Disclaimer: This article arose out of a challenge posted to me by John Morgan that I couldn’t do a write-up of the Žižek-Peterson debate without having watched it, while completely blotto. Okay, not really, but John liked a comment in which I stated my intent to do exactly that. Proceed at your own risk.
I remember a time in my youth when my grandmother dismissed a politician’s arguments completely out of hand, refusing to even consider him. When someone – my mother, I think – asked why, grandma replied, “I know his kind.” There’s something that’ll become important later on in that sentence – specifically that someone reading it in English won’t feel the revulsion and disdain it communicates in its original Macedonian: „Сортата му ја знам (Sortata mu ja znam).“ This, friends, is more or less my general opinion of Slavoj Žižek.
For years, whenever someone brought up Žižek, I’d deride said person for paying attention to such a charlatan, and link to this excellent article by Theodore Dalrymple. According to Dalrymple, Žižek is the ideal fraud, looking every bit the intellectual we imagine brings wisdom to an undeserving world. I’d reference this article and call it a day, dismissing Žižek out of hand, as well as anyone who took him seriously. Well, apparently, that’s not good enough.
Apparently, one has to listen to Žižek and his arguments, and address them. Now, I cannot do that for several reasons. First, I can only listen to Žižek for about five seconds before loudly shouting “Thuffering Thuccotatsh!” in my most ostentatious Sylvester the Cat impression, complete with projectile saliva. Secondly, I cannot listen to Žižek without suddenly getting the urge to storm out of whatever room I’m in, drink, and hit on the nearest coed. This is because those were my exact coping mechanisms against Žižekite hot air when cruel fate saw fit to dispatch me to college, where I was lectured to by many mini- and wannabe-Žižeks. And thirdly, I don’t really have to listen to Žižek because, like my grandma before me, I know his kind. I was, as I mentioned before, stuck with his kind for the five long years that were my college education.
So lemme tell you about his kind – the old Yugoslav academic Left, which was left without much direction in the wake of the collapse of the Yugoslav project. To say that they are arrogant gasbags is an insult to arrogant gasbags. Accustomed to the high status which accompanied being the official spokesman of the regime, they approach everything with characteristic high-handedness and condescension. They are far more concerned with gatekeeping – which is to say, making sure that no serious dissident thinker can enter academia – than with educating the young or pursuing the truth. In fact, even ostensible goodthinkers can’t get in; mostly, their children get in, and each is more offensively stupid than the last. These people speak in an affectation of a language which is vastly more foreign to the land they occupy than the various anglicisms of germanisms which permeate everyday speech.
This might be difficult for an English-speaking audience to grasp, but many European languages are regulated by central bodies which set the parameters of the “official” language. Now, there are good reasons for having a unified language for the purpose of government work, but one of the hallmarks of this academic sort is insisting on using this more-or-less constructed language even in everyday contexts, and certainly those contexts which include academic work. In fact, this was my first bone of contention with this academic sort, as my intransigence on the legitimacy of regional dialects in learned discourse infuriated these types’ priestly sensibilities, who crave official everything: official language, official ideology, official thought patterns, official asswiping procedures, and so on. In fact, the very idea of discourse and of opposing viewpoints offends and wounds them deeply; these are people who prefer to lecture to a captive audience who’ve had their eyes glued open and their mouths sewn shut.
In contrast to their authoritarian approach in the universities, however, they are often dithering and indecisive as public intellectuals, though generally (and then explicitly) leaning to the Left. They’ll stand strongly against Rightism of any kind out of academic and personal principle, and then fold like cheap lawn chairs to the whims of Leftism – declaring, for example, violent overthrows of the legitimately elected government’s “expressions of democratic will.” Their first salvo against the intellectual Right is always an accusation of ignorance, followed by projection of their own academic authoritarianism onto the Right, and finally a call for a ban and crackdown on such anti-intellectualism. And they’ll always nitpick about the language used, delegitimizing the use of the various dialects, claiming that those who use them “do not know their own language,” as if the essentially constructed official languages were usable in an everyday context.
