If Bush Did It

I still like her, but she makes it hard. Sheesh. At New York Post , ” Marxist Theorist Slavoj Žižek ‘The World’s Hippest Philosopher’ Catches Lady Gaga’s Attention .” Lady Gaga has struck up a strong friendship with mysterious Marxist Slavoj Zizek, dubbed “the world’s hippest philosopher.” In the midst of her rift with long-term boyfriend Luc Carl, eyebrows were raised over Gaga’s decision to spend a lot of time with the 62-year-old, bearded, postmodern theorist and pal of Julian Assange while she was touring the UK and US this spring. Sources say Gaga and Slovenian-born Zizek — who like Salman Rushdie seems to be intellectual catnip to beautiful women and who was once married to Argentine model Analia Hounie — spent time together discussing feminism and collective human creativity. The pop star also agreed to support Zizek at a March rally in London when the lecturers’ union UCU was on strike. In a recent blog post titled “Communism Knows No Monster,” Zizek called Gaga “my good friend” and said, “There is a certain performance of theory in her costumes, videos and even (some of) her music.” He says her infamous meat dress is a reference to “the consistent linking in the oppressive imaginary of the patriarchy of the female body and meat, of animality and the feminine.” More at that link above, and check DSG , ” ŽIŽEK/GAGA: Communism Knows No Monster .” Too much drivel, but it’s the nihilist, postmodern insight into Gaga and culture’s that’s key. Freaky. RELATED : See Adam Kirsch, at TNR , ” The Deadly Jester “: The curious thing about the Žižek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror—especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose “lost causes” Žižek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes —the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult. A glance at the blurbs on his books provides a vivid illustration of the power of repressive tolerance. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle , Žižek claims, “Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy”; but on the back cover of the book we are told that Žižek is “a stimulating writer” who “will entertain and offend, but never bore.” In The Fragile Absolute , he writes that “the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred , but proper political hatred”; but this is an example of his “typical brio and boldness.” And In Defense of Lost Causes, where Žižek remarks that “Heidegger is ‘great’ not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement,” and that “crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough , that his violence was not ‘essential’ enough”; but this book, its publisher informs us, is “a witty, adrenalinfueled manifesto for universal values.” More Stalinist terror AND Hitler wasn’t violent enough. No wonder he’s the bomb on the left. The is right up Robert Farley’s alley! (And folks gotta read that whole TNR essay. It’s a real encapsulation of today’s left: That liberalism is evil and that communism is good is not his conclusion, it is his premise; and the contortions of his thought, especially in his most political books, result from the need to reconcile that premise with a reality that seems abundantly to indicate the opposite. Hence the necessity of the Matrix, or something like it, for Žižek’s worldview. And hence his approval of anything that unplugs us from the Matrix and returns us to the desert of the real—for instance, the horrors of September 11. One of the ambiguities of Žižek’s recent work lies in his attitude toward the kind of Islamic fundamentalists who perpetrated the attacks. On the one hand, they are clearly reactionary in their religious dogmatism; on the other hand, they have been far more effective than the Zapatistas or the Porto Alegre movement in discomfiting American capitalism. As Žižek observes, “while they pursue what appear to us to be evil goals with evil means, the very form of their activity meets the highest standard of the good.” Yes, the good: Mohammed Atta and his comrades exemplified “good as the spirit of and actual readiness for sacrifice in the name of some higher cause.” Žižek’s dialectic allows him to have it all: the jihadis are not really motivated by religion, as they say they are; they are actually casualties of global capitalism, and thus “objectively” on the left. “The only way to conceive of what happened on September 11,” he writes, “is to locate it in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism” … When it comes to the heart of the matter, what Žižek wants is not dialectic, but repetition: another Robespierre, another Lenin, another Mao. His “progressivism” is not linear, it is cyclical. And if objective conditions are different from what they were in 1789 or 1917, so much the worse for objective conditions. “True ideas are eternal, they are indestructible, they always return every time they are proclaimed dead,” Žižek writes in his introduction. One of the sections in the book is titled “Give the dictatorship of the proletariat a chance!” He’s murderous. That sounds like REPSAC = CASPER. Perfectly. Evil)

Read more from the original source:
Lady Gaga Attracts Marxist Philosopher Slavoj Žižek (and Vice Versa)