“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Rocket, I'm shocked that you don't have an opinion on Zizek. I know internet is sparse, but you gotta be plugged into the ideological battlefield that is YouTube.
Zizek in RT on Traditional Masculinity labeled as toxic by the APA.
Quote:
The Czech-born writer Milan Kundera once wrote an entire book about an atmosphere where one joke made in bad taste can ruin your life. It's no joke now, as denouncing colleagues becomes normal in the US. Recently, the boffins at the American Psychological Association (APA) proclaimed “traditional masculinity” as toxic.
With no apparent shame, here are the exact words they used: “Traits of so-called ‘traditional masculinity,’ like suppressing emotions & masking distress, often start early in life & have been linked to less willingness by boys & men to seek help, more risk-taking & aggression - possibly harming themselves & those with whom they interact.”
ALSO ON RT.COM Toxic masculinity: American Psychological Association says it’s bad to be a man What makes this statement really dangerous is the mixture of ideology and ostensibly neutral expertise: a strong ideological gesture of excluding phenomena considered unacceptable is presented as an impartial description of medical facts.
How can one not recall here the notorious Serbsky institute in Moscow (thriving even now!) which, in the Soviet years, was well known for categorizing dissidence as a form of mental illness?
And exactly the same happens when we designate masculinity as “toxic,” under the cover of medical expertise. It amounts to the imposition of a new normativity, a fresh figure of the enemy.
New Normal Indeed, if, in the old days of heterosexual normativity, homosexuality was treated as illness, it is now masculinity itself which is medicalized and turned into a sickness to be fought. Thus, all the references to power, patriarchy and oppression of women cannot obfuscate the ideological brutality of the operation.
Plus, the fact the APA is involved makes it clear we are not dealing with an excess of “Cultural Marxism” because the APA is the psychological wing of the medical establishment. So, we are talking about nothing less than a shift in the mainstream ideological hegemony.
ALSO ON RT.COM Current trends in self-reproach & guilt serve interests of elites – Slavoj Zizek The contours of this shift become clear the moment we take a closer look at the list of features supposed to characterize “toxic masculinity”: suppressing emotions and masking distress, unwillingness to seek help, a propensity to take risks even if this involves a danger of self-harm.
Which raises the question: what is so specifically “masculine” about this list?
Does it not fit much more as a simple act of courage in a difficult situation where, to do the right thing, you have to suppress emotions because you cannot rely on any help but take the risk and act, even if this means exposing yourself to harm? Obviously, in our age of Politically Correct conformism, such a stance poses a danger.
But What is replacing courage?
First Hand A recent experience of mine tells a lot in this respect. I was involved in defending a colleague against an accusation from a graduate student that they had solicited unwanted intimacy between the two.
What shocked me was the career reference which was evoked to render non-problematic the behavior (of the accuser, in this case). I don't know the accuser, I never met him and didn't read anything written by him except his publicly available emails.
My point is: let's suppose all he says is true – he was disgusted and oppressed etc. So why did he fully reciprocate her messages and sometimes even heighten their emotional tone? His repeated answer is a reference to his career, as if this were taken as a given.
ALSO ON RT.COM Slavoj Žižek: Until the rich world thinks 'one world,' migration will intensify Is this “justification by career” really so self-evident? When I made this point, I was predictably accused of not understanding how power functions in US academia – nothing could be less true: from the 1970s when, after graduating, I was unemployed for years (yes, for NOT being a Marxist) ‘til recent times, when I was almost exiled from the US academia and public media because of my "problematic" positions (critique of Political Correctness, etc.).
As a result, I was able to observe how power works in all its guises. I don't expect people to be heroic, I just think that there are certain limits, both professional (betraying one's theoretical vocation – if one has it, that is to say) and private (writing passionate emails to a person one finds disgusting, like the accuser did), that one should not violate.
This is how “toxic masculinity” is left behind in the new Politically Correct atmosphere where one joke made in bad taste can ruin your career but ruthless careerism is considered normal. A new universe of subtle corruption is thus emerging, in which career opportunism and the lowest denouncing of colleagues presents itself as high moralism.
Hegel is one of the central figures to European philosophy and has influenced everyone from Nietchze to Marx. Zizek made his name in academia over 30 years ago by being primarily a Hegelian scholar.
I totally get how Zizek's constant sniffing and accent can put people off. It took me a few years to get into his lectures, but now I view these things as cute quirks in speech. I'll say that his books and articles are a lot more accessible. Let me know if you want a rec.
‘The Parallax of Ontology: Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement’ by Slavoj Žižek
WATCH
The concept parallax refers to the apparent displacement in the position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight. Yet, more precisely, it includes the assumption to understand the observable change not simply as a subjective change of focus on the part of the subject, but also as a change of the object (characterized by an internal antagonism) on the level of its ontological status. In this case, a shift in the epistemic standpoint of the subject implies an ontological change in the object as well. To give an example, one can refer to Galilei’s astronomical observations. They were obviously more precisely reflected in celestial objects, even though the subject-object determination of his antipode, Bellarmin, was epistemologically more in accordance with the established web of reasons. Galilei’s ‘victory’ not only shifted the modern subject in the cosmos, but provoked a change of status of cosmic spheres themselves. Parallax refers to such and similar shifts between subject and object in historical processes, which cause both entities to circling each other again and again due to their lack of reconciliation. This is a process that has no end, because, as Hegel says, subject and object are mediated in themselves through time. Jacques Lacan expresses this idea likewise when he shows to what extent the subject’s gaze is always inscribed in the perceived object, in the form of a “blind spot”, from which the object can literally (in times of both epistemic and and political crises) return the sight.
Parallax can be detected in Kant’s antinomies, as well as in the incommensurability of various debates between eliminative scientistic and historically dialectical materialists, and it can be identified in the struggles for the sovereignty of a scientific worldview over, for example, life forms of religions. At the conference, internationally outstanding philosophers devote themselves to the concept of parallax within German Idealism and contemporary ontology in order to present it as an illuminating figure of thought and explanation, especially in theoretical philosophy.
As multifaceted as this figure of thought is, it contradicts both a naive epistemological realism, widespread in the academic world of today, and an eliminative scientism, namely in rejecting the belief in one basic structure of reality in which subject and object can harmoniously be put to rest. Parallax stands in opposition to this belief.
Talk given at the conference “Parallax. The Dependence of Reality on Its Subjective Constitution” on Dec. 1, 2018 at the Munich School of Philosophy, Germany.
