getfiscal posted:

Congratulations to Sam Kriss on making Slavoj Zizek look like a moron in the Inthese Times newspaper.

gesundheit!

zizek posted:

In Spike Lee’s film on Malcolm X there is a wonderful detail: After Malcolm X gives a talk at a college, a white student girl approaches him and asks him what she can do to help the black struggle. He answers: “Nothing.” The point of this answer is ..

mr.x posted:

it makes me think about that little co-ed I told you about, the one who flew from her New England college down to New York and came up to me in the Nation of Islam's restaurant in Harlem, and I told her that there was "nothing" she could do. I regret that I told her that. I wish that now I knew her name, or where I could telephone her, or write to her, and tell her what I tell white people now when they present themselves as being sincere, and ask me, one way or another, the same thing that she asked.

RedMaistre posted:

But Žižek has another explanation: the Jews are stubbornly rejecting the universal love that expresses itself in revolutionary terror, just as they rejected the love of Christ.

but jews were overrepresented in the bolshevik party

Urbandale posted:

RedMaistre posted:

But Žižek has another explanation: the Jews are stubbornly rejecting the universal love that expresses itself in revolutionary terror, just as they rejected the love of Christ.

but jews were overrepresented in the bolshevik party

1.Zizek would probably counter that by saying probably say they, and other Jews who have participated actively in socialist and democratic movements, are not "really" jews in any relevant sense, and thus don't count. Perhaps using similar logic to one he employs when he says priests who speak out against sexual abuse are not "really"Christian priests because they don't identify with the alleged obscene essence of their community:

"Identifying oneself with this secret side is key for the very identity of a Christian priest: If a priest seriously (not just rhetorically) denounces these scandals he thereby excludes himself from the ecclesiastic community."

(he almost certainly expects the reader to extrapolate the same argument to Muslims who reject takfirism)

2. If we assume that Zizek is in fact, a right-Hegelian nationalist masquerading as a "Stalinist", we can presume he would partly locate the alleged failures of the USSR, both its violence and its (to him) prosaic humanism, with its "Jewish" concern with ethics and guilt:

"Against the utopia of mechanized collectivization, the high Stalinism of 30s stood for the return of ethics at its most violent, as an extreme measure to counteract the threat that traditional moral categories would be rendered meaningless, where unacceptable behavior would be perceived as involving the subjects guilt, but as a malfunctioning..."

From In Defense of Lost Causes

"Under Fascism, even in Nazi Germany, it was possible to survive, to maintain the appearance of a ‘normal’ everyday life, if one did not involve oneself in any oppositional political activity (and, of course, if one were not Jewish). Under Stalin in the late 1930s, on the other hand, nobody was safe: anyone could be unexpectedly denounced, arrested and shot as a traitor. The irrationality of Nazism was ‘condensed’ in anti-semitism – in its belief in the Jewish plot – while the irrationality of Stalinism pervaded the entire social body. For that reason, Nazi police investigators looked for proofs and traces of active opposition to the regime, whereas Stalin’s investigators were happy to fabricate evidence, invent plots etc."

From "The Two Totalitarianisms"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/slavoj-zizek/the-two-totalitarianisms

(Note the backhanded compliment to Fascist rationality and legality)

Remember also the he thinks the main problem with the Nazis was that they were "not violent enough." Hitler was still under the thrall of capitalism, the other face of the Jew, thus his revolution failed. They were were distracted by their one-sided reaction to the Bolshevik threat:

"Nazism was not radical enough, it did not dare to disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space (which is why it had to invent and focus on destroying an external enemy, Jews). This is why one should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions—but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive"

And it should be remembered that being governed by reactions, by ressentiment, as opposed to being active creators, has long been an alleged quality of the Judaic in secularized anti-Semitic discourse (of which Nietzsche has been the most notable codifier).

Edited by RedMaistre (Nov. 16, 2015 20:25:44)

ilmdge posted:

Marx’s notion of Communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy

-The Fragile Absolute, p19

What a pleasure having Zizek as a member of the 'left' is