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Discussion
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Twitter is so silly and none of us take it seriously but we want to use the fact that Slavoj Žižek was just trending due to a hit piece put out by Counterpunch to set the record straight. We do not think Žižek needs our defense, nor do academic Žižekians. But as working class and independent thinkers who do public philosophy, we do think defenses are important, because otherwise the general populace hears some bad stuff and never sees the good. We’re going to use this as a teaching opportunity. I’m starting this as a forum thread because there were questions about it in the premiere from this morning, and I’m hoping to start something where people can add stuff they want addressed ahead of time in the forum. Put your summaries, main points, questions, or memes below.
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Replies
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Related memes
These memes on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CnFc-ttvq0M/
These memes on Twitter https://twitter.com/theorypleeb/status/1611437549838557191
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One of the strengths of Zizek, that many other philosophers in modern academia cannot contend with is the ability to approach a text and not only garner information but transform (think Aufhebung) the information and map it into a given structure a la structuralism; this tends to be done through: Hegel, Lacan, and Freud. Yet he never simply rebrands the insight with a single name from the pile (those above and also Althusser, Kant, Marx) he utilizes multiple structures of thought to devise an original approach.
This is why I and others call ourselves Zizekians. He is not simply a reader of philosophy but perhaps (to invoke D&G), a productive mis-reader.
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I’m going to copy-paste a youtube comment I made on your weekly roundup before I signed up:
It’s great that you got Tutt to send voicemails, super interested in both his and Zizek’s analyses of contemporary issues; Tutt’s focus, naively summarized, starts at the historical reproduction of working conditions via the family, then shifts to a more Freudo-Lacanian perspective of what he calls the ‘social Superego’ corresponding to new family formations, and culminates with analysis of labor historically and contemporaneously in the form of critique liberal philosophy(From Hegel to Lasch to Nietzsche).
At the end of the day I still have fealty towards Great Leader Zizek, but I’m optimistic the (friendly) “confrontation” between Tutt and yourselves will be fruitful in clarifying the differences between Tutt and Zizek’s views on, what I’m guessing is their point of disagreement, the role of the intellectual in theorizing collective emancipation, starting with an explanation of how to incorporate Oedipus with the family as the stage of social reproduction under liberal capitalism
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This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by
Matan Levin.
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Thanks for sharing it here, Matan. Did you get a chance to tune in last night or watch it after the fact? Here’s the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xItwGcubXFg&t=10937s
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Just watched it. Since I have an interest in and modest exposure to both Tutt and Zizek, my main interest was their exchange; I’ll summarize T’s POV in a nutshell:
Zizek’s singular emphasis on generalized notions of the working class as a symbol don’t include concepts about the organization of the working class. Tutt believes this is a crucial “principle of classical Marxism,” and proposes a resurrection of this principle.
T admits he agrees w/ Z’s critique that contemporary liberal identity politics adheres to this principle by relativizing class as just “one other oppression in a discursive battle” which obscures its overdetermining role in the production of the Subject. Where Tutt says he differs from Zizek is that T still believes we can theorize working class consciousness in a realistic and constitutive way which breaks down all the presuppositions of liberalism. Z, he argues, forecloses the notion of building working class consciousness on the basis that it would result in an essentialism or fetishism of the signifiers of class. Tutt says this can be avoided if one is not “subsumed by liberal discourse’s understanding of class”. So, according to Tutt, Zizek finds himself on the wrong side of Marx.
The dogmatically Young Zizekian part of me says that on the contrary, Tutt finds himself on the wrong side of Negation, and by extension misses the radical dimension of Zizek’s reading of Marx and Lenin. What do I mean by this? As was made explicit in FTKNWTD, Z follows Lacan and Hegel in the belief that the precarity and fundamental uncertainty of concepts, on a certain level, articulate and make manifest a dimension of precarity and fundamental uncertainty in our very world. Given Zizek’s fidelity to this concept, we can formulate his response to Tutt as the assertion that he makes in his essay “Repeating Lenin”, that “the passage from intellectual game to an idea which effectively “seizes the masses” is the moment of truth – in it, the intellectual gets back his own message in its inverted/true form”. Tutt of course is aware of this, but Zizek’s subtle point here is that the ideal of organizing politically with certainty of one’s doctrinal purity is in itself a recipe for distracting oneself from moments of desperate contingency.
With that being said Tutt is a great theorist of the family and keeping up with his leftist meta-analysis of Nietzschean ressentiment has been very fruitful, I even plan now on re-reading his book “Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family”(https://www.amazon.com/Psychoanalysis-Politics-Family-Initiation-Palgrave/dp/3030940691/ref=sr_1_2?crid=187E6YUN37DUV&keywords=daniel+tutt&qid=1673504401&sprefix=daniel+tut%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-2).
