>First, the bartender in Toronto is not in the least weird. He
She, actually.
> is wrong,
>very wrong, but he is as rational as those leftists who confuse being
>wrong with being weird or irrational. The world is filled with
>irrational acts and irrational conceptions and theories, but "irrational
>person" simply makes no sense. This is my reason to begin with for
>saying that Zizek's _question_ was silly. But as this thread tends to
>show, the question is rather worse than silly, it is aggressively
>reactionary. (Please note that it is the question, not Zizek, that I am
>terming silly and reactionary. To assume that because his questions are
>silly he is would be to accept his Miltonic/Thatcherian premise of a
>world made up of isolated individuals, with social relations merely
>being the additive result of the acts of those individuals.
>
>The assumption that the bartender is weird or irrational is also the
>assumption that (a) social relations are unintelligible and (b) that
>he/she who calls the bartender irrational or weird has the divine
>knowledge of individual essences that (as I suggested in an earlier
>post) Hamlet quite cogently refutes. You can study that bartender from
>here to eternity and you still won't have an inkling of "why" he thinks
>as he does.
I think her position was "weird" from the point of view of material self-interest, but that doesn't mean I think it's weird or irrational in the sense you're taking it, nor do I think that people generally run their lives on material self-interest. A psychoanalyst, amateur or professional, assumes that behavior that looks weird on the surface makes a lot of sense when you look at the personal history behind it.
Doug