[lbo-talk] Zizek, "Against the Populist Temptation"

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Fri May 5 13:01:38 PDT 2006


woj is complaining about technical language when he whips out sociological variants of rat choice theory to say, "two birds in the hand better than one in the bush" and other colloquialisms? Or that people aren't very rational? LOL

At 12:54 PM 5/5/2006, Carrol Cox wrote:


>Jerry Monaco wrote:
> >
> > Here, here, Woj!
> >
> > Except for your mode of expression (which I call "my style problem with
> Woj" - he is sort of the neo-con Spartacist League of this list) I agree
> with you completely. Unless you want to work through an obsession with
> Lacan, Hegel, Lenin, and the Roman Catholic church, Zizek is close to
> unreadable. But as far as I can see is Lakoff is not much
> different. All of thes guys make a critical fetish of language,
> essentially reducing an analysis of politics to an analysis of ideology,
> and an analysis of ideology to their own peculiar misconception of human
> language.
>
>
>Have you read this particular article? Neither the RC nor Lenin figures
>in it, the Lacan is strictly decorative, the use of Hegel is decorous,
>and the language is straightforward for the most part amd quite
>readable. Most of the usual Zizek tics are absent. W may claim he's
>responding to style but I suspect it's another instance of W's being
>unable to acknowledge (or even imagine) that honest disagreement with
>him could possibly exist. (Actually, I haven't read W's post -- but I've
>never seen one of his polemics that didn't fit this description, so I'm
>fairly confident that I wouldn't need to rephrase had I read him.)
>
>I'm not exactly obsessed with Lenin, though I've always found his works
>quite useful.
>
>Carrol

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