Lessons posted:

i think zizek says that hitler was basically the ultimate ironist, that he (and mussolini) basically took bolshevism and made it into a right-wing farce, and that it didn't really matter whether or not racism and shit was all garbage, and that that's why we should be passionate but sincere. lol to be honest i decided that from gleaning the words "hitler as ironist?" in one of his books as i was packing.

getfiscal posted:

what does it matter what anyone believes

i'm a bag of meat that cares a lot about my labels

i'm a bag of meat that cares about being superior to others, and denial of idiocy is a big factor in that

By returning to a "minor" author, the late-nineteenth-century English conservative writer G. K. Chesterton, The Puppet and the Dwarf wishes to turn on their heads what it sees as contemporary cultural theory's dominant forces, of postmodernists who anemically ordain transgression, advocate shallow hedonism, and deny metaphysical belief (pp. 36-39, 95), and the kind of messianic turn in deconstruction espoused by Levinas and, increasingly, by Derrida (p. 3). Zifek particularly dislikes (and here I have a great deal of sympathy) the notion of "radical Otherness" (pp. 5-6). He complains that this Derridean-Levinasian focus on "the openness to Otherness and its unconditional Call" has almost become the "hegemonic ethicospiritual attitude" of today's critical intellectuals (p. 8). This victory of a certain kind of Judaism is to be rejected, for it forgets the "precious" spirituality of the "kibbutz" and its "unique collective experience": the kibbutz that is "the greatest proof that Jews are not 'by nature' financial middlemen" (p. 8). In "Levinasian-Derridean Otherness," the "assertion of Otherness leads to the boring, monotonous sameness of Otherness itself' (p. 24; also pp. 138-39).

We in the West should not, says Ziiek, look for assistance or inspiration to "Oriental spirituality" (p. 26), as some contemporary movements unfortunately do. We should suspect "the message of Buddhism" (p. 20), for it turns out that "benevolent Buddhist disengagement" and stress on "inner peace" inevitably have their reverse side: Buddhists become "passive" observers of their acts, so that Buddhism "could well function as the support of the most ruthless killing machine" (pp. 27, 29, 31). We can observe the same doubleness in Gandhi, Zifek telling us that "the fact that Ben Kingsley's two big movie roles are Gandhi and the excessively aggressive English gangster in Sexy Beast bears witness to a deeper affinity: what if the second character is the full actualization of the hidden potential of the first?" (p. 30). Furthermore, perhaps if the "Buddhist" and "Hindu" doctrine of noninvolvement, as in the Bhagavad-Gita, is really responsible for the Holocaust, it is the ultimate "justification for the burning of the Jews in the gas-chambers," the proof being that the Bhagavad-Gita was Himmler's favorite book and he always carried a copy in his uniform pocket (p. 32; also p. 112).

We should not, then, look to pagan polytheism-which is apparently far more destructively violent than monotheism, or at least true monotheism, which is creatively violent-which liberates and creates freedom (pp. 31, 33). For there is true and false monotheism. Aggressive, exclusionary, and violent monotheisms like the Islamic and Jewish (pp. 24-25) are really "secretly polytheist" (p. 26). Even when it appears that Christianity-which is "the only true monotheism" (p. 24) and by its nature always "tolerant" (p. 26)-is anti-Semitic, such behavior simply represents a "regression into paganism" (p. 119).

Nor should we look to any accepted notion of a continuous Judeo- Christian tradition. Judaism, says Zi~ek, was rightly superseded by Christianity. Because in Judaism the messiah has not arrived, Judaism constrains us to mere waiting, to being "passive" (pp. 135-36); an interesting choice of term since Buddhism was also accused of being "passive" (p. 29). The implication would seem to be that Judaism is likewise an Eastern religion; it does not properlyb elong to Europe, to the West (at one point the narratora ccuses Derridean-Levinasian desire for the Messianic Promise as "the ultimate form of idolatry" ). Christianity rightly broke with Judaism, by introducing a gap within God: the gap between God's appearance on earth as Jesus Christ, a man full of doubts and hence "the ultimate divine Fool" (pp. 90-91 ), and God as imprisoned in eternity (visiting earth because he was so bored in heaven), impotent to affect anything in the earthly realm, including saving Jesus from suffering (pp. 14, 80, 129, 140). The implication here seems to be that the Christian God, split in two and powerless and foolish in sending himself to earth only to have himself crucified so he can return, could certainly never harm anyone. Christianity is necessarily historically benign, and philosophically superior as well, because God splitting himself creates the "gap" that is the most valuable principle of all, that of difference as such (p. 24). Because of God's self-division and impotence, Christianity impels humanity to be active in history (pp. 136-37).

