EstablishmentRude493 t1_jb0ptu1 wrote on March 5, 2023 at 3:28 PM

Paragraph one:

She engages in pleasure.

Paragraph two:

She engages in pleasure.

Then:

>Žižek’s philosophy can be characterized as orthodox, almost traditionalist, for his love of Hegel, Lacan (and to a lesser extent Freud), and of course Marx.

It can also be characterized as unorthodox and challenging to certain readings of Hegel, Lacan, Freud and Marx. It can also be argued that he uses Freud substantially and does ot just "love him to a lesser extent". Another questions is; when is a love for Butler, Foucault or Frank B. Wilderson III orthodoxy? In twenty years? Fifty? A hundred? Or do we need certain historical conditions for that to become orthodoxy?

Also:

>His persona in the public consciousness, on the other hand, one which I would contend is deliberately cultivated, is that of a Diogenean provocateur, an iconoclast but not a self-serious one.

He is serious, but she thinks of him as a cynic.

Is he a clown as long as it is for "our side"? A true jester has to jest at everything.

She then glosses over the need to give a clear definition of what she deems good introductions to his thinking (and therefore of course, what not!). No argument is given. Opinions and gutfeelings.

Paragraph three:

She engages in pleasure. Then she signals to the master-signifier (for pleasure):

>(...) there is a sense of bitterness within the piece that seems difficult to square with his usual tone. This is to say nothing of the content of his argument, which is my primary concern.

"Something is not quiet right with this Zizek. I can not tell what it is, but surely godfather/the big Other will notice." Again, there is no argument for the bitterness, no structure. Just "somehow" he is bitter. She does this to supplement her "primary concern", because the "primary concern" is not enough, it needs an (unspoken) "secondary concern".

Paragraph four:

Her thesis starts of with:

>Žižek is not engaging in some semiotic analysis of the arguments surrounding the recent political controversy around trans rights in Scotland, nor is he truly linking them to much else.

But he does. Just not towards her preferred ideological stance. It is what she takes later offense on as transphobic. He plays with the ideas sleep/wake/woke, he plays with the taboo topic of "the woman with the penis", he plays with pronounce. He quotes McWhorter on contradicting statements to and imagined from the big Other.

Her claim that he does not link it too much else, I want to refute here. Identity politics, partisan politics in UK and US, academia as a public sphere vs. a private sphere, universality, the assumptions we have about "what we all are" and "what is" are complexe questions/problems.

She again invokes the big Other:

> Žižek has fallen for the panic surrounding trans healthcare that has seemed to infect the entirety of liberal intelligentsia in the past decade.

Which sets her apart from the panic. She implies that she is outside of this panic, on the "good side of history".

Paragraph five and six:

She quotes Zizek, then she makes a claim about facts, that are still disputed. I want to clearly critizise the claim that there is a definite answer to the long-term medical consequences of puberty-blockers on children and youth. There is no definitive conclusion for either "side" (for or against). It is possible that the medical approaches to medical transitioning are inherently flawed (and therefore different methodes need to be researched).

As far as I can see Zizeks article does not claim that cross-sex hormones were given to people under 16.

Here she makes an ideological backed claim for which she provides no proof. She does not even give proof for her own side. "It is all very obvious if one can read" is her implied message.

EstablishmentRude493 t1_jb0r5hc wrote on March 5, 2023 at 3:38 PM

Paragraph seven:

I want to argue that she refuses to engage with Zizeks Lacanian premises and rationalizes this with Zizeks use of the "wrong" language. (Over-)simply put, in the Lacanian structure of sexuation there exists no "cis", already "man" and "woman" are "strickenout", they are constituted by their failing to be what the symbolic order superposes. ("Be a man!"-"What is a man?"-"Someone who succeeds!"-"Put I always fail!"-"Be more a man").

Why does she take this system not into consideration?

For Zizek there is no woman (but the imagenary symbol of "the woman"), no man (but the imagernary symbol of "the man") but a complexe interaction for the subject trying to accord (ent-sprechen) to these signifiers.

