/lit/ - Literature

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1365-some-bewildered-clarifications

Entire response.

Lol at posting a blog post of some idiot Chomsky supporter rather than to the direct link of Zizek's original post. (http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1365-some-bewildered-clarifications))

And it's amazing how Zizek is wholly better than Chomsky.

>>3970103

Are you blind?

>caring about intellectuals

oh wow, chomsky just got toldusaurus rekt

the thing is that Zizek is very lenient and gentle, clowns around and makes a fool of himself - so he's an easy prey. chomsky spouts the same anti-intellectual, boorish accustations that square minds of academia has been pestering "continental" philosophy with for decades (it's apparent that only American thought could come up with such a retarded dichotomoy as the continental/analytic traditions).

if anything chomsky is the one posturing with his "scentific and rational" approach when the only thing scientifically relevant he has provided with is a metaphysically hideous abomination in the form of the unverifiable spook of "universal grammar" which cannot, in any way it is dressed up, be considered a sound, empircal observation but rather unfounded speculation. not that this is wrong, rather, it becomes wrong in the light of what he is accusing Zizek of.

>Chomsky obviously doesn’t agree with me here. So what if—just another fancy idea of mine—what if Chomsky cannot find anything in my work that goes “beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old because” because, when he deals with continental thought, it is his mind which functions as the mind of a twelve-year-old, the mind which is unable to distinguish serious philosophical reflection from empty posturing and playing with empty words?

>when he deals with continental thought, it is his mind which functions as the mind of a twelve-year-old

BBBUUUUUUUUURRRRRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

fuck this shit is juvenile.. normal men might not be as smart but at least they act like fucking men

so basically his response is "u 2 dum trolololo"
wow, #rekt indeed

>>3971268
lel, I love him

>>3971268

His response would be *sniff* "My god, what if the objective prisjiple of the mind of a twelve year old isj a characterisjtic that sjtandsj out in a traditsjion known as the analytic mind? Then thisj mind would of coursj find waysj to sjay 'Oh, but thesje wordsj sjusjpend the Lacanian paradigma that hasj been plasjed over the posjt-capitalisjt worldview'. I claim that thisj characterisjtic is present in Mr. Chomsjky indeed. "

>>3971342
you forgot, "and so on and so on"

>>3971370
riemynds mie of dies owld diessident jowke in slovenia

>>3970167
yeah he was doing pretty good up until that childish fart

>>3970156
say what you want about UG but it was a revolutionary model for explaining natural language production and acquisition; besides neither it nor anyone post-Popper really buys into brute sense-datum verificationism. Which is not to say that they aren't positivists, or at least spiritual heirs to it, for whom logical clarity becomes a fetish devoid of content; for whom the intellectual encounter with contradiction and obscurity is always a problem of theory and of method, so only to be cleared up in that realm - the idea that theory must reflect the contradictions and confusions of its object, namely society in particular.

I've been reading the Positivismusstreit book and it's really quite astonishing how the retreat to a blanket vomiting of "obscurantism!" is almost unbroken in analytic philosophy's engagement with the continent, from Carnarp to Popper and now to Chomsky. For all the "open society" of liberal analytic philosophy, a tradition no doubt with merits and insights, balks at the slightest deviation from its circumscribed area of rationality and method. Which I guess is the paradox of liberalism's tolerance in many ways. This is all the more poignant given the fact that continental philosophy has been just as eager to merely gallivant within the circle of its own circumscribed discourse, and in many ways deserves the beating

My God, these fucking faggots with their ego contests.

Can lit stop sucking their collective dicks for one second?

> there is no subject
> haha im gonna prove you wrong, again and again!
> haha you're so fucking dumb
> ooga booga!

post-structuralism in a nutshell

>>3971603

Lol'd.

>muh scientific evidence
>muh serious empiricism
>muh STEM

Chomsky can't into philosophy at all.

>Philosophy is only for patricians!

Let's see if I understand the context of this debate properly.

