Has this retard ever made a single coherent argument for anything in his entire life?

What

"something something Lacan something *sniff* hegellian anal fistfuck *picks nose*"

The superiority of eating two hot dogs simultaneously.

Not him, but I just wanted you to know that Zizek is my daddy :)

but that's obvious, unless he outlined a comprehensive model for it, then it's just random shitposting.

The negation of the negation

Its not obvious at all to most people, hence why they go on having stupid debates trying to logically domineer each other and "fact wars" over what is a totally predetermined positionality as far as information is concerned

Why assume the political ideology is penetrating the subconscious (more so than other things we experience) and not assume that it's the subconscious which penetrates the political ideology?

The whole topic is stupid anyway. There's no real take-away from it.

mind linking the source? curious

And but scho on
Snif

Because the way in which it manifests in behavior obviously. An obvious example being the way people can assert entirely counter-intuitive things that fly in the face of their own ideologies consistency. i.e. 'There's no such thing as gender but this person has a female brain and you're a bigot if you disagree'
The facts clearly come after the subconscious conclusion

The Parralax View is a good start

The Sublime Object of Ideology. You could've googled him

>implying everyone has an ideology

you got that ivory tower bad

cleary a communist for dat south american coke. would fall apart if we embargo trade with those nations.

Capitalism does not mean progress, it means an endless repetition of fetishized consumption.

It's both. It's a feedback loop. He's not wrong and you're not wrong. Zizek has just focused on examining what ideology does to the individual mind and the populace. But obviously individual and general subconscious affects and molds political ideology as well.

Ideology isn't something you take part in. Your participation in it is passive. Just by existing within the system of late capitalism you're already being affected by ideology.

No ideology is pure ideology

except zizek and his followers, they're enlightened and overcame ideology

No. You never "escape" ideology, its like the static background on a radio. Its always there and all you can do is learn to position yourself around it

How? You choose to be a liberal, conservative, social democrat, anarchist, islamist, communist, fascist etc. etc. However surely plenty of normies don't choose any ideology.

>However surely plenty of normies don't choose any ideology.
Which leaves them operating on the status quo ideology of the society we live in. Just like when /r9k/ talks about "normie advice" juss b urself and so on. Thats all from that background as produced by what we're thought in schools, what we see in Hollywood movies, what is said by politicians etc

for zizek, ideology is not the same as mere political orientation, it's something much deeper that undermines and sometimes supersedes politics. you can choose whatever political "ideology" you want, you are still subjected to the ruling ideology of neoliberal global capitalism.

but that background shit often isn't political, nor do they represent a coherent cohesive system of political beliefs. It would be quite the mixture. So your normie doesn't really have an ideology.

again, ideology is not what we commonly call "politics", you are conflicting the everday use of the word (ie. liberal / conservative etc. ideology) with the marxist tradition of the term that zizek operates in.

you are thinking of ideology as the dictionary definition of the word. zizek talks about the marxist theory of ideology

Ah but it very much is political because it strongly reinforces the status quo. Ask those normies to describe history and if they come from a liberal area they'll talk about it as "progress" from the nasty racist and sexist past and how good it is we have netflix and macbooks now instead of horrible religion.
You're correct though that it is not in the least bit cohesive but that is precisely because the society we live in is not the least bit cohesive. Capitalism by its nature is a schizophrenic mess in which everyone in power says one thing while acting another way

There is of course a difference between ideology and actual politics. For example the ideology of all socialist parties in Europe in 1914 was anti-war, however every socialist party of the great powers that went to war in 1914 pretty much supported the war. The actual politics doesn't always follow what the parties and politicians are ideologically comitted to. However ideology is still something you choose. You have to think over what system of political beliefs you'll follow.

the ruling ideology is the one which survived the test of time, in this case the monetary policies of Thatcher and Reagan described as 'neoliberal'. Countries which didn't adopt them eventually had to, not because they were forced by "imperialism", but because they'd succumb to inflation and fiscal mismanagement.

>However ideology is still something you choose. You have to think over what system of political beliefs you'll follow.

Although this choice is determined subconsciously. You might think you have free reign to switch as you please but when push comes to shove as you describe, we see the reality come to the fore.

Zizek would agree, hence why he speaks that he sees no alternative other than Capitalism at this time

I think most people will choose an ideology based on their values and personality. Based on the kind of thinking that becomes ingrained in the person during adolesence. But of course it's not written in stone. Plenty of people have and do switch ideologies. Mussolini was a socialist before he later became a fascist.

