B-I-N-G-O
DEATH KNOWS MY NAME: Žižek the Authoritarian
In a post last week, I quoted Johann Hari on the myriad problems with Slavoj Žižek. Not surprisingly, fans of Žižek were quick to write to me about why Hari is wrong. The blogger at Interruptions, in fact, pointed me to an interesting piece by Graham Harman that serves…
This is an amazing article on the implicit authoritarianism in Zizek’s work, I would urge everyone to take a look.
ahaha what
Johann Hari is seriously one of the hackiest pundit-“journalists” around. I’m trying to remember what other shitty article he’s written before, but I know he’s been floating around this usual slew of center-right liberal bullshit for most of his cretinous career.
I mean, look at this quote from the article. Just look at it.
This kind of thought can only be entertained because nobody would ever take it seriously enough to act on it. When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say we should all become schizophrenic, when the gay Michel Foucault embraces the murderously homophobic Ayatollah Kho meini, when Zizek suggests a return to Leninist terror - these very positions are admissions that postmodernism is merely an unserious confection by intellectuals. It leads nowhere except to demoralisation and disaffection.
How the hell does anyone take people who write this tripe seriously? It simply reveals an obvious lack of actual intellectual engagement on any of their work and a focus on easy, empty slander based on out-of-context statements that are quickly picked up on by the Hari’s of the world.
It’s no accident that all the people praising this article seem to have exactly the same ideological axe to grind, from admitted plagiarist and pro-Iraq War Johann Hari to this I’m-a-liberal-but-still-teach-marx-i-swear kohenari dude. The fact that the latter seems to believe the former has Zizek’s number down is beyond irony. It really is about ideology, kids. Three cheers for tepid liberalism and the shallow castigation of anyone with an actually radical vision, preferably through the use of reviews by their critics and quotes with suspect secondary sources.
