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Zizek Microdose - Pill Pod 23 · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:04
  Well everyone, Hello to the listeners out there. We are If you've read
• 0:11
  the title of the episode, you know what we're going to tackle today.
• 0:15
  And he's a beast. He is somewhat beastly. So we do have to
• 0:19
  establish some ground rules though, as to how many impressions, sniffs and so
• 0:24
  on and so on each of us are allowed to do for this episode,
• 0:28
  because it could get annoying. I really feel like we should be allowed a
• 0:32
  generous number of them. I would say that only one per person wants Oh
• 0:38
  well, I already used that mine. Then each person can have one tick
• 0:42
  like somebody can do on so on and so on. Another person can do
• 0:46
  the sniff. Then there can be the person like yeah, and I can
• 0:51
  grab my shirt, but no one can hear that. It'll sound like this.
• 0:56
  It's true. So this is I don't know when to release this episode,
• 1:00
  but it's very close to the same time that I'm releasing a video on
• 1:06
  Gijack's philosophy. And the reason for that was mainly that mainly for clickbait now,
• 1:15
  but I needed I needed a video of a philosopher that I already know.
• 1:19
  So I knew because I had to do it under a time crunch.
• 1:23
  But what I found looking up is that he's like canceled by a lot of
• 1:30
  people. Usually yeah, usually fancy people, people who whine about his decorum,
• 1:36
  the elites exactly. It's the fancy, the fancy leftist polyside bros that
• 1:42
  go to you know, the Ivy League schools, and now they're trying to
• 1:45
  make a media career out of it. I wonder who that is. And
• 1:48
  we need some new enemies anyway. I think we've beat the Jordan Peterson horse
• 1:53
  to death. So if we want, if we want to turn our eyed
• 1:56
  elsewhere. One thing that's uncharacteristic in some ways is that, like the four
• 1:59
  of us are all academics, and we have somewhat different backgrounds in like our
• 2:02
  focuses, but we all likejaqu which I think is maybe a little bit uncommon
• 2:07
  perhaps these days in academia. He's the king. I don't know if I
• 2:12
  would say that, but I think we all we all have fondness and he
• 2:15
  is the one who made very cool for like this generation. Yeah, that's
• 2:20
  for sure. Yeah, probably, what do you anticipate some of the criticisms
• 2:23
  of his work is well, I can actually just give you a couple of
• 2:29
  anecdotes about I have noticed him. I mean my department, in the political
• 2:34
  science department. As you mentioned, I noticed that theorists I've come across what
• 2:38
  I respect, have there been multiple instances where I've heard just disparaging, dismissive
• 2:43
  comments Ofjacques, made obviously by people who didn't bother reading him and just saw
• 2:49
  him. I heard one person refer to him kind of disparagingly. It's like,
• 2:53
  oh, yeah, I one time went to go see gjaqu in one
• 2:55
  of his comedy routines. And then and then I heard another person and who
• 3:00
  was reading my dissertation proposal where I do mention and you know, I was
• 3:05
  just good looking for feedback, not necessarily him to be on my committee,
• 3:08
  but he kind of mentioned He's like, yeah, like, you know,
• 3:10
  this is an interesting topic. But the fact that you take Gjaques seriously it
• 3:15
  means that we probably would have a lot of diametrically opposed commitments and theory.
• 3:22
  That's interesting. The fact that you take Gjack seriously implied to that person that
• 3:27
  you have all of these views that he would necessarily disagree with. Yeah,
• 3:31
  I know exactly. Like gets accused of being racist and sexist and antisemitic.
• 3:39
  Those are some of the big ones on the on the probably on the canceling
• 3:44
  side, Yeah, I mean he gets critiqued from both the left and the
• 3:46
  right. I mean it's interesting. The second professor I mentioned is probably like
• 3:51
  a classical liberal, like like they're their research is mostly on like human stuff
• 3:55
  like that, so that maybe you would characterize that as like a critique from
• 4:00
  the right maybe or right of Jujack. But it's true on the cancelation side,
• 4:03
  there is a lot of critique from the left I think as well.
