- Joined
- Aug 20, 2018
- Zizek wants to move away from a teleological sense of Marxism, and instead emphasize the non-teleological/non determined sense of Marxism.
- As such, he's trying to understand both consciousness and material being with reference to both Lacan-- no doubt this influences his distance from Peterson-- and earlier idealists such as Schelling.
- I appreciate Zizek trying to engage Marxism in a different paradigm from that of the 1960s onward
- I certainly don't side with capitalism, but this sounds like what I thought it'd be: two intellectuals talking past each other through their own lenses. Reminds me of the Foucault-Chomsky debate. (Dammit, maybe I'll have to watch it after all).
- That's what I call the cultural criticism of capitalism (object fetishism, labor alienation, etc.), but those are hardwired in the sense of human as a emotional being (which is half right). Sadly those are not capitalists faults, those are human faults to what Jung would call individuation, and relying on those material characteristics as a means for that (at least on the facade). There's not
- He's still under the 20s leftists as Marcuse, and sadly the "soviet new man" is a worse example of the übermensch, again a teleology of "mankind", and what we can see on new wave feminism since Beauvoir to Butler. At least the übermensch talked about individual morality (under heavy ataraxia thinking coming from nietzsche though). This relates to the next point.
- Kinda makes water when he says he likes the alienated to say "I want the centrality of power" to then admit that the worst part of capitalism is that it works even better under tyranical dictatorships in the communist sense (the tyranny of the goodooer state). I do think that still Peterson's idea is the way to start to individual morality not be subjugated to the mass morality (that both admitted to be the case).
- If you know about Pinker's "capitalism is fucking awesome to make the poor richer", you can skip Peter's part. Zizek part was a diss to political correctness, capitalism works better under dictarship like China, and his usual spiel. The breaking point was when Zizek asked "where are the communists you talk about" and Peterson said that 25% of educators call themselves communists (and Zizek handwave that as "Bernie sanders is being killed by PC politics", in a sort of no true scotman), then he called himself a Helegelian. After that the discussion is pretty OK (but not really relevant to anything).
And kinda sad, because to be honest, if Zizek was going to handwave his marxist doctrine and just focus on the capitalist (non economic critique, that is supposedly scientific materialism), and that Zizek "global effort is against capitalism" is totalitarian and Peterson's approach of "better urgent than important" they should talk about what Zizek and Peterson actually agree about and is the metanarrative of eurocentrism, and that never happened.
And it's certainly the most important topic to discuss, because let's say that many people would eat them with forks just by pointing out statistics, specially since both are so "non PC".
It kinda feels sad that the actual outsiders have such a wider grasp of social problems (though local "answers").