This dovetails with their own brand of what Anglos will call blank slate ideology – non-essentialism (or existentialism) – the Continent’s counterpart to the original sin of Anglo philosophy. This, of course, is not quite Camus’ big-balls existentialism, nor Sartre’s milquetoast existentialism of good deeds, but a tattered and patched version of Marxist determinism which has had some Lacan, some Derrida, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that tacked on. In the end, it comes out as neoliberal social democracy – sorta, kinda. It means that we liked the old Marxist system, and it was good, but we also like the current neoliberal globalist system, which is good. Especially the European Union. NATO, not so much, because war is bad and warriors are worse, which is why NATO needs to be an investors’ club with guns attached, or nothing else. Above all, physicality is bad: being in tune with your body, its rhythms and means is bad. To have red blood, to breathe, to be a creature of flesh, to desire flesh, to seek out conflict and challenge, to disrupt the stupor of modernity, that’s bad. Better to be overweight or thin as a rail – I’ve never seen one of these types who is in good physical condition – they come in Žižekian rotund and Chomskyite insufficient. The men look weak, yet are arrogant. The women are ugly, yet slatternly, and tend to grow a second surname around age fortyish.
Which brings me to their philosophy, which is made flesh in their flesh. It is a rejection of all things martial and military – except such as they can use as eunuch slave soldiers. These are the kinds of people who consider self-defense to be an aspect of anarchy. They’ll use their poison tongues to bar anyone healthy – which is to say not physically and spiritually deformed – from intellectual discourse, thus framing that discourse in such a way that no dissident voice can be heard.
Now, from all that has been heretofore mentioned, it is quite clear that these people are the establishment – but no, no, no, a thousand times no. In fact, they are beleaguered dissidents in a sea of ignorance which threatens to drown them. The moneyed oligarchs which tremble at their feet are actually forces of capital set on crushing them. The emasculated military and police are in fact vectors of fascism set upon disappearing them in the middle of the night and gathering them in soccer stadiums in preparation for ideological extermination – the aforementioned sentence was uttered almost word for word by one particularly paranoid such intellectual. The forces of Rightism – which is of course military capitalist clero-fascist military authoritarian anti-democracy fascist neocolonialist and euroskeptical military authoritarian fascism – surround the camp of the sorta-kinda Marxist, sorta-kinda democratic liberal saints in academia. Poor them – even when they are the President of the republic or Minister of Internal Affairs, which is to say in command, respectively, of the army and the police.
If this sounds like Chomskyism, it’s because it is essentially Chomskyism. In fact, from what I can tell, Chomsky quite dislikes Žižek (and for that matter, Lacan), mostly because Žižek is flanking Chomsky from the left. Chomsky is not used to taking fire from his left. If ol’ (((Noam))) sympathizes with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Žižek can disparage ISIS for not being extreme enough. Žižek and the other gasbags whom I was forced to endure as a young adult are essentially gentile Marxists LARPing as Jewish academics. They’re able to practice entryism due to the clannish nature of the Balkan nations, and this clannishness is even more pronounced in the priestly-professorial caste; but they also get to take advantage of naïve Westerners who cannot tell a good-faith argument from a bunch of dishonest pulp. In that sense, I have a certain admiration for Professor Žižek, for he is the Steve Jobs of selling polished turds to Western rebels without a cause for whom Chomsky makes a bit too much sense.
If postmodernism contributed anything of substance to serious thought, it’s the notion that translation is near-impossible, and that we are prisoners of language, in a certain way. The same way that “I know your kind” won’t communicate the depths of revulsion and disdain contained in the Macedonian original, nor the sense that somehow, your intelligence is insulted by the other guy’s implicit assumption that he has successfully fooled you when, in fact, you know his kind. This is the same way that “charlatan” doesn’t even begin to capture the essence of the Žižekite intellectual. Apparatchik doesn’t cover it, because these men and women really believe at least some of the garbage they spew.
