The Zizek response is absurd. He criticises Zizek for not giving any alternatives to (cultural) capitalism, and yet he clearly has never been in the same room as a Zizek book. How can you expect to know everything that there is to a writer’s thought by watching a ten minute video. Reading a chapter of HPMoR doesn’t entitle me to sweeping opinions on Eliezer’s philosophy.
Edit: Please explain how the Zizek video is “bad/incorrect/flawed/misleanding/incomplete”.
Well, by the looks of it, almost the entirety of the talk.
Seriously though, are you kidding me? The author of the rebuttal criticises Slavoj principally for not offering alternatives and for not fleshing out his ideas fully. This animation is 10 minutes long. Do you seriously think that Slavoj went to give a talk at the RSA which lasted 10 minutes? Give the man a break. I highly doubt that in his talk, which featured questions from audience members and panelists, he did not address any of these questions at all.
If you want a more precise answer of what the author missed, then I doubt it would be possible to condense this to a ‘smidgen’. This is not a small topic and I suggest that if either you or the author of the rebuttal want a decent idea of Zizek’s ideas regarding society then reading his work would be a better start than watching a 10 minute animated clip.
The thing that has been doing the rounds of the internet is the 10-minute animated clip, not whatever longer talk Žižek may have given, nor the entirety of any of his books (still less his whole oeuvre).
It seems perfectly reasonable to write a rebuttal of that.
Of course it might fail to be a good rebuttal on account of considering only the 10-minute animation, in two ways. (1) By criticizing Žižek for failing to do something that in his fuller work he actually has done. (2) By rebutting with bad arguments that Kaufman would have discovered to be bad, had he read the fuller work.
I don’t think the rebuttal does #1, simply because most of it isn’t criticizing Žižek for failing to do something. Yes, at the end K says that Ž needs to do more than just argue that capitalism is bad. That bit might be invalidated by a more complete consideration of Ž′s work. But that’s not remotely the main point of the rebuttal, which I take to be: Helping people is not worse than letting them suffer to encourage the smashing of the system that harms them, unless not helping them is actually likely to lead to replacing that system with a better one.
So maybe that point is wrong; that would be an instance of problem #2 if Ž has refuted it somewhere. If so, then it seems to me that K’s critics should at least be pointing to some such refutation, rather than just “highly doubting” that Ž has left important points unanswered.
Note that even if Ž has some concrete better system in mind, and an idea of how it might be achieved, that’s little reason to believe that letting people starve will actually make it more likely that that better system will come about. Yes, when things get really bad the result is sometimes a revolution, but revolutions can turn out very badly (as witness the example of 20th-century communism, which as K points out Ž himself agrees was disastrous).
My post wasn’t a response to Žižek’s views overall but to the arguments he makes in this particular 10 minute video that people keep posting as an argument against charity.
What would you suggest I read to understand how Žižek would answer the question, “what should I do to most improve the world?”
Zizek is quite a prolific writer, and so I hence hope you’ll forgive me for linking to a book that I haven’t myself read, but this book appears to be the one which is most geared towards the question at hand (especially given that it shares its name with Zizek’s talk).
As I side note, I must admit that I do completely understand the frustration that comes with people constantly posting videos like this in an attempt to justify themselves, hence I can understand you posting what you did as a response to that.
I just finished “First As Tragedy Then As Farce”, and I’m a little disappointed. The book is full of pointing out contradictions and problems, suggesting interpretations, and criticizing everything left and right. While I found the writing style hard to follow and had lots of problems with the arguments, the main frustration was that he doesn’t attempt to build anything up. You wrote that I “criticise Zizek for not giving any alternatives to (cultural) capitalism, and yet he clearly has never been in the same room as a Zizek book”, but even now that I’ve read this book through I would make the same criticism. The closest he gets is saying that we need to make a fresh go of communism, from the beginning, but there’s nothing about why we should expect better results this time or how we should go about it.
… Did that guy really just write that article without any concrete claim of harm due to capitalism? He seemed to make an oblique reference to outsourcing and implied that he thought that financial speculation leads to some form of poverty.
The Zizek response is absurd. He criticises Zizek for not giving any alternatives to (cultural) capitalism, and yet he clearly has never been in the same room as a Zizek book. How can you expect to know everything that there is to a writer’s thought by watching a ten minute video. Reading a chapter of HPMoR doesn’t entitle me to sweeping opinions on Eliezer’s philosophy.