Chomsky is asked in an interview to comment on post-structuralists. He briefly says they don't interest him and they just posture and offer no real substance. (2 minute long answer to a question)

In turn, Zizek writes two very long responses to why Chomsky is such a dumb, wrong idiot.

Why are post-structuralists so insecure? Chomsky just doesn't care.

Remember that hate is unreciprocated love. Apathy is the true opposite of hate. Chomsky doesn't think about post-structuralists, Zizek thinks about Chomsky all day.

>>3971721
When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

Guess who said that

>>3971721
But Chomsky dismissal has that childish Dawkinsian narrow-mindedness to it. Mostly it's the analytic types getting their feather ruffled though.

>>3971648
Philosophy isn't relevant and nobody really cares about it anymore.

Sorry.

>>3971408

Hey,

If you're still on, I was wondering if you could tell me anything about Wittgenstein's relationship to poetry. I know he was big into Trakl and some others, so I'm wondering what he thought the philosophical significance of poetry was.

>>3971807

Relevance isn't relevant and nobody really cares about it anymore.

Sorry.

>>3971799

I think we need a new Rorty/Wittgenstein type figure who can stand in the middle and tell both sides that they're wrong and to cut the bullshit.

>So what if—just another fancy idea of mine—what if Chomsky cannot find anything in my work that goes “beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old” because, when he deals with continental thought, it is his mind which functions as the mind of a twelve-year-old, the mind which is unable to distinguish serious philosophical reflection from empty posturing and playing with empty words?

ICE BURN. For those who missed it, earlier Chomsky basically said:

>If you can't explain it to a 12 year old, its meaningless shit! (referring to continental philosophy)

>>3971863

But Zizek's basically just saying 12deep24u there.

this whole thing is just a replay of the Searle v Derrida debate, except it's a lot less interesting and way more retarded

stop, just stop, nobody cares anymore

>>3971824
uhhh that's a pretty ambiguous region. I believe he also admired Rilke, and I know he would turn his back to the table and read Tagore when he visited the Vienna Circle, which is fantastic.

But as far as any detailed explanation of how he felt about poetry or poets in particular, there's not really much of that - if there is it's personal and not really that philosophical. But I do think that his philosophical work is fruitful for aesthetics as such, but you'll have to turn elsewhere to get a feel for that. There's an edited volume called the Literary Wittgenstein you might want to check out - Cavell, Diamond, Mulhall, I know, are prominent Wittgensteinians who write often on literature (Cavell has a whole book on Shakespeare)

>>3970100
>Mudslinging continues!
Will they both don thongs and wrestle in gelatine? For Zizek this would be a great pragmatic example of the dialectic brought into the real, for Chomsky it'd be another tick on that bucket list. Everyone wins.

>>3971870
I don't know - it's a dumb fucking idea amongst dumb fucking ideas that the work of academics should be written so its accessible to twelve year olds, and it's only thrown at continental theory, because nobody bothers to put the work in to get to grips with it.

>>3971870
It's more like the great /a/ spoonfeeding debate. It's not Zizek's duty to explain this stuff in a way palatable to a 12 year old, but he can give this old guy a ladder and assurances if he puts in the effort to climb it there's something at the top.

>>3971870
I'm no fucking massive figurehead in the discussion of philosophy and I understand Derrida, but Chomsky can't? Maybe he really does have the mind of a 12 year old.

>>3972100
Especially since it's a standard nobody holds any other discipline to. I just ordered a history book about the thirty years war. If I don't take copious notes, and put about fifteen minutes work into every page, I lose track of what's going because the thirty years war is fucking complex.

Philosophy is equally complicated.

>>3972076
it would of course be interesting to peruse the remarks in Culture and Value on art in general, and on music, his string of passages on Shakespeare (who he didn't like at all), though

>>3972100
>>3972113
Dem analyticals suffer from the occams razor fallacy.