Instead of Judaism, Zitek declares, we must do the most daring thing of all: return to the "true orthodoxy" (p. 35) of Christian tradition as history's telos. Through Paul's wise intervention in breaking with Judaism, Christians became the Chosen People: God "changed the identity of the chosen people" (p. 130); it is Christians, not Jews, who now represent humanity as such (p. 131). The narrator tells us that the greatness of Paul was to form, after the break with Judaism, a kind of Leninist collectivity: "Paul goes on to his true Leninist business, that of organizing the new party called the Christian community" (p. 9). In more modern times, it would appear that the chosen people now also includes other collectivities, principally "the revolutionary party and the psychoanalytic society" (p. 130). The chosen people in history and modernity are Christians, Leninist revolutionaries, and Lacanians.

The Puppet and the Dwarf is a sinister, ominous text. For Zifek as omniscient monologic narrator,t here is only one "truth"a nd one single way to truth, a single way conveyed in a violent, reductive language of essence: insistent metaphors of the "core" (pp. 15, 20, 117), the "very core" (p. 7), the "innermost core" (p. 17), the "kernel" (pp. 6, 23, 64, 96, 143), the "innermost kernel"( p. 16), the "realk ernel"( pp. 59, 75, 120), the "fundamental"(p p. 23, 70), the "basic lesson" (p. 19), the "message" (pp. 19, 25), "the only way" (p. 19), the "conclusive evidence" (p. 26), the "authentic" (p. 31), and "the truth" (p. 33). Frequently the text reduces theoretical language to a vulgar demotic, as in its coupling of Gandhi and Ben Kingsley playing a gangster in a film.

In Formations of the Secular (pp. 159, 164-68), Asad questions the Western Orientalist desire to make a sharp distinction between Europe and non- Europe, observing that the populations designated by the label Islam are in great measure the cultural heirs of the Hellenic world and that in medieval Moorish Spain there were numerous connections and exchanges between Muslims, Christians, and Jews (p. 168). It is precisely this line of division that Zi'ek's text wishes to patrol; for all its dislike of Levinas's Other, The Puppet and the Dwarf makes the pagan polytheistic Orient into an absolute other. Christian Europe is the Absolute One.

(John Docker "Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity by Talal Asad; The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity by Slavoj Žižek")

In Formations of the Secular (pp. 159, 164-68), Asad questions the Western Orientalist desire to make a sharp distinction between Europe and non- Europe

does anyone really believe this? For example Greece and Syria are both a bunch of swarthy folk grazing goats on rocky hills and living in crumbly tenements as far as i can tell.

Meh, i dunno, fuck "Europe" though

babyfinland posted:

i havent read that book yet but

the cryzone motto

babyfinland posted:

getfiscal posted:

Lessons posted:

i think zizek says that hitler was basically the ultimate ironist, that he (and mussolini) basically took bolshevism and made it into a right-wing farce, and that it didn't really matter whether or not racism and shit was all garbage, and that that's why we should be passionate but sincere. lol to be honest i decided that from gleaning the words "hitler as ironist?" in one of his books as i was packing.

zizek is such a sinister little fascist and he always comes back to this idea that Forget your humanity, be PASSIONATE and strike back at Passive Orientals and Womanly Decadence. he is an evil man

Alyosha posted:

babyfinland posted:

greek philosophy

But ancient Greek philosophy predates Islam and also Christianity by hundreds of years

this is not how ideas work Joel

babyfinland posted:

greek philosophy

didn't that originate and have it's heydey quite a while before The Prophet (PBUH) was traipsing around Arabia?