Mariborchan

I must admit that I find zizek rather weak in debates. I had the same impression when he was confronted to B.H.LEVY. When his contradictor is stupid, zizek ,who could easily, make a fool of him, remains curiously very polite et little aggressive. I’m not sure this is a quality. However when the issue is relevant, then he goes on with his same old jokes and takes the listener in breath for him to believe that he will respond but in truth he manage to change the subject.
I understand better why he often refers to deleuze’s sentence “philosophy must not be discussed» but then why does he accept this kind of show ?

I think that the act of trying to communicate something is the challenge, more so than simply being opinionated.

Also, there is this saying “Never argue with an idiot, they drag you down to their level and beat you with their experience”. :D

Glucksmann who said so many stupid things was still quite clever after zizek told his famous story about niels Bohr and the horseshoe.
Glucksmann said to zizek: “communism is your horse shoe, you dont beleive in it but you hang it in front of the door because you think it will work”.
I was upset to see Zizek just nod his head without answering.
I suppose “Dag” is right.there was no point arguing, but it could look to the public as a defeat..

Its nice to post interviews in different languages, you’re doing a great job. I dont know french but I can understand some things zizek says, thanks to his accent lol

I don’t think zizek was particularly weak in his confrontation with BHLevy which really isn’t a huge accomplishment since BHL is such a weak thinker.However I do think he was rather weak in some of his responses to Stephen Sackur’s questions in HARDTALK and was very defensive. Zizek has never really built a convincing case for communism which he has admitted on numerous occasions to be the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.

However,since I don’t understand French-I have no idea what he is saying here.Would love if somebody could translate some of the important or interesting part of this debate.would really appreciate it.

thks for reminding me the link.The same thing that happened with Levy happened with Tarik Ramadan on al- jazeera tv.
but it is true that if Zizek speaks a comprehensive french he often lack vocabulary,or mistake a word for another,so it si muchmore difficult for him.

Hi, thanks for the videos. In the last one after about one third of it there is no more audio. Do you experience the same problem?

The Zizek/Levy debate was a fiasco; Zizek was almost childishly complacent and a lot of his arguments were shot down by Levy. I really did not like how after the debate Zizek went off to talk so aggressively about Levy when in the debate he was so ‘nice’. He furthermore was obstinate enough to repeat some flaws in his argumentation after Levy raised some serious objections. I can remember concretely the following:

1) About zionist anti-semitism: Levy replies that although it is true that it exists it actually constitutes a tiny minority, and that the situation at large in Israel was rather one of great tolerance, where even you had an Arab party and anti-Zionist position in the parliament; as well as numerous other factions.

Zizek replied to this appealing to how reality was the life for the arabs was made miserable because of regulations in the microphysique of practice (for example, in preventing Arab farmers to dig deep for water). But this was not a reply to zionist-antisemitism! Levy thereby raised a serious objection as to how relevant this Zionist-antiseminism actually is. The Arabs were not the crux of that issue.

Zizek should have said that simply because these non-zionist positions are represented at parliament it doesn’t mean they are on equal footing politically or socially; and that Zionism was in fact aggressively anti-semite empirically. But Zizek had no argument of this sort.

2) Zizek’s claim that today’s anti-semitism was centered around the Jews as a State, whereas before it was rather the wanderong Stateless Jew that was the object – Levy simply retorts that Hezbollah leader Nasrallah had explicitly said that he hated all the Jews; indifferently of whether they had a State or not. Zizek simply had no answer to this point.

3) Today’s fundamentalism is a reaction to liberal-market capitalism – Levy accepts this thesis, but asks ’so what’? Zizek retorts then that the liberal project is doomed to engender fundamentalism, but retorts to the ‘I don’t have time to develop it now’. Levy indicated that there were a good number of reasons besides the reaction to liberal-market capitalism, but Zizek’s insistence on the insufficiency of capitalism was depressing.

4) Why call today’s fundamentalism islamo-fascism; should we then call Hitler Christo-Fascism? Well, Levy here simply said he was prepared to make the qualification in each case; so why not? He corrected Zizek saying it would be Pagan-fascism in the case of Hitler, or Latin-fascism in the case of Mussolini. Zizek, however, seemed a little hard headed, since in his recent 2009 lecture on the EGS on the question of the Jews he explicitly repeats the Christofascism argument, error and all.

