’ men, who fear to take the necessary risk). This holds even more in our pc times: the pc prohibitions are rules which, in one way or another, are to be violated in the seduction process. Isn’t the seducer’s art to accomplish the violation in such a way that, afterwards, by its acceptance, any suggestion of harassment has disappeared?
lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/slavoj-zizek/you-may

...

There is a general tendency today, although it would not surprise me if it was a common trend among all periods, to decontextualize words. You see this a lot when watching news: relevant events not advantageous to the ones presenting are left out so as to construct the image of the thing in question as being bad through demonization.

With Zizek and many other philosophers, politicians and what have you, this happens through taking certain words present in speeches or texts and claiming that they adhere to these views the presenters give, sometimes going as far as to attributing views that they are attacking, as happened with Zizek a while ago with his article titled The Sexual is Political.

This has even happened with Hegel's famous words "All that is actual is rational, and all that is rational is actual", being twisted to hell and back.

anyone who plans for after the revolutionary is a reactionary

And Zizek also does this constantly. Taking single concepts or passages in philosophers and twisting their meanings. Taking single scenes from films or novels and giving them some significance they don't have in the original.

In the example above: no feminist actually says that every unwanted propositioning is harassment. I've seen feminists who act that way in real life, but Zizek's just not doing the work to show what's going on.

I like Less Than Nothing but most of his writing these days is just him endlessly recycling and self-plagiarizing from earlier texts, while I'll admit that Less Than Nothing is one of his best works it's not like a lot of it isn't just a rehash of subjects he already touched upon in The Ticklish Subject, Tarrying the Negative, Sublime Object, and The Parallax View.

He's right though.