Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Slavoj Žižek is weird

I'm just sayin'.

Slavoj Žižek: On Corbyn, the election, Brexit and fake news Channel 4 News 05/16/2017:



The interviewer here jams him on his chronic sensationalism.

His bit on Gandhi is a wacky idea, in which he buries whatever points he has with a dumb Hitler comparison.

There is an important point to be made about systemic violence. But Žižek doesn't get farther than expressing a fuzzy idea.

He's engages in what is essentially a vapid talking point about surpassing the EU by "a new, much more aggressive universalism."

At around 11:00 in the video, he gets around to making a more-or-less coherent point, that the new French President Emmanuel Macron stands for the same kind of neoliberal economic policies that has recently strengthened the radical, anti-EU rightwing in France. And he right about the point, even though he doesn't state it quite that straightforwardly. The YouTube video is dated May 16, and Macron is already illustrating the point:

TINA referring to the end-of-history dogma that There Is No Alternative to such policies. Even though there very clearly are constructive alternatives.

Then he lamely defends his endorsement of Donald Trump in the 2016 US Presidential election. This looked and looks to me an awful lot like someone taking a very conservative position with a thin veneer of a left justification.

He goes on to mealy-mouth about Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party in the upcoming British election.

After 41:00: "I want the rightwing chaos so that the new left will save us from it."

He goes on to complain about LGBT advocates and "political correctness." He may not understand LGBT issues very well.

At least he admits that he consciously tries to provoke with some of his formulations.

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