If they were Jews, you’d chalk this behavior up to their Jewishness, but these are pure-blooded gentiles, and besides, there’s no clear tribal interest to rally around – that they muddy the waters is as much to their detriment as is to everyone else’s. They’re not the classic postmodern intellectuals – they’ll often retreat into classical Marxism or even neoliberalism when it suits them, and they’re more than capable of operating on the Right, feigning religiosity and reason. Their relationship with language is complex, whereas a Western academic – and especially (((academic))) – would attempt to undermine language itself. These people rally against linguistic pluralism in order to limit the diapason of expressible opinion and delegitimize anyone who doesn’t use conlangs as a shibboleth – which is to say anyone who won’t debase his speech with obvious absurdities.
I believe that this is the unique ecology of the former Yugoslavia which produced this strange species. Yugoslavia was officially a Marxist-Leninist country, which in 1948 broke with the Warsaw Pact and drifted closer to NATO, and especially the United States. Its Jewish population was mostly destroyed in the Second World War, but the few Jews who remained were part of the government and societal elite. Intellectualism was a rarity in pre-war Yugoslavia, the societies it contained being very agrarian, and those intellectuals that did arise tended to be strongly folkish in their disposition (see Tesla, Kočić, and Racin). The Yugoslav regime therefore needed a caste of repeaters of official truths to staff its universities, and lacked the Jews to do so, so it bred this caste of half-literate apparatchik-charlatan-bullshitters out of the ambitious, yet servile, lesser intelligentsia.
Three generations on, regression to the mean has done its thing, and we have some pretty stupid fucking grandchildren of deans staffing universities around here. Worse yet, whereas they once served the socialist regime in Belgrade, these intellectuals are now slaves primarily of Brussels, but a lucky few report directly to Washington. However, typical Balkan clannishness has not been bred out of them, so they still practice cronyism and entryism. The system makes it impossible to find employment without going through the gauntlet of the universities, so they have a cozy existence collecting rents and kvetching about impending tyranny while singing the praises of the EU, NATO, globohomo, and neoliberalism.
Žižek, bless his entrepreneurial little heart, has found an alternative means of sustaining his voracious appetites. Instead of forcing captive populations to purchase his blue pills, as those other guys are doing, he’s selling it to willing Westerners. Genius. And now he’s come across a different type of goyish grifter LARPing as a Jewy intellectual in the form of Jordan Peterson. The many problems with Peterson have been addressed by people with much bigger brains than mine, of whom I think the best is Vox Day. What I find interesting is that Žižek and Peterson have started cross-pollinating. These two blue pill salesmen probably have significant audience overlap. If I were part of the (((chosen))), I’d look into options of shutting “it” down. It’s worse than the goyim knowing; the goyim are – oy vey! – Jewing even harder than the hardcore Jews. One could credibly claim that this is anudda shoah.
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26 comments
While I concede that there is much legitimate criticism that can be levelled at Prof. Žižek, and I wouldn’t wish to be dismissive of your firsthand knowledge of the Yugoslavian intellectual establishment, I think you’re being a bit too harsh on him here. Žižek has always maintained his position as a non-liberal Leftist rather than one of the neoliberal, SJW variety, and there are precious few living examples of these today, with the possible exception of Alain de Benoist. And also, Žižek has tended to be more sympathetic to the radical Right than just about any other major Leftist I can think of today: we shouldn’t forget that he plagiarized Jared Taylor in a paper years ago (even if he later tried to talk his way out of it), that he took Leftists to task for calling all anti-immigration sentiment “fascist,” that he has made direct appeals to the Alt Right to join with the radical Left in destroying capitalism, and not least that he publicly stated on several occasions in 2016 that if he were an American that he would vote for Trump. So I really don’t see him as the cartoonish type of establishment Leftist that you ridicule above – or at least, not entirely. I also had the opportunity of attending a small lecture that he gave in Michigan many years ago, and he didn’t at all have the authoritarian attitude that you describe.
1. Marxism is non-liberal leftism. Zizek is a Marxist. Therefore, Zizek is a non-liberal leftist. This is also quite common among former Yugoslav academic leftists outside of gender studies and similar US and EU funded bullshit, until it stops being useful to them.
2. Generally, the non-liberal left will be more sympathetic to the radical right, if only for the reason that our similarity types are markedly similar.