Are you sure about that? Surely there must be some states without a neoliberal economic policy?

Yes but what is "personality" other than the subconscious structures on which our rational conscious minds operate?
Even "values" are largely subconscious, though they're also suggested by one's ideology itself its clearly not rational why one person decides to embrace minorities and another prefers his own race.

Like where, North Korea?
Even China is operating on a Neo-Liberal basis today.
There could be alternatives but they're not so obvious

does he really use Lacan for anything beyond flavor? most of the points he makes can be followed without falling for any kind of Lacanian meme

same thing with being a communist, seems like he does it for flavor, as an starting axiom, but it doesn't really follow from any of his arguments

When it comes to Communism thats true, or at least to me does not appear in any accessible way otherwise.
But his analysis of Ideology is deeply Lacanian, there's no dividing that from him.

we should instead be focusing on an endless repetition of fetishized production instead

To give you an example. If I think that there isn't an inherent value in something for being a tradition, then I'm immediately not gonna be sympathetic to conservative ideologies. I'll probably be somewhere left, thinking that rational criticism of society opens for the possibility for progressive change. However if I like traditions and think they have an inherent value and shouldn't simply be abolished even if they can't be defended rationally, then I'm probably more inclined towards conservative ideologies. This is just a single example amongst plenty of such variables.

not any of the other anons but I'll jump in.
i'll say first, against the other user, that there is no one dictionary definition of ideology: if you look it up in a comprehensive dictionary you should find its various uses including the most important, which is the one zizek uses/has developed.

it's important to grasp the subconscious nature of ideology. it's certainly not your conscious (and potentially coherent) set of political beliefs. (one particularly insightful comment on ideology, i can't remember by who, maybe althusser, is that ideology is actually a function resolving inconsistencies and contradictions in idea-structures). Ideology is a component of subjectivity itself - to be a subject is to be ideological. getting at someone's ideology in a critical enquiry doesn't exhaust their subjectivity, but neither can you separate ideology away from a subject and still have a human subject left over. This isn't to say ideologies are immutable, or 'human nature,' in the sense that you're born with one and it never changes.
So from this understanding we'd see ideology as being both 'in-here' and simultaneously 'out-there': subjective and objective: a function illuminating how bound up we are in society (again though, this is not to say that people who go out into the wilderness for example and live alone don't have any ideology. they'd have the one they went out with.) Ideology runs the spectrum from being a foundational element of your subconscious subjectivity to your most articulated political affiliations.

Is Socratic ignorance an escape from ideology?

If you follow Zizek’s idea of Ideology then we aren’t talking about people who believe in explicit doctrine, but rather that background beliefs which justify our own actions. The idea that it’s good to get a job and work hard is Ideology. And the basic worldview held by normies, that’s the dominate ideology of society.

Zizek tells us that Ideology is its more powerful exactly when we we think some waynof being is the ‘natural’ way, that is the strongest ideology.

This

>. If I think that there isn't an inherent value in something for being a tradition, then I'm immediately not gonna be sympathetic to conservative ideologies.

Yes but which comes first, what if its the convervative thought itself that makes one appreciate tradition.
I would argue it all begins with a subconscious relationship to your parentage

>There's no such thing as gender but this person has a female brain
>counter-intuitive things that fly in the face of their own ideologies consistency
nothing in that strawman quote is inconsistent

Now, that's a dank meme.

If ye say so

glad you agree

>And so on

LUL

>etch chetera

...

>late capitalism

Subjects dont even exist in late capitalism, subjects are only ideology and ideology is just an articulation and functioning of the economic base. Agency is gone for good.

So I've read through this fred and still haven't seen anything about this gimli answering so I suppose he hasn't. Basically like each and every youtube """"intellectual""""

Ideology means personalities and values in the way marx and postmarxists use the word. In non academic language it will mean things like political views. Youll get really tripped up reading marxists without know this

weber was better than marx

I think it begins with being severed permanently from the Real during the mirror stage and because of language

Weber invented idpol, and was a consrvative tho senpai

Can ideology resolve contradictions in material structures too? Say for instance the contradiction between mode of production and relations of oroduction that marx thought drove all of history?