These are just a few concrete observations on that debate. I am rather curious to see what goes on in this one with Glucksmann; it certainly doesn’t look good to look argumentatively naive against the ridiculed ‘nouveaux philosophes’, who are under constant blatant dismissal and mockery by Zizek and Badiou.

@Mari

Did you mean Christo-fascism? Because the problem is not the propagation of Islamofascism as a term; which is already an specification of ‘fascism’. Levy said he had no problem making the appropriate qualification in every case. The problem was that ‘christo-fascism’ was blatantly wrong as an specification of the German Fascism during the National Socialist period; the correct designation would be pagan-fascism.

In any case, Zizek’s argument was quite strange, since he merely mentioned the case of Hitler as it somehow sheds any light as to why we shouldn’t make the specification.

Hello,

It seems like at the third minute of the last part (just as Zizek was about to finish the sentence “What I’m trying to say is…”) the clip goes mute, and we can’t hear what’s happening! (Though I fantasize about it, and in my guts I can hear Zizek getting through to the Egalité/Fraternité/Liberté brothers and mystically achieving a sexual relation)

I tried to find another link to help out, but I couldn’t.

Anyway, thank you so much for the amazing work, your website is a lighthouse!

Gabriel

Oh god it was painful to watch, one of the panelist was trying to convince Zizek that China does not have a capitalist economy; he seems to have an image of China stuck in the Cultural Revolution. Unsurprising seems he’s the author of Economics doesn’t lie, A Defense of the Free Market in a time of Crisis.

Not to mention that Zizek himself talked about Guy Sorman many times, even dedicating much of an article portraying Sorman as the spokesperson of ruling neoliberal ideology in France.

No wonder he’s so hostile in this debate; reading that he must’ve felt like he was on the operating table looking at his innards.

the three (Glucksmann, Sorman & Fleury) were there because they have been attaqued by zizek in previous books. he knew this, it was no surprise for him and no doubt it was courageous. at the beginning of the show he says “ok I accept to sacrify myself”. Later he says to all three :”I agree with that but still if I get the power I will send you to goulag”.
when sorman says:” your communism also will be a laxative chocolate !” he answers “no it will be only laxative,no chocolate !”
But all his sense of humour falls apart because he is quite uncomfy with french,and also becauce, once again,I dont see the point in staying so polite in front of “ennemies”.(shaking hands with Fleury when she says she does like Robespierre,but doesnt wish to be a Robespierre avatar ).

Still, I dont see the point of talking with “ennemies” and staying so polite

@isi
Do you happen to know where Zizek was critical of Glucksman and Fleury? I found the Sorman passage but I can’t seem to find anything on the other two. Or is it a case of since they’re opposed to Badiou then by extension they are also opposed to Zizek?

thanks for posting this.

in the intro when the the panel is introduced, zizek quips “like christ, i’m ready to be sacrificed for the good of humanity”… and the subsequent videos seem to follow to this leitmotif

It would be interesting to see what Badiou would say in a confrontation of that sort. He seems much more shy and unwilling to engage in those sorts of journalistic mediums.

@Tony K
Sorry, I was only repeating what is said in the introduction.I Cant recall myself any on these critics (Zizek is such a name dropper!).
“ils sont venu se payer zizek” I dont know how to translate this correctly in english, it literaly means “they have come to buy themself zizek”. It can be understood in many ways. when said by the mafia it means “to pay to get rid of someone” more commonly it means “to make a fool of someone,to make him shut his mouth”.

@Mariborchan
I agree that civility is the best way to act in front of vulgarity.But Sorman isnt vulgar, he is the typical cynical liberal.
on the vidéo 2 at 6:48 Sorman says to zizek” you are not speakin of the real world, you live in the world of ideas, you know nothing about reality”.
we could expect here, if not a bit of violence, at least a good laugh.Unstead,Zizek seems realy offensed, and will only react a few minutes later when Sorman says “capitalist is natural because it fits human nature” Zizek answer “what do you think you know about human nature?”.