3. He correctly identified Trump as a centrist who LARPs as a rightist, I’ll give him that.
4. Zizek sells in the West but extracts rents in the East. Different audiences call for different approaches.
‘Marxism is non-liberal leftism.’
That’s a new one.
There are basically two forms of Marxist. The one who focuses on Marx’s economic theories and can speak for hours (literally) on the labour theory of value. These people are increasingly rare, but still do exist. They are usually also socially liberal in outlook, but not always.
The other form is the cultural Marxist. This type is now much more prevalent and is focused entirely on what you’d call SJW issues. More often than not, they disdain the actual working classes. These people are philosophical descendants of the ‘68 movement – hipsters and poseurs. Highly globalist and socially liberal.
‘Non-liberal’ leftism is a separate thing. It may draw on Marx’s economic ideas but will typically emphasise national solidarity (as opposed to international class solidarity) and be more or less socially illiberal. In addition to John’s example of Alain de Benoist, there are a number of groups operating today that are economically socialist, nationalist and either moderate or conservative on social questions. Examples abound; the Hungarian Workers Party, the FN in France, the CPRF under Gennady Zyuganov, the genuine Peronists in Argentina, Australia First, the Institute for National Revolutionary Studies crowd, etc etc.
The nationalists who are also socialists will be sympathetic to nationalists who are traditional conservatives, not because of similar personality types (I think that’s what you meant) but because we share an outlook that’s national, not global.
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Поздрав за авторот од македонски читател!
The author here has a very very good point that sadly gets lost on even dissident-right Westerners. Maybe it’s because the argument needed to be presented in a different way, as it contains a lot of background experience and understanding that is peculiar to where we (the author, myself and Žižek) are coming from. I am of the same ethnicity as the author and I know that where we’re from, people are not impressed by him at all. They all sense the problematic nature of Žižek’s persona and rhetoric even if they can’t put their finger on it, just like the author’s grandmother did for that man.
A note to those who say that he is close to us: He is not. He laughed off Kevin McDonald and consistently laughs off most of the principles our thought (call it dissident right) stands on. Practically all of the basic points, other than maybe the the authoritarianism and socialism). And yes, after being so exposed to everything data and not being part of the establishment, he is still **genuinely blue-pilled ** on the importance of the ethnos, on Jews, on the transcendent etc.
He **is** problematic precisely because he sounds an awful lot like us in some segments and is no fan of democracy or liberalism, but everything else he says in a political sense is an ice-cold take. He is the ideal man to be pushed as safe rebellion when the (((elites))) start easing off with the anti-whiteness and capitalist shilling, which they undoubtedly will, as we have seen from the calls of their most promiment thinkers.
While I don’t think anyone (including the author) is claiming that Žižek is intentionally gatekeeping, the things that Western readers see as promising or redeeming in him are actually not. Look at the first 20 or so minutes from today’s TDS – they go into it in a way that is understandable for AR folk. (https://therightstuff.biz/2019/04/24/tds434-the-sex-petersons/).
The problem with him is that he is no shallow thinker – his points are deeply considered and well supported by philosophical reading and psychological and social observations. And yet, his general sensibility as well as his conclusions are very antithetical to ours. I will say it again – Žižek seems based because where he comes from, but that does not make him suitable for co-operation. He will never be red-pilled even in private, let alone collaborate. It’s a piece of cake for him to take on liberals or Peterson….or indeed most others. But when it comes to us, if anything, we will be his biggest enemies precisely because we are the only other people that talk about these issues, but in ways that he will find deeply probelatic and ultimately will start calling fatwas on us.
Срдечен поздрав за г-динот автор на текстот.
Counter-Currents has reviewed several non-liberal Leftist thinkers over the years, in particular:
Jean-Claude Michea, discussed here =
https://counter-currents.com/2017/09/between-capital-archaic-socialism/
Wolfgang Streek, here =
https://counter-currents.com/2015/08/buying-time/
Thanks for the links. Two great articles – I hadn’t seen the review of Streek’s book before this.
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This debate with the writer, Will Self is telling of what Zizek is when confronted by someone who’s read his work, understands its author to be the novelty of late capitalism as the violence advocating, rich rockstar philosopher who simply fills the void for young English speakers who’s mummy gives them a stipend to pretend play revolutionary at whatever university that offers the best sociology degree.
