"I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern secular non-religious man bureaucracy...

"I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern secular non-religious man bureaucracy, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine. " -Zizek

Did Kafka ever actually say this though...

I mean, I guess its an easy reading of some of his work to do, but this always puzzled me. Zizek likes to bring it up, but this would not be the first time when his "quotes" are off.

Other urls found in this thread:

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm
youtu.be/yUtW6KIdtxE?t=48
youtube.com/watch?v=18qD9hmU9xg
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

In all likelihood Kafka probably never "said" that exactly, but it is implicitly said in the Trial and elsewhere.

great thread

Zizek also always quotes Lenin in an odd way:

"Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort “Freedom - yes, but for whom? To do what?”" -Zizek

But I can hardly find any mention of Lenin saying that, besides Zizek saying so.

how is that his legs are skinny, in fact his calves are somewhat tonedand his arms are relatively thin, but his upper body is pudgy?

His fat storage is all on his torso; pretty obvious

That's how a male stores fat.

Kafka implied it though. The divine is terrifying, mysterious, incomprehensible, and dangerous.

In our modern secular world the only way we ever experience those emotions in the same way an ancient man would experience the divine is in encounters with bureaucracy.

Just how *sniff* Bill Gates said, "capitalism *sniff* is the worst thing ever"

the castle is about german idealism trying to retrieve the absolute

In The Trial there is literally a direct comparison between the abstruse bureaucracy K. has to endure and the structures internal to the Church.

Even the way in which Kafka presents it to us: it is mysterious, incomprehensible, self-contraddicting, indifferent. It resembles both nature and divinity, it represents a real new, complex mistery in our perception (or at least in Kafka's perception): all of these traits are inherent to bureaucracy, and more in general to the state itself, and his metaphysical, symbolic power that it mantains while towering over us.

In this bureaucratic jungle you see something bigger, more complex, uncomprehensible that moves everything around itself, while being indifferent to your will: it's the state as a superior mind, unapproachable by the single human being (who could, in fact, really grasp at once the complexity that characterizes a entire state?).

Why is Zizek cosplaying as pre-tomgirl Chris-chan?

deep

The Trial is about the teleological suspension of the ethical

the castle is about jouissance in the absence of pleasure gain which cant be accounted on in objective processes

I hope CWC-core comes back into style

Now that you mention it, user, when I read the Trial, the editorialnotice said that Kafka was most proud about the part in the Trial where Josef K. is conversing with a preist in the church, and even published that part separately a few times.

Bureaucracy in Kafka, as most blatantly clear in the Trial and even more in the Castle, is (to use another concept Zizek refers to very often) the Lacanian ''big Other''.
It is a structure which transcends individuals and configures their interactions. It can also refer to ideas of anonymous authoritative power and/or knowledge such as God, Nature, Society, State, Science etc.

It's called Primark. Welcome to europe

i think that's just extrapolation

so by participating in this, we're constructing a God. and barring planetary catastrophe, it will only grow more elaborate, more powerful. Nick Land was fucking right.

Probably the Castle, because that was literally what it was about.

Maybe in a safe country. In America we encounter it among our mentally ill and violent fellow Americans.

Cont... well, not so much the mysterious part.

zizek makes shit up all the time. I would guess 90% of his apocryphal anecdotes are either straight made up or "adapted"

It is kind of cool him actually, forces one to check things oneself rather than straight-up trust his quotes and so on.

Goes well with adapting his method. If I'm going to apply Zizekian critique to something, I must listen but I can't just take anything at face value.

(I would not call the Kafka thing "making up shit" tho, it is just a little bit misleading)

Turning being disingenuous or outright lying son of a bitch into a positive human characteristic. I can't handle these mental gymnastics.

People like Chomsky are boring because they're all facts, facts and facts. Facts alone haven't saved us thus far, they're no weapon against ideology.

Zizek is much more interesting, he is wrong on so many things yet his methods of critique are great tools to adapt.

I will never be able to speak thoughts like that out of my mind. Because of that I will now screencap this argument and recite it. Thanks litchan.

Either he's disingenuous therefore unreliable or he's wrong and therefore also unreliable.

I think Lenin's quote was something about how freedom in capitalist society just means freedom for slave owners.

let me guess, you're one of those new atheist 'I fucking love science' types? do you like sam harris?

get off my Veeky Forums, sophist

Or that time when he told some people critiquing bolsheviks that they're free to criticize, but the bolsheviks are also free to shoot them. Zizek called it a "retort"; after all.

But that one is really odd, Zizek uses it like a straight quote but it probably isn't - the only other option I can think of is that its a translation of something Lenin said in Russian, but that usually gets translated a different way.

This stuff, I remembered a bit wrong but the idea is the same: marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

"Indeed, the sermons which Otto Bauer, the leaders of the Second and Two-and-a Half Internationals, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries preach express their true nature—“The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again.” But we say in reply: “Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the whiteguards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious whiteguard elements.” We must never forget this."

Nah, he's one of those boring moral relativists that excuses the stance with robots replacing everything. More of a JB Peterson kind of guy myself.

It's the same with C. Hitchens. Witty and eloquent, but just like O.Wilde a socialist nonetheless. Just like Žižek.

I just don't agree with him because those ideologies sprouted hell and suffering for the country he and I are from. He being part of critical government organs in Yugoslavia, and has firsthand experience of Mini-Truthing.

He did however stand against the commie regime during the "Proces proti Četverici" and left the "ZKS - Zveza komunistov Slovenije", which was the precursor for the Slovenian spring and the following Independence of Slovenia. He is definitely unorthodox.

Regardless, you haven't proven me wrong,yet. He's disengenuous and is thus unreliable or he's wrong and then also unreliable.

The truth is more like this: when he "quotes" someone, he doesn't always bother with straight quotes. He'll just go with the meaning of what the person being quoted said, sometimes through a work of art, sometimes through something else.

Is this disingenuous? I dunno.

>moral relativist
you don't know what you're talking about, brainlet
Zizek calls himself a 'proud eurocentric' and says there's nothing wrong with enforcing enlightenment values like secularism on the rest of the world
>Peterson
ask me how I know you don't actually read literature and you're just here for virtue signalling
>Hitchens
he's a neocon now
>part of critical government organs in Yugoslavia
he was a dissident, and presidential candidate for the liberal democratic party

Well, then he's paraphrasing and should say so. I just didn't like the mental gymnastics of excusing him. There's only so much credibility you can give someone until it's worthless to even listen to him.

>He's disengenuous and is thus unreliable or he's wrong and then also unreliable.

unreliable as what? a biographer of lenin? even if, so what?

Still unreliable. You said so yourself, he lies. All I did was rephrase it and now you're mad.

case in point, the lenin "quote":

>How, then, do things stand with freedom? Here is how Lenin
>stated his position in a polemic against the Menshevik and
>Socialist-Revolutionaries’ critique of Bolshevik power in
>1922:

>Indeed, the sermons which . . . the Mensheviks and Socialist-
>Revolutionaries preach express their true nature: “The
>revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have
>been saying all the time, permit us to say it again.” But we say
>in reply: “Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying
>that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you
>insist on expressing your political views publicly in the
>present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult
>than it was when the white guards were directly attacking us,
>then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as
>the worst and most pernicious white guard elements.”16

>This Leninist freedom of choice – not “Life or money!” but
>“Life or critique!” – combined with Lenin’s dismissive atti-
>tude towards the “liberal” notion of freedom, accounts for
>his bad reputation among liberals. Their case largely rests
>upon their rejection of the standard Marxist–Leninist oppo-
>sition of “formal” and “actual” freedom: as even Leftist lib-
>erals like Claude Lefort emphasize again and again, freedom is
>in its very notion “formal,” so that “actual freedom” equals
>the lack of freedom.17 That is to say, with regard to freedom,
>Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort “Freedom –
>yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?” – for him, in the case of
>the Mensheviks quoted above, their “freedom” to criticize the
>Bolshevik government effectively amounted to “freedom” to
>undermine the workers’ and peasants’ government on behalf
>of the counterrevolution . . .

the actual quote from lenin is the whole second paragraph and a footnote points you to the source (V.I. Lenin, “Political Report of the Central Committee of the R.C.P. (B.),” March 27, 1922)

the "famous retort" bit is not a quote from lenin at all, but rather zizek summarizing the long paragraph into what he considers its essence. it is entirely clear in context that he's paraphrasing the real quote and not making up a new one. he is not disingenuous at all. it's actually who is being disingenuous by removing the context to make it look like zizek is making up lenin quotes.

All in all, Zizek is just a bit ambiguous at times. I mean, it DOES, to my eyes at least, seem like he is "quoting" a famous retort of Lenin's, while he really isn't. Lenin isn't particularly remembered for saying anything like that. But it is easy to understand that Zizek is summarizing after you realize that Lenin never said such a thing literally.

The Kafka thing in the OP is the same: it isn't WRONG to say that Kafka "said" that, but it is easy to misunderstand to mean that Kafka really said that (rather than just saying that through his literary art).

It is a quote from one of those Perverts Guide films, I think, so it is actually extra odd since there, he also said this: youtu.be/yUtW6KIdtxE?t=48
(to summarize: he mentions that "if god does not exist, everything is permitted" thing which is often attributed to Dostoyevsky, then corrects that Dosto never actually said that)

Maybe its actually an intentional piece of irony in the case of the Kafka thing, now that I think about it and relate it to that part.

zizek is a pseud but attacking him for paraphrasing quotes in a lecture? give me a break

>All in all, Zizek is just a bit ambiguous at times. I mean, it DOES, to my eyes at least, seem like he is "quoting" a famous retort of Lenin's, while he really isn't. Lenin isn't particularly remembered for saying anything like that. But it is easy to understand that Zizek is summarizing after you realize that Lenin never said such a thing literally.

some of this is zizek's style, some is simply the lack of context that comes from reading little chunks of text instead of the book/essay it belongs in. in this particular book ("on belief") quotes are always sourced so the lack of an endnote number immediately identifies the lenin thing as a paraphrase and not a quote. plus the pattern of quoting a wordy paragraph and following it up with a snappy paraphrase recurs many times in the book, so you're less likely to be confused if you're reading the whole thing.

the thing about zizek is that he's an internet meme but his actual work (other than when intentionally simplified, like in pervert's guide) is completely incompatible with this internet mode of discussion. this stuff does not divide well into bite-sized chunks. i'm convinced 99% of the people posting "pure ideology!" would not be able to define what zizek even means by "ideology". there was a thread about it a couple of days ago where maybe one or two posts demonstrated a decent grasp of the term.

>is completely incompatible with this internet mode of discussion.
True, it even does not translate very well into short articles (or maybe Zizek is, simply, occasionally pretty bad at writing them - he should know what'll happen if he writes a short-ish, incomprehensible yet provocative Lacanian analysis on trans, gender etc stuff - obviously people get mad, and it isn't solely their fault!)

>some is simply the lack of context that comes from reading little chunks of text instead of the book/essay it belongs in
I'm not sure, I'd just say that his style is such that it is easy to misunderstand, even if you do read everything.

No one ITT was doing anything comparable to those idiots who quote Zizek saying something like "Gandhi was more violent than Hitler". I've read plenty of Zizek and I honestly thought, until I checked, that Lenin had actually said that short "paraphrase" somewhere else than in the linked text. I also had to google if Kafka ever was that literal about his message.

>oh noes! I hafta think?? NO THANKS

Dosto, or rather one of his characters, actually said that in Brothers K. I think it was Dmitri. Sartre never said that, as Zizek claims, but perhaps adapted it or parodied it in his writings.

wtf I hate Zizek now

and AGAYN!

rare Žižek, do you mind if I save it?

Well, I am a communist but I live in a capitalistic regime, currently. So, no, not for free. $5 and it's yours.

I'll get a Chinese knock off instead, free market bitch!!

He just twists actual quotes around to have a different meaning.

No he adds depth to dumb quotes nobody even remembers you idoit

Erm, yer still payin' for that knock-off...
(You) have to go back.

He does both. Not even that guy, but you are a very black-or-white thinker. Very sad.

We still have our unhappy troll with us! How sweet!!

Why are people so afraid to see past their ideological blinders?

It's not fear. It's will.

They don't want to.

zizek and chomsky
>chomsky
lmfao

Why not?

if the Big Other is the trace of an undefinable outside that cant be systematized, shouldnt Zizek try to salvage Kant instead of Hegel, whose system is based on the postulated impossibility of a permanent Big Other?

No.

When you're sitted comfortably within yourself, why would you ever want to move?

why

Hegel's system is based on the impossibility of a permanent Other, or even an 'outside', not Kant's.

but thats what i meant. so question remains why zizek doesnt just let hegel die.

Why would he?

mutually exclusive mindsets obviously, either one is seriously interested in a systemic difference from the Big Other or one tries to explain it away with system-immanent contingency like Hegel.