Also Zizek does go through to three in his original article, he does not stop at "woman with penis in woman prison", but goes through to "self-identified woman in male prison" (and one can imagine the impass of the situation if you think about prison-queerness, prison-rape, etc.). His conclusion, I want to argue is, that THERE is the problem. How do you treat trans-people? How do you treat gender that is supposedly divorced from sex but still needs sex to inform its genderexpression? How do you deal with the contradictions of social transitioning and medical transitioning?

Paragraph eight:

An example of ideology.

Zizek is just "shilling" for another compact article.

Is this in any way refuting or reframing or analyzing or critical examining the phenomenon of an established anti-racist (a black!) professor getting booted out of a voluntary and supposed participative seminar? Zizek, supplementing his examinations and ideas about ideology with observations of socialist and stalinist propaganda, structures and mechanisms, has an inherent interest in a situation where the always present censorship in capitalist-democracy (and in any democracy) becomes visible. This is a situation where academic discourse in a certain context became verboten.

Wokeness is a secular religion, which is not big news. Christian fundamentalism claimed the same about atheism.

And there is a point to be made, especially in our times, when the experts rise to be the rules, that the believe in science is something different from the concrete application of scientific methods. We do have an empirical crisis in a lot of the sciences. Yet "the people" still put faith that the experts while in the end find the TRUTH (which interestingly has a part in the contradictions surrounding trans-medical-care). Even Nietzsche has pointed towards this. For him god was already dead. It was not, that he had just died or we were just in the process of killing him.

>However, this brush with making a reasonable point is short lived, and Žižek quickly sets this aside and positions himself as the arbiter of those whose oppression entitles them to talk about it: 'Those who appropriate the role of the leaders of the revolt are precisely not the brutalized victims of the racist oppression. The woke are a relatively privileged minority of a minority allowed to participate in a top quality workshop of an elite university.'

Let me be the arbiter of who has no right to be an arbiter. Again, the critical examination of the historical figure of Joseph Stalin (or Mao Zedong for that matter) can function as a tool for the critical examination of those who strangely flourish in a system they describe at absolutely closed and put up against them. The provocative and polemic question to people profiting in the context of DEI is: Then why are you getting so rich?

>Perhaps, if one were in the mood to entertain this thought, there could be an interesting argument about who leads movements and what social privileges might get them to such positions, but this is not Žižek’s point. He is instead interested only in bemoaning the results of one particular class at one particular school, implicitly suggesting that this happens a lot and in a lot of places, and that maybe this whole racial justice thing has gone too far.

The first line is exactly Zizeks point. But to not get caught up in her own contradictions she has to refer to "one particular class at one particular school" as a signifier that this can not be important. But the special (das Besondere in Hegels thought) is just as important as the general (das Allgemeine in Hegels thought). They are linked, not exclusively excluding each other.

Then she uses a strawman argument (while later refering herself to strawman argumentations):

>(...) and that maybe this whole racial justice thing has gone too far.

I want to argue, Zizek calls for "not far enough" instead of "too far", as the white man is as much a phantasma as the black.

Interestingly to not is what she omits here; Zizek makes references to Maryam Namazie and John McWhorter, which Melanie Zelle does not engage with at all in her commentary of his article.

Paragraph nine, ten and eleven:

"Finally (...) Žižek introduces psychoanalysis." Note here the subtile implication. The text we just read before was not psychoanalysis. She engages in more pleasure, Zizek is always saying the same, etc. etc.

Then she uses the example Zizek gives for one instance of superego. But instead of reading it in any psychoanalytical or psychoanalytically informed mode of critique, Zizek should "calm down". (This is to me the best joke in the whole text, I have to admit. I wished she made more jokes.)

