Lacanian-marxism

[gauchisme]

i quote this not so much to discuss the particular case of china or religion, but as an example of lacanian-marxist psychoanalyst-philosopher slavoj zizek's analysis...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/opinion/11zizek.html

he also begins his lecture on 'liberal utopia' with the same bit...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMp8P3C_J7I


...thoughts?



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[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I have moved the duplicate post of this thread to the trash can.

[gauchisme]

yes, i was gonna ask you to do that. i couldn't find a delete thread option. only i wanted it to be called 'lacanian-marxism', not slavoj zizek. is there a way to make that happen? -- i mean, move this one to the trash and bring the other one back?

[midnight marauder]

That's a pretty terrific piece. I've always had a big interest in Slavoj Zizeck.

Once, we wrote him about some of his writing that we were using for debate, and he wrote us back a big long letter about how much he hated debaters twisting his arguments for personal gain. Lol!

[More Fire for the People]

Zizek is somewhere in between cryptic & obscure and insightful.

[ShineThePath]

I think perhaps giving it the name Lacanian Marxism confuses what Zizek is about into a rather hotch potch of psycho-analytic and social theory. This is perhaps a mistake understanding, and an approach which Zizek himself calls a "false synthesis" that is merely uniting Two rather than dividing from One. To understand Zizek, in particular to understand Zizek in the political, one had to first understand what Zizek is trying to do in his writing on politics.

1) Zizek is "reloading" Lenin, in the sense that the spirit of Leninist political committment and project to create revolution.

2) In this sense, Zizek is going after the idea we have come to a "post-politics" or an end to History, where the Liberal hegemony has been ensured and is the only viable political system. In particular, Zizek criticizes liberal Leftists who are concerned more with liberal form of which politics comes from rather than the political committment itself. Here we find the criticism of Rorty from a Hegelian position.

3) Multiculturalist pluralism and Identity politics are also taken to task by Zizek. For Zizek, this phenomena is inherently negating the need for revolutionary challenging of oppression, and is its own worst form of racism. A racism which doesn't acknowledge its own racist kernel.

4) Zizek further is not adopting a Left Utopian vision of politics which is false, which leaves "revolution without revolution." For Zizek, this "third way" neglects the need to be committed to politics and is rather just another liberalism.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

G: I will alter the title for you.

[Monty Cantsin]

I’m not going to run out and by a book. But are there any major essays published in English by this guy? Something accessible? Via a academic database…

[Hit The North]

Monty, you can find a few essays of Zizek's on MIA:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/...sophy/index.htm

[gauchisme]

"I think perhaps giving it the name Lacanian Marxism confuses what Zizek is about into a rather hotch potch of psycho-analytic and social theory. This is perhaps a mistake understanding, and an approach which Zizek himself calls a "false synthesis" that is merely uniting Two rather than dividing from One. To understand Zizek, in particular to understand Zizek in the political, one had to first understand what Zizek is trying to do in his writing on politics."

point taken. i'd rather the thread title be 'lacanian-marxism' than 'slavoj zizek' - one of zizek's spiels concerns how his own personality should be irrelevant to the theories he advances - but i sympathize with the cautionary note: all nutshells distort. i'd call him a lacanian-leninist, but that might really give people the wrong impression. if some label remains necessary, perhaps the best one is hegelian; in a lecture (that's now nowhere to be found online) zizek described his whole project in one phrase, "hegel got it right". but he's still a right honorable leftist, of course.

[Enragé]

i have read some of his stuff and it dazzles me to be honest. His style of writing is difficult to say the least, and i get very little of his ontology especially.

After reading one of his articles im always left with the feeling that i sort of understand what he's getting at but not precisely.

[gauchisme]

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread...n/desublimation :

Again, although people accuse me of being some arrogant Hegelian, Leninist, I'll admit - very honestly, that I don't have answers. At this state of the revolutionary process [chuckling] I see my function as introducing more trouble, if anything, to force confrontations. As a friend put it, the standard Leftist stance is that we basically know what's going on, and we just need to find a way to mobilize people. I don't think we really know what's going on. By this, I don't mean anything mystical. I simply mean that the Left still doesn't have a representative theory. I see elements here and there. For example, although I violently disagree with the second half of the book, the first half of Jeremy Rifkin's The Age of Access, offers a nice description of the whole change in the commodity structure. Basically, your life itself is now the ultimate commodity. What you are buying is not an object, but the `time of your life.' You know, you go to a therapist, you buy your quality life.