Assuming a systemic difference from a Big Other implies there's a Big Other in the first place, with all the noumena and postulated God drivel, Hegel and Zizek are on the opposite camp.

>with all the noumena and postulated God drivel
not necessarily. the main thing is that one accepts the difference between a system and an outside, irregardless of the assumptions about this inaccessible outside.

zizek is closer to kant by stressing the big other all the time instead of treating it like an embarassing detail or illusion of contingency like hegel.

I think that's less to do with Kant than Lacan.

>not necessarily. the main thing is that one accepts the difference between a system and an outside

That's precisely what Hegel's Notion, the union of objective and subjective, is wholly opposite of. Being a Hegelian, Zizek would never draw from Kant.

>More of a JB Peterson kind of guy myself

i.e. this unattainable 'outside' that is forever just out of reach is pretty much what Zizek means by 'pure ideology'.

you keep repeating my own thoughts to myself without adressing the absurdity of zizeks project i keep mentioning since the first post. either i'm overlooking something super obvious or the whole premise of zizek/lacan is absurd.

You're a Kantian and he's a Hegelian, you need to change the paradigms you are approaching him with otherwise you'll never get nowhere.

ad hominem, pure ideology

either it's ideology which he wants to eradicate or it's the big other he keeps talking about and which is a fundamental limitation of systems, which hegel didnt accept, but kant did accept. i dont have to be a kantian to objectively notice this difference of approaches.

>ad hominem, pure ideology
Not really, you being Kantian or not is fundamental to the argument.

>which hegel didnt accept

Have you ever read Hegel? I assume not by this statement, the moment of 'in-itself' or fixed rigidity is part of every system, what Hegel rejected was the independence of this 'in-itself' apart from the Becoming of particular things (the phenomena)

>if the Big Other is the trace of an undefinable outside that cant be systematized

i can't speak to zizek's work on hegel but i'm not sure you're using lacanian terms correctly here. the big other is part of the symbolic order, serving as a virtual medium of symbolic registration. it is a feature of the symbolic order, not "outside" anything. when you drop something and you say "oops" despite nobody being there to witness it, you're saying it to the virtual big other (at least that's how zizek explains it, i've never read lacan directly).

pointing out specific flaws is fundamental to an argument, whether or not somebody channels kant will be obvious from there. you just insult people with a hidden premise.

How is it calling him Kantian an insult???

i remember ungoogleable quotes too

Am I very wrong if I treat Zizek's ideology as fundamentally the same as Althusser's? Of course with differences, but ultimately: ideology is the imaginary relationship to material conditions of existence, and those other "main points" of Althusser's.

Zizek doesn't seem to talk about Althusser that much, so I'm sometimes a little confused, if they really are more or less the same notion.

>Veeky Forums

zizek's ideology is founded more on psychoanalysis and is kind of a broader term: it's not that you can get indoctrinated into an ideology that will obscure reality, but rather that everyone is actively perpetuating ideology by escaping into it. all social reality is ideologically structured according to zizek.

Zizek is a true man of the people

That's why I'll always trust him

first order approximation of kant: knowledge is green zone, only antinomies and spooks behind boundary

hegel: almost inversion of kant, reason has advanced almost everywhere, the only "outside" of the system are small zones of randomness and contingency

where would you place zizek's Big Other in these?

youtube.com/watch?v=18qD9hmU9xg

...

...

He talks a lot about Althusser in his first book (Sublime whatever). He's mostly Lacan+Althusser+Hegel+Netflix.

Chomsky isn't trying to save anyone
Zizek is fighting ideology with ideology and there is no substance to anything he says

Hegel sees reason dialectically, where the particular and seemingly contradictory terms are subsumed under a high form of universality, e.g. in the law of gravity (in-itself and universal) is contained all particular objects that happen to fall on Earth, the representation of the law is itself the truth of the world of Becoming as the union of subjective activity (numbers, formula and so on) and objectivity (the objects themselves).

>Chomsky isn't trying to save anyone
>literally a leftist political activist

the big other is simply an intrinsic feature of the sociosymbolic order. it's not about epistemology. where on your drawing would you place the concept of language?

>Zizek is fighting ideology with ideology

if you actually read zizek you would see what a moronic statement this is

You could argue that CWC is a man completely consumed by commodity fetishism

reasonable language in green zone and rest in white zone, artistic language close to boundary on either side. what's sociosymbolic order?