Why does Zizek uses the image of the flight attendant? Because the symbols that get put together (stichted up) in the symbol "the flight-attendant" are relevant to the function of the superego. The servile attituted a person working as a flight-attendant has, is related to sexuation (the servant is a person you can "have" but not too much!). Note the outfit that has evolved. It is a uniform, yet it can be an fetishistic object (I know it is just a uniform, but ...). And it is not a power-uniform, but a servant-uniform. Flight-attendants are there to give you comfort (commodity), not to controll you (they do not check your ticket for example). So you are just faced with the fact that something in you (your phallus, that which you can not control) reacts to this. For example you get an erection by looking at the flight attendant, even though you know you are not supposed to (verboten, good people do not do this). But the superego bribes me to deny my immediate pleasure with pleasure. Pleasure (Jouissance) means to be, to feel me by being fragmented, split, ever turning forward, never reaching what I want to reach (Todes-/Trieb, death-/drive).

In addition I want to dispute that Rushdie has received "nothing but hagiographies (...) in the press" To this day there exist experts, scholars and politicans that deem Rushdies"Satanic Verses" a massive provocation to muslims, not only in Iran. Some clues In addition to this; the phenomenon of certain press outlets (as nobody can read all of them, including myself) championing Rushdie on the basis of free speech could be an instance of an inverse in identity politics.

Paragraph twelve, thirteen and fourteen:

This is a false equivalent I think. Zizeks provocation of Peterson can be taken more at face-value. Zizek does not ask him as a liberal, but as a communist. Zizek says "If there are such strong mega-marxists, where can I find them (to join)?" The implication is, that there exists no movement in the form Peterson describes. Identity politics has a big consensus in the democratic party and in the republican party and stands in relation to the partisan-style of policing now common in the US (and for a while, at that). Being for "the oppressed" is the "game of the day". The ideological move is just to put in the supposed relevant substance into the signifier (the downtrodden fallen-from-grace just-run-of-the-mill small-business-owner vs. the eternal damned black surrounded by enemies and stuck in the gutter). One can observe this in the Russian-Ukrainian war aswell.

And yes, I agree with Zizek, that there are questions of power that are fought over in instances like the one at Telluride. These fights do not happen in a vacuum, they happen in a world where public discourse is gone and replaced by private discourse, which are non-political (glad to give further arguments if people are interested), kapital flourishes and worker-conditions (no matter, gender, sex, perversions, ethnicity) continue to decline.

EstablishmentRude493 t1_jb0u90w wrote on March 5, 2023 at 4:01 PM

Paragraph fifteen:

Lacans reading of Freuds description of the dream of the father, contains the syllogism Melanie Zeller is looking for:

Awakening is realizing/confronting. In sleep there is a (traumatic) realization/confrontation. Sleep is awakening (inverted: Awaken is sleeping).

So Zizeks concluding statement is; the superego structure of ideology (in this case, wokeness/conservative identity politics) not only keeps us from confronting the traumatic truth (of oppression) but also traps us in not ending it. In the above example the son can not burn to death in the dream, really burn so close to the father that he can not recoil, since it is "in" him, the dream is closer than reality. The father wakes up before it happens. So we are trapped not fully realizing/working through the absolute senselessness of oppressing each other.

Zeller states that this is a deception to hide the true reactionary position of the piece. If I champion her position here, she is right in that this can be possible. This can even be defended with one of Zizeks refutation of the cynical position to "stitch up" internal (in)consistencies: "I tell you I am a reactionary and I act like a reactionary, but let me not fool you ... I am a reactionary!" But does Zizek tell us he is a reactionary? On the contrary he insists that he is a communist, albeit he has stated that as he got older he became more "conservative". It has to be examined though, conservative in relation to whom and to what ends/towards what. If we take Zizeks insistens on a communist position (a materialistic approach outside the liberal framework of individual rights as the ideal to strife towards) seriously the above quote becomes:

"I tell you I am a communist and I act like a reactionary, but let me not fool you ... I am a -" what is he then? A reactionary communist? Something else entirely? Jordan Peterson/Hitler?