The Peterson debate was pointless because both were essentially intellectual panderers to similar demographics of utopians in flux who long for meaning in post-christian, now post-liberal worlds.
Will Self, for all his faults, actually has some problems with Zizek because he is an unabashed defender of liberalist humanism, though more of the John Gray variety.
https://youtu.be/CId1iOWQUuo
I love the liberal establishment’s reading of Nietzsche. Because they never mention that he would be utterly horrified by the rise of, and the privilege of the status quo, of Islam, gay rights, multicultural interests as an expression of slave morality
I apologize for being off topic, but did anyone see this today from The Quillette:
https://quillette.com/2019/04/22/why-we-should-read-nietzsche/
“Finally, Nietzsche would have found the invocations by the far Right—past and present—infuriating. He often looked at his sister Elizabeth’s gradual descent into German nationalism and later Nazism with an uncharacteristic mixture of pity and scorn. Had Nietzsche lived to see the rise of Hitler, he would likely have immediately recognized the Austrian dropout as the mean and resentful creature he was. He would likely have been horrified to see his work on the will to power and the great man transformed into a kind of racist eugenics, insisting that his work was about the individual self and not collective genetic overcoming. And, of course, Nietzsche would regard the deindividuation of totalitarianism, its attempt to completely assimilate the single person into the nation, as nihilistic. Today, no doubt Nietzsche would have lambasted the alt-right efforts to associate his work with concerns about immigration and the racial makeup of society.”
This sounds really wrong. I just got done reading “genealogy of morals“ by neitzsche. He talks about race a lot. He was aware of race and would be considered a racist or race realist (depending on your persuasion) by our standards.
I think neitzsche would disavow the altright but not because he’s an individualist. He would do it because he’s a purity spiraling sperg. He was always nitpicking things, like Wagner, and finding reasons to disavow them. The guy was pretty autistic. I admire the guy. He is a genius. He also has the sort of anti social personality common to many autistic geniuses.
One final thought. A lot of people in the past didn’t write about mass migration because legal mass migration of different races is a new idea. Back then, you get the impression that ethnicity and nation were basically used interchangeably. I don’t think many people would have even thought to consider multiracialiam or multiculturalism as a possible goal. I don’t think it would even occur to neitzsche that Germany could someday be filled with people from all over the world.
“Intellectualism was a rarity in pre-war Yugoslavia”
Intellectualism was a rarity in post-war Yugoslavia (for all the obvious reasons). When people speak of intellectual life of Yugoslav nations, they invariably mean the pre-war years – science, jurisprudence, literature, arts… Curiously enough, for all the effort Croats made to paint the Yugoslav socialist regime as somehow Serbian, in tune with the typically Balkan particularism and Oppression Olympics, the Serbian intelligentsia suffered the bulk of the blow, almost everyone ending up in exile, save for Andric, but that is nothing remarkable since Andric was a humanitarian author, which is after all a necessity for winning the Noble Prize.
What came to be the post-war intelligentsia (mostly literary creators) were the people whose formative years encompassed the Communist regime itself, and as such they kept out of politics and of openly criticizing the government.
Zizek is a quite unremarkable little anarchist, whose criticism boils down to that instinctive fear of any form, distinguishing quality, authority, anything at all that might cause great distress in the ordinary happy-go-lucky unit of the contemporary human mass.
Congratulations on writing an article that exposes your own shortcomings as a reactionary and the way that as a reactionary in the modern liberal capitalistic system you can only consider anyone’s motivations in the context of a market interaction. As such, this article reads more like a diary entry than anything about Zizek as a person or as a political figure.
1. What part of “completely blotto” don’t you understand?
2. Zizek’s motivation is quite unimportant. He DOES sell his product to gullible westerners, this is not under dispute. He might have engineered this, he might have stumbled upon this, but it cannot be said that this does not happen.
3. The whole point of the article is to NOT address Zizek as a person or political figure because we’ve developed a useful heuristic for dismissing charlatans of his kind.
This is brilliant. Thank you!