@Daniel Sacilotto (krelianx) I just read your first post quickly and I have numerous problems with what you wrote.but i want to reply regarding one specific point.

About the 3rd point in your first post – as somebody who comes from a Muslim country (pakistan) and who has personally known people or listened to those that hold ‘fundamentalist’ views let me tell you that zizek’s analysis and critique of the rise of fundamentalism in most muslim countries and what is generating this phenomenon is for the most part, pretty spot on. zizek’s insistence on the discontent with capitalism and liberalism is completely appropriate. Islamist groups are a reactionary phenomenon and are a by-product of globalization.it is predominantly a response to what they consider to be the ‘americanization’ of their society. The british writer John gray is another one who provides a very good analysis of what is generating this fundamentalism and i recommend his writings on this subject as well.

Zizek is also correct when he quotes Walter Benjamin’s old thesis that ‘every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution’ and the turn from radical left to the radical right.Many of those who are now hard-line reactionary fundamentalists were at one point or another radical left-wingers.To give one example,Sirajuddin,the spokesperson of Maulana Fazlullah (the leader of the militants who overtook the Swat valley in Pakistan) was a former Socialist (http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/provinces/12-from-much-sought-after-to-most-wanted–bi-01) read 12th para from top. Examples like that of Sirajuddin are numerous.

People like BHL have no idea as to what is generating this fundamentalism which is why they have noth answers in how to deal with it.they not only do not have the right answers they don’t even have the right questions.

I thought that was a bit embarrassing. Why does Zizek want to debate mainstream liberal-conservative pundits if he’s not willing to make explicit his real views and is not ready to attack their ideology (the ‘enemy propaganda’) head-on, as he does in his books? he spent half of the time apologising and revoking what he had said previously. he should either confront these people as they should be confronted (making apparent the false, ahistorical and ideological assumptions behind their seemingly benign and “realist” politics) or he should not debate mainstream ideologists at all. this show was an embarrassment for the Left, in my view.

on the other hand, thanks a lot for uploading this, Mariborchan!

@nadeem
Thank you Nadeem, for your post.

I was not so much disagreeing with Zizek as much as pointing out that in the debate he failed to offer a convincing argument to show the necessary entailment between liberalism and the rise of islamic fundamentalism. The problem that Levy retorted was simply not addressed: so what if it is a reaction? One can say that the reaction comes from conservative sects who seek to censor the freedoms purported by liberalism; say, the freedom of women. What is unclear in Zizek’s account is how this purported reaction to liberalism is something which indicates a flaw within the liberal project. What he needed to show is not only that liberalism engenders fundamentalism, but that the liberal project is inherently doomed to generate fundamentalism whereas another political form wouldn’t.

I wonder whether Zizek’s acceptation of the universalization of human rights would be welcome by these fundamentalist sects, so that in the end whether Zizek’s own non-expressed solution would end up generating fundamentalism as well. In other words, in focusing on fundamentalism as a response, it looks over what precisely the Muslims are reacting to. You mention the Americanization of their culture; would they welcome then, the sort of egalitarian society Zizek or Badiou have in mind? Are these fundamentalist sects concerned about a new form of generic communism? I don’t know that, but Zizek’s argument doesn’t quite show that.

I think you provide an excellent example in Sirajuddin’s conversion, and many other follow. This is then what is needed: not only to define the Muslim’s position negatively as a reaction to liberalism, but to make explicit what it is they are demanding and how this is not a mere reinstantiation of communitarian values which would violate the rights of women and all these other things Zizek claims we should have no compromise with.

Perhaps you can clarify this for me through two questions:

1) You mentioned Fazlullah and others. Are these the norm? Can one say that the fundamentalist uprise is in fact the reactive rise of a radical leftist movement? As you lay it out, the situation seems an international-scoped variant of the Maoist motif that occurred in my own country (Peru): the leftist uprise against the democratic cities was considered an attack on the oppressive class system.

Has there been a change in the conception of their positive project in the course of this conversion?