Paragraph sixteen:

Zeller identifies Zizeks desire to be oppositional "misplaced". She continues that Zizek creates an Other that haunts him ("Wokes"). Her one argument for this is, that Zizek follows the recurring line of gendercriticals/trans-exclusionaries from "The Transsexual Empire", in that medical procedures for people to transition is in the interest of capital, because they make money with the pharmacy. The counterpoint I want to make is that medicine in our world is actually always to some degree informed by capital. So is any kind of trans-humanist operation (pacemakers, anti-depressants, operations involving screws, heart-transplants, to give a few examples). Since going back to any mythological "whole" is as much an ideological phantasma as the notion that medicine = good (and the notion medicine = evil), is there an alternative to critical examination of the methods of the medical care? Zizek does not say "puberty-blockers are an example of woke capitalism", but "the use of puberty blockers" (in this concrete instance). If we critically inspect a text like "The Transsexual Empire" we also have to critical inspect a text like "The Transsexual Empire Strikes Back" in that there is a point to be made that the completely-changeable subject is a capitalist dream(sleep).

The article Zizek wrote does not mention medical procedures for adults to transition, but puberty blockers for children and youth, which are not based on conclusive research. If any critical inquiry into medical research and pratices is refuted as propagandistic, then the word "malpratice" is, in fact, not applicable anymore. What do we use instead? What concept do we use?

We also do not know, conclusively, if all medical procedures are life-saving to trans-people. Cross-Evaluation is furthermore hindered by capital, which is, in a certain way, censorship. If you do not get money for your research, if universities are privatized further and further and political gains get involved (were always present), how do you research a thing? I agree with Zeller, that there is a real material conflict over the body. Where we differ is: a) there is a material conflict for all bodies (biopolitics), which includes trans-people, and b) we have to carefully analyze what this entails. For example, is it the same as being free from exploitation ("I want a space where I do not have to sell you my body/labor/potential to survive" or "I do not want to fight this war for your interests") or a right I can claim ("I want you, society, fellow humans, to help me get cured from this sickness" or "I want the right to get poison to kill myself") Both examples are interlinked, are they the same though? When we think about the climate catastrophy, yes they are. This another reason why we have to critically engage with the concepts of transhumanism (and by that the category transgender and therefore of course the categories gender and sex)

Paragraph seventeen:

Zeller quotes Zizek and frames the quote as "transphobia wraped in the thin venner of his particular philosophical process":

>“There is nothing ‘abnormal’ in sexual confusion: What we call ‘sexual maturation’ is a long, complex, and mostly unconscious process. It is full of violent tensions and reversals—not a process of discovering what one really is in the depth of one’s psyche.”

Actually the full quote is:

>One should take a step even further in this criticism and question the very basic claim that arriving at sexual identity is a matter of mature free choice. There is nothing “abnormal” in sexual confusion: What we call “sexual maturation” is a long, complex, and mostly unconscious process. It is full of violent tensions and reversals—not a process of discovering what one really is in the depth of one’s psyche.

This is a Lacanian premise. If the claim is that Lacanians sexuation is transphobic (or sexist), it has to be backed up by contrapoints to refute the assumptions, observations and reasonings in Lacans proposed systems (and the people that developed these systems further). Interestingly both readings of Lacan are possible, broadly spoken. Also at a certain point Zizeks reading of Lacan can be read as queer, but arriving via a different route. Since gender is itself inconsistent (not even my biological organs are represented in the symbolic order, not their failings, not their not-all), no one truly is "a man" or "a woman". This is in contrast to Butler, who argues that there is a "true" being/self (the subject which the narratives/discourses do not represent fully) under the narratives put onto it. For Zizek there is no "true" self (the subject is constituted by that which it is not), it is inconsistencies all the way down.

Interestingly the part Zeller put up, can be spun the other way. Since there is nothing "abnormal" in sexual confusion, trans-people are not "sick", they do not need to be "cured" (from what?), This does not mean that it is not possible to use transhumanist means to help them in their particular "abnormality" (as we are all abnormal, cis, trans, genderfluid, etc. does not matter). It also can be read as challenging the famous line that trans-woman from the "Transsexual Empire" by Raymond, that being transgender is "reducing" the "real female form". There is no real female form for Zizek (but a structure of the symbolic woman). None of us are what we think we are.

