.

And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again? Archilochus

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Zizek Interview

<center>
</center>
Joe Humphrey's with Slavoj Žižek, "<a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/slavoj-%C5%BEi%C5%BEek-joe-biden-is-long-term-the-same-catastrophe-as-trump-1.4312913">Joe Biden is long-term the same catastrophe as Trump</a>"
<blockquote><i>I’m 20 minutes into an interview with Slavoj Žižek when he propositions sex. As a thought experiment, I stress.

“Imagine a love encounter. Let’s say you are a beautiful lady.” He holds his hands up and grins. “Sorry, heterosexual! I’m old-fashioned. I am a guy, I want to get you.”

Such is the nature of conversation with the Slovenian philosopher that he spins from enunciating Marxist social theory one moment to asking about Ireland’s record in combating Covid-19 the next. Right now he is focused on the implications of futuristic technology – envisaged by the likes of Elon Musk – which would transmit thoughts directly from one brain to another.

“There will be no promises of seduction. Our minds are in contact and your mind reads a signal in me: ‘I want to screw you.’ I get it back: ‘Over my dead body,’ and it’s over in a split of a second.”

Musk says he is developing a device called Neuralink with exactly this capability. The Tesla boss claims it will be ready in as little as five years, after which, according to the hype, human language will be rendered obsolete.

Žižek doesn’t buy it. “Our minds work only through language, I claim. Language is this paradoxical intruder,” he says. “Because we have to communicate in language, I never know exactly what you mean but the very obstacle generates a surplus of meaning.”

Žižek – pronounced “Djee-shek” – divides critical opinion. One camp takes him seriously as “the Elvis of cultural theory”: an original and invigorating left-wing thinker. A second camp treats him as a joke: a high-brow comic act, or “the Borat of philosophy”, obsessed with sex, movies and the abstruse writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

There is a third faction which takes Žižek seriously but as a dangerous relativist. One proponent of this view described him as “the most despicable philosopher in the West” highlighting, among Žižek's many crimes of reason, his claim that Gandhi was “more violent” than Hitler because “Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned” in India.

<b>Third camp</b>

Many people previously sympathetic to Žižek were driven into this third camp a few years ago when he expressed his support for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election.

“I am tempted to changing my position,” he tells The Irish Times. “I will put it like this. I don’t think my old statement – ‘Trump better than Hillary Clinton’ – was wrong because my calculation was a simple one: If Trump wins it will give a new boost to the left, and it did strengthen. It almost split the Democratic Party [and helped] not only Bernie Sanders but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It created, for the first time in I don’t know how many decades, a true American left. So I still think the great merit – I’m sorry for this obscene term to be used with somebody like Trump – is Trump mixed the cards in a new way.”

Who would he vote for this time, Joe Biden or Trump?

“Biden is long-term the same catastrophe as Trump,” he replies. While welcoming “the chaos” of the current incumbent, “I think Trump is a little too much.” On the other hand, the Democratic contender “is sometimes, you can see, painfully senile”. Without giving a straight answer, he says he hopes Biden “has this talent Ronald Reagan had. I was told . . . Reagan had a good Leninist talent to nominate the right people to positions. I hope [Biden] will build a better équipe around him, which will somehow control the situation”.

As a committed Hegelian, or more accurately Hegelo-Lacanian – his other lodestar is French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – Žižek is constantly holding at least two opposing ideas in his head at once. At one juncture, he describes the Hegelian outlook as “desperately optimistic” but he also says, “I don’t know a much more pessimist philosopher than Hegel.”

To the extent that Žižek accounts for this particular contradiction, it is in the fact that no one is sure what Hegel actually believed; he was, after all, a philosopher described by Arthur Schopenhauer as “a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense”.

<b>Hegel incarnate</b>

Žižek is Hegel incarnate in one sense at least: He has an enormous catalogue of work, producing a book roughly every six months. So frequently, in fact, that he loses track of the title that he is currently promoting.

“Which book are you talking about?” he asks about five minutes into our Skype call. “Ah, it’s already that one!”

