ZizekianHotDogVendor [comrade/them]
Why do you want OP to feel guilty for liking it?
Honestly I actually believe they will enjoy it more if I do, that’s kinda my point. It’s an obvious attempt to rationalize a guilty pleasure, a public appeal to absolve the guiltiness so as to keep just the pleasure. The issue is that this avoids the traumatic fact for any moment of enjoyment - that the pleasure is itself grounded in the repression of guilt. To my mind, that OP feels insecure and seeks validation for these specific points of enjoyment is merely evidence that they should hold on to that feeling whenever listening, lest they want to be incessantly confronted face to face with the subjective void of aesthetic judgement when trying to affirm their own position. I was just stoned and wanted to be an annoying little psychoanalytic shit. Y’all don’t appreciate the importance of negativity enough, it’s not like my dissing Green Day is traumatic
Also I would like to say “that was good, but it would better if x,y,z” is not really a critical position. A critical position is more like, “I can see they tried to do/say/represent X but they actually ended up doing Y and saying Z”.
Also I will never like 00s pop punk and will continue to hopelessly struggle against it, citing the relativity of subjective music tastes will do little to dissuade me!
Boooo stop trying to rationalize your embarrassment and guilt. Guilt is sometimes good. You should feel guilty if you enjoy American Idiot, I’m sorry comrade (plus I’d argue that this is where your enjoyment truly originates anyways- it’s precisely because you had to feel guilty about it that you actually developed such a strong libidinal attachment to it). Feeling good about private consumption should not be a prerogative for our use of public reason. I like shit that’s bad and that I feel guilty consuming. This doesn’t mean I should work to have it inscribed in the annals of public discourse that Walking on the Sun is truly a good song nor do I need further reinforcement when it comes to my godawful taste in food - I deserve no recognition for maintaining the pallet and diversity in consumption of a perpetually stoned and broke 20 year old. I’m an unexceptional human who has good and bad tastes, but the great thing about being a communist is that you can still be critical while being unexceptional.
Yeah but hating somebody is usually what prevents one from moving on. Bojack was actually amazing in helping me frame my own trauma, especially with regards to parental figures. Hopefully not indulging in my own life experience too much, I would like to assert that so long as the hatred for the parent who abused and abandoned me burned white hot I could not help but treat their figure as anything but a tortured deity always haunting my presence. I couldn’t move on until I stop hating the image of the tyrant, until I saw nothing but an impotent, lacking subject caught In the vicissitudes of their own imposture.
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.
You should check out the podcasts Red Library and Why Theory. The latter is definitely very RadLib (lots of orange man bad and I think even a positive mention of Russiagate at some point lmao) and they critique Marxists often on the terms of a pretty vulgar understanding of Marxism, but I think they are amazing at talking clearly about Zizek, Hegel et al; plus I think that its important to understand and engage with their antagonism to some (quasi)Communist ideals because I think a proper Marxist and Dialectical Materialism has to be able combat notions of the Communist project as being utopian and naive egalitarianism. However Red Library is comrades, they’re sick, but the podcast is ending soon. I’m kinda disappointed I didn’t get all that involved in their little online community (I’m bad at discord), but I taught myself a fucking shitload of political theory through them and their book recs. I certainly did not take Zizek seriously before listening to them.
Also Alenka Zupancic is another Slovenian author who considers herself a part of the same project as Zizek. She writes in a much more focused manner than Zizek and doesn’t often do the “I’m going to give myself the worst grounds to argue from so as to undermine it from within” thing that Zizek does a lot and which can be confusing/problematic to people ( I mean I think it’s important to force readers to think in the negative, but it’s hardly a natural inclination and not easy to approach). Like when Zizek criticizes AES all the time while simultaneously calling himself a Stalinist, the most difficult and radical step is not to dismiss this as charlatanism, but to take it extremely seriously.
Also the podcast Machinic Unconsciousness Happy Hour engages with Lacan and Zizek a bunch, but from a more Deleuzian/Anarchist perspective. I don’t listen to them a shitload, but they seemed pretty cool and open minded.
I wouldn’t trip about being pissy about the promise of nirvana tho, the main thing I like about this site is its willingness to be pissy and antagonistic towards things.
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.