• 4:06
  Yeah. I think the article that we were all dancing around is the October
• 4:11
  twenty eighteen article in Current Affairs what is Jujack For? That was written by
• 4:15
  I think he's a PhD at Oxford specialized in physics. But this article made
• 4:19
  a lot of waves because it's just lacerating. He uses Jujek of racism,
• 4:26
  obscuritism, pretty much everything under the book. I think he tried it at
• 4:30
  the end of that to also like put Jijak's arguments into formal logic points and
• 4:36
  was very frustrated that he couldn't, and then threw up his hands and said
• 4:41
  this is all bullshit. Oh yeah. It was a pretty clear article.
• 4:45
  I mean, I'd actually provoked a considerable response from Gijack, who published I
• 4:48
  think it's only two or three reply essays and philosophical salon, to which the
• 4:54
  author of this spiech responded basically reiterating his points. So there was some juicy
• 4:59
  left in fighting, certainly. Yeah, the Current Affairs has been a host
• 5:04
  of some pretty dire jy criticism. Yeah, well, I think to understand
• 5:10
  why. I mean, like, I actually like Nathan Robinson. I enjoy
• 5:13
  his writing. I think that he's wrong about this, and we can get
• 5:16
  into why. But having read a bunch of his articles on this, he
• 5:19
  thinks that the kind of like hyper academic, very referential, super theoretical approach
• 5:26
  that takes to radical advocacy is wrong. He wants things that are like more
• 5:31
  down to earth, grounded in people's material concerns as they understand them. That
• 5:34
  kind of stuff. I believe his reference to was as an embarrassing clown of
• 5:42
  the left. Yeah, something to that. But no, I don't take
• 5:46
  Nathan Robinson also said that he was smarter than Marx and that people should read
• 5:49
  him instead of reading Mark, So I don't take him seriously either. With
• 5:53
  his little feather Cap Willy Wonka routine. Well, he's a good writer.
• 5:58
  I will say I meet his suff pretty regularly on current affairs, and he's
• 6:01
  very clear, tends to be pretty empirically driven, uh and focuses on practical
• 6:09
  rather than theoretical issues. So I think this is why people that love him
• 6:12
  or they hate him. But I can certainly see why he would be hostile
• 6:15
  to Gjack since Gjack is kind of the embodiment of everything that he thinks lefts
• 6:18
  shouldn't be. I think Robert Robinson, I actually really liked his article.
• 6:24
  I remember you linked it about like, like, you know, workers' rights
• 6:29
  in the context of cancel culture, right, if your if your job is
• 6:31
  able to fire you, the problem isn't necessarily with you being canceled, but
• 6:34
  with like your employer's you know, ability to just fire you for no reason.
• 6:40
  But yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of leftists Sejack
• 6:43
  and they see that he has kind of like a weird view that isn't necessarily
• 6:46
  linked to what they would normally think of as Marxism, and I think just
• 6:49
  don't really understand him, don't take the time to actually read his philosophical points.
