babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.
Support rabble | Advertise with us | Contact our staff | About rabble | Log-in or Register for a new account | Corrections | Privacy policy | Newsfeeds | Mailing lists
rabble: Features | Columnists | In Cahoots | Blogs | Books | Photos | What's Up | Polls
babble: Forum Topics | Active Topics
The rpn: About the RPN | Become a podcaster
rabbleTV: Program Guide | Features | Indie Inside | Best of the net
Copyright © 2001-2013 the authors
Syndicate
Zizek on Lacan's Other:
No like round-earth
How does this joke explain anything? Moreover, the prior paragraphs remind me more of Hume than Lacan although neither is readily available to me at this point. I am sorry but this does not explain Lacan but seems to illustrate Zizek's confusing one for the other.
This joke quote doesn't make sense to me. Plenty of people who have intimate moments with someone they care a great deal about know that some of those moments are secret and shared only by the participants. People cherish such things, and keep them, quiet, in their hearts for their entire lives. They are waypoints (to use a pilot's term) in life. I am talking about those moments you remember forever.
What I mean by this is that there is no need for the gaze of another or a third party - or the imagination of such a gaze - for such experiences and memories to be complete.
Well, we have to remember that it's a) a joke and b) illustrative. Having sex with Cindy Crawford is not what I would call an "intimate moment." It's a crass emblem of heterosexual masculine desire. The underlying point is not that we literally declare our desires or have them publicly affirmed--for the most part, our desires are cryptic to us. Zizek's (and Lacan's) point is that our desires our socially determined--or at least determined by a larger symbolic order into which we are born. Another example is the Mennonite rumspringa, which is famous for letting adolescents raised under the strict Mennonite prohibitions the opportunity to indulge in all manner of social deprivation and decadence. The infamous moral of this tale is that some absurdly high percentage of Menonites (90+%) return to embrace the prohibitive Mennonite lifestyle. What a Lacanian would take from this is not that a religious life is ultimately more attractive and fulfilling, but that we have the desires we are taught to have--so of course excessive partying and drug use would not appeal to a Mennonite. Their worldview has no place for such desires.
This doesn't devalue our desires and their fulfillment as waypoints and so on, it simply points out how we come to have them, and how they in turn colonize and define us.
In social life we sometimes have very disturbing and bigoted views justified by reference to "It's a joke". Anyone on the political left with a brain in their head knows ALL ABOUT this phenomenon. It's how people sometimes justify racism, misogyny and all the rest of the spiritual "benefits" of our current "civilization" when we have a "gotcha" moment with them. Instead of learning from a mistake nothing changes. Gah.
So, apparently I can jettison the claims expressed by:
"This Third, which is always present as the witness, belies the possibility of an unspoiled innocent private pleasure. Sex is always minimally exhibitionist and relies on another's gaze."
... since it's not serious anyway, isn't useful when it comes to private and intimate moments that are important to me, and so on. It's blather.
How am I doing here? And if this is fair on my part, why would I bother to waste my time with this stuff?
But the fact that a joke illustrates the point in no way dismisses it, so I don't understand your analogy. Moreover, jokes enjoy a special position in psychoanalysis: Freud, in his excellent The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), contends that a joke represents a point of rupture between what is expressed and what one desires. It's actually an opportunity to expose what is repressed or what society attempts to prohibit: a very valuable moment in psychoanalysis. This is a large reason why ironic racism is not allowed on babble--it exposes privilege in the utterance. Zizek uses a lot of jokes for precisely this reason, I think. If anything, jokes are ironically when psychoanalysis is at its most serious.
I'm not buying that. Jokes or humour are more than simply the exposure of what is repressed. They expose the contradictions that are inherent in life itself and have a spiritual component that you're glossing over. They nourish us. Yuri Borev refers to laughter as something that "mocks the imperfections of the world and purifies the joy of living" etc. I agree with Borev.
I don't see that in your explanation.
I think Zizek would agree with Borev too. Marx is good at exposing the contradictions of capitalism; Freud is good at exposing how we manage to live with them. Zizek would scoff at ideologically loaded words like "spiritual" and "purify," of course, but in the main, your position is not far from his.
There is a stigma attached to agreeing with anything psychoanalysis has to say, but there needn't be.
lol. OK. Good point.
There might not be a need, but yet we have this film. A person with a camera has elbowed us and said look here is Zizek lying in bed at night, these are the toys his kids play with, picking out films in a movie shop, dealing with people in a city park, showing you around his apartment.
Oh, boring.
No clear analysis of how 'climategate' was a fraud which is what is needed now, not meaningless po-mo crap.
But what would I do with such an analysis? and once I've heard it would I still go to sleep at night? Play with my kids? Go rent a movie?
I found zizek fun to watch and he has nice ideas, but I didn't gain much respect for him as a person. I think it's a rather humbling portrait. We should ask as much from all our larger than life public personalities.
Well that is the type of analysis is needed; so Zizek is there to 'entertain' us, to distract us from doing anything? Is that your admission? If so, why show up here?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw
That's not my admission. I'm not really sure what he had in mind when he agreed to be in the film. I think the film maker made an attempt to humanize him. I think idealized superheros contribute to the problems of the world.
I don't think we need more analysis of climate change. I think the majority of the worlds population realizes we're fucking with nature and we are experiencing serious implications as a result.
