The life and philosophy of Slavoj Žižek | Interview

[@TheInstituteOfArtAndIdeas]

How does historical contingency relate to freedom? Leave your thoughts in the comments. To watch the full conversation, head to iai.tv/video/the-life-and-philosophy-of-slavoj-zizek?KZbin&

[@kennethshort2016]

You have to stay with this guy but he's really bright and insightful. What nationality is he?

[@mnemonija]

@@kennethshort2016he is slovenian.

[@AngstAngst]

It's so fascinating to me how EVERY person who has Slavoj on their show/podcast/etc, absolutely cannot control him or the conversation. Once he goes its like trying to stop a moving train. U love 2 see it

[@thstroyur]

Zizek is a force of nature; his lispy tic - doubly so.

[@logancade342]

It drives me crazy how every host, without fail, will at some point interject to move to their next prompt at a point which betrays the fact that they are not following the meaning of his words in real time. And yes, his speech patterns are an acquired taste. His thought patterns, same. In my opinion, acquiring that taste is the responsibility of a host/moderator so that they can ensure the ideas are being communicated as effectively as possible.

[@thstroyur]

@@logancade342 Nobody has to "acquire a taste" regarding someone else's speech pattern.

[@logancade342]

@@thstroyur nobody has to do anything

[@JackT13]

Haha yes, someone could ask him what the time is and before you know it he’s pontificating about the sociopolitical set-up of 7th century Armenia

[@HipHopLived]

"When I was introduced to metaphysics as an undergraduate, I was given the following definition: metaphysics is the study of ultimate reality. This still seems to me to be the best definition of metaphysics I have seen." Peter Van Inwagen, "Metaphysics", 3rd edition, P. 1

[@ElectricityTaster]

kneegah how many comments are you going to make?

[@adriaanvivier864]

@ElectricityTaster it's like an AI bot is rambling like zijek don't you think ? But they are two ingredients short, so they left it here to test the public ? Also found weird 😕

[@matthewglenguir7204]

Zizek is basically a Phd Philosopher that rambles on and on, but you cant help and be intrigued by what he says

[@shadowkxm]

And so on and so on

[@alecfraher7122]

basically; really? ~ how much more dismissive can you be? the lineage goes back to the legacy of Paul Hirst and the failings of the Left to defeat the unbridled rise of the right wing authoritarianism today ... his ramblings no-more than having the decency to actually name what the Left intelligencia suppressed for 40 yrs...

[@kennethshort2016]

​@@shadowkxm Yea. He's really a force of nature. He really tries to help people understand complex ideas. He dares to think big. I heard him speak once on the idea of God and pain

[@MarceloZigaran]

Zizek is so much more than a Phd philosopher ….

[@tuckerbugeater]

now if we can get ai to translate his speech we will reach the singularity

[@hoola_amigos]

😂😂

[@kennethshort2016]

Lol😊

[@HipHopLived]

And in the end all knowledge is categorical, the value of fluidity lies more in our ability to admit that we _DON'T_ know.

[@HipHopLived]

also he just seems like an all around nice man. (and the bit about cinema clearly works it's way into how one might think about video games)

[@matt99121]

Between two ferns has really changed

[@HipHopLived]

In any case, even Hayek is quite clear - _who is a very respected professional economist_ - that the biggest supporters of "Collectivism" are organized capital, and organized labour, because on the one hand monopolies shut out competition, and on the other monopolies can pay higher wages to specific groups (at the detriment of the workers in the non-monopolized industries) - effectively producing a "frozen society"

[@HipHopLived]

"His odd interests marked him as an outsider, and he did not alleviate this by feeling any compulsion to be 'one of the boys.' He despised gym class and team sports and often cut classes to follow his own interests. Moving beyond the standard school texts, he absorbed volumes analyzing human behavior on every level, from the impulses of the individual to the dynamics of the herd."

[@geoffreyprecht2410]

I love the video game analogy! But I personally think freedom is just a story that Life tells itself in order to stay alive.

[@HipHopLived]

A quick reading of Hegel implies that a statement is authoritative because our life is at stake over whether we accept it, reject it, or choose to ignore it; either it's relevant somehow to our choices in life in which we run a risk to it (understood in a broad sense, no one wants to end up in the gutter), or because someone overbearingly present is threatening us with a stick (or bribing us with a carrot)

[@tuckerbugeater]

Zižek advocates for diverse discursive strategies to challenge established norms. Drawing from personal and historical examples, including the unexpected emotional response to a pet's death and the ethical justifications of figures like Himmler, he illustrates the complexities of human behavior. Addressing technological advancements, particularly brain-computer interfaces, Žižek contemplates the potential impact on freedom, suggesting an optimistic view that retains the essence of subjective experience even in the face of advancing neurobiological understanding

[@farrider3339]

Yeah, this is what he's been saying. Nice summary🎉

[@Vader53124]

And so on, and so on.

[@swagatosaha]

Pretty sure this is AI generated

[@gothxm]

​@@swagatosahait does have that vibe doesn't it?

[@kennethshort2016]

I love how he defined true patriotism any why Himmler was a prime e example.