It also can be used to champion any stance against any form of conversion therapy for anyone. There is no true self and there is no free choice in this. (Trans)people do not choose to have a gender, as much as (Cis)people don't choose to have gender.

But if we now commit to the idea that children and youth can completely freely autonoumsly decide a medical transition, even if it is the beginning of one (which can have irreversible effects, like any operation), we greatly diminish the space of exploration and play in puberty (a terrible time). We also ideologically circle around the necessary responsibility of the parent, while the institutions circle the responsibility back onto the parent.

"I am not sure to help my child be its authentic self!"

"You have to be very careful and not surpress the childs authentic self. The child knows best."

"My child accuses me that I did not protect it, because it did not know what its authentic self was!"

"We told you to be careful."

Last paragraphs:

Ultimately Zeller concludes that it is just the protectionist impulse of the old and/or eternal afraid. This is a false eternal. There is no inherent "rightness" or "goodness" in being "new", aswell as now inherent "goodness" in that, which was (there is no turning back in history). At some point fascism was the new thing. At some point putting observable "abnormal" people in overcrowded prison-adjacent institutions was the new thing. At some point heroin as a medicine was the new thing. But we have to go through with it. At some point Marx was the new thing. At some point human rights was the new thing. At some point anti-bacterial medication was the new thing. At some point even the human itself was the new thing.

The end gets, of course, ideologically filled in. "Sad day for all of us.". With pleasure she points out that the old man is aware of his own, onsetting, impotence. If our imagined father was only as potent as we hoped. Now sadly we see him naked, in the mud, a human, just as us. I propose: Either we kill him or we sit down with him. Doing both at the same time will prolong what should be ended.

tl/dr: I engage in the pleasure to observe Melanie Zeller in engaging in pleasure.

elimial OP t1_jb11gdj wrote on March 5, 2023 at 4:54 PM

I appreciate the time you took with this, there are some interesting points you’ve made, and some places I disagree with.

I do have a question though, referring to this part:

> This is in contrast to Butler, who argues that there is a “true” being/self (the subject which the narratives/discourses do not represent fully) under the narratives put onto it.

Can you elaborate or point me to a reading here? My understanding of Butler’s work is of their application of speech act theory onto gender. I don’t recall this idea of “true” self being something Butler has discussed, but that could just be my ignorance.

EstablishmentRude493 t1_jb1k7zb wrote on March 5, 2023 at 6:57 PM

I'm interested what you disagree on!

You are right to question this part as it is a blindspot and weakly argued by me.

From my understand, and I have to admit, that I have read far more from Zizek than from Butler, so please be highly critical, Butler positions (in accordance with Hegel) that the process of becoming a subject means to be in contrast or accordance, with that what is found "outside" oneself, narratives, social norms, culture, political rule. The subject is subjugated. But out of this subjugation emerges resistance. The symbolic order is performed and in the performance subversive potential can be found. Symbols can be over and/or under played, like hyperfemininity (which in turn can also be under-masculinity in a dialectical relation) in drag for example. One aspect of the relationship between the subject and subjugation is desire. A certain desire is demanded from me by the symbolic order ("You are a woman so you have to desire men") but something may not meet up with this demand ("I am a woman but I desire woman. What am I then? What even is a woman?"). I want to argue that the "true self" enters through "the back" in their (Butlers) view on the subject. If the (resisting) subject becomes as it constitutes itself in relation to narratives/power/symbols by an excess, is this excess the true self? Is the performativity the true self? The subversion? A space opens up where the subject that is aware of their subjugation can only exist in relation to their subjugation. This "true self" is that which constantly challenges in subversive performative acts. The act of subverting has become the more authentic.

Note that my critique on Butler was derived with Zizek in mind, who at the end uses Lacans "Real" as an idea that there exists a point of non-sense. Butler challenges Zizeks use of the Real as ahistorical, while Zizek sees in relation to Lacans Real the possibility to act (oversimplified).

But I encourage to read Butler themselves on this, from what I know it can be found in "Subjects of Desire", "Gender Trouble", Contingency, Hegemony, Universality" and "Giving an Account of Oneself"