I've watched hours and hours of his talks, and found some of what he says to be useful or interesting. But what is he really saying?
- Most is barely intelligible, with tangents upon tangents of weird psychoanalytical jargon.
- The jokes function to disarm and disorient anti-communist talking points.
- The core message seems to usually be "idpol bad" (which is true, at least for the liberal variants), but nothing much more interesting.
???
SUBTEXT: Ex-Yugoslav lib reformer now supports COMMUNISM*! If he can, so can you!
* by which he always specifies "the big problems are not solvable by capitalism" and distances all other associations
Really interesting guy. I love his movies, talks and read a lot of his books and find them enjoyable
His prediction of the "new authoritarianism" coming in the form of Silvio Berlusconi, the ridiculous clown going to bunga bunga parties everyone laughs at yet still there is an authoritarianism underlying it was very accurate
His shitting on shitlibs obsessed with Idpol is also good
That said his 'communism' is dogshit. He rejects any actually existing socialism as unmitigated disasters and dismisses the Leninist view of vanguard parties.
His speech versus Jordan Peterson was a pyrric victory as he basically conceded every point on any actually existing socialist country
The problem with this is a majority of citizens in former socialist countries say their lives were better under socialism: from ex Yugoslavia, to Russia, to DDR to Czechoslovakia, to a majority of Ex-Ussr states
Zizek himself was a dissident in Yugoslavias Slovenia. Marx explicitly that
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
He was explicitly a materialist... Proceeding from the conditions that are now in existence and proceeding from there. What does Zizek offer in place of the Leninist theory of the party...Of the conditions of capitalist encirclement by the CringeZoners? (Which presupposes a strong state in lockstep with a Communist Party with a foreign policy of Socialism in one country basicslly unchanged since 1920s ussr? 3rd wayers have ended up where Allende did)
What are we to make of the fact that socialism has only appeared in 3rd world countries with peasant majorities seeking to break free from imperialisms fascistic grip?
Zizek, as much as i enjoy his social commentary and mannerisms, is basically an armchair philosopher Marx wouldve hated
He offers nothing for anyone to ground themselves in material reality but he rejects what has appeared, even his own Yugoslavia which had more freedom for its citizens by occupying a "non aligned" position in geopolitics (as soon as Ussr fell the capitalists then invaded)
He is a good introduction to the general spectrum of left thought to "normies". I looked up to a Marxist philosophy major when I was in high school so my introduction to Zizek was "look at this clown, don't take him too seriously". Of course, that was before the rise of IDW and other reactionary elements of new media. Now that we have to compete with the spectacle of Ben Shapiro, Zizek is able to keep the attention of people who might otherwise tune out. His films are decent explainers to some concepts that are easier to explain with visual aids.
his thoughts on irony/the way satire is coopted are interesting and 100% borne out in the way every ironic space on the internet inevitably gets poisoned and turned into part of the fash pipeline
I mean tbh you're gonna need to understand some psychoanalytic jargon to get some points of his. If you want to learn that stuff, and not get bogged down in a quagmire of Zizekian tengentiality: I'd recommend reading some Todd McGowan (or especially listening to his Why Theory podcast), Mari Ruti, or Alenka Zupancic(who I think is the most genuinely Marxist of the batch). Honestly the Lacanian shit is super interesting and I think everyone should understand it a bit, especially when there's so much you can tie back into Dialectical Materialism. Once I could start drawing lines between Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Lacan (which are actually quite intuitive), I think it helped deepen my understanding of them as really pivotal figures, and all that has helped create a more cohesive understanding of the intertwined disciplines and movements which have emanated from or responded to their bodies of work. I don't even know how I'd interpret some people differently if I hadn't sorta stumbled into the Lacanian stuff early on: I think especially Althusser and Deleuze.
I would also really recommend the podcast Red Library, they were there the reason I turned away from being overly skeptical about Lacanians. I definitely had pretty much the same opinion as you, I get thinking Zizek is a bit of a spectacle and grift. No doubt the dude pumps out reactionary hot takes. Yet I'd definitely recommend still exploring the niche to which he belongs