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This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by
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Nick is having issues with bugs on the website so here’s hispost:
As we all know by now, this past week Slavoj Žižek came under fire in multiple publications primarily for political statements he has made in the past. Charges against him as an frenzied political shapeshifter were backed up by other notable academics who capitalized on the moment to side with his detractors and, in my opinion, cover their asses lest their connections with him and his work jeopardize their contracted allegiance to the ideologically liberal establishment of academia and thus threaten their careers. Jeremiads against the purity and authenticity of his Leftist orientation are nothing new. By now, burning his media persona in effigy while taking his provocations in bad faith has become a yearly tradition. This ceremony is never brought to its conclusion without taking some potshots at the legitimacy of his philosophical undertaking – his lengthy bibliography in multiple languages being cited as somehow as evidence against rather than support for the seriousness as a philosopher.
We Žižekians should not be expected to support each and every of his articulations apropos of his changing political perspectives. There is no holistic exterior to his politics and the attempt to discern clearly the figure of a latent imperialist, pro-capitalist behind his claims to be a Marxist is to ignore one of the main leitmotifs of Žižekianism – anamorphosis – an optical illusion which reflexively bespeaks the distortion inherent to the subject position, but before attempting to fix a place for his political theories inside his philosophy, let’s take the charges against him at face value.
We could make excuses for him and ourselves in this regard: one should be familiar with his theories of ideology, jouissance, and social antagonism before trying to make sense of his mercurial political shifts in stance — Slavoj the commentator says controversial things in order to rouse libs from their self-adulating complacency — he just doesn’t take seriously the media outlets who routinely enlist him to proffer his one-of-a-kind assessments on current affairs while throwing him overboard when record of his not so-PC utterances is dredged up by a lapsed Žižekians who, Thank Father Engels, have been brought to “see the light” of the totally non-problematic revolutionary project started in 1917 that morphed into the leviathan of “actually existing socialism”.
Does Slavoj say things which, even for those of us who believe we understand some of the rudiments of his theory, are very difficult to agree with? Absolutely. Do I think some of what he has to say about military interventionism or NATO is wrong? I’m not a fan of American military interventionism or American imperialism in general and when it comes to NATO, I consider myself grossly undereducated in this topic. At any rate, I’m sure that, apart from those political views which are for him axiomatic (those which I assume are chiefly informed by his experience of growing up under a Communist regime), much of what he avows in his op-eds are really just samples extracted from his latest book and which, when removed from this network of ideas, can appear incongruous, unfinished, and underdeveloped (I can thank Michael and So On from the podcast “Žižek and So On” for this thought). Does he care? No. Should we? I don’t know.
I understand that many of his contentions about the impact of Trump’s election don’t necessarily square with his endorsement of “the Squad” — that he might have supported liberal causes to purge the Slovenian government of socialist elements (not having grown up in the Soviet Bloc, I would be overstepping if I said what he was doing here was bad or good). I have no idea if he actually was involved in the establishment of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia party as Gabriel Rockhill claims (in a footnote, he says he’s not so sure of this claim either, but he has it on ‘good authority’, etc.) As for the claim that he does not support the working class, that is a completely baseless charge. As Agon Hamza said in his response to Daniel Tutt’s tweet in which he said almost verbatim just that, Žižek does not “fetishize the working class” and I would guess comes into contact with more of the working than do the large majority of academics who believe their work serves the interests of the proletariat.
Ok, what about the whole “he’s not a real philosopher” spiel? In today’s live stream discussion, Mikey & co will be countering this claim with more verve than I can muster here, but suffice it to say, there’s no way to attack a system as intricately developed and deeply textured as that of Žižek without appearing foolish. Understanding Slavoj (a goal which I wouldn’t count myself as anywhere close to reaching) entails not only tarrying with Lacan’s three registers, but also translating Hegel’s central concepts into that framework. Any “critique” of his philosophy which isn’t as equally conversant with the traditions within which he operates his innovations should not be taken seriously. Tall order, right? No wonder, mfers find Ž too heavy a lift and rather than admitting defeat, take recourse in the tired argument that he’s a charlatan and paradox monger who’s in it for the money and the fame is a much easier option. If you take him seriously, you might gasp have to read some Hegel. (But I thought Derrida and Deleuze and Foucault permanently discredited Hegel ;____; nooooo!).
Anyway, just some incomplete thoughts meant to get the ball rolling on a discussion.
Do you disagree?
Do you agree?
Would you want to be sat next to Žižek on an international flight?
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