2) If so, what are their concrete proposals, ideals, moved by the so-called fundamentalist, but truly leftist, movement?

Thanks!

hey guys we really need a forum !

I have a forum I would be willing to share. Would everyone be interested? http://centconcom.ning.com

Does anyone have the 3 videos of Badiou on CSOJ, as well as Zizek’s first appearance? These would be good to have in stock.

As regards Badiou’s face a face, he recently debated Alain Finkelkraut on the National Identity debate taking place in France. It’s in French, but I can provide if you’d like. It’s quite good.

@Jake
Darn that would be amazing to see; and if someone could help subtitling it, all the better.

Here is Zizek’s first appearance,

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4jk0c_csoj-slavoj-zizek-250208-22

Badiou’s first appearance

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3g4kl_csoj-alain-badiou_news

Badiou’s second appearance,

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x92r26_alain-badiou-ce-soir-ou-jamais-12-0_news

there are also videos up from the conference Puissances du communisme that I attended at Paris 8, but I didn’t take the videos. It wasn’t a spectacular conference, but it was good to be there.

Let me know if you’re interested in my forum.

Still looking for Badiou’s last appearance on CSOJ which I think was december about Eloge de l’Amour

@Daniel Sacilotto (krelianx) Just read through your post quickly and i just want to write a few general things regarding this subject .hopefully it will clarify a few things for you as well.my english isn’t great but i think you will understand what i’m getting at.

I remember sometimes back,i watched an influential militant being interviewed by a host for a news channel which operates in my country .the guy being interviewed had trained many top Taliban leaders.when the host asked him as to what can be done to quell this insurgency and to get rid of the problem of growing fundamentalism-the radical replied ‘justice’.that if ppl had justice in the present system then they wouldn’t takeup arms.He was justifying what he did on political grounds.On numerous occasions when he was trying to explain certain things/events/decisions he was quoting figures like Lenin and Che Guevara.

This really shocked me and I asked myself,”what the hell is this bearded mullah doing quoting these great leftist figures?”.Many of these fundamentalist have also made use of the concept of the vanguard in their writings.The idea of a revolutionary elite dedicated to leading the deluded masses to a more equal and just society is a borrowing from Lenin and the Jacobins rather than anything derived from Islamic theology.As i examined this movement closely,it was really shocking for me to see that,despite all their anti-western rhetoric,so many of their concepts were derived from Western ideologies and political thinkers.Taqi Nabhani, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who left to found the radical Islamist organisation Hizb-ut Tahrir was much influenced by Hegel and Marx,while Nabhani’s contempt for liberal democracy echoed that of Rousseau.As some former members of this organization have stated ,Nabhani’s ideas were not innovative Muslim thinking,but wholly derived from European political thought.There are various other examples of this sort, for example Ali Shariati,the hugely influential thinker and leader of the iranian islamists in exile during the reign of the Shah,was very much influenced by Heidegger and Frantz Fanon (who’s work he translated into Persian). Shariati was very much influenced by Marxism which he encountered as a student in Paris where he also came to know Sartre.Much of this radical movement has
been profoundly shaped by modern Western ideologies-even if some of these radicals are themselves not aware of it.The technique of suicide bombing was pioneered and developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist organisation that until the Iraq war had committed more such attacks than any other single group. Communists and socialists were responsible for most of the suicide bombings that occurred in Lebanon in the early 1980s, forcing the withdrawal of US and French forces. More than a third of the suicide bombings committed by Muslims between 1980 and 2003 were the work of members of secular groups such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Another thing i want to point out: there was a televised debate in pakistan,when the problems in Swat were exploding,between a journalist(who was against the fundamentalists) and a senior member of a hard-line religious party(who supported the fundamentalists.) during a heated moment of the debate,the member of the religious party in an outburst chided the moderator and his opponent and said ‘ why don’t you ppl get it?we have had these dictators and they did nothing for us.we had these democratic politicians and what did they give us except for corruption’ and he explicitly stated that that is why he supported the militants because they were the only ones who could bring them justice and equality.He never even mentioned issues like freedom of women and all that. It became clear to me then that underneath all the religious veneer was a man who was deeply discontent with the democratic political system and the inequalities it generated and wanted an alternative.It was incredible for me to see how many people justified these radical movements and organizations on political grounds and used terms like ‘justice, and equality’ .

