'You know, let me conclude with another thing that may interest you. People tell me, "What you are saying is impossible." Did you notice how strange the word "impossible" functions today? When you talk about private pleasures and technology, everything is possible, you know, like we will live forever, everything will be downloaded, we can do whatever we want. We say impossible is happening everywhere in technology. But, the moment you go to social changes, ah, ah, ah, the idea is—we learned the lesson from the fall of socialism—practically everything that disturbs the market is impossible. So what they ruling ideology is telling us, maybe we will live forever, maybe we will become omnipotent, whatever you want, all these new—we will all travel to moon—that’s all possible. But a small social change of more healthcare is not possible. Maybe the time has come to change this and to less dream about these gnostic possibilities we will all turn into digital entities and more about quite modest social changes.'
When I read what Slavoj says, I'm inspired by how easy it is for him to recognize the discrepencies in our conventional norm: the fact that we see infinite possibility for the impossible with technology but we limit the possibilites for social change. And it makes me wonder if this is a strategic paradigm, is it nique to our society/country, who benefits from it and what enables it to stay in place, who is capable of dismantling it, how, and what could replace it?
agree that Žižek flouts standards of reasoned argument. Harpham calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention." O'Neill concurs: "a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance."
While criticizing Žižek's style in general, David Bordwell criticizes his humor as an "academic humor" and in Bordwell's words academic humor is to humor what "military intelligence is to intelligence." Supporters such as R. Butler argue that such critiques miss the point and instead support Žižek's thinking: "As Žižek says, it is our very desire to look for mistakes and inconsistencies in the Other that testifies to the fact that we still transfer on to them...."
Žižek's supporters praise his "irrepressible urge and inexhaustible ability
to articulate theory at length, in depth, and with manifold entertaining
examples" but his critics complain of a theoretical chaos in which questions and answers are confused, and in which Žižek constantly recycles old ideas which were scientifically refuted long ago (or which in reality have quite a different meaning than Žižek gives to them).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj
Haters.