• 6:57
  I am irate towards these fancy fancy boy leftists, especially and probably because
• 7:03
  I'm from the Sticks, So my educational career has been able to grind out
• 7:10
  a lot of my what do you call it, the sticks, the rural
• 7:15
  tendencies, we'll call them to the regular people. But then the folks,
• 7:19
  the folks sees. But then the gate keeping suit wearing trust fund Yale,
• 7:25
  Ivy Oxbridge, whatever. When those people gatekeep me or infantilize or dismiss as
• 7:32
  a clownish, then I get my back up. See. Actually, I
• 7:38
  would tend to agree with you on this, and I'll say why I think
• 7:43
  you know, one of the interesting thing is is I think Nathan would actually
• 7:45
  turn this around and say, well, this is exactly why he doesn't like
• 7:46
  people like Jack right. Like is hard to understand unless you have a pretty
• 7:50
  firm education and you know background and critical theory and the history of like continental
• 7:56
  philosophy and so on and so forth, which is why in his mind,
• 8:00
  should be focusing on things that see you to have a more down to earth
• 8:01
  appeal, like advocating for universal health care, criticizing people on the political right
• 8:07
  who are popular authors, and so on and so forth. I actually think
• 8:09
  that there are a lot of people I know, including people with some pretty
• 8:13
  rough backgrounds, who are interested in philosophical issues and like to learn about this
• 8:16
  stuff. And so I think he's misguided and assuming that we really should just
• 8:22
  be focusing on more practical things because that's what people are interested in. Because
• 8:24
  I actually think that people are quite interested in the idea is that underlie a
• 8:28
  lot of these positions, right, And I think you can see that with
• 8:31
  somebody like Jordan Peterson's right. I mean, Jordan Peterson has a huge fan
• 8:35
  base for people from all walks of life, in part because he appeals to
• 8:39
  their interest in having an intellectual justification for their positions. And I imagine that
• 8:45
  music fulfills a similar role for those of us on the left right, and
• 8:50
  I think people are interested in knowing about that. I would agree with that,
• 8:54
  except that it's hard to know what his positions are like. You'd have
• 8:58
  to read quite a bit to even get to that point. But anyway,
• 9:01
  we have an unstructured podcast, always not unstructured, we'll say unscripted and always
• 9:07
  unscripted, and some of us have a chip on our shoulder when it comes
• 9:13
  to let's call it the sanctimonious dismissal as a hot take own when you clearly
• 9:20
  don't even have a fucking clue what you're talking about. Because as I see
• 9:22
  it, this is, in my opinion, a totally different set of circumstances
• 9:28
  than an academic disagreement like the props you were talking about earlier. This is
• 9:33
  basically a battle of images dissed. Well, well, at least for really
• 9:37
  Wonka, clout is at stake. Yeah, and yes, it's fun.
• 9:41
  Is an image celebrity, but there's also a long, not very careful,
• 9:46
  but long career of thinking supplementing that image celebrity. And to I guess,
• 9:52
  to have the gall to handwave it away could only come from someone who is
• 9:56
  pompous enough to say it would be better if marks had never been born.
• 10:00
  Oh my god, that's not an academic debate. It's a claw for clout
• 10:03
  for Willy Wonka. Well, actually, I kind of want to like be
• 10:09
  a bit harsher towards actual academics, because I will say, you know,
• 10:13
  getting into like academia, doing my PhD, being around whatever, like so
• 10:18
  called top scholars. I gotta say I find it so I found it very
• 10:22
  surprising the level to which there's you know, lazy thinking and like lazy dismissals
• 10:28
  for lazy reasons. And I think Jik is a prime example of somebody who
• 10:31
  I often hear academics, very you know, decorated academics just saying dismissive things,
• 10:37
  and I know that they haven't read them. And I guess, like
• 10:41
  I would say that the biggest I would say that, like the most valuable
• 10:46
  tool I ever learned in academia. It was when I was doing my master's
• 10:48
  and I remember my supervisor at the time. On my master's thesis, it
• 10:52
  was on Rolls and I was like very dismissive of a lot of things Rawles
• 10:56
  had to say, and he really taught me this like super valuable lesson that
• 11:00
  you know, people who who you initially don't like, when you go and
• 11:03
  read them, like if you have an attitude of charity, you're going to
• 11:05
  find that there's something interesting, that there's a reason why people like them.
• 11:09
  It's not just you know, nonsense. And I think it's a it's a
• 11:11
  it's a virtue as an academic to adopt an attitude of assuming that there's going
• 11:16
  to be something valuable. If a thinker is very popular. There's got to
• 11:20
  be a reason for it, and it's on you to do the work to
• 11:24
  find out why people like him. And I have to say it's shocking the
• 11:26
  number of, you know, high level academics who don't seem to have that
• 11:31
  virtue, which is like, actually pretty obvious when you think about it.