[@MateusCCaetano]

It's very adorable to try to save free will with quantum fisics. Probability, statitics and randomness only add to the problem. Reminds me of theologians evoking contemporary astronomy to resuscitate god.

[@HipHopLived]

Anyway, on the problem of Analytic Philosophy, it seems to have been the product of the historically most dramatic application of Ockham's Razor ever made - the reduction of meaning to formal logic and predicable experience (or more like the first, and then the latter) - then Ryle came and said "No, we really do get meaningful concepts from everyday life", and a few decades later, "No there really are meaningful really philosophical (and therefore, I suppose, "extra-ordinary") problems", and then "But those French-o's are so obscure, they're like gurus... like... like..." and then "We're back to doing philosophy as it's always been done" (since philosophers have always been akin to "a guru")

[@MtnMig]

The interviewer was out of her league. As always, Zizek was great.

[@genomedia44]

In what way? She didn't say anything at all really. I much prefer it when an interviewer isn't forcing a direction , or speaking over their guests

[@genomedia44]

To all of those judging this man based on a short extract (the KZbin Shorts extract), have you made the effort to go listen to the entire talk so that you can be sure you hear what he is saying? (And not what you think he is saying)

[@alecfraher7122]

Freedom is a necessity of its own ~ CB McPherson on possessive individualism ? Who is Zizek channelling and how would anyone actually know ~ his talking about Himmler etc is the core ground of the anthroposophists and rosicrusions; the take on naturalism is akin to the work of Enst Bloch in The Principle of Hope; Plancks constant is a thought-form to mitigate indeterminacy ~ Existenz?

[@smokedbeefandcheese4144]

Nobody Leads him he leads the conversation

[@user-qb8qm4mp5n]

I learned in 7th grade by division of halves you can get to zero point in reality but not mathematically. Zizek's story about Himmler, was never heard before. What is the definition of freedom used in this context? Reading minds is reading memories, or is it thoughts about memories? Probably cannot read someone's mind while they are making calculations in real time.

[@HipHopLived]

Uh, and for the record, _I am an analytic philosopher at heart_ (it's not that if you understand it you must explain it in plain language, after all, communication is intended for an audience - I read Umberto Eco in Spanish sorry for not using the technical terms - and sometime's somebody is spying, but that maybe we shouldn't assume a psychopath can understand the right thing in plain language anyway, since "stop hitting me" is just a joke to those people)

[@HipHopLived]

Anyway, why is that important? Because Avicenna (like Maimonides) was a Medical Authority, and his most famous text, "Al-Shifa", is translated "The Healing"

[@HipHopLived]

I personally agree that the Zohar was contemporary with the Talmud, tradition would actually place it's completion in the second century and where-abouts prior to the 6th century completion of the Talmud (took 5 centuries to write, the Zohar was written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, his son Elazar, and his disciples, per tradition. It's roughly 10000 pages, making the "skeptical critical position" of "Moses ben Shem Tov made it all up in 13th century Spain" untenable)

[@HipHopLived]

I probably made several mistakes there. Anyway it seems to imply that what children fight over is their mothers, I find that a brilliant correlative to Freud from a social perspective, and this is understood, more or less, as "comfort" (which of course recalls the Master-Slave Dialectic of Hegel). This is what immature adults continue to do when they've refused to grow up - they fight to impose their "comfort zone" at other people's expense.

[@HipHopLived]

I think any vision of a future must admit that reality is not as it will be, which is to say reality is not yet, or even that reality is not as it must be, so it can only describe the present reality by way of a lack or a negation. The language of a better, more perfected, or more complete reality, must necessarily be in-direct.

[@HipHopLived]

Is Lacan saying that nostalgia is the uniting feature of the human condition? I know that sounds counter to what he is literally saying, but he's talking about recovering a "state of oneness that only exists in myth", I mean he's saying myth (which is extraordinary) is excluded from language, right? And that the signification of language (which is ordinary) is always what's excluded?

[@HipHopLived]

anyway, added adendum: Ordinarily we hold synthetic judgments to be the empirical observation that inspires a definition which shall be the future subject of an analytic judgment. (But, typically in the case of scientific/artistic/philosophical/theological creativity, ___ [moment of insight, etc. etc.

[@HipHopLived]

You know there are philosophers who have gone on record and said such things as "Aristotle's insight was that there is no need to invoke a 'deeper reality' to explain phenomenal realities" (that would be Martha Nussbaum in an interview in the 80's), but Noam Chomsky in his books from the 60's states that there is no science without explanation by means of a "deeper under-lying structure", his explanations then, unsurprisingly, take the form of a layered explanation, so there's a phonological layer, then a morphological layer, of language. But Derrida few years later would already point out that this is (actually Saint Augustine started it) "the naturalistic fallacy" of language, as it were. The very existence of "Grammatology" as a department of archeology, which originated in the study of Egypt, disproves that language starts at phonemes and then proceeds to "morphemes". Because hieroglyphs are non-phonetic language - something every linguist knows, and none seems to care to account for. I blame freemasonry?

