Tags
Balkan, Buddhism, New Yorker, Noam Chomsky, Otniel Schneller, Paul Postal, Slavoj Žižek, United States
Can someone of my wise friends enlighten me on what’s so fascinating about Slavoj Žižek to Western taste? And what’s the guy’s problem with Buddhism? It seems to me he is simply trolling and i find him to be an attention HO, quite unattractive one too.
I went to his lecture here in Podgorica and i really don’t get it – first and foremost, because he simply doesn’t make sense. His are ramblings, literally.
Is it that he is the first smarta** from Balkans who learned English properly and took Balkan bluntness to an all new level?
Check out this infamous article: http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/western.php
Firstly, it is built on false premises , secondly – even if this idiotic hypothesis was true – what’s exactly Žižek’s problem with Tibet and its religion?
(Tibet, rest assured, won’t be ‘assimilated in couple of decades’ – and not because US gvmnt’s heart bleeds for Tibetan cause, so they won’t allow it – but because it is one of the hot spots where US can pressure China’s ruling party – and in that way exercise some, even if minimal, upset – if not some control over it.)
He is not known to have spent any prolonged periods of time in Tibet, he doesn’t speak the language, probably does not hang around ethnic Tibetans either and certainly does not practice Buddhism – on what exactly he based his opinion? And why does it matter? Except that it’s funny – a somewhat typical Balkan gastarbeiter thing to do – dismissing the things you don’t get with an arrogant attitude which only an utterly ignorant person can permit themselves. There are countless jokes on gastarbeiter still circling all around ex Yugoslavia – it was mostly the uneducated work force that filled positions with minimal wage in Germany, where the word for ‘guest worker’ originated. Being incapable of learning the local language and integrate – “guest workers” of first generation had developed a cultish mentality of their own: they gathered in “Yugoslavian clubs”, eating their own food and listening to Serbian folk music ; from the heights of hills of grilled meat stuffed with onion and hypnotized by the two accords of the turbo-folc music & rivers of slivovitza, they disdained the culture of their host country – because they didn’t know any better.
That’s exactly how Slavoj Žižek’s verbal escapades come across to me.
If you want an intelligent reply to this verbal diarrhea of his – read Nathan, he explains it step by step: http://www.ethannichtern.com/tag/slavoj-zizek-buddhism/
But in Balkans you don’t get such detailed explanations under pretense that you misunderstood something – here you get punch in the face & i believe that’s the only reason Žižek choose to go ballistic on Buddhism and not on Christianity or Islam for example.
Or the other, in my view, bully – Chomsky. You’ll hear that he alone started the new shift of the scientific paradigm – if one has the slightest idea what is a shift in scientific paradigm – that immediately sets off the BS alarm; he certainly did not.
What he did is the following: having overdosed on Bakunin, an anarchist of times long gone and militant antisemite, about whom best part of contemporary anarchists don’t care the least – Chomsky thought that , given that he has Jewish blood, he’ll manage to get away with BS with which Bakunin, a CO Russian could not… well, next time he wants to enter Israel (and is not allowed into the country) he can indeed try “one of the tunnels connecting Gaza and Egypt” as he was recommended by MP Otniel Schneller.
Here is what some intelligent people have to say about Chomsky:
“Even on the rare occasions when Mr. Chomsky is dealing with facts and not with fantasies, he exaggerates by a factor of, plus or minus, four or five.”
Walter Laqueur, The New Republic, March 24, 1982
“After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false. He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake.” Paul Postal, The New Yorker, March 31, 2003
And here it is – exposed lie by lie, if you can stomach it: http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomskyhoax.html
(I can’t, his discourse simply makes me sick.)
How he rose to academic prominence in the first place – is indeed beyond my comprehension. Except that – imho – he’s an attention HO too. As per the imaginary shift , here on what it comes down to, explained clearly: Noam Chomsky, America’s Village Idiot http://theanti-chomskyanredoubt.blogspot.com/2006/07/noam-chomsky-americas-village-idiot.html
(I disagree only on one count – with author’s derogatively use of sophistry – which in academic circles is passe.)
I do know that if you posted hate speeches like that on any internet forum in English language – except the supremacist ones – you’d get banned promptly; how come these two, in my opinion, pretenders made it – is a subject for careful analyzes and a wake up call to us all.
Basically, what Chomsky has been screaming from the top of his lungs is DIE, DIE AMERICA – his hatred for Israel is secondary ; Žižek calls for return to bolshevism – and not to mild Leninist kind, but to the hard’core Stalinism. And the latter probably doesn’t even mean it – it’s merely bluffing and a publicity stunt. And even if you bother to understand what he is trying to communicate in between tirades about Marx, Lacan and bashings of Shunryu Suzuki – even if his faked or not neurotic tics don’t bother you – there is very little to hear. Simply, in my opinion, he is fake.
There can’t be any wisdom, not even in disguise, where there is hate – and especially where there is ‘hate for no reason’ which Kabbalists happen to consider the root of all evil.
Haaretz Article on Chomsky being denied entry to Israel: http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/noam-chomsky-denied-entry-into-israel-and-west-bank-1.290701
Slavoj Žižek: A Radical Critique http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/slavoj-zizek-a-radical-critique/
Žižek, the Borat of philosophy http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2007/04/slavoj-zizek-intellectual