It always fascinated and baffled me when i would talk to certain ppl,who were either pro-fundamentalist or deeply sympathetic towards them and YET I could find nothing in the life-style or practices of this person as to why he was sympathetic towards religious fundamentalists.i could not understand why a person who frequently watched movies and listened to music,who sent his daughter to school and who’s wife did not wear the burqa or hijab and YET he was sympthetic to the radicals.i know ppl who probably only entered a mosque very,very rarely(maybe only once a year) and yet they were sympathetic towards these movements.I had ppl tell me , “what democracy?this is just the rule of the rich”.As Badiou has pointed out : electoral democracy is only representative in so far as it is first of all the consensual representation of capitalism, or of what today has been renamed the “market economy”.

Pakistan is a deeply conservative society but it’s not extremist when it comes to religion.Most women do wear conservative clothing but vast majority of them don’t wear the burqa or hijab(except for in the NWFP and tribal areas where it is more common).

I remember when the Pakistan army was about to begin it’s offensive in the Swat valley against the militants and the foreign media in Pakistan interviewed various people from the streets who were for or against the military operation-and the two people they interviewed that were against the offensive basically said : ‘the Taliban are the only people that can bring us peace’.

Let us take the case of the Taliban takeover in Swat .Zizek is correct when he quotes the New York Times article which reported that the Taliban engineered “a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants”:

In Swat, accounts from those who have fled now make clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power. To do so, the militants organized peasants into armed gangs that became their shock troops /…/. The Taliban’s ability to exploit class divisions adds a new dimension to the insurgency and is raising alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal.
Mahboob Mahmood, a Pakistani-American lawyer and former classmate of President Obama’s, said, ‘The people of Pakistan are psychologically ready for a revolution.’ Sunni militancy is taking advantage of deep class divisions that have long festered in Pakistan. “The militants, for their part, are promising more than just proscriptions on music and schooling,” he said. “They are also promising justice, effective government,end to corruption and economic redistribution.”

Let us take the case of madrassahs(which are not inherently bad and have been around for centuries) but quite a few which operate now and since the mid to late 80’s do promote fundamentalism. Madrassahs are the only means through which the poorest families can educate their children and they also provide free boarding and lodging.I know a local madrassah near my apartment where i was living and almost all the children who studied there were from a near-by slum. The radical militant organizations are the main force that have mobilized the discontent of the Excluded ones and the lower classes and promise a better just society.

Basically,from my own personal experience,I agree with zizek that what is generating this fundamentalism is the discontent with capitalism and globalization which forces a certain economic model and the social dynamics(consumerism,individualism)/inequalities that result from this.Discontent with the liberal democratic capitalist system is what is MAINLY generating this fundamentalism so zizek is right to insist on this.

sorry for this long and haphazard post but it’s getting really late here and i wanted to reply before i went to sleep.

what would you reply to a fundamentalist who claims:
“rather be a slave of god than a slave of consumerism” ?

videos from the Puissances du communisme conference:
http://www.dailymotion.com/soukaz/1

@isi
I think that’s precisely the limitation of (postmodern) liberalism since, as Zizek pointed out, liberalism itself generates its opposite since as we know in a totality the positive content is positive in so far as coming from the backdrop of its opposite and vice versa. “Rather be a slave of god than a slave of consumerism” seems on the surface a “real” antagonism precisely in the context of our global hegemonic (liberal-democratic-capitalist) system.

So the task of leftists today is not to get caught in these particularities (religious fundamentalism versus liberal democracy) but to take a step back and look at the system that generates such antagonisms in the first place.

So to answer the actual question, isi, I would pose another one: why would you have to be the slave of either? I mean, Islam itself has a radical emancipatory kernel, just look at the protests in Iran which are themselves reaffirmation of the core values of the Iranian Revolution. And Zizek has gone on about this regarding Christianity, which is the inspiration of liberation theology, the social gospels movement, etc just to name a few.