>>3972113
yeah I admire Wittgenstein's having remarked somewhere (I think it's Philosophical Grammar of Philosophical Remarks) that philosophy, that is the practice of philosophy, must be as complicated as the knots in thinking that it is trying to untie

>>3970100
I read ''pomo philosopher'' as ''porno philosopher''.

The Self-Existentialist Crisis of Cocks, by Žižek.

>>3972146
yeah it's from Philosophical Remarks:

2Why is philosophy so complicated? It ought, after all, to be completely simple. Philosophy unties the knots in our
thinking, which we have tangled up in an absurd way; but to do that, it must make movements which are just as
complicated as the knots. Although the result of philosophy is simple, its methods for arriving there cannot be so.

then he goes on to say that the complication isn't in the object (in the sense of Sache) of philosophy but in the understanding and there's where I'm like ehhhhhhh but still.

>>3971721
No, Chomsky says that he is a charlatan with no content in an interview.

Zizek is asked by the public at a debate what he thinks of chomsky's comment.

Chomsky gets all mad and writes an article saying "you haven't cited any of the sources and you missreprenset my positions"

Zizek answers back that it was an improvised answer to a question from the public and that he could not have been expected to answer and that Chomsky is the first one that does not read him. And then concludes that if chomsky can't find in serious philosophy anything that a 12 year old won't understand maybe it's because he is not as smart as he thinks he is.

>>3972102
well there is a saying "there is no greater deaf than the one who does not want to hear".

Chomsky is heavily invested in certain ideas of agency, freedom, morality and human nature and that's why he doesn't want to hear objections.

Even worse, and this is obvious when you hear his debate with foucault, he doesn't want to acknowledge that what he is fighting for may, if we are not careful, turn out to be even more oppressive than the situation we are in.

In a way he is like those people that are "what do you mean that too much economic freedom can be bad? freedom is always good right?"

>>3972113
I can see where each are sort of coming from. One of the issues has been Zizek's kind of cutesy, in-jokey way of talking about things. I think he did it in the response before this where he called Chomsky saying "you misquoted me you misunderstand me" part of the Hegelian dialectic I think. And I think Chomsky is perhaps focusing a little too much on the quips, and not so much on what has seemed to be his main issue with Continental phil in the past, that of accessibility. I think he wants philosophy to be for 12 year olds because that's what he thinks will sell, as it were, to people with poor education in developing countries.

>>3971841
I like Brassier.
He does that.

First Chapter he schools Sellars and Churchland.

Second chapter he schools Adorno and Horkheimer while re-interpreting Hegelo-Freudism.

He is incredibly clear but he is no analytic.

But some could accuse him of being a positivist.

>>3970106
Even /lit/ loves drama I suppose

>>3972189
Really? I thought he's an awful, self-promoting hack, along with the rest of that shitty, fractious coven of passive-agressive second-raters.

>>3972188
The truth is, Zizek doesn't write for everybody. He writes for people who've been trained in continental theory, and, if you have, his work is genuinely funny light-medium reading. I don't think he's in any way a great philosopher, but he's very entertaining. His weird position as a sort of political demagogue is more a function of the fact there are very few good candidates, and contingent facts (that he's at a post in London when shit's been going down in London, he's always been anti-po-mo) than of any particular skill or suitability for the position

>>3972246
>he's always been anti-po-mo
I would say he's anti-post-struct in a lot of ways, but a lot of what his views and explanations are fairly typically pomo. I've noticed a fair few academics since the late 80s/90s have taken the opposite of this, being happily post-struct but anti-pomo.

>>3972246
About Brassier: yeah that's what i thought too. Then he called them all fucking idiots and decided to give him a chance (also because I'm an edgy teenager and I read anything with nihilism in the title). If you menage read Nihil Unbound (you can find it online). Just a couple of pages of the first chapter. You will see, I believe that there is more substance than one might think.

As for Zizek: I don't think he is just light-medium. I think he has some serious points that he doesn't always take the time to articulate properly but I believe he is deeply original.
His capability of having a fresh perspective and construct worldview drawing for a series of different sources is priceless. Rorty said that the valuable philosopher is not the one which gives the most solid argument but the one that flips the gestalt switch and allows us to see the world in a different way.