The book in question is Hegel in a Wired Brain, a meditation on what the German philosopher – born 250 years ago on August 27th – would make of technological progress. Žižek doesn’t use social media and says he has never had a Twitter account; the “personalised” aesthetic doesn’t appeal to him.

“I have this old philosophical disdain, when somebody says ‘I personally feel like that’, my immediate reaction is: ‘F**k off. I don’t care how you feel. I’m interested in truth. Truth not in the naive sense of objective truth but truth in the sense of what is the presupposition of what you’re saying’.”

He credits Angela Nagle, the Irish author of Kill All Normies, for influencing his view of online communities. A “weird reversal” has occurred, says Zizek, where“the new right almost appropriated all the vulgarity” once associated with student reformists, “and much of the new left is going into this politically correct direction”.<blockquote>I have a personal question. Don’t laugh at me. I ask every Irish person: de Valera versus Michael Collins?</blockquote>
He adds: “This is my problem with the tendency to get rid of all reminders of racism, sexism and so on . . .” While “I am for this struggle”, he asks whether “ruining monuments” is the best tactic. René Descartes, for example, “is the quintessence of the western mind, pure rationalism, privileged man, no sense of empathy, and so on –but wait a minute! Do you know how popular Descartes was among women readers? Why? Because cogito – the pure Cartesian ‘I’ – has no sex; it’s open to contingent sexual construction . . . Without cogito there is no modern feminism.”

Whatever about the quality of his logic, Žižek is charming company.

“I have a personal question,” he interjects. “Don’t laugh at me. I ask every Irish person: de Valera versus Michael Collins?” Later, he cites the Dublin-based novelist Tana French – “a big hit in Slovenia” – as evidence of Ireland’s greatness. “Every stupid, small nation can have a great poet, a great national novelist. To have a good detective writer means you are in.”

<b>Short tract</b>

Given the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Ljubljana’s most famous son is already thinking of the next book. It will be “something like Hegel in the Viral World”, he says, having already brought out a short tract called Pandemic! in April.

The restarting of tourists’ flights across Europe is “absolutely crazy”, he believes. At the same time, “I sympathise with the guy who says ‘I don’t want to wear a mask’. I understand him. We are being asked literally to change our nature.”

As for the effect of Covid-19 on the capitalist system, Žižek says: “What I like – ‘like’, it’s an obscene term to use here – for what goes on now is that even conservative prime ministers and presidents have to do things which, if you had to mention them a year ago, they would tell you: Are you crazy? This is radical left; it will never be done.”

Don’t expect any neat conclusions from Žižek. But even his fiercest critics must admit that, like a stopped clock which tells the right time twice a day, he inevitably hits upon some truth – even if it’s the simple truth that humans are hopelessly flawed and contradictory.

With a nod to his own shortcomings, he suggests the ridiculousness of our species is what makes us special, as it’s something no superintelligent computer can match.

“This example I use all the time – I’m embarrassed it’s in at least five of my books,” he says, before retelling a joke from the 1939 Ernst Lubitsch comedy Ninotchka: “You go to a restaurant and ask: ‘Can I get coffee without cream?’ The waiter says: ‘Sorry sir, we don’t have cream, we only have milk, so you only can get coffee without milk.’’

“This is a properly Hegelian point,” Žižek adds. Both types of coffee, along with “plain coffee” are “materially the same but they are not symbolically, in our space of meaning, the same”.

“I debated this with computer specialists and asked them a simple question: Could an artificial mind distinguish between plain coffee, coffee without cream and coffee without milk? And I didn’t get a good answer.”

6 comments:

The Prophet Dervish Z Sanders said...

F*ck this brain damaged cokehead. Who gives a sh!t what he thinks? Except you. And aren't you disappointed that he isn't standing by Dotard?

Joe Conservative said...

Even Zizek can see what you can't, that Biden is "painfully senile". lol!

Franco Aragosta said...

