Can someone explain what and how to read Zizek?

Can someone explain what and how to read Zizek? I first discovered him on Youtube and became interested in his ideas a while ago and bought his recently published book: "Heaven In Disorder". However it was so bad, I couldn't bring myself to finnish it, it just seems to be a bunch of shallow takes on recent political events without any deeper philosophical or political insight.

However, I recently came across an earlier (actually his first published) work by Zizek titled "The Sublime Object of Ideology" which seems to be a real banger, judging by the first few pages of the first chapter. The two books seem to be on two completely different levels, so now I don't know what to think. Help me understand this IQfy.

Beware Cat Shirt $21.68

Rise, Grind, Banana Find Shirt $21.68

Beware Cat Shirt $21.68

  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    just read it. this is something you only learn when you become an advanced reader: if you want to read a book, you can actually just pick it up and start reading it immediately. literally nothing is stopping you. most of the ideas are right on the page.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      And you didn't read more than the first sentence, did you?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        you want to know if zizek's other books are better. YOU CAN FIND THIS OUT BY READING THEM you will know after an hour with better knowledge than secondhand, immediate and true knowledge by... reading. you can literally just start reading it right now and know, you don't have to go ask other people. you can just read it

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Well, the underlying question of my post was: "why does does two books, written by the same author, differ so much in quality (with the older one being better)? Does the reader (whitch is me) perhaps just not understand the author-in-question's newer book?"

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            COCAINE ADDICTION

            One is written to scholarly standards and actually has something to express.

            The other is written high off his breasts on cocaine between blowjobs.

            THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR HEGEL SCHOLAR ON DRUGS. DRUGS NOT EVEN ONCE.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            ..what?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Zizek has a serious stimulants abuse problem, and it comes out in his writing. If you write like Sartre you're on a stimulant. Its Cocaine with Zizek.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            To be fair, Freud produced his best work utilizing the latter method.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Yeah but all Freud has to do is write up cases and permute the great wheel of repressed desire. Enumeration works fine on stimulants. It is far less good when you're trying to talk sensibly about categories, even if you're not actually talking about "categories" par categories but your mode of presentation is via categories as a linguistic metaphor.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Freud stopped using cocaine before he wrote any of the stuff he's known for.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            The answer is quite simple, its because Zizek distinctly writes two kind of books: On one side there are his academic books in which he develops in greath his philosophical positions and examines complex subjects, and on the other side are books that are written in a popular manner and are made to reach a wide audience.I wonder why you react so negatively to them though, since they are exactly the same level of quality as his public appearances in the last 10 years.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >Zizek distinctly writes two kind of books
            I see, what suprised me with "Heaven In Disorder" though, was all the moralistic standings and takes (whitch I can't stand) since he have stated many times that he is "not a moralist".

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Zizek is a cocaine addled 90s frick pig.

    He uses Lacan to watch films, and has read enough Marx to make bad jokes to impress bourgeois students in the United States.

    Zizek has actually read enough Marx and Hegel to make bad jokes to impress academics; but, he never moves on from the joke to substance.

    His two useful pronouncements are on Yugoslav recruit training of university students, "Your mother, your sister," and on the role of Marxist intelligentsia in class struggle, "But look, his balls are dusty."

    Go read Annales or something useful

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    If I wanted to read Marxist theory I'd reach for Althusser and Gramsci before Zizek

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Marx and Freud.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    i'd just read his shit.
    hes obviously a philosopher who read a lot, so you either wont get 75% of what hes saying or it will be very obvious and shallow drivel to you.
    im not sure if you should read what he read, mostly because of the discussion wether one should actually read the sources or just continue

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Zizek's contributions are in the field of "ideology" studies and represent a trivial post-Althusserian contribution to Marxism. That he uses Lacan means that he is more accurately trivial, not that he is less trivial.

      The real wissenschaft of contemporary Marxism is workplace studies. It is not ethical to publish these. Zizek knows from the dusty balls joke that this is true. He knows that he is busy reproducing capital by reproducing capitalist ideology.

      The best use of Zizek would be for a starbucks worker to conduct an attentat by ineffectively blowing half his face off with a shotgun.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        i can tell that you didnt delve deeper than that video on youtube 'the perverts guide to whatever' dont try to (You) me again

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          You can tell can you? Why wasn't Zizek part of the "Islands" scene in Yugoslavian marxism?

          Why did Zizek jump onboard the "out of date" French train rather than reading D&G?

          Why wasn't Zizek arrested in the 1980s?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Because D&G is, let's be honest, adolescent claptrap that can't be put to use in the same way that Lacan can, and Zizek is a cagey fed who knows how to butter his bread.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Lacan was straightforward enough in his presentation of ideas that he's easy to use in an essay about Alfred Hitchwiener's sexual repression.

            D&G are problematic because if you discover how they are to be used it is unethical to actually use them. Also the quality of their metaphors are… wew. You just shouldn't fricking publish if you make something as straightforward as Gardening that esoteric.

            I mean you could attack them for being bad writers in that Umberto Eco manages to cover the same terrain and nobody arrested him and the esoteric message is still there. But those who have ears to ear Eco don't actually use him.

            I've heard D&G recapitulated from scratch over pints in front of the disused darts board at the British Isles Repressed Minority club. Yes they are that trivial; but, Tony Black got arrested and he's fricking useless.

            European states were handing out justificatory free arrests to anyone who felt the imminence of the immanent in the 1980s and Zizek went and used Freud to write about pulp fiction.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Oh, you're insane, ok, got it. The D&G love makes sense now.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            You need to read European intellectual and social history SE of the Neisse 1945-1975. Your limitation shows quite badly.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >The important thing is how history and politics expose groups and trends and reveal the bourgeois nature concealed behind their “pseudo-socialist” or “pseudo-Marxist” phraseology. In the epoch of bourgeois-democratic revolutions, scores of groups and trends have everywhere, all over the world, imagined themselves to be “socialists” and have posed as such. History has speedily exposed them in a matter of ten to twenty years, or even less.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            True that. I just ask people which union they're a member of in the first three sentences.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >has to resort to trick questions
            >has heard about the frankfurt school only from /misc/

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >frankfurt
            Lotta Continua.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Is it really substance accuse abuse or an invasion of jouissance?

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    As an ex-yu it never ceases to amuse me to think that there was a period of like five years straight where this clown was taken deadly seriously by the w*stoids.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >As an ex-yu it never ceases to amuse me to think that there
      is a period where people identify as Ustase or Srspka fascisti. Or that people fail to get the nSk joke.

      You're all fricking LARPers down there. You're just jealous that Zizek is making money selling Tito.

      You're jealous of a Slovene for selling irony to Westerners?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >y-y-you're just butthurt!
        are you a balkaner too? because you sure argue like one

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Yeah, nah, urak hunt.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Watch a lot of videos. Then either read a lesser short book or one of the giga-mega Hegel tomes like Less than Nothing. You will find a lot of the things from the videos in those books so you'll have an easier time when you get into the harder theory. Generally you need you have a bit of knowledge about every single part of the western cannon(music, philosophy, literature), but Wikipedia knowledge will be enough since he himself details a lot what he is talking about with everyday examples.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *