Slavoj Zizek featured in RSA Animate

[Traianvs]

The Elvis of cultural theory is featured in this great vid.



He makes a good point (in the second half of the vid), but his view on fair trade isn't very nuanced. Lots of people (like me) don't simply buy fair trade in order to 'feel better about ourselves'.

Anyway, I like the concept of drawing a speech.

[giblets]

Anyway, I like the concept of drawing a speech.

Yeah, RSA Animate is fun to watch.

[Az]

Zizek owns, because while you hear him going on in circles, you know he is married to an argentinian ex-lingerie model ( which has PhD in philosophy or something.)

[Meticulous Man]

Zizek owns, because while you hear him going on in circles, you know he is married to an argentinian ex-lingerie model ( which has PhD in philosophy or something.)

Word.

[Nostromo]

Dumb chicks are easily impressed by frauds

[Al B. Sure!]

Judging from his name, he's Slovenian or a Serb or something right?

If Hera ever comes back, I need to think of this voice/accent when I read his posts.

It's like spit talking. Do all Balkan people talk like they have a mouthful of spit?

[bipolarbear]

As I recall he's famous primarily for keeping the ideas of Lacan alive, but after watching The Pervert's Guide To Cinema, or at least as much of it as I could stomach, I think he's full of crap.

[Az]

Dumb chicks are easily impressed by frauds

"... If she only met me, I would treat her right... all those frauds "


:QQ:

[Pekka]

I like Zizek. He trivializes, dumbs down a lot of angles coming from Continental philosophy, French philosophy that is, of the last 60 years. So it makes a lot of that more scholarly and difficult to understand stuff more accessible to people who like to read readable text. Often times these previous authors, IMO, are in it for some kind of mental masturbation; they write in circles, by this I do not mean the hermeneutic circle of going from a detail to the big picture to the detail back again, zooming in and out, but in circles as opposed to linear text that people are with normal sense of logic read.

Defenders of this circle-writing say that they only say the things precisely - and it's the price they have to pay. I say bull****. Write linear, *******. If it is super difficult to understand the first time reading it, and the concept is very simple, then it's poorly written. Most scientific classics are really simply written, because the authors are geniuses.

Back to Zizek. He takes away those circles and plays a role of making these lines of thought accessible to everyone. This is what I appreciate about the man. He also is fairly interesting with his chosen topics. But there is something superficial about him I cannot quite realize, perhaps too much trivializing things. It's always a bad sign when dickheads praise someone, and that someone is actually calling the dickheads dickheads. Meaning that the dickheads don't even get it. It's not Zizek's fault, but it's annoying regardless.

[Az]

To be quite honest, linear doesn't cut it, since the processes are both iterative and are approximated by a number of metastable conditions which are connected through cascades.

Erwin Laslo ftw, etc.

[Pekka]

How does that prevent an author to write about it in linear manner? It's like saying you can never describe chaos in any way, unless you write chaotically, making no sense at all.

[Meticulous Man]

I caught one ep of Pervert's Guide to Cinema and have watched a couple of his lectures on the Internet; also tried reading The Sublime Object of Ideology (IIRC) but figured I had better things to do than be reading that and gave up. It did seem to be an easier read than Lacan's "Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" though, that one is definitely no walk in the park.

Occasionally he has said good stuff, I remember in particular his answer to someone who was asking what to think about bands like Rammstein making use of Nazi aesthetics... he took up the anti-immigration/anti-Slovene movement in Carinthia that had come up with the powerful-sounding slogan "Kärnten bleibt Deutsch" ("Carinthia will remain German") and the way the lefties twisted it in forms like "Kärnten kreibt Bleutsch", "Kärnten streibt Kleutsch", etc and said Rammstein was doing the same with Nazi stuff. Thought that was a good way of putting it... though I'm not sure how someone could be afraid of Rammstein turning people into Nazis in the first place.

[Az]

How does that prevent an author to write about it in linear manner? It's like saying you can never describe chaos in any way, unless you write chaotically, making no sense at all.

An iterative system is different from a chaos.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

excellent vid