And let's admit it: Zizek did for Hegel way more than Pippin (whom I love) or Pinkard with their thorough and super thoughtful scholarship did.

It's unfortunate though as you say that today no figure embodies that erratic genius like power of thought with a thorough scholarship. But I think it's a sign of the times and of the absurd amount of scholarship done on any topic. Absurd because most often the result is not a deepening of the understanding but just the repetition of what are the most diffused stereotypes at the moment.

>>3972265
Nah, how can he be po-mo?
He believes in truth, ethics and the cartesian subject.

The only po-mo quality is that he does not buy in the separation between high and low art.

>>3971876
Derrida was very disingenuous and arrogant in that debate.

Searle one because he actually tried to engage with Derrida and not just score points to show off his theory.

>>3970103
you comedian, you.

>>3972396
Not everyone thinks it like that:
"Searle argued that he did not want to dedicate any attention to the deconstructionist point of view, so as not to legitimize it."

From wiki

>>3972102
>chomsky can't understand derrida
>i understand Derrida
>chomsky has a mind of a 12 year old
lel'd.

Damn, Zizzy called a fucker out

I get where Chomsky is coming from. I believe he sees philosophers like Zizek one of the major problems with the left today. Incomprehensible intellectual jargon that just goes on and on while explaining concepts you can explain, much much easier without the intellectual jargon circlejerk. This is why I think he made the "12 year old remark". Most of what Zizek says is actually quite simple, but he goes about a super, super long about way of doing it, such as is common in modern philosophical academia.

There is a thing where to make sure that your average adult needs to understand a concept, you need to make sure a 16 year old understands it. If a 16 year old doesn't understand it, your average adult most likely won't.

For as much as I love Zizek, Chomsky has done, far far much more for the left than Zizek ever will. Chomsky is quoted by leftist world leaders, his books are massively popular and he gets many many people thinking about the true state of Geopolitics.

So it doesn't matter really what Zizek says, because Zizek doesn't matter at all in the slightest. When Zizek dies, most people will be like "Who the fuck is Zizek?" in fact even most leftists I talk to don't even know who he is. When Chomsky dies, that will be a massive blow to the global left.

>>3972470
Chomsky makes comfortable money off capitalism. What Zizek does is in a sense what Derrida did. You get the complacent academics playing their word games to a degree and living pleasantly, and then you get a maniac who follows the same structure of academics and word games but pushes it in such a way that the games become apparent. This makes other academics uncomfortable because they always played modest hands and they realise that some cunts running wild with the game might expose them as well. Zizek, like Derrida, is a sophist's sophist. And that is what really makes the other boys in the game sweat. It's pro wrestling pushed beyond the wilful suspense of disbelief and people are threatened by it.

>>3972534
Which is probably why Zizek is happy to call himself "a clown".

>>3972470
> Chomsky has done, far far much more for the left than Zizek ever will. Chomsky is quoted by leftist world leaders, his books are massively popular and he gets many many people thinking about the true state of Geopolitics.

This right here.

>>3972534
Derrida was much richer and had a much broader range than Zizek, though. Derrida also didn't represent the voice of the new left, but was rather modest in his political annunciations. Not that Chomsky's correct, but there's a big difference between Zizek and Derrida.

>>3972534
>Chomsky makes comfortable money off capitalism.

And Zizek didn't write Lacanian slogans for an Abercrombie & Fitch ad campaign? Since when is making money from capitalism a bad thing, according to Marxists?

>>3971408
>neither it nor anyone post-Popper really buys into brute sense-datum verificationism
>neither it

Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar doesn't buy into brute sense-datum verificationism?

>>3972546
Of course, but I was merely pointing out that both of them make the establishment queasy in the same way, It's not so much about specific theory but their general position in academics here.