You can’t take Zizek too seriously. He’s the joker in the pack, neither adding or subtracting from your hand, just mixing things up.
One thing he is not is a shill like Peterson: he is an authentic loose cannon.
There’s this unreconstructed marxist core with social justice which he seems emotionally unable to let go of (and which is pretty tame by modern standard), but it’s combined with this attitude that seems to be saying to the entire left “you’ve all completely lost your minds!”
Having his cross-spectrum attacks coming from a nominal marxist is what’s given a lot of establishment intellectuals a twist to their knickers.
The stuff he says is certainly not the kind of thing you can build a system or world view around, but it’s worth listening to as a fascinatingly novel critique of liberalism.
Bullshit. He may have been an authentic loose cannon, to some extent, graduating to be NSK’s first official ‘philosopher’, but soon to be replaced at the time.
Now, I have little idea.Admittedly, his writing of twenty years ago was at times of interest, but, as the real situation now, he is doing nothing but write articles for the worst media outlets in the world (for example, the ‘Guardian’ in England, to dust them with a little patina of rubbish.
I don’t know if Doc. Johnson still wants to make a narrative of Laibach, the NSK and Ziszek would be difficult to separate from it.
And he does op-eds and interviews for RT which is essentially the anti-Guardian. Pertinently, no matter where he speaks or writes he’s not singing peans to cultural marxism or global capitalism.
I’ve read or watched a fair bit of his stuff and there isn’t really much that’s truly disagreeable (at least relatively) and he makes these insights that are sometimes genius because they’re so correct yet eccentric.
At the end of the day he’s mostly shooting in the right direction, and if he’s who people want to focus their hate then we must have an unprecedented lack of real enemies…
The pity is that there’s no shortage of real enemies, but the simplistic binary left/right worldview leads some to mistake friends for enemies and enemies for friends. The swamp of the conservative right calls us still with its siren song, just as Dr Saleam warned us twenty years ago.
I agree. No matter how much one may disagree with his writing as a columnist, it almost always offers something of interest and worth reading. It is generally not the same as the voice of the crappy western left.
Ice cold take on Zizek. Zizek is way closer to a third position than you give him credit for, all you do is attack straw man after straw man, exactly like our enemies do.
A different view..
https://openrevolt.info/2019/04/25/who-won-the-zizek-vs-peterson-debate-it-may-not-be-who-you-thought/
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I will credit to Zizek for his hot take on Hitler & Pokémon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cli5WNZ083c
Seems like a lot of people don’t get what the author is saying: the author doesn’t need to watch the debate because the Žižek is just the same shtick in a new package. You already now the type, and it’s “same shit; different day” political figure edition.
“The Yugoslav regime therefore needed a caste of repeaters of official truths to staff its universities, and lacked the Jews to do so, so it bred this caste of half-literate apparatchik-charlatan-bullshitters out of the ambitious, yet servile, lesser intelligentsia.”
Brilliant!
Very entertaining and informative piece overall, but calling Vox Day a bigger head than any intellectual in the dissident right who finished 5 years of humanities higher education is a bit of a stretch.
The guy’s thinly veiled pomposity and megalomania, poor “copywriting” skills (compare cringy terms like “supreme dark lord” with anything the TRS guys come up with) and conception that otherwise well known realities are somehow great insights that demand great intellectual effort firmly place him in the band of “gamma” (egh!) midwits he tends to obsess over.
Since I’ve mentioned TRS, I remember him on the show sharing the fact that Italian communists used to be fairly social conservative back in the day like some sort of great epiphany, not a piece of info that every reader of such obscure right wing luminaries as Paul Gottfried is very well aware of, and when one of the guys agreed, he kept on trying to convince the audience of this triviality as if he couldn’t acknowledge that their brains were big enough to handle such esoteric truths, despite the evidence of the response previously given to him. This is how the guy handles most things…
Add to this his penchant for coining uninspiring terms which may very well rival a detergent commercial and you have one very lackluster pompous twat.
You’re probably right in your character assessment. Nevertheless, Vox is right on Peterson and his single-minded focus has produced a wealth of counter-arguments to Jordanetics (and that’s just snazzy).
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