[@jezzdogg6857]

Why do you write so many comments?

[@HipHopLived]

When Lacan says "My title conveys the fact that, beyond this speech, it is the whole structure of language that psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious. This is to alert prejudiced minds from the outset that the idea that the unconscious is merely the seat of the instincts may have to be reconsidered.", in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious" (delivered as a talk in 1957). Look, I got this from Wikipedia, but Noam Chomsky supposedly takes up linguistic applications Carnap in a 1957 book to claim that a language is an infinite set of grammatical statements that can be generated algorithmically from a "syntactic structure" given a finite number of "linguistic elements" (it's been a while, but I did take 4 semesters of formal logic - Wikipedia meant something like "semantic variables", right? Like in math). This later became, published in the most famous book "Language and Mind" (1968), growing from a debate with the behaviorists, the claim that the mind pre-exists behavior, but not necessarily language, as an innate syntactic structure subject to biological evolution, right? So that Chomsky gets lumped in, some times, I've heard or read this somewhere, with the "Structuralists" - which would make him ironically just as "continental" as "analytic", right? Because Freud didn't shy away from saying, that what he was creating was a science somewhere in the "interstices between biology and psychology", and in that regard Chomsky was merely making "lingui-analysis" (and how is that not pseudo-science?)

[@victorperez1234]

He reminds me a lot to hermeneutics. In the way of approaching history and the openness of ontology, i felt like i was reading Dilthey or Gadamer.

[@victorperez1234]

I know he is student of Lacan, Hegel, Marx...so is obvious he will lean to in the direction of hermeneutics, but i dont recall before seen him so in to it.

[@HipHopLived]

I suppose what I am proposing is simply what Chomsky already accepted, and Tomasello, in a way unbeknowst to me, brought up in the shape of a critique: There must be some sub-layer to linguistics, we are all agreed it is biological, but, in Chomsky's words, "linguistics is a sub-science of psychology" (somewhere in "Language and Mind"). So if, per Freud's words, "Psycho-analysis is between biology and psychology", there should be a layer of linguistic analysis, that is properly scientifically, psycho-analytical. And I think Lacan is right in choosing martyrdom on the hill, that all traditional scientists believe, that Science is Truly Revolutionary. (an achievement of modernity - we DO believe)

[@HipHopLived]

According to Conspiracy Theory folklore the Pike Letter on "World War Three" was to Mazzini on August 15, 1871, and the original is found in the British Museum. I'm not sure if I believe it.

[@HipHopLived]

anyway, Heidegger continued the practice of conceptual "destruction" ("destruction of the history of ontology") first found in Nietzsche's "Will to Power", right? The point of that wasn't to "erase dead white males" but to discover the heart at the root of thinking that the Greeks "invented" (and let's face it, Chinese philosophy I've yet to really get to, it was pretty glorious) so as to recover for ourselves the ability to think for ourselves, right? And Deleuze continues that in his "What is Philosophy?", but what is note-worthy is that in choosing to use the term "Arche-ology" rather than merely the (possibly bland and "descriptive", to allude to the average mediocrity's interpretation of Wittgenstein) "genealogy" is no small mater. What you usually get in readings of Foucault is the notion that "whatever the author is saying is irrelevant, all that matters is the relation of his language on the wider discourse had with other authors including ones from the future". But clearly this isn't so we can forget THE ESSENCE (as my translation of "The Archeology of Knowledge" insists that "to be inessential" is to have failed), this is so that we can read what is said in the proper order that would allow us to grasp the "secret" (the translation uses the word "secret") meaning of what really was meant. Hell, this is simply phenomenological realism isn't it? "Horizons" without "brackets" as it were. Which of course recalls Wittgenstein's "picture language" and it's "optical illusions". You know these people were profound thinkers but more than that they were standing on the shoulders of giants, they clearly had a lot of unfinished thinking to think through.

[@HipHopLived]

to be clear the "cartoon noises" I had in mind was the weird half-human purrs of one "Snarf" from "Thundercats"(I know a few fans here in Mexico, my dad's into "Pinky and the Brain" by Stephen Spielberg, I'll tell you that story later!)

[@HipHopLived]

But the fact is, from my own personal conviction, I do agree, and I believe this belief is pragmatically founded as a question of ethics (which deals with actions, choices, values). So what is the last paragraph of Clark and Chalmer's article? "As with any re-conception of ourselves, this view will have significant consequences. There are obvious consequences for philosophical views of the mind and for the methodology of research in cognitive science, but there will also be effects in the moral and social domains. It may be, for example, *that in some cases interfering with someone’s environment will have the same moral significance as interfering with their person.* And if the view is taken seriously, certain forms of social activity might be re-conceived as less akin to communication and action, and as more akin to thought. In any case, once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world."

[@HipHopLived]

Okay, you know what, I can't help but notice that Lacan, in making the phallus the signifier, makes it what points always at something other than itself (or maybe homosexually at some other phallus in a circle, but the point is at that point it's the signifier of another signifier, but never of the signified) - that as being - did I get this correctly? - the center of the Symbolic Order it is also precisely that which exists as a lack, or, Platonically, a desire. It is not the thing desired so much as the expression of the desire of a reality other than itself. Clearly Lacan had read Horney.

