“I call myself a moderately conservative communist, and I mean it."

September 7, 2024 12:26 AM

While students recognise him, the Slovenian media ignores him and so, increasingly, does the mainstream left-wing press internationally. Žižek is in a strange place in 2024. Jokes are innate to his political pessimism, and his pessimism is offset by his energy; while humour drives his work, it also undermines its seriousness. “The fans are attracted to my dirty jokes, the idea that I am normal,” he says, “but this perception, the right-wingers use against me. They call me one of the world’s best-known ridiculous clowns.” from Slavoj Žižek’s war with the left [The New Statesman]
posted by chavenet (16 comments total)

One of my favorite Zizek quotes, during a trip to Berlin he noticed…

along and above all the main streets numerous large blue tubes and pipes, as if the intricate cobweb of water, phone, electricity, and so on, was no longer hidden beneath the earth, but displayed in public. My reaction was, of course, that this was probably another of those postmodern art performances whose aim was, this time, to reveal the intestines of the town, its hidden inner machinery, in a kind of equivalent to displaying on the video the palpitation of our stomach or lungs--I was soon proved wrong, however, when friends pointed out to me that what I saw was merely part of the standard maintenance and repair of the city's underground service network.

From that story of his you eventually get to the idea: what if “postmodernism” or “postmodern art” isn’t a set of attributes, but a perspective. What if confusing street maintenance for art isn’t confusion as much as it is seeing traces of beauty in things like street maintenance.

In this essay I will
posted by josephtate at 12:43 AM on September 7 [9 favorites]

"This is the paradox of language: if I do something tasteless, the proper way for you to accept my apology is to say, ‘No apology needed.’ If you accept my apology, it means you didn’t really forgive me!"

I can't work out if this whole piece pushes my buttons with "he says it like it is" or "you don't want to know how your heroes make sausage"* but ... I figure it's imperative that I disagree with him. So here goes: forgiveness isn't forgetting, an apology can retain an acknowledgement that something was broken and needed to be restored even a long time afterwards.

*: sometimes there's overlap meeting your heroes, finding out how the sausage is made.
posted by k3ninho at 2:07 AM on September 7 [9 favorites]

Certainly I sometimes wave off apologies because it's clear to me the other party doesn't get it and never will, so their apology is useless to me.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:40 AM on September 7 [6 favorites]

Zizek is a proto-GPT trained on the philosophy corpus, prompted by " make profound but annoying monologs with the unifying goal of being able to say in the most abstruse way possible '' it's just a joke, can't you take a joke'' "
posted by lalochezia at 4:55 AM on September 7 [14 favorites]

I'm not completely convinced that Zizek isn't Andy Kaufman, to be honest.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:29 AM on September 7 [21 favorites]

They call me one of the world’s best-known ridiculous clowns.

Zizek's career has been entirely about no-one ever being able to ask of him "who's this clown?"
posted by Merus at 5:50 AM on September 7 [7 favorites]

GK Chesterton is a good comparison; he says so many great things, taken in isolation: then you try to figure out exactly what his overall viewpoint is, & say, "no one can possibly believe this!"
posted by graywyvern at 6:04 AM on September 7 [8 favorites]

Zizek is a proto-GPT trained on the philosophy corpus

I mean, who isn’t? The Infinite Conversation is still the finest application of generative AI I have encountered (previously)
posted by 1024 at 6:34 AM on September 7 [7 favorites]

I find it an interesting counterpoint to the conversation going on about men who like, and don't like, women, that this article starts with him reporting saying, "Fuck you!" to his wife over and over again.

I found that distasteful enough that I didn't stay with it. The writer says Zizek checks to see if his jokes have gone too far, and for me, they had.
posted by Well I never at 8:38 AM on September 7 [3 favorites]

The other night, I pretended I didn’t know who Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian Hegelian Marxist and cultural critic, was. I’ve done this before, but never to such triumphant effect. This Marxist bro I was talking to made a reference to Žižek that he obviously assumed I would get, and my heart sank. He was a nice guy, actually, but I saw the conversation stretching out in front of us, and I saw myself having to say things about Žižek and listen to him say things about Žižek, and I saw that I really did not want this to happen.

The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek
posted by MengerSponge at 11:09 AM on September 7 [15 favorites]

GK Chesterton is a good comparison

But Chesterton was a much, much better writer.
posted by doctornemo at 11:21 AM on September 7 [7 favorites]

“Why did Stalinism go so wrong?” he says, within 20 minutes of meeting. “We still don’t have a good theory as to why."

Man, there are plenty of theories about this.

Sigh. I've never found Z. interesting. Maybe I keep looking into his stuff at the wrong times.
(Back in grad school, I asked my dissertation committee about him. They confessed that their copies of his books were gathering dust.)
posted by doctornemo at 11:25 AM on September 7 [3 favorites]

Two things always come to mind when Zizek's name comes up: the phrase "unknown knowns" and Laibach.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 3:52 PM on September 7 [2 favorites]

That Rosa Lyster piece is so good. It's become a local shorthand in our household for a certain kind of imp of the perverse.

“This is a bar,” I wanted to say, the same way that my grandmother might have said “This is a church.” A bar is not the appropriate venue for a loud, show-offy conversation about The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.
posted by clockwork at 4:13 PM on September 7 [2 favorites]

“This is a bar,” I wanted to say, the same way that my grandmother might have said “This is a church.” A bar is not...

I absolutely adore that pair of lines, but because I couldn't paste the entire article I had to cut it off somewhere.

Some sizeable fraction of us probably moved from one side of that conversation to the other over the course of our 20's. I sure as heck did.
posted by MengerSponge at 10:37 PM on September 7 [3 favorites]

Mod note: One comment deleted for violating the guidelines. While it is OK to disagree with other, please allow them to speak about their experience without turning the conversation into a discussion with specific people.
posted by loup (staff) at 4:47 PM on September 13