Zizek rules, people. The very first sentence of his new book is: “There are two opposed types of stupidity.” Isn’t that the best first line for a huge book on philosophy ever?
First Lines
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
Zizek rules, people. The very first sentence of his new book is: “There are two opposed types of stupidity.” Isn’t that the best first line for a huge book on philosophy ever?
Clarissa's Blog 
Here’s some rampant stupidity.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : This is how the left shoots itself in the foot
PhD candidate ape: I liked the article.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : It was idealist — accurate in a way, but wants angels and harps and clouds
PhD candidate ape: I must have missed that sentence.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : It was the one implied by the thesis “I can’t stand feudalism and I don’t like capitalism, but let’s get rid of feudalism already.”
PhD candidate ape: I didn’t get that message either. But that does not mean it was not there.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : Philosophical idealism — you can’t criticize everything if you have no idea what to put in its place. The right will step in and eliminate universities to make everything consistent with capitalism.
PhD candidate ape: They already have eliminated universities – what you have are vehicles for the production of indebted workers, a production system for a new form of indentured labour. The class sizes have been ramped, the teaching periods curtailed, the content dumbed down beyond belief. There is almost nothing of the university left. The name does not cover the changed role.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : It’s not entirely that bad, but that is the direction it is headed, with the help of your leftist friend
PhD candidate ape: Well we have to disagree then.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : Isn’t it a symptom of the decline of contemporary academia, that a writer would slam feudalism and capitalism, without giving an alternative.
PhD candidate ape: There can be no alternative that is not tainted by being conceived of and designed under the alienated social relations of capital. An alternative cna be found after the system is smashed. Like Durruti, I am not afraid of ruins. The people …
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : I don’t have a moral/spiritual view that is is possible for human beings or their views to be “tainted”. Alternatively, may the spirits preserve us if we are set from our “taintedness”, because that is all there is.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : Doesn’t matter, though. You can begin tearing down the liberal institutions and your own house and then work your way gradually toward those things you don’t like.
PhD candidate ape: It’s a word. Influenced if you prefer. Incorporated. My point is that under alienated social relations, knowledge is itself alienated and distorted by an all pervasive ideology. Even revolutionary knowledge. I don’t understand what the builder comment means I am afraid.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : If your knowledge is tainted or incorporated you’d better leave everything the hell alone.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : There’s absolutely nothing to suggest there’s such a think as non-tainted, non-incorporated knowledge
PhD candidate ape: Exactly. There is no such thing in the where and when we live. Perhaps in the future the possibility will exist. But we have to fight to enable that future to be built.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : No, in the future it can’t exist, because there’s no such thing and you can’t fight to enable a future to be built if you are yourself tainted, by your own reasoning
PhD candidate ape: Then you have to do what Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch recognised has to be done – allow reason to be abandoned at crucial moments; in other words recognise that history is non evolutionary and that ruptures can occur. The job is to create the conditions in which ruptures become possible. But I think we may have exhausted the topic.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong : Oh, I think everybody is entirely irrational. It’s one big rupture. Not up to me to “let it occur”.
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OK, I want to take every part of the dialogue made by “Jennifer Frances Armstrong” and kiss it. THIS PHD APE’S COMMENTS ARE PRECISELY THE KIND OF STUPIDITY THAT I CAN’T STAND from these pseudo-leftist circles.
” Isn’t it a symptom of the decline of contemporary academia, that a writer would slam feudalism and capitalism, without giving an alternative.”
– Yes, exactly!!!
” Philosophical idealism — you can’t criticize everything if you have no idea what to put in its place.”
– Thank you!!! Now how do we get this through the thick skulls of these apocalyptic pseudo-revolutionaries who would cry and run to their mommies if they have to go without running water or electricity for just a couple of days?
From the article: “Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.”
– This is precisely why failures remain failures. They keep blaming capitalism, feudalism, and the God almighty. But the reason why they are such failures is that, for them, being a star is all about having a pretty house in a nice neighborhood. None of them even conceives of dreaming about the actual work that leads to being a star. The house is what they envy the stars. What they don’t realize is that the house is not the reason why the stars are enviable. It’s the joy they derive from their work, from being creative, from doing something. Other than whining, I mean.
These are precisely those spoiled daddy’s babies that I abhor.
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“We’ll see you at the barricades.”
– I just can imagine how this person will flip out when s/he discovers that there is no place to charge the iPad at the barricades.
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Indeed! And the guy who wrote this has had a tough life, it’s not that he’s really namby-pamby, he’s just flaking out.
I don’t know what leftists are like in the US, apart from what you’ve implied above, but in Australia, they are generally flakes. They believe the most radical thing they can do is to attack a liberal institution or form a splinter group within an existing leftist organisation. “We might have to agree to disagree,” they say darkly, believing themselves to be knights charging against “the hegemony” to rupture it.
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” in Australia, they are generally flakes. They believe the most radical thing they can do is to attack a liberal institution or form a splinter group within an existing leftist organisation. “We might have to agree to disagree,” they say darkly, believing themselves to be knights charging against “the hegemony” to rupture it.”
– Same here. 🙂
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He rules…his minions as a book-selling hipster overlord. But to each his own. It was inevitable that someone like this emerge. What wikipedia has to say about hipsterism is certainly true of its intellectual spokseman. His style is the “embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics”. His “iconic carefully created sloppy vintage look” forms the basis of his personal appeal. His flamboyant neuroticism is another way that he can turn anything into a “self-conscious scene, something others can scrutinize and exploit.” The problem with reading him is that he “reduces the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how ‘cool’ [philosophically ironic] it is perceived to be.” Another, not insignificant part of his appeal, is his presumed expertise in Soviet communism, which fills an important void in intellectual hipsterism. In this way he enables his reader’s desire’s to “fetishize the authentic” elements of all of the “fringe movements of the postwar era…and draw on the “cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity…then regurgitate it with a winking inauthenticity”. What are his prescriptions, what pragmatic solutions does he suggest, in his role as a public intellectual? “the whole point of hipsters is that they avoid labels and being labeled. However, they all dress the same and act the same and conform in their non-conformity”. The similarities could go on indefinitely.
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https://clarissasblog.com/2010/06/06/zizeks-living-in-the-end-times-a-review-part-ii/
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