5 thoughts on “Zizek Talks (Again) About Violence.”
One of my favorite moments is, with still over 40 minutes to go, he begins one of several complaints about taking too much time and only needing a few more minutes. He was like this when he came to Portland too, except he just didn’t say anything. The person to introduce him said he would speak for 20-minutes and then sign books, but he spoke for well over an hour.
His critique of Zen Buddhism via D.T. Suzuki is getting a little old, and it’s not even really his own. Nietzsche already said 100 years ago that the Buddhist is “the perfect cow.” The analysis of “Zen at war” is correct, but limited and limiting; I want to see it go further. There is substantial criticism of Suzuki from within the Buddhist community, and scholarly work that shows the kind of “Zen without Buddhism” that Suzuki instigated in the United States has a strange relationship with the modernization of Japan in the Mejei period. That said, there are more complicated historical forces at work in Japanese nationalism and it relationship to Buddhism, just as he argued how Pere Josef was in his own weird way responsible for Nazism.
There’s something a bit sad about this video – Google’s lunch talks isn’t really Zizek’s audience, he looks sort of out of place there – one can’t but imagine his not-so-distant future appearances at the open-mic gathering at some local coffee shop pestering everyone with his latest theories…
Actually, he has like a tick or a nervous thing that he talks about in one of the many documentaries out there, that is, he has to do this rubbing the beard and touching the nose thing…
Perverse Egalitarianism 
One of my favorite moments is, with still over 40 minutes to go, he begins one of several complaints about taking too much time and only needing a few more minutes. He was like this when he came to Portland too, except he just didn’t say anything. The person to introduce him said he would speak for 20-minutes and then sign books, but he spoke for well over an hour.
His critique of Zen Buddhism via D.T. Suzuki is getting a little old, and it’s not even really his own. Nietzsche already said 100 years ago that the Buddhist is “the perfect cow.” The analysis of “Zen at war” is correct, but limited and limiting; I want to see it go further. There is substantial criticism of Suzuki from within the Buddhist community, and scholarly work that shows the kind of “Zen without Buddhism” that Suzuki instigated in the United States has a strange relationship with the modernization of Japan in the Mejei period. That said, there are more complicated historical forces at work in Japanese nationalism and it relationship to Buddhism, just as he argued how Pere Josef was in his own weird way responsible for Nazism.
There’s something a bit sad about this video – Google’s lunch talks isn’t really Zizek’s audience, he looks sort of out of place there – one can’t but imagine his not-so-distant future appearances at the open-mic gathering at some local coffee shop pestering everyone with his latest theories…
is it my imagination, or does it seem like slavoj might, uh, be doing cocaine?
Actually, he has like a tick or a nervous thing that he talks about in one of the many documentaries out there, that is, he has to do this rubbing the beard and touching the nose thing…
I wonder if they have anything like T-ball or youth baseball in Slovenia. I think Zizek would make for an interesting umpire.