Contrarian antagonists
____ care rarely for what’s true.
They’re far more eager to denounce,
–––– so here is what they do.
Their purpose is to denigrate,
-––––– belittle and defame.
Their wish is to humiliate
–––– in hopes of fixing blame.
The truth too easily is lost
–––– in battles of this kind.
Hectoring and badgering
––––– abuse the human mind.
Instead of curiosity
––––– we often find expression
Of little but indulgence
––––– of a passion for aggression.
When avidness appears
––––– to open Vitriol’s loose spigot,
The one who twists and turns the tap
–––– is apt to be a bigot.


... Yu No Hu. - Oriental scholar, poet, essayist, linguist, and Supreme Moral Authority


Franco Aragosta said...

_______ Dungdon Dervy's Ayre ________ 



Oh Dervy Boy, the pharmacists are calling
To putrid dens where evil smells reside
Your horrid breath has all the flowers dying
it's your vile stench Alas! we must abide.
And you'll stay on to cast your fearsome shadow
As cross the land your halitosis grows
It will stay here like ever stinking spoilt shad roe
Oh Dervy Boy, you give to us such toxic woes!

When your bad breath has all the flowers dying
If we are dead –– as dead I hope we'll be ––
Because I know you'll find our bodies lying
Skin back your dick, to wag smegmatically
And then I know you're bound all over us to pee
For that our graves will ever barren be
Your horrid presence ever bound to guarantee
That we shall sleep in a latrine eternally!


~ Castoria Fletcher O'Privy

Franco Aragosta said...

A SERMONETTE WRITTEN TODAY TO CARRY WITh YOU TILL NOVEMBER 4TH

Since the behavior of Democrats in power at the Supreme Court hearings for Robert Bork, the hearings for Clarence Thomas, those for Brett Kavanaugh, and the more recent Kangaroo Court Attorney General William Barr was subjected to were brutally unfair, circus-like proceedings that turned the nominating process and hearings in each case into a travesty –– a hideous perversion of due process that most closely resembled the infamous "Show Trials" of Stalin's era –– I see no reason whatsoever why we should trust ANY of the Democrats NOT to lie, cheat, steal –– and possibly even kill –– to get their way.

Democrats are obsessed with an all consuming LUST for POWER that supersedes all other considerations. This makes them exceedingly dangerous to deal with, becuse they are ruthless. Should they win the presidency and claim majorities in both the House and the Senate –– God forbid! –– I would greatly fear for the future of our once-great nation

Because of the inordinate influence bold, new, hyper-insolent leftist figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ratshita Tlaib, and Ayanna Presley seem to have been virtually granted by our avowedly Marxist ENEMEDIA, and the craven acquiescence of Establishment Democrats like Nancy Pelousy, Chuck Schumer, and Jerrold Nadler, who have simply rolled over and played dead for the outrageous demands and highly destructive radical ideas of these hoydenish harpies, our political orientation has been virtually forced to move so far to the left that the tenets and principles that faounded the United States of America have been virtually buried in screeching, roaring, droning, thumping, clattering, nattering, sneering, jeering LEFTIST Propaganda.

The apparent lack of awareness of this regrettable phenomenon on the part of Republicans, who tend to be stolid, woefully dispassionate, too polite, and frankly otiose when it comes to taking positive action designed to thwart the ambitions of political adversaries is discouraging to say the least. This is the stuff of which RINO'S are made, and the main reason President Trump's admittedly radical, but remarkably wholesome, energizing and restorative "Big Agenda" may not succeed,

If the GOP had even one TENTH of the virulent energy the LEFT employs in furthering its nefarious ends, the Marxicrats, as I believe we should now call them, wouldn't stand a chance.

Franco Aragosta said...

The Communist Party, which is –– and always has been –– aggressively, vehemently, militantly anti-AMERICAN -– should have OUTLAWED at least 100 years ago. No shool or public organizatin should EVER have been permitted to TEACH its subversive, destructive doctrines. Anyone who insited son knowing more abut Marxsm should have been told, "Go to the Soviet Union, go to Red china, go to Cuba and SEE for YOURSELF what Marxism really is."

"By their FRUITS ye shall know them."

The fruits of Marxism are sour, bitter, meager, indigestible and ultimately LETHAL.