Hey David! It might be useful for your listeners to check out Gerry Coulter’s piece on how Zizek’s radicality is lapped by Baudrillard’s notion of terrorism. It’s on the Baudrillard Studies journal homepage.
27:26 Keep in mind that many Communists outside the Soviet Union and East Asia were indeed black and overlapped with pan Africanism to a degree. And for the US many of the US Communist party were black.
As a big Zizek fan its always intreasting to hear critisism of his work. Some good points! This will definetly help me understad the book better and go into it more skepticle.
I think you're criticisms are misplaced. He's saying that non-western epistemologies have been obliterated by colonialism and imperialism. Any remaining 'tradition' is only a nostalgia for a long-lost plenitude that cannot be regained, and any phantasmatic claim to having retained some pure non-western epistemology or tradition only works to prop up colonial power. The radical decolonial move is to understand that anything that is articulable falls within western/colonial epistemology, but modernity itself is non-all and is ripe for rereading. For example, indigenous scholars in the US are forced to articulate their claims through the language of 'land' and 'sovereignty.' These are western categories that did not exist in indigenous epistemology, and the nostalgia for them is a purely virtual object created by colonization itself. To me the 9/11 comparison makes no sense and I don't feel like you're being fidelitous to his whole philosophy.
"British colonization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself" (116). He continues, it is important "to admit the positive effect of colonization" (117). I see nothing here about sorrow for a lost tradition; only the celebration of its loss. Indeed, the same is seen in much of the Marxist tradition. Some strange sophistry you're conducting to argue otherwise.
@@TheoryPhilosophy Indeed. Zizek's main problem is trying to use an imminent framework of Hegelian Logic that seems to be futile thus far, it makes him run into all these paradoxes and contingencies that plagued Nietzsche as well.
@@TheoryPhilosophy What Zizek is saying is not a blindfolded celebration of colonisation and its obvious ills. He's saying colonialism on the surface is terrible, but pre-colonisation in India was no picnic due to the caste system, I presume. So colonialism came into India destroyed the unjust tradition of social control of the caste system, which emancipated Indians somewhat, then the new colonial system of control fell apart leaving a freer India all things considered, despite the collateral damage, which I assume is dialectically unavoidable The shit hit the fan, but the shit was already in the room and so things may be better as the worst thing occured, colonialism, but it destroyed some parts of oppressive tradition, and itself! opening up new possibilities of higher social order, ad infinitum. Zizek's position, in essence, is you can't make an omelette without cracking eggs -- Capitalism has to collide with communism to bring about higher social order that is yet unknown. (Is this not the story of Christ?) And to offer my critique of Slavoj, is this logic of social/economic developmental order not Buddhist? e.g the cycle of reincarnation, which he derides often as a balm to individuals under capitalism helping maintain the system, when instead, something more subtle is occuring, individual alterations in subjectivity mirroring the process of social progression/reincarnation, people are Christian turn to Buddhism, Christianity fails, Buddhism, too, and one is left with secular mindfulness and Jesus as a role-model. The old, the new -- the good parts of old and new; classic Hegel, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Dang it, Slavoj's a communist Hegelian, get it?
I feel that all colonialism managed to do was cause a few centuries of death and misery. End of colonialism did give a chance for B R Ambedkar to add anti casteism in the Constitution but it's hard to implement such ideals when the majority is passively supportive at best, everyone being distracted in their own financial problems indirectly but significantly created by the colonial rule. Who's to say an altered form of casteism won't return as India slowly regains prosperity? @zMACHINEz but it's not a long lost plenitude, it's a recently (like 1850s) stolen plenitude, soon to be regained I guess like how China seems to have done it (it's a matter of the country's economic and political policies regardless of past colonialism is what I'm trying to say) @TheoryPhilosophy It's maybe not merely a lost tradition because that has happened multiple times in India's history seven before colonialism but it's more of a lost prosperity which has happened only once. @SickWithAbundance, the egg meant to live its own life as a chicken and now it's an omelette made to be eaten and for whom?
What Zizek is saying is not a blindfolded celebration of colonisation and its obvious ills. He's saying colonialism on the surface is terrible, but pre-colonisation in India was no picnic due to the caste system, I presume. So colonialism came into India destroyed the unjust tradition of social control of the caste system, which emancipated Indians somewhat, then the new colonial system of control fell apart leaving a freer India all things considered, despite the collateral damage, which I assume is dialectically unavoidable The shit hit the fan, but the shit was already in the room and so things may be better as the worst thing occured, colonialism, but it destroyed some parts of oppressive tradition, and itself! opening up new possibilities of higher social order, ad infinitum. Zizek's position, in essence, is you can't make an omelette without cracking eggs -- Capitalism has to collide with communism to bring about higher social order that is yet unknown. (Is this not the story of Christ?) And to offer my critique of Slavoj, is this logic of social/economic developmental order not Buddhist? e.g the cycle of reincarnation, which he derides often as a balm to individuals under capitalism helping maintain the system, when instead, something more subtle is occuring, individual alterations in subjectivity mirroring the process of social progression/reincarnation, people are Christian turn to Buddhism, Christianity fails, Buddhism, too, and one is left with secular mindfulness and Jesus as a role-model. The old, the new -- the good parts of old and new; classic Hegel, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Dang it, Slavoj's a communist Hegelian, get it?