[@HipHopLived]

I'm an Ockham's Razor guy, but I, too, find the appeal to "what is natural" fallacious in building a scientific theory (questionable epistemology), by which I mean "simple, orderly, 'what one would assume'", "comfortable _for me and my associates/colleagues"_ - I think that's a fast way to construct competing "epistemes" (shots at hegemonic, monolithic, "Truth"), it's a far-cry from an objective view at knowledge.

[@HipHopLived]

How about Yuval Harari, the guy who talks about digital dictatorship, _at the World Economic Forum_

[@HipHopLived]

Just keep in mind that when I say me all I mean is "Charitable Love" (which my boggled brain has come to understand as having primarily two components: advocacy and forgiveness - well a positive and a negative as it were, and both are to be interpreted both materially and spiritually - so a banker can't fool himself that he's very forgiving while keeping the whole world in monetary debt [I guess if money is an "Idea" is more of a metaphysical discussion, I'll have to save the Marxism of course])

[@HipHopLived]

Point is I'm afraid I didn't really "get" the Chomsky that well either (as if someone whose claims escape the bounds of philosophy, and into empirical science should be so easy to "get"; indeed, continental philosophers generally have political implications to their thought, so it's unsurprising that they are not superficial or "understandable at a glance")

[@HipHopLived]

Anyway, I have often emphasized that in Christianity, we mean "Charitable Love", emphatically not "Erotic Love" (this appears also to be roughly "Sant" Dnyaneshwar's interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, "I am the enemy of the god of love"). But is Lacan talking about erotic or charitable love? He says the discourse of love is specular (about an illusion, or perhaps a "miracle" as understood by Hume whom he so clearly read, as he himself refers to him by name), he then says that lesbians emphasize love to the exclusion of orgasm. He clearly does not exactly mean "erotic love" (at least not as found in "hardcore pornography", where the orgasms may be faked, but "extremes of pleasure" linked with death, "little death" being a euphemism for "orgasm" as found in Roland Barthes, are a selling-point), if perhaps "sensuality" (as it connotes "sensitivity"), but Havelock Ellis (a eugenicist and history's first Sexologist) in the "Psychology of Sex" says that the inherent correlate of orgasm is a "the joy caused by the play of [...] emotions", he also says "as aroused by the opposite sex" (this was XIXth century, he was "heteronormative" before Lacan). Anyway, P. 109 of the "Psychology of Sex" ought to be fascinating for Lacanians for that reason alone (since lesbians in their "courtly" or romantic "love" are attempting to "give what they don't have"). But perhaps what the two passages together are implying, as Lacan says "this is not to say that she renounces hers for all that" (but men are fascinated into imaginary spectating by the mystery of being radically excluded BECAUSE of their phall..ii), is that, as I saw on a Facebook meme (and Tiresias says in Apollodorus' Library of Mythology), "lesbian sex is dramatically (but the lack of objectivity might be the "causal factor") superior"

[@HipHopLived]

Yo Zizek! I'm sure you actually read the "Guide to the Perplexed", right? So what's "The Lightning Flash", about?

[@HipHopLived]

for those who weren't bothered with ever referencing the text in public in their lives, it's in the Book of Revelation, and is, in Greek, "Eureka!"

[@HipHopLived]

Now I've no doubt Heidegger read Schelling, but far as I know he read him completely differently (and I didn't think Heidegger was a Monotheist, for all his talk of "gods") [perhaps it's best the world be flawed, but on the surface that's paradoxical]

[@HipHopLived]

I had Chomsky explained to me by a professor (my other logic professor, he's more of an original thinker, but less good as a teacher.. he gave me a 7 on my last exam! ..and well I probably deserved it), I suppose once I finish getting decent Wikipedia referenced citations of Chomsky and Lacan, well, what do you say we do an old "Russell meats Sartre" (the colloquium they organized to protest the Vietnam War) but instead for Trump('s inevitable invasion of Mexico)?

[@HipHopLived]

ah I don't judge, I think all the repression of the P.R.I. state apparatus just meant "letting off steam" in the form of sporadic neurotic violence of organized individuals somewhat inevitable.

[@HipHopLived]

Look, is Schopenhauer saying "destroy all desire" or "fulfill all desire"? Logically, speaking, he is saying both. And even "create new desires" (perhaps that we can also destroy or fulfill - but I think once we "get and discard the picture", these new desires are bound to be somehow "holy", our ordinary language in the world prior to this Global Redemption, which of course is what Schopenhauer would've desired, no longer applies; "all things are clean to a clean conscience" to quote Paul)

[@HipHopLived]

well, except Jung, but I meant "language", I guess I forgot the way I said it out loud in a class originally (back before I know so many things, I guess pick up quick, and it's come to a sort of "epistemic breaking through point" for me)

[@HipHopLived]

You know to be fair, revolutions in thought might have to be forced just like any other revolution. But then the question is of you doing it well, and not being inept, which at a certain point is "trafficking with the enemy"

[@HipHopLived]

According to the Mystic Treatises of Saint Isaac the Syrian, by "The World" is meant "The Passions" (you know, of Nature). So of course it'd be "Self-Control" (which when genuine, and not the imposition of "socialization by surveillance" is all Foucault wanted, right?)

[@HipHopLived]

"desire is only that which I have called the metonomy of all signification." Jacques Lacan, "Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever" You know I like it.

[@HipHopLived]

"In 1942, when he was twelve years old, LaVey’s fascination with toy soldiers branched off to concern about the world war. He delved into military manuals and discovered that arsenals for the equipment of armies and navies could be bought like groceries in a supermarket and used to conquer masses of people. The idea took shape in his head that contrary to what the Bible said, the earth would not be inherited by the meek, but by the strong and mighty." From the original introduction of the 1968 edition, once again, most historic Satanists are close to the military, police or intelligence communities.

[@HipHopLived]

A lot of people have alleged that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a tyrant, mostly upper class types, and I don't doubt Solon got the same treatment, as he also said "Refrain ye in your hearts those stubborn moods, Plunged in surfeit of abundant goods, And moderate your pride! We'll not submit, Not even you yourselves will this befit!" - and if Galileo were a heretic I'd be first in line to sign the blood-writ contract and be one

[@HipHopLived]

to be fair, I don't Hegel ever claimed to be party to "Absolute Idealism" either. Schopenhauer claimed to be an idealist, and his reading of Kant was completely different (but I bet both can be read into Plato retroactively) - and would become Wittgenstein and, in some weird way I've yet to divine, Nietzsche

[@HipHopLived]

Anyway, what is Heidegger's conception of "das Man" ("the one", or "they" - obviously word-play on this went into Deleuze's conception of "d'une")? It obviously corresponds to Rousseau's conception of Civil Society. Everyone knows Heidegger was a Naturalist. (so not quite a materialist, not quite an idealist, like the historical Illuminati he was something of a neo-Pagan)

[@HipHopLived]

Ehem - Vanis Varoufakis pointed out that we've gone back from capitalism into "neo-feudalism", and at least three sociologists have stated that the origins of the mafia are in the remnants of the feudal enforcement systems. In other words it's unsurprising that "neo-feudalism" means "the golden age of the con" (con man, scam artist, or "art of the deal" to put it politely)

[@HipHopLived]

I can't help but perceive in the "Oedipus Complex" (at least as construed in Lacan, but it's definitely there in Freud, if I recall the point of the Oedipus Complex is that it resolves itself - to escape it), a High Modern attempt at replacing Religion. But perhaps it could also serve as a biological explanation for the perennial existence of Religion (well it's "Moses and Monotheism" where one finds "Return of the Repressed", but that's a long book and I know like, 3 pages. "Future of an Illusion" and all that)

[@HipHopLived]

Wikipedia says Lacan's greatest inspiration, with regards to his style, is "Ibn Arabi", why did he not say Ibn Sina, inventor of the "Flying Man" Argument (or "Medieval Sensory Deprivation Thought Experiment"), and first man I know of (I think Philo of Alexandria came close in saying "Adam" is a euphemism for "Mind". In Hinduism this is explicit as "Manu", the Hindu Adam, means "Mind") to believe out-loud in the Existenz of the "Collective Unconscious" (he, Peter Adamson explains, believed we "down-loaded" our knowledge, whether concrete or abstract, from this Divine Higher Plane called the "Active Intelligence" ruled by God, who is defined as "The Necessary Existent" in an "Ontological Argument" that precedes Anselm) And Averroes' "Two Truths" (science and religion) theory is just what inspired Aquinas' "Plurivocity of Being" (creatures and creator) theory.

[@HipHopLived]

Anyway, to be friendlier to Ms. Butler, it seems what she's saying, taking the "Big" quote found on her Wikipedia page to be representative of the text as a whole, that "heteronormativity" (or more broadly, from our perspective where Lacan isn't such an over-bearing presence, but "SJW's" are, "sexual normativity" or "rigid sexual identities", taking preferences to be less performative and more "material") is "an act" the "actors" of which "make mockeries of themselves" (and so of any possibility of establishing a more authentic sense of self) by repeating "what is normal" out of fear of being "different" (and being "excluded" from daddy patriarchy or something)

[@HipHopLived]

You know Mr. Zizek, it used to be said, I think it still is held implicitly by scientific consensus surrounding the use of Ockham's Razor, that "Nature takes the path of least resistance". But that is like saying that, were someone to set himself up "against Nature" (and not in a fun way like in late ninteenth century "decadent" novels and art), Nature would have a hard time saving "herself" (or whatever you prefer to call it), for if it "takes the path of least resistance", it "goes with the flow", or sort of "goes where the wind blows" so to speak. Anyway if the common saying holds true, then Rousseau had a very intuitive mind about Nature. (even if he really did create the myth of "mommy comfort", I genuinely don't think Derrida was denying the existence of "natality", or birth and generation", as a scientific fact, much less the reality of the external world which is a metaphysical question of a higher order)

[@HipHopLived]

You know if the Enlightenment is primarily an export of French culture, I don't think an understanding of either modernity or science can be dissociated from an understanding of French culture. Friedrich the Great was a Francophile, evidently so was Kant. It has been said that "Where Paris goes, Europe follows", and an Argentine considered by some a prophet (Benjamin Paravicini) once said "Paris is the Heart of the World" (he burned some of his prophecies for being "too weird", having to do with aliens and stuff. I don't think he was a fraud, but someone was definitely sending him "signals"). I don't know if the saying applies to the British Isles, but it's true enough to be worth looking into. In any case, Charlemagne existed, King Arthur, who per Geoffrey of Monmouth ruled an empire from Scotland to Marseilles and also Scandinavia. I don't see the French Republic or Kings of France claiming the British Crown, but up until at least George III's "Treaty of Paris" (1783) and most likely after, the British Empire has du jure considered France a part of itself. (If you want to read that short piece of paper, it's mind-boggling that Benjamin Franklin signed it, except he's some times called "a wizard of intrigue")

[@HipHopLived]

That's because The Idiot is the End of the World, Slavoj, but like I said, I think a sequel is implicit ("Anastasia" - "Resurrection"), as Jesus would put it "Think of the time" (it's somewhere in the synoptic Gospels, I guess I'll have to get the key citation eventually)

[@HipHopLived]

"As LaVey pointed out, all other churches are based on worship of the spirit and denial of the flesh and the intellect. He saw the need for a church that would recapture man’s mind and carnal desires as objects of celebration. Rational self‐interest would be encouraged and a healthy ego championed." He clearly had traditional spiritual doctrine explained to him, as in Mirandola or Ghazali, there is the human, angelic and divine natures. The human and angelic are acceptable, but the divine eliminated.

[@HipHopLived]

You know Zizek, I feel the concept of "Evolution" has been forgotten by philosophers as of late - despite it showing up prominently in Spencer and Bergson (Nietzsche having criticized the Darwinian concept) - but as an evaluative concept, that relatively devalues Rousseau's Natural Man and values upward Nietzsche's Ubermensch (I find it funny that "mensch" is neuter) - I think it can be held up as given toward superiority because evolution is adaptation to an environment prodded on my random mutation. So it might be said that the most evolved organism is the one most able to adapt to the largest number of contingencies (circumstance/randomness)

[@bonganimathibe]

Tourism Center bout to explode 💥

[@HipHopLived]

"The experience in the colonial sphere, of this country as much as of any other, has amply shown that even the mild forms of planning which we know as colonial development involve, whether we wish it or not, the imposition of certain values and ideals on those whom we try to assist. It is, indeed, this experience which has made even the most internationally minded of colonial experts so very sceptical of the practicability of an “ international ” administration of colonies." From a footnote by Hayek, he clearly would've opposed both the European Union and French monetary control of West Africa. Does anyone even read this much referenced man?

[@HipHopLived]

You know Foucault clearly surpasses Thomas Kuhn in this: For him the revealer of a new Episteme is also inherently a moral hero. It's really the only rational way we can explain why Einstein, Newton, and to the more enlightenened (me), James Clerk Maxwell are as Saintly figures.

[@HipHopLived]

If you want to have a co-op that's fine by me, but only on the condition that you genuinely want it (that it's fine by you)

[@HipHopLived]

In any case it's odd that Hugo Chavez denies ever having had any contact with EZLN in Chiapas. Know what I think? EZLN is a cover for European colonial operations in Mexico, as opposed to Canadian or American, using relations with the Chinese as an intermediary. Hence the hefty presence of the Catholic Church in the "Zapatista" movement (which plays on the fact, abusively of course, that Zapata had a personal confessor, and his followers fought in the Cristero War against Obregon and Calles)

[@HipHopLived]

After all, I recall reading a "history of mentalities" that said that in the Middle Ages things were considered as SIGNS of the Divinity. So that the whole world was very "enchanted" and "coded" (and I suppose this could be a little rigid, and "beyond dispute" and some things were considered "proper" - others no doubt were merely folk superstition, so an element of fun and freedom that was emancipatory was available to the Medieval Peasant... who, the algorithm also made sure to inform me, tended to spend half his life "on vacation" [but a third of both halves at Church])

[@HipHopLived]

Hum, Mr. Avram Chomsky's teacher was named "Zellig *Sabbettai* Harris", "originally an Hebraist" (per Wikipedia), and Mr. Chomsky's early books claimed "It was he that taught me the Cartesian history of linguistics" (and obviously the Zohar, which Descartes obviously knew just like Leibniz got his "Isaac Luria" from a literal magician who learned of the Monad from reading Bruno. Newton, too). Huh, that's weird. Not that weird is wrong. I'd say that's pretty cool, and salvific, it's a linguistic conspiracy! of messianic proportions (but then how isn't Derrida - I mean Sabbateanism is only cool because you CAN disagree)

[@HipHopLived]

You know there was a great man in Mexico (a superior form of civilization that eschews chauvinism) once that said, "Hemos sido tolerantes hasta excesos criticados", and I argue he did not go _far enough_

[@HipHopLived]

You know to be fair, I think Lacan demonstrated by means of his theory that the unconscious is structured as a language, what's more that it cannot possibly not be structured as a language (otherwise it meaneth nothing and goeth no-where, not even to escape from meaning - I mean Freud's Titanic Dong... well all joking aside it wouldn't be therapeutic if it wasn't "structured", which to him analytically, as in by definition, just means "as a language" in roughly a way akin to the way that he meant it)

[@HipHopLived]

Or in any case to "surpass" the world (so someone can "conquer the world" as a hermit from a cave, provided he isn't merely putting on a show for himself, but acquires True Wisdom. I had some argument for that but I forgot it)

[@HipHopLived]

Isn't that somewhat like what has happened, and what Lenin would've dreamed about before dying had he been introduced to quantum mechanics?

[@HipHopLived]

You know revolutionaries and socialists, and revolutionaries that are not socialists, often speak of the need for "another world", but it is a fact that until fairly recently, through the magic of the internet and unlimited PDF's in English (and sometimes in Spanish, I don't think other languages are quite so blessed with an embarrassment of riches), we have had no idea of "the world" as it really is. It might even be said that before globalization, there wasn't even a globe. Or that we've undergone a process of "the worlding of the world" as it were. And I think that really does re-invite speculations as to what the world being round really means (I know Thomas Friedman called it "flat", but he just meant "it's a small world after all", right? I dunno I don't remember)

[@HipHopLived]

Look, maybe I just didn't under-stand, but it seems Clark is begging the question because he assumes that just because the notebook will modify behavior, the notebook is a belief. But the Pragmatists weren't saying that, they said that belief modifies behavior, not that if it modifies behavior, it is a belief.

[@HipHopLived]

I think "adapt" is wrong at that point - since that is defeatism, a human "adapts" to reality by changing it (Hegel/Adorno/Marx). To be passive is to be absorbed, to be human is not merely to "adapt" (and I say "merely" as I am implying humanity is the most evolved organism), it is to Conquer, the human adaptation is to be active and to take over the World.

[@HipHopLived]

Anyway my reading of Lacan makes out the "phallic mother" to be akin to Schopenhauer's interpretation of Nature, the ever-desiring "Will" (which is true, right? the woman only desires the phallus in order to reject it, in Lacan - what she wants fundamentally ["Fundamental Fantasy?" I guess it's unachievable because that's the point, otherwise it'd be "stuck" and "final", whereas in reality it's changeable and ever--self-perpetuating] is Freedom, like anybody else)

[@HipHopLived]

Keep in mind there is an undated letter from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Paine denouncing his rejection of Christianity as "elitism, betraying his childhood"

[@HipHopLived]

You know Zizek, I know you and your... crew have signalled at me to shut up, BUT I believe I have made a Kantian discovery very relevant to your work as a Lacanian psycho-analyst: It is that Man literally cannot grasp what he wants. If he could grasp it, he wouldn't want it. Because, logically, that is simply how desire - understood aesthetically (even if we desire something ugly, surely it is for some impressive factor we would call "sublime") - functions. This is of course relevant to any analysis of Kitsch, we can say of what is Kitsch that it is what is dead, and therefore what is passing. At best, mere fashion, and not even good fashion as fashion

[@HipHopLived]

anyway, back to the superior form of Latin American philosophy: If the first requirement of a person, is to live, the first formation of the knowledge of peoples, is the wisdom needed in order to live. This is what gives initial shape to the traditions of knowledge-formation, and therefore why we would be right to say "the way they do philosophy over there, is not the way they do philosophy over here, but they are both philosophy to me" (or we'd all go kablooey)

[@HipHopLived]

I think this strikes to the core of the liberal critique of "alternatives to capitalism" as "We are just stating the facts, this _is_ reality." Feminists and gay rights types often point out, "If it's natural, why enforce it?" And that applies as much to the status quo as to any alternatives to it, and, per Hegel, it is reality's nature to _change._ But precisely what capitalism does is drive us mad with desire (hence it's de-territorialization, which tends toward re-territorialization, as in fascism) It is as if we were to dissect a frog, re-arrange it's organs, while it yet lived, sow it back up, and expect there to be no vital consequence. Which of course would be as if we were totally dissociated from "the drama".

[@HipHopLived]

Indeed, Maimonides first intuited the existence of the human Unconscious almost two centuries after Ibn Sina, or "Avicenna" by way of the discovery of psycho-somatic conditions as described in his proto-Aquinean-hylo-morphic theory: The Oneness of Body and Mind.

[@HipHopLived]

Since his father (who committed suicide) was a member of the merchant marine, he must've travelled lots, and one sees many oddities as a sailor! it is a fact

[@HipHopLived]

The implications are clearly, as it were "dysgenical", as opposed to eugenical (selection for psychopathy)

[@HipHopLived]

I hope you read that whole last comment in full.

[@CandidDate]

Why is any job involving electronics a guaranteed job? Are we trying to automate everything? And what will we do once this is achieved?

