Just looked into The International Journal of Žižek Studies.
The article was A Hysteric's Guide to Pixar.
I am convinced it is just an elaborate blog for impish Alan Sokal.
I'm on a roll today. Disposed of Girard and Žižek.
Maybe after breakfast I'll gut Hegel.
The article was A Hysteric's Guide to Pixar.
I am convinced it is just an elaborate blog for impish Alan Sokal.
I'm on a roll today. Disposed of Girard and Žižek.
Maybe after breakfast I'll gut Hegel.
4 comments:
No, 'twould be one-sided to only gut Hegel.
You must gut und böse Hegel.
The synthesizer of opposites deserves nothing less!
Zizek constitutes a useful example of Left Privilege -- the privilege when one wants to attack the status quo of always being able to start from assumption that one means well, even if mistakes have been made, or one was too idealistic, etc.
Correlate is Right Disprivilege, I guess. When one wants to attack the status quo's driving off a cliff for the sake of eventual equality, one is necessarily a defender of privilege and inequality -- and one must struggle uphill against condemnations that one is therefore sympathizing with Jim Crow or even slavery within the Wes, etc. (The left and the routine authorities of the careening status quo would like to condemn conservatives for anti-semitism, since always Jews are endanger'd only by the "Right," but conservatives' support for Israel makes this accusation difficult.)
Anyway, Zizek can claim to be a 'good Stalinist,' enthuse for "redemptive violence" (which he with hands piously folded awaits from others [the "right"], who will bear the karmic bad rap), etc -- but because he is "left" or a "leftist" he can stand in left privilege at prestigous university podiums and be appauded by youngsters from the best families in North America and Western Europe.
Hitler and George Gilder are alike because they're both right wing. Hitler and Stalin are not alike because Hitler is rightwing and Stalin is leftwing. The exterminations that suggest a similarity between Hitler and Stalin (and Mao and Pol Pot et al) are irrelevant for all practical considerations.
Since Stalin meant well (we know this because he is 'leftwing'), his motivations were similar to those of children who carry UNICEF boxes while out trick-or-treating on Halloween. Hitler's motivations were like those of Ronald Reagan.
If Zizek styled himself "rightwing" while saying the same things about the sublimity of the object and enjoying the redemptive violence in "the Fight Club" movie, he would be condemn'd by students.
I see that Zizek got in trouble for not condemning popular hostility in a town somewhere in Slovenia to a Roma camp, but instead excoriating the affluent liberals etc who condemn'd this hostility but don't have to live near a Roma camp.
This gives us a fine scapegoating mechanism illustration for Girardians to celebrate.
Girard was condemn'd by various leftwing journalistic "activists" for not simply condemning any and all hostility to Roma. If there is any problem with the costs Roma culture visits on ordinary European populations nearby, these problems result from centuries of hostility by ordinary Europeans to the Roma who presumably moved to Europe from India via Egypt in order to find a place even more hostile to them than Indian and Egyptian populations. (Indians and Egyptians were hostile to Roma but European hostility is racist and that's what we're all concern'd to eliminate -- racist meanings attach'd to rancorous hostility and violence between population groups. The point is to eliminate the meanings, not the violence and rancour.)
Zizek's proposal that the Roma be invited to dwell in posh neighbourhoods (so that the white liberals can rôle model welcoming behaviour for their benighted low-class white half-brethren) is apparently historically abstract. All such blame shifting should be postponed until after the capitalist hegemony has been destroy'd or expropriated. In the meanwhile, while the leftwing activists struggle for Revolution, the low-class whites should have to put up with Roma cultures nearby.
They inherit the karma for preceding centuries of white racism.
In North America, Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mocking Bird" proved that upperclass white Southerners i positions of power etc were decent Negrophiles like Atticus Fink. The low-class whites -- like the guy who beat his daughter for making out with the black male she desired -- orchestrate all the racism, and accordingly by the law of karma should bear all the opprobrium.
Scapegoating works! ... Also labels work. I think if the recent American Christology offer'd by the American president at the 2 February prayer breakfast had been spoken by a Republican president, Europeans, Canadians, and American liberals-progressives would have condemn'd such "unthinking" "exceptionalist" "triumphalism."
But all the karmic opprobrium for the president's patriotic Christian Americanism is borne by the odious scapegoat Rick Santorum, white Republican conservative Christian etc.
And indeed the president spoke as I believe a Christian president ought to speak. Some of his wordings were unusual, and deserve close attention; but basically the speech continues the Pauline-Augustinian line that the oikoumene should be reclaim'd from the devil by Christian civilization and revelation, which turns the oikoumene "upside down" as the president affirms (referring to Acts 17:6 cf KJV Psalms 146:9; 2Kings 21:13; Isaiah 24:1, 29:16), so that we can understand the underside of the oikoumene.
Not that the overside is irrelevant. Seemiliness is half of the truth too, eh?
Zizek: »There was, in Slovenia, around a year ago, a big problem with a Roma (Gipsy) family which camped close to a small town.
When a man was killed in the camp, the people in the town started to protest against the Roma, demanding that they be moved from the camp (which they occupied illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc.
As expected, all liberals condemned them as racists, locating racism into this isolated small village, while none of the liberals, living comfortably in the big cities, had any everyday contact with the Roma (except for meeting their representatives in front of the TV cameras when they supported them).
When the TV interviewed the “racists” from the town, they were clearly seen to be a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the constant theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of small harassments from the Roma.
It is all too easy to say (as the liberals did) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of the centuries of their exclusion and mistreatment, that the people in the nearby town should also open themselves more to the Roma, etc. – nobody clearly answered the local “racists” what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems the Roma camp evidently was for them.«
But as the activist critiquers said, the problem is caused by the racists, not by whatever faults the racists imagine come from the Roma.
Evidently low-class whites as well as Roma, black underclass etc needn't expect any help form anti-racist activists in improving the real material conditions of their lives until the capitalists' cultural hegemony is expropriated by the anti-racist activists.
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