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Friday, May 04, 2007
Zizek on YouTube
Here he is explounding on philosophy and late capitalism or at least that’s what the clip is entitled:
During the middle of this clip he’s speaking from a bed: “I don’t think that philosophers ever provided answers. . . . Philosophy is a very modest discipline. . . . What does it mean to be free?” Here’s more clips.
Comments
Funny. I just saw that movie last night. The clips on the American TV show are priceless. Also a delight: watching Zizek watch a mid-70s French program in which Lacan explains psychoanalysis.
First of all--love the word “explounding” and will add it to my vocab!
“The duty of philosophy is not to solve problems, but to redefine problems, to show that what we experience is a false problem. If the problem is a true problem, then you do not need philosophy.” Seems that this clip tries to address the old Seinfeld question, “Philosophy and what is it good for?” Does he say anything at all about capitalism, though?
Ah, “explounding,” a very apt typo I’d say. One can imagine similar coinages, e.g. “explository.”
Don’t know whether he explounds verbally on capitalism, but we have those commercial messages after we’ve seen his hairy chest. And the concluding stuff on pleasure and restraint might well be commentary on late capitalim. Note that he concludes with a comment on consumption. That has just got to be somehow about late capitalism.
This kind of thing is really the admirable part of Zizek’s work, and I suspect it’s why so many people are so interested in him. He’s saying, look, I can have people film my college bull session about nuclear weapons stopping earth-impact comets, and isn’t it cool that chocolate laxatives have the cause and the cure at the same time, and they’ll film me in bed too! Just like the audience for gangsta hip-hop is middle-class white kids, Zizek’s audience is those people who wish that they could be him, but don’t dare to—so they try for symbolic identification by studying his writings, which he can make obscure enough so that if people disagree about what they mean, they’ll never even realize it. Your sympathies have to be with Zizek when observing this, because suckers deserve it.
The problem of diverting large earth-impact objects is important politically, by the way, because anything which could do so would make an especially good weapon when directly at the Earth, and the project in general would ensure that nuclear weapons makers and the aerospace industry continue past the troublesome failure of Star Wars. So it’s one of those problems that is real, over long time-scales, but that you really want to have a better society in place for before you implement it. Right now it’s riskier to build a solution to the problem than to go without a solution to it.
... which raises quite elegantly the question of whether what we’re seeing here is really about self-performance and “impersonation of a philosopher” more than it is about philosophy and late capitalism. Did anyone watch the other clips on YouTube (Why Only An Atheist Can Believe)? Ueber-funny, especially if you imagine the face someone like Jerry Falwell would make if they were in the audience ...
Rich, I always enjoy it when you trot out your standard bit about psychologizing people’s interest in Zizek. One question, though: How do you explain those who became interested in Zizek’s work before the celebrity stuff hit? For instance, me—there was no movie, no major lecture circuit (that I knew of), no articles in the New York Times, just ten or so really big books that were really heavy on Lacan and German Idealism. Did I somehow just anticipate that this Slovenian guy was going to become a huge rock star? If so, then maybe I’m in the wrong line of work—I need to put this infallible nose to work for a record company or something.
It’s just pillow talk, baby.
That’s easy, Adam—you’ve just figured yourself as the guy who always says that he liked somebody before they sold out. So like all such rock snobs, people who liked him early were those self-consciously attracted to obscurity and “difficulty”.
I liked Zizek until “Everybody Hurts,” and then I was, like, buh-bye.
I’m losing my edge. I was there at the first Zizek concert in Cologne. I was there at the first Derrida concert at Max’s Kansas City. I was there when Lacan first set his guitar on fire. I was there in Florida when Walter Benjamin flashed his willy to the crowd. But I’m losing my edge to the kids. Who traded in their guitars for semiotics and then traded in their semiotics for an 808 drum machine and then traded in their drum machines for a tube amp and some Kenneth Burke. But they’re really nice. The kids. However, I’m losing my edge.
"Zizek’s audience is those people who wish that they could be him, but don’t dare to—”
His audience doesn’t dare to be him, you say. What do you mean by that? What about “being him” is different from being any other successful, charismatic intellectual?
Is it the lisp? The politics? The innumerable hours spent with Hegel and Lacan? The will to avoid teaching positions in favor of lucrative speaking engagements and a manic pace of publication? Is this the stuff his voyeuristic, bling-and-hoes-luvin’ “middle-class” readership wants but just can’t have?
Or is it the (straw man) college bullshitter who recycles material ad nauseam and/or explains abstruse European philosophy via American cinema that his timid readers dare not become?
What the hell are you talking about, guy?