Rasmussen: You buy - or access - experiences.

Žižek: Yeah, exactly. So there are elements here and there, but I don't think we have a theory. Here, I am even more pessimistic. It's not that the Left knows what's going on and just doesn't know how to mobilize people. This view is the last, and maybe the most dangerous illusion, of the Left.

[Enragé]

I think so too.
Though class struggle is very real and the class analysis still holds some merit in especially macro phenomena, especially in less developed countries (im talking middle east etc) its not quite suited as an actual sociological theory of modern western industrialised/post-industrial nations. Marxist theory should be updated, and for some part simply thrown out the window (though key concepts remain, such as class, class struggle, though certainly not exactly in marx's meaning, society and the power-relations within it most definately has changed).

I think the hesitancy amongst the left to openly question the validity of marx's ideas in current society, to update them, and to throw some away, is because it is
1. very difficult
2. because it is so difficult it leaves room for flaws, and so may lead to disillusionment and eventually weak-willed reformism.

Class and class struggle still IS at the very basis of society and forever will remain so, the power relations between the different economical clases DO shape society, HOWEVER: things like racism are not directly deducable to the class structure of a society, though it remains based on it (it is "relatively autonomous" from class structure of society, as soon as it is "created" by class struggle [i.e in this case in the legitimation of slavery for large parts of the population and undermining of working class unity] it begins to lead its own life, which can lead, and in fact does lead, to members of the white working class defending their material interests against e.g blacks [and so the south african labour movement at one point proclaimed "Workers of the world unite, for a white south africa!" or something along those lines. At that point it is no longer deducable to class struggle, material interest of the class).
Another problem is the fragmentation of the working class into different camps: when marx analyzed capitalism THE working class was mostly factory workers, that is now not the case. Though in the end the working class, even privileged parts, have a class interest opposed to that of the capitalsits, they in current society (i.e within the bounds of capitalism) often find themselves on the side of the capitalists at least on the short term, not mentioning the relation with the working class of the 3rd world. We must analyze HOW this fragmentation takes place, WHAT it is, THE EFFECTS it has, yet realize this is still all based on the divide between the proletariate and the capitalists, and that the fragmentation of the working class is a direct result of social democracy and the threat of revolution (i.e a product of class struggle), and how to in the end reforge the "class for themselves" (klasse für sich).
The end of (large parts of) marxism does not mean the end of the revolutionary "project".

Just my 2 cents, might make no sense at all.

[gauchisme]

ernesto laclau has made the same objection to zizek, and has argued for a gramscian 'cure' of replacing the theory of "class struggle" with one of "collective will". see, for instance, his most recent book 'on populist reason', or the classic with chantal mouffe, 'hegemony and socialist strategy'. there's also this book written between zizek, laclau, and judith butler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency%2...2C_Universality

[Hit The North]

Zizek is right, of course. Gender and ethnic oppression may have their own ideological emanations, but they are tied to the capitalist mode of production and that can only be transcended through the class struggle.

Patriarchy, for instance, is an archaic ideology which survived the collapse of Feudalism and was utilized strategically by Capital. Despite the continuing inequalities between men and women, the gender gap is closing in the developed countries and there is enough evidence to suggest that capitalism will survive equality between the sexes. As Marxists, also, we need to be clear that this is only an equality in terms of an equal chance to be unequal. The fight for a truly equal society remains tightly bound to class struggle.

Meanwhile, ethnic inequality is closely linked to social class in the West and it can only be overcome by the Left organising under a universalist banner - and that banner can only be socialism and class struggle.

[gauchisme]

well zizek's stance is more complex than reductionism. it's more accurately parallaxism - as are most of his stances. it's not that gender, race, etc. are explicable by class - it's that there's something special about class, and if economics itself gets reduced to just another site of social struggle, you miss its distinctiveness. he makes the analogy of the illusion that's both an old and young woman - the trick is, you can't see both at the same time, and if you try to, you see neither. (... laclau actually distorts zizek's position in 'on populist reason', which might be intellectually dishonest.)