Edit: Please explain how the Zizek video is “bad/incorrect/flawed/misleanding/incomplete”.
Could you provide a smidgen more detail on what the author missed?
Well, by the looks of it, almost the entirety of the talk.
Seriously though, are you kidding me? The author of the rebuttal criticises Slavoj principally for not offering alternatives and for not fleshing out his ideas fully. This animation is 10 minutes long. Do you seriously think that Slavoj went to give a talk at the RSA which lasted 10 minutes? Give the man a break. I highly doubt that in his talk, which featured questions from audience members and panelists, he did not address any of these questions at all.
If you want a more precise answer of what the author missed, then I doubt it would be possible to condense this to a ‘smidgen’. This is not a small topic and I suggest that if either you or the author of the rebuttal want a decent idea of Zizek’s ideas regarding society then reading his work would be a better start than watching a 10 minute animated clip.
The thing that has been doing the rounds of the internet is the 10-minute animated clip, not whatever longer talk Žižek may have given, nor the entirety of any of his books (still less his whole oeuvre).
It seems perfectly reasonable to write a rebuttal of that.
Of course it might fail to be a good rebuttal on account of considering only the 10-minute animation, in two ways. (1) By criticizing Žižek for failing to do something that in his fuller work he actually has done. (2) By rebutting with bad arguments that Kaufman would have discovered to be bad, had he read the fuller work.
I don’t think the rebuttal does #1, simply because most of it isn’t criticizing Žižek for failing to do something. Yes, at the end K says that Ž needs to do more than just argue that capitalism is bad. That bit might be invalidated by a more complete consideration of Ž′s work. But that’s not remotely the main point of the rebuttal, which I take to be: Helping people is not worse than letting them suffer to encourage the smashing of the system that harms them, unless not helping them is actually likely to lead to replacing that system with a better one.
So maybe that point is wrong; that would be an instance of problem #2 if Ž has refuted it somewhere. If so, then it seems to me that K’s critics should at least be pointing to some such refutation, rather than just “highly doubting” that Ž has left important points unanswered.
Note that even if Ž has some concrete better system in mind, and an idea of how it might be achieved, that’s little reason to believe that letting people starve will actually make it more likely that that better system will come about. Yes, when things get really bad the result is sometimes a revolution, but revolutions can turn out very badly (as witness the example of 20th-century communism, which as K points out Ž himself agrees was disastrous).
My post wasn’t a response to Žižek’s views overall but to the arguments he makes in this particular 10 minute video that people keep posting as an argument against charity.
What would you suggest I read to understand how Žižek would answer the question, “what should I do to most improve the world?”
Zizek is quite a prolific writer, and so I hence hope you’ll forgive me for linking to a book that I haven’t myself read, but this book appears to be the one which is most geared towards the question at hand (especially given that it shares its name with Zizek’s talk).
http://www.amazon.com/First-As-Tragedy-Then-Farce/dp/1844674282/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376331792&sr=1-5
As I side note, I must admit that I do completely understand the frustration that comes with people constantly posting videos like this in an attempt to justify themselves, hence I can understand you posting what you did as a response to that.
Requested it from the library!
I hope you enjoy it. Even if you dislike his arguments, his writing style is wonderfully unique.
I just finished “First As Tragedy Then As Farce”, and I’m a little disappointed. The book is full of pointing out contradictions and problems, suggesting interpretations, and criticizing everything left and right. While I found the writing style hard to follow and had lots of problems with the arguments, the main frustration was that he doesn’t attempt to build anything up. You wrote that I “criticise Zizek for not giving any alternatives to (cultural) capitalism, and yet he clearly has never been in the same room as a Zizek book”, but even now that I’ve read this book through I would make the same criticism. The closest he gets is saying that we need to make a fresh go of communism, from the beginning, but there’s nothing about why we should expect better results this time or how we should go about it.
People might prefer this pair:
Peter Buffett and Zizek on why philanthropists do more harm than good and Will MacAskill’s response on Qz.com
… Did that guy really just write that article without any concrete claim of harm due to capitalism? He seemed to make an oblique reference to outsourcing and implied that he thought that financial speculation leads to some form of poverty.