Is ideology more powerful than material forces? It certainly so far has stopped marxs theory of progressing stages of history as inevitable

Zizek is really remarkable in my view, because that movie "They Live" was out for YEARS and had millions of viewers before he talked about it

And think about how remarkably stupid Zizek must be, since he was the first person out of millions to come out of the theatre slobbering and saying "Whoa, you know what was crazy about that? When he put the glasses on, he could see reality and it was way fucked up compared to his normal perceptions"

Holy shit, really Zizek? I was wondering why things kept looking so different.

Fun weekend night story time. You guys get this one for free:

>Be me.
>Go to New York Public Library to see Zizek give a talk with Stephen Kotkin.
>Kotkin's just finished this massive biography about Stalin that he spent years doing research for.
>Nobody cares; they're just there to see Zizek.
>Kotkin spends most of the talk shilling his book. Nobody cares.
>Afterwards there's a line to get either author to sign a book for you.
>Both Zizek and Kotkin are at the table, but basically everyone is getting signatures from Zizek and nobody cares about Kotkin or his weird Stalin book.
>Except there's this one teenager in front of me and my GF in the line.
>He has a copy of Kotkin's book.
>By the time our part of the line gets close to the table Kotkin has bailed and left Zizek alone at the table.
>Kid in front of me approaches Zizek with his copy of Kotkin's Stalin biography and hands it to Zizek.
>Zizek speaks:
>*Sniff* "Er umm" *sniff* "You know" *sniff* "I am not that guy."
>Kid indicates that he doesn't care.
>Zizek takes the copy of Kotkin's book, signs it, and hands it back.

And now there's some random kid somewhere with a copy of Kotkin's Stalin biography signed by Slavoj Zizek.

I ended up getting my book (First as Tragedy, Then as Farce) signed by Zizek and personalized with my name, though it looks like the signature was written by an intoxicated kinder-gardener. I read it but don't remember much about it.

if he makes the coffee without cream joke again someone should assassinate him

wow I lol'd

I don't really know about that sorry
The point of it 'resolving' contradictions is that as a single system it subsumes and gives unity to various ideas and idea-structures that can be incompatible in a strictly logical sense. It might be logically inconsistent, for example, for a french rationalist in the 1800's to support the enfranchisement of working class males based on some egalitarian principle, but simultaneously to deny like rights to women - but speaking ideologically, it's entirely consistent, because french rationalism of the time is mysoginistic top to bottom.
Zizek atm gives the example of political figures supporting economic globalisation but at the same time insular social nationalism - like putin. It's not really an incoherence because the social politics is a subsidiary branch of the capitalist ideology, supporting it despite apparently being opposed on principle to it.
Hope that helps with your marx question - i don't really know much about Capital.

And is it more powerful than material forces?
I dunno about more poweful, but there's a possible world where every human being simultaneously 'downs tools', switches off all automated systems, pulls the plug on all computers etc. - and so we should always keep at the front of our arguments (for now, at least, since we may be entering an age of 'post-humanities') the necessary human element of modes of production. And ideology is part of the explanation of human motivations.

It might be more powerful bc it creates people who will not do that. Hegemony + ISAs makes the decision, and not some teleos of economic determinism, perhaps.

Žižek's arguments are pretty consistent and easily understood. You would know this if you've actually read him. His whole political perspective focuses on a possible revival of the Left, which he believes is today mired in politics of localism, fairy-tales about perpetual direct democracy and irrational fears about holding state power, which neatly reinforces the right-wing agenda of neoliberalism. He says in almost every serious lecture that he doesn't believe capitalism can be fought on a local level, advocates for a renewed theory of state power and new left-wing internationalism to combat globalized capitalism. He's pretty humble about his own lack of a coherent theory and recommends other writers instead.

As for philosophy, it's harder to summarise in a paragraph, but he's done a lot of work on a Hegelian analysis of social life and ideology, a sort of re-interpretation of dialectical materialism, and in recent years he's been writing a lot about the importance of the western, universalist Christian tradition which hasn't endeared him to the usual center-left liberal media that he used to publish in.

How far left is Zizek?

Kotkin is your usual anti-communist historian in most respects, but he at least denies that the Ukrainian femine was a deliberate act, which is better than most I think.
Which Stalin biography should I read as a shameless commie, anyway?

>Žižek's arguments are pretty consistent and easily understood. You would know this if you've actually read him. His whole political perspective focuses on a possible revival of the Left, which he believes is today mired in politics of localism, fairy-tales about perpetual direct democracy and irrational fears about holding state power, which neatly reinforces the right-wing agenda of neoliberalism. He says in almost every serious lecture that he doesn't believe capitalism can be fought on a local level, advocates for a renewed theory of state power and new left-wing internationalism to combat globalized capitalism. He's pretty humble about his own lack of a coherent theory and recommends other writers instead.
isn't the left in the perfect position currently to achieve that now that they have infiltrated all the deep state positions in most of the west? i think it won't happen, because one of the main strategies that the left has used consistently is to deny responsibility at every single chance they got, which creates ruthless people in their ranks with no standards or virtue, and which makes sure that the worst kind of individuals will hold power every single time

yes, zizek is mostly an unashamed globalist

>isn't the left in the perfect position currently to achieve that now that they have infiltrated all the deep state positions in most of the west?
this is not the "left" which zizek speaks of

I don't know what kind of /pol/ conspiracy you're living in, but leftists have most certainly not infiltrated the governments in the western world, and in fact reformist parties have been effectively dead for decades after accepting the "third way", i.e. the right-wing economic consensus. Just look at any social democratic party in Europe and tell me this has anything to do with leftism. American politics are even worse in accepting social liberalism to promote extreme corporate agendas.

It really speaks a lot about your ideology when you have to invent an evil leftist conspiracy at a time when the Left is inert as fuck, and hasn'thasn't recovered even after the 2008 crisis outside of maybe a few respected economists which still have no impact on policy.

when has ever any kind of left taken responsibility for anything? "not real communism" is a meme for a reason, and even thought Zizek acknowledges it. he has no theory to address it

no big left movement takes it as a main point, except maybe anarchists, but anarchism basically amounts to taking all the utopian elements of communism and removing all the practical elements, leaving nothing except empty memes, basically a simple extreme purity spiral to create isolated beautiful souls that have no agency

Actually, Zizek is a fascist

again, here we have it, "not real leftists", holy mother of god, works like fucking clockwork. just keep playing your purity spiral games, this time i'm sure it will produce something of worth.

just because the left decided to abandon the economy and play cultural games for the last 70 years doesn't mean that now that those games are very convenient for global capital they get to ignore their responsibility of it. The left decided to be counter-cultural, transgressive, decided to accelerate the dissolution of traditional structures, and produced plenty of theory in that direction. Now that this has created a hole that the right is trying to fill, now they start playing "not real leftists" purity games to throw responsibility away, when will they learn?

Not the other user - they're completely right though.
Both halves of the political spectrum in america are right-wing by a proper leftists standard. Here in the uk we've had a conservative government pushing right wing austerity politics for more than two terms. The 'left wing' had its only real share of power under blair and brown, who totally buy into the capitalist globalisation economics. Now there's an actually left wing candidate, and from the beginning he's been hounded by every media outlet and every institution as a political radical. I'm not a fucking communist or anything, but it's absolutely true to say the left don't have, and never really did have, any political clout. We've been political outsiders from the beginning. That's why we call ourselves fucking progressives. There's no fucking left wing conspiracy because the left wing has no power. Of course it's in the interests of the establishment to convince you the left wing must be feared.

I wasn't refuting the responsibility part, read what I greetexted.

The hysterical media response to Corbyn has been amazing to me. If you have any doubts that the liberal mainstream media absolutely hates leftists and the working class, just look at the crap Guardian spouts about Corbyn all the time. I have to conclude that right-wigers don't actually follow the news at all, since it's pretty difficult to miss the smug middle-class contempt towards anyone that advocates left-of-center politics. You have to be literally insane to think that communists control the media, I think. They can't even deal with an old school socdem without mass panic.

>he at least denies that the Ukrainian femine was a deliberate act, which is better than most I think
it was as close to "deliberate" as you can get without issuing an order that says "starve these folks"

basically just a prank bro

>implying Hegel understood Hegel

Communists are, by definition, idiots

Strange since 99.999% of progress has been achieved by capitalist countries

> Zizek uses an example of a piece of media to explain a point about ideology, and further lines of thought it raised within him
> WTF WHY IS HE EVEN TALKING ABOUT THAT MOVIE?? I SAW IT FIRST

t. brainlet

No he hasn't you fucking idiot

Honestly consider suicide

God I wish that were me