>>3972548
Zizek's is just more honest in his hypocrisy, which is disturbing to the old garde.

>>3972556
> Zizek is edgy, people are scared he will blow their cover
> point out how Zizek isn't edgy
> ACTUALLY HIS EDGE IS MUCH MORE EDGY THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT

>>3972534
Don't get me wrong, I love Zizek and I actually enjoy the Zizek "trollfest" far far more entertaining and thought provoking.

But in the wider scheme of things, it is Chomsky that matters far more than Zizek. Chomsky may be a shit philosopher, I don't know, I haven't read much of his philosophical work, but like many others, it was Chomsky that opened my eyes to the real world of Geopolitics and political science.

>>3972551
I meant it doesn't take part in that sort of thing, as a theory. bad personification on my part

>>3972534
>Being able to understand Derrida and Zizek only as trolls.

I really wish people taught Kant in high schools. I'm starting to think that people after 17 don't have the mental plasticity to understand what he is saying and consequently don't understand anything that happened in the subsequent two centuries of post-kantian philosophy.

Can someone explain Lacan and Derrida to me in the same vein that someone might explain Plato's theory of forms to a layperson in under a minute?

Give me the general outline of their ideas?

>>3972659

Lacan: Freud says we have an unconscious that speaks to us through the symptoms and dreams. If it speaks that's a language. If it is a language it can be analyzed linguistically.

Derrida: When we speak to other people we use a language that we inherited. This language that we inherited uses metaphors and rhetorical devices invented by other people which now are no more. So when we analyze the meaning of our language what we are really doing is more similar to the interpretation of a written text. So it seems that at the origin of our language there is an act similar to writing. But then why do we think that first come speaking and only after comes writing? Because in metaphysical thought we have always privileged the presence of the speaker or of meaning rather than absence.

>>3971342
you forgot a mention of ideology, Stalin and Hegel dialectics

>>3972693
Zizek so as much doesn't mention Dialectics by name though, he just blatantly uses the concept

"Blah blah blah and that in the end they will come together and become the same and it continues so on and so on"

>>3972632
>and consequently don't understand anything that happened in the subsequent two centuries of post-kantian philosophy.

But all of post-kantian philosophy is shit.

>>3972687
Thanks!

>>3972703
If you studied Kant as a teenager you would know better.

>>3972687
>Lacan: Freud says we have an unconscious that speaks to us through the symptoms and dreams. If it speaks that's a language. If it is a language it can be analyzed linguistically.

Except that's not really an explanation of Lacan. You've merely recited one famous sentence of his.

>>3972708
they're all weak misreadings

>>3972711
I had to do it under a minute.
I assure you I can be much more thorough.

>>3972711
everyone's a critic

>>3972765
you sound like a dismissive jewish mother upon receiving backtalk

>>3972100

>great /a/ spoonfeeding debate

When was it? Fuck, I'm /a/ and didn't know it.

Polite sage for posting off-topic.

yawn

>>3973530
The argument for the acceptance of spoonfeeding was/is largely one sided, coinciding with the emergence of /q/ and that sort of thing. They saw /a/ as a board for /v/ and dismissed what they perceived as elitist practices. Well, I think it's mostly died down now, but /a/ was fucking retarded for a while.
>implying /a/ isn't always shit
Etc.

Would Zizek be able to beat Chomsky on a fight? Both of them are in the peak of their physical shape.

>>3973938
Zizek is younger and doughier, Chomsky wouldn't have a chance.

>>3972703
>But all of post-kantian philosophy is shit.
>thinking post-Kantian philosophy is Hegel and Hegel only

I would advise you to kill yourself.

>>3971841

Conformism + appeal to authority = antiintellectualism.

>>3973957
You implied that, not me.

It's still shit.

>>3972556
no it means that he's a hypocrite and can be easily brushed away

Chomsky met Lacan and realized he was a charlatan.

Are you Lacaniacs saying that Chomsky is delusional and that only you guys know "the truth"?

psshh what a fucking joke