This is the culture forum. I'm here because it's part of our culture to understand all the problems of the world, and enjoy babbling about them. "condemned by doubt, immobile and timid, I, like my culture am an indecisive dreamer. I speak to however will listen about my imaginary land with a heart totally dizzy and gnawed my fear." I'd like to move beyond that. I know not how, but I'm certain gloomy boring analysis alone is not going to do it.
I would love to see your imaginary land
A majority of the world's population perhaps but not of the nations that are stalling on climate change actions.
I said analysis of 'climategate', the phony controversey created by the fossil fuel puppets to further cloud and further seed the clouds of doubt, furthering the stalling. Zizek helps Big Fossil, not us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTSKU0FgZts&feature=related
There are rather many Zizec links on this thread so I may simply be putting up the same link again here. Let's assume I'm not.
Zizec: What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? Marxism 2009 Conference.
There's a quote here that's interesting. Zizec connects it with a "joke" again. It's a new variation of Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.
I suppose one has to hear the joke to contextualize the remark. I would mention in that regard that here Zizec is drawing attention to a phenomenon of leftist intellectuals that he would like to see changed; he wants such intellectuals to stop "fooling themselves" that they are accomplishing something significant, or being "really" subversive (to the existing order), etc., etc, when they are only ... "dirtying with dust the balls of those in power".
Not bad, methinks.
Which intellectuals? I have attempted to find a transcript for this speech because listening to him is like listening to sharp nails scratching across a billboard continuously without end. As I listen to the fourth quarter of this video, he does not name any particular intellectual at least a current one. How is Zizek accomplishing anything beyond entertaining fellow po-mo's. His Defense of Lost Causes reads like a long one-note, one-joke written by Mike Myers to ridicule the foolishness of depthless academics.
This is more proof of at best, his worthlessness, or worse, a painful distraction of the road we need to actually follow.
Is Chomsky only asking for reform? Is Vidal? Which reformist intellectuals is he supposedly attacking?
I rather thought you would have more sympathy with someone, whatever other views you might disagree with, who made an effort to expose the sort of useless talk and mock subversiveness that passes for radical thought in academia (and elsewhere)... even if only by the use of a vulgar metaphor.
I really don't know anyone who does what he does quite so well. I mean provoking the listener to re-examine their cherished values, ideas and beliefs. At least for those on the Marxist left.
A young Karl Marx was able to look at the ultra conservative doctrine of Georg Hegel and, along with like-minded intellectuals like Fred Engels, draw out the useful parts or what Marx called "the rational kernel" , etc.
I don't see why the same can't be done by modern day Marxists looking at other writers.
Anyway, it seems pointless to argue about it as I would hate to impose a reminder of fingernails on a billboard/chalkboard for you.
He is unclear, he jumps here and there, he is incoherent. He is not explaining anything, he is not adding anything to any discussion, he trails off and only misleads others. He is worse than useless, he is destructive to progress, he does not illuminate anything, he only distracts us from the discussions we really need to follow. The crisis of our time is oil and he does nothing to put that to the forefront.
To talk about the oil crisis as if everyone doesn't already know about it and feel guilty would probably be the best joke he could make.
New York Post fooled by Lady Gaga, Slavoj Zizek hoaxWell that is just it; how does he exposes useless talk? He himself sounds useless, he cannot make a consistent point. If he could actually make a clear example of what is referenced as useless talk that might help but that would require a level of concentration that is either beyond him or not useful to him gimmick. I suspect he is a fraud just like his hero, Lacan. We can do better than him and we need better than him. Seriously, if some first year university student or someone who is otherwise a novice to radical politics, and came here only to discover him first before anyone else, that would be very destructive to real progress.
I am not totally satisfied with Tariq Ali or Michael Parenti but I would feel much better if they were more prominent. Either of the two can be better understood and have made better indictments of various aspects of our political culture. The reason why so many of us prefer Chomsky is that he has addressed so many topics with the same approach and is consistently clear.
Zizek is appearing on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" on Saturday with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. I guess you'll be skipping that, eh?
If I can get access to a computer that day I will send an e-mail of protest. Horrendous giving him such push when he is so utterly destructive to what we need. Doubtlessly, she will not attempt to ask almighty Zizek to sum it up in 10 seconds; that would be intolerable for this new God of the po-mo Left.
Sorry, but there is not only not anything remotely like "everybody knows" but there is no "everybody." Although I am not fully satisfied with the analyses of The Trouble With Kansas, Bowling Alone, The Big Sort, etc those books do point to the more general problem of how utterly segmented the North American population is currently with so many at the bottom of a deep, nearly impenetrable silo. Twenty-five years ago, in my rural hometown in southern Manitoba, the anti-semite of the town was openly derided as a crazy, possessed man. Now, he has much cache and many people are listening to him, even my own parents.
Few people, if any, fully understand the dimensions of how bad oil is. They might know something about climate chaos {but unlikely not is full depths of widths} but will they understand its full dimensions much less any of the other issues related to oil (ie its role in depletion of the acquifer in the drilling process)? As of yet, I still have not yet found any website that really discusses clearly, forthrightly the fully demonic dimension of every crises in which oil plays a hand.
Part of this goes to the penchant for the North American Left to divert itself into destructive directions as positing Zizek as a leader or a spokesperson for anything at all. Zizek is worse than worthless, he is destructive to a real serious discussion about anything be it the growing racism in Europe or climate chaos and the particulars of why capital refuses to/cannot go green. Zizek is the worst part of a political-social swamp, a Peter-Pan-pied-piper who will only lead us further astray. I hate him with a rage beyond belief.