I thought Bert or Vive might like this, but really anybody who likes Rand might get something out of it.
http://www.aynrandstudies.com/jars/archives/jars3-2/jars3_2szizek.pdf
they said we would have an unfair fun advantage
I thought it would be a critique, but it turned out more like Sparknotes on Rand. Pretty good, and I think it actually cleared some things up on Dominque's character in The Fountainhead that I had trouble figuring out.
That's a pretty snazzy article, thanks for bringing it up.
I was actually toying with the idea of doing a baiting post for the anarchist/ radical leftist bohemian types on how their ideas and probably aesthetics, etc are inescapably within the "irrational" creative-destructive world of Austrian Econ - this article kind of hits a lot of those points.
"As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." - Ludwig Lachmann
"When A Man Dies A World Goes Out of Existence" - GLS Shackle
Vive do you think that rightist-anarchism is doomed to an aesthetic void? More and more I think that left-radicals choose their ideologies on how the shape of the idea feels in their head. Despite knowing/believing that individualist anarchism is the least destructive societal structure, it somehow is not as satisfying to consider as radical left revolution. I think that this is because individualist anarchism has no propagandists or artists.
EDIT: Zizek is a profoundly retarded overexposed 'intellectual'. http://evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2008/09/zizek-is-right-to-suggest-that-stalin.htm. He tries to assert that Stalin fundamentally respected human life because he forced confessions out of his victims before executing them, in contrast to Hitler. I am not twisting his words there.
EDIT EDIT: http://evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2008/09/zizek-is-right-to-suggest-that-stalin.html
The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist. -Ernst Jünger
No clue how to think of that question. I think the "left:" has managed to create a language and inner circle that makes it very hard to play that "game" by the rules they establish. It's best to either ignore the left or radically affirm them / get subversive with them in such regards.
p.s. can you fix the link please?
How do you mean, specifically, by 'radically affirm' them?
just treat their art as any other product, and everything they put out socially as part of the scope of human action
Do you mean like, play dumb to the politics of their art?
This is straying from the topic of the thread - and I don't think I'm ready to make a clear statement as to what I'm getting at. I may make a post in the near future as to what I'm trying to get at - I'll let you know if I do.
Zizek is a profoundly retarded overexposed 'intellectual'.
This made me laugh, but only because the idea of being "profoundly retarded" conjures images of college kids mistaking a mentally retarded man for a genius, and hanging on his every word. Not sure if you read the article, and I don't care either way, but Zizek makes some solid points. That he even wrote an article on Rand is significant, because she was always outside of academic philosophy.
But um, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is mostly decent. It has a lot of non-Objectivist writers, and does a lot with dialectics and other continental outlooks not popular among libertarians.
I read the article and it was cool. I don't really 'get' literary criticism. The reason I hate Zizek is his idea that appearances matter, that Stalin was morally superior to Hitler because he murdered in the name of a brighter future. From a consequentialist perspective, this is lunacy. The madman that kills for good will garner far more support than the madman that kills for evil.
I liked Zizek's Lacanian reading of Dominique also. I have written about her as a Nietzschean strategist. She does not choose to marry another man who has admirable attributes when her internal conflict won't permit her to have Roark. She doesn't choose 2nd best or third or whatever. No she follows Nietzsche and chooses the "worst" one around her that she knows. She marries Wynand as she finds him "worse" than Keating. She is a true Nietzschean heroine. But Rand can't acknowledge this out loud. She is right in the middle of World War II when publishing the Fountainhead, and its aftermath when doing the screenplay for the film. Patricia Neal is having trouble understanding Dominique and in Rand's journal is the psychological portrait she wrote for Neal saying Dominique is a masochist, self-destructive blah blah as that will be understood and she can't openly say Nietzsche after Hitler held him up as his own inspiration, even after Hitler is dead. Foucault also was chary of acknowledging his great debt to Nietzsche until very late in his career. Baudrillard quit reading him and quit talking about him and openly thinking about him after he failed his exams on Nietzsche, because the examiners didn't like his reading of Nietzsche.
The same thing is happening to Eric Packer in DeLillo's Cosmopolis. I had hoped Cronenberg's film would clear up the crap about his being a self-destructive loser who loses all his billions in one day. He does the same thing as Francisco with his San Sasbastion mines. Remember when he tells Dagny he spent 15 million of them, lost multiple millions of that for his investors plus took down the companies depending on their business with the mines including Taggert Transcontinental. Dagny sees that he has done this, doesn't believe he could have made a mistake, knows something doesn't feel right about it, so Francisco tells her what he did. She is even more furious to know he did it on purpose.