[@nowave7]

We will enter the era of a fully automated luxury communism, where mundane activities will be carried out by robots/androids/automatons and humans will be able to concentrate on arts and sciences, ushering the golden age of humanity. Somewhat similar to Greece, though this time around, truly egalitarian since there will be no slaves to do the heavy work but machines. Or maybe we'll be enslaved by those very machines. One of the two...

[@checosa777]

Since when they started to offer only half the content?

[@HipHopLived]

He was the son of the Duke of Orleans who was a Montagnard.

[@HipHopLived]

You know Solon created democracy, and he once said, "Smother a strong man in his crib" (roughly something like that, I'm taking it from Willis Barnstone's "Ancient Greek Lyric"), he himself being "a strong man". If you can't understand the wisdom behind the saying, are you truly prepared to live in a democracy?

[@HipHopLived]

like reading the mood of the room - like BPD and manipulative, sensitive or hyper-sensitive types do.

[@HipHopLived]

That said, the implications of my "Bergsonian" (Bergson and Comte were such big hits in Latin America they kind of arrived to stay, so Deleuze as a positivist vitalist kind of gets the most attention out of the fancy foo foo French people) linguistics are really just out-lined in Ngugi Wa Thiongo's (he's a Gikuyu, I heard they're from Kenya!) "Decolonizing the Mind", since what language does fundamentally, according to him, is communicate values the end of which is the reproduction (understood in a broad sense, what life wants to do is live, and live well) of life (what is "uncommonly" called "wisdom"), the form of a language must correspond to a tradition of ancestral wisdom. It's just as likely related to syntax as semantics, so don't forget to read the Ha'dith along with your Qu'ran kids! (a value that gets emphasized in Ngugi's book, which is also found in Islam, is "generosity", as opposed to miserliness, rarely spoken about by Europeans _after_ the Greeks, as I'm quite sure it shows up in Aristotle)

[@HipHopLived]

In any case it'd be wrong to call Llosa a fascist as the "height of Peruvian Liberalism" was perhaps under Manuel Prado was vociferously "anti-fascist" (as he was "anti-statist")

[@HipHopLived]

In "Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis", Lacan proposes to induce "negative transference" (such as of a former abuser) onto the analyst, to provoke their aggression in the form of a "controlled paranoia", right? I.e., IN A HEALTHY SOCIETY WE OFFEND ONE ANOTHER (that is a way to do one another favours, it is a healing act). (anyway, I was wondering if for Lacan, the Analyst is "Big Other" and the analysand has to be taught to be the untouchable "little other", which would be profoundly anti-authoritarian, right?)

[@HipHopLived]

The Royce-Borges-Korzybski-(Baudrillard-Deleuze?) "Map" problem comes up in Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures": An exact one-to-one map of language is sense-less and impossible. Fortunately for him that seems to be a response to Searle's argument that if "universal grammar is an unconscious structure we must be able to make it conscious or it makes no sense" (or in any case we might say, I find this "convenient" in the sense that it is epistemically "self-serving", that the unconscious rules are too complicated to be easily caught in language, except perhaps by poets - something like in the logic of a _dream)._ Since for him the problem is primarily "cognitive" - can we put it into epistemically helpful terms with explanatory power, that are therefore inherently simplifying, "rules for rules" as it were, or "rule of thumb" like how people still estimate angles at a distance with their thumb some time - inherently inexact but profitable in reality - the theory of "Universal Grammar" wouldn't make sense were it one-to-one in its exactitude. He then says it's a "Computational System". I hope I've understood him, but I think this is reminiscent of a certain Philip K. Dick novel everyone knows: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", or "Do computers have intentions" (since I've heard it said that psycho-analysis or the study of desire, is phenomenological - it studies intentional realities)

[@HipHopLived]

Well, since the child is still attached to its mother (and therefore Nature), perhaps it's related to how Lacan states that a "fraudulent father" is "seen through" by a child. And that this leaves a traumatic condition by way of an inability to fully assimilate morality (perhaps "conventional morality"; or perhaps this tends to lead to joining cults out of despair during adulthood). After all, the Subject is instituted through the process of maturation, and I'm pretty sure this begins, for Lacan with the Oedipus Complex, which is instituted with The Law, right? I.e., by The Father (separating the child form its mother)

[@HipHopLived]

"Boy I thought you liked Kristeva" (did you catch the stuff about oriental spiritualism?)

[@HipHopLived]

Has anyone pointed out that Irigaray is obviously a natural-born sorceress? Hence "The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger". "Air" is an essential part of wizardry, like "what's in the air" - it allows one to enchant people and direct their inclinations (and this is undoubtedly why NASA, of the infamous Project Paperclip, has a "global winds" monitor). Also I've yet to read it but it sounds like gender essentialism of the "No, Lacan, I'm better than _you!"_ type.

[@MrSalbego]

Dude stop commenting are u sick ? Use your time better

[@HipHopLived]

"Bro Derrida was such a nominalist, he didn't even believe the human heart existed!"

[@HipHopLived]

I mean to say the least this isn't "vague fluff". That's ridiculous, it's very precise.