First checked it out a couple days ago, been stoned and fucking around with shit around the apartment so I’ve listened to decent number since. Y’all are great, I’ll probably sub on patreon sometime soon.

You should read Zizek (I’m begging people , please engage with him beyond youtube!), I think his position on Buddhism is fairly congruent with yours and he would likely give you a more in depth critique. My short circuited take is that Buddhism (and lots of (post)structuralism and Heidegger etc.) raises death to the level of the sublime (death as rendered non-antagonistic to Being, death as the mere fact of life’s passing) while positing the possibility of a moment of (impossible) autopoetic harmony with life as such (through withdrawal, meditation, nirvana etc.) wherein death is torn from its sublimity, overcome, and treated as mere contingent excess to life. The issue with this sublime concept of death which is necessary for positing separation from worldliness in nirvana is that one must presuppose the world as a constituted, harmonious whole which treats life and death as a complementary duality. Of course all life must pass, but everyone of experience can attest that death’s entrance into their world does anything but introduce harmony. Death is not dissonance to life’s consonance, but that which dissolves harmony as such.

Oh shit my bad

I haven’t ever really looked into it too directly myself, but everything I’ve heard about birthright sounds batshit and insanely manipulative

I mean she has been saying that she’s going full Boomer with the JFK stuff recently…

:zizek: :zizek-ok:

I do think everyone should take his theory seriously though, especially his big works like this one or Less Than Nothing, but they are a little daunting and really time consuming… I think it would almost be better to recommend Alenka Zupancic if you want to more clearly understand the core and systematicity of what Zizek’s always getting at, Zupancic writes way more precise and efficiently plus her works are just shorter

But does he get blow in the box?

Look all I’m saying is I didn’t choose to grow up in the goddamn desert… and yeah I smoke maybe too much weed, but I dare someone to tell me Kyuss, especially fucking Welcome to Sky Valley, doesn’t fucking rip. Just because it’s better on drugs doesn’t mean that…

I don’t wanna copy here, but you’re on to something here, I think I might be Zooted in a Box Homme as well

He does address identity politics in a nuanced way throughout his work, he views it as the hysterical response which is also a necessary/ fundamental moment in articulating a critique of ideology and hegemony, it’s merely that this, the proliferation of the multiplicity of identities, is not in itself revolutionary. He absolutely believes trans people have the right to exist, housing, work, have full political agency, families, friends… His whole point is that these things should not hinge on whether identity of the other is merely tolerated, but on the basis of a shared emancipatory project which excepts no one. I just think he principally refuses to fetishize transgender identity (which can appear callous and be weaponized through reactionary framing).

I think a good feminist interlocutor from the same Lacanian frame as Zizek is Mari Ruti if you want to check her out. She offers a ton engagement with the notion of identity and most of her work I’ve read has also woven in very valid critiques of Zizek (and while these are grounded in a more individualist frame, she writes in a much more accessible manner). I get that Lacanian discourses around the phallus, castration, hysteria and whatnot can sound hyperpatriarchal, but the core implications are actually radically egalitarian if you grasp them correctly. Castration is the precondition of subjectivity for all of us.

Also the thumbnail above is obviously inflammatory relative to the content of the video, come on

In the neurotic oscillation between the poles of their dualistic identity, RadLibs draw their authority from the disavowal of the figure(s) of violence and terror which supposedly stain our collective ideals for a new set of social organizations and relations to constitute our world, the exemplar of course being Stalin. This inevitably leads to the contradiction (although what is more contradictory than the mere name, Radical Liberal?) wherein the necessary disavowal of the crimes of Stalin (and Mao, the USSR, PRC…) becomes the grounds they must incessantly reconstitute in positing their claims - “here is our emancipatory vision for societal change which, unlike the totalitarian Tankie’s, can avoid the pitfalls of revolutionary terror…” - the ghost of Stalin is thus fated to forever haunt them, despite, or rather because of, their neurotic clinging to a possibility of a return to purity from before our original sin. That’s why Lenin Marx insisted that we not make excuses for our terror.