Well Eric Packer destroys cyber-capital (Zizek calls it Virtual Capital - no product there) and all reviewers, academics and now film critics are calling him a loser. His downfall. He is self-destructive. Now would anyone have dared say that about Francisco? Rand would have taken them to the woodshed for it. Dominique has now been misread as a masochist for 70 years, And Eric Packer is going to be a loser. I am fighting the mainstream here.
Zizek loves Ayn Rand. She is his profound enemy as he says, and he loves her. She is in his latest book Less Than Nothing his more Hegel than Hegel. Difficult but incredible. What he is saying about Rand is that she was a radical capitalist in the same way that Brecht was a radical communist. She took capitalism to its extremes. She was more a capitalist than the capitalists themselves. She got all this from Nietzsche, and his influence got downplayed and scrubbed out of her journals during world War II as Hitler was such an admirer of Nietzsche. NIetzsche advocates pushing to the limits, to extremes, excessive, "more so", but Nietzsche was saying this in the context of getting rid of something, destroying it. Rand was not consciously employing this strategy and neither was Brecht. Zizek dicusses the four permutations of known and unknown that Runsfeld so screwed up by leaving the important one out, which was the unknown knowns, but Zizek doesn't refer to this conceptualization in his JARS article. I had emailed Sciabarra my ideas on Nietzsche and Rand and he was interested, but he never mentioned the Zizek article in JARS to me, but I did find it. Zizek only goes so far with this as her over embracing capitalism to the radical sphere. Zizek does not mention the unknown knowns nor does he tie Rand in with Nietzsche. But then he never spent time being an Objectivist, so he wasn't digging around the way I have been.
As far as the dialectic and Zizek he is taking Hegel to extremes and it is a wild wild ride and well worth it. You can find influeneces in The Dark Knight Rises. DeLillo's Cosmopolis reading through Rand is fantastic. Eric Packer does what Francisco does. But DeLillo's Packer is called a self destructive loser, a suicidal character blah blah blah. Can you imagine what Rand would have said had anyone said the same about Francisco? Well, they would be dead or permanently mute.
I've blogged massive amounts on this at : http://cosmopolisfilm2.blogspot.com and http://aynrand2.blogspot.com so please visit.
DeLillo uses this quote in Cosmopolis and it was a favorite one of Rand's. DeLillo is tossing cookie crumbs all through Cosmopolis to jog your mind.
You can't take Zizek out of context. He doesn't sound bite successfully. and to keep what he says in context requires immense concentration and pages of context to include. Just about impossible. And he makes it impossible on purpose. So you can't sound bite. Although he has some good ones and they are always very funny. But he does respect Rand, talks about her, writies about her and says repeatedly now that was a smart woman as he jabs at his head. She knew how to think. Now when someone of Zizek's immense intellect pays her homage, she has arrived!At last and it has taken a long time and her disciples haven't helped at all. They are some of the dumbest around.
The left is finished. The neo liberals aren't even worth thinking about. Dead in the water. The far right is fanatical and crazy and their valid points get all covered up in their insanity. They can't express coherently their strongest points. Zizek does though, but doesn't call them right wing extremest. This is unecessarily complicated writing software. Why don't you change it. KISS.
Zizek was writing for JARS and readers interested in Rand. He intentionally did not make it so complicated as to drive away readers. He is a Rand admirer and he is one of the foremost thinkers in philosophy today. When he says something about someone, it is listened to. People pay attention. They hate him of course because he is an intellectual terrorist, as was Rand.
Liberals and 'leftists' have a obsession with Ayn Rand. Maybe it's some kind of subconscious fear of the efficacy of her influence, mostly it is a kind of cognitive dissonance as her attacks on collectivism directly challenge and contradict their pretensions to being 'rebels' who challenge the 'status quo', instead of actually being sycophants for the status quo and the political elite.
To them she is "the far right" incarnate, and thus they can lump every sort of critic of liberal statism under some sinister 'Randian' umbrella.
Everything Zizek writes just sounds like a desparate struggle to transcend or deny the logical implications of his militant desire for social engineering. Not that the essay is useless, I just don't think its conclusions support what he wants them to.