• 11:33
  I would be remiss if I didn't point out that that in itself is a
• 11:37
  very rollsy and kind of idea. When it comes to he states to almost
• 11:43
  exactly that point and his lectures on political philosophy that I've read right, and
• 11:48
  he would always be generous as possible when interpreting a figure. You should always
• 11:52
  assume that they're right, uh, and then if they're wrong, you know,
• 11:54
  you should try to strengthen the argument to see if you can hold water,
• 11:58
  you know, all that kind of stuff. But I agree there's some
• 12:01
  Snellth reflexivity, and I appreciate it. But I'm from I'm from the farm,
• 12:05
  and I fucking hate smugness. I mean, also from an academic perspective,
• 12:11
  like I'm at the I'm in I'm in the same sort of stage too,
• 12:16
  building a building a dissertation around a bibliography and trying to come up with
• 12:22
  a reading list, Like, I can't imagine the sorts of reading lists that
• 12:26
  Jijack would be a figure on when like, you get your committee together and
• 12:35
  you present them with your proposal. I mean, you've already done your comprehensive
• 12:39
  exams, I guess, and you have this reading list. Like, what
• 12:41
  role does Gjack play on the reading list? First of all? Like if
• 12:45
  we're saying he often repeats himself and writes the same book over and over again,
• 12:48
  Okay, so which book do you put on there? And then what's
• 12:50
  his role on your reading list? Is Gijak just going to be a foil
• 12:54
  for your own interpretation of Marx or a foil for your own interpretation of Hag
• 13:00
  or Lacan or whatever, Like I can't see him contributing to a a I
• 13:05
  guess, a comprehensive exam list or a bibliography. Yeah, for a monograph
• 13:11
  that you have to present to get your PhD, especially in a in a
• 13:16
  in an environment where you might expect your supervisor your committee members to already be
• 13:20
  hostile towards Gijk's ideas. You can't put him on there as anything more than
• 13:26
  a foil or somebody to just contrast your ideas with but not take seriously,
• 13:31
  not take seriously in like an academic sense of the points you're going to make,
• 13:35
  not dismissal, but right. I was. I was reading Less than
• 13:39
  Nothing, like for this video are we reading? And he quotes Wikipedia?
• 13:46
  I think, oh, I don't remember exactly it was like the I think
• 13:52
  it was the Wikipedia article of a movie, so you know, hopefully he's
• 13:56
  seen it, but we don't know. But I was in the wick be
• 14:00
  An article and he was like, there must have been a reason for I
• 14:01
  don't think he's just doing it for real, No, I think less than
• 14:05
  If you need one book that has all of Jijak in it, it's probably
• 14:09
  that one. I would say that, yeah, definitely as magnum opus at
• 14:11
  this point. But like I think, just speaking to Eric's point, I
• 14:13
  think one of the reasons why people are a little bit reticent to accept him
• 14:18
  as a serious academic is precisely because his work is so transdisciplinary. Right,
• 14:22
  I mean take less than Nothing, right, I mean formally, the book
• 14:26
  is supposed to be about synthesizing Hagel and McCom, which is an eminently academic
• 14:31
  task that anybody could like recognize, right, But at the same time,
• 14:35
  the book touches on everything from politics and history and then has a huge chapter
• 14:39
  on quantum theory, which is really controversial, right since a lot of people
• 14:43
  are like, what are you doing talking about this and virtual reality porn?
• 14:48
  Yeah? Exactly, Well, yeah, of course, I mean with Gjack,
• 14:50
  porn as a kind of a must, right. But I think there
• 14:52
  are people who are reluctant to say that there's still a place with that kind
• 14:56
  of systematic philosophizing, perscially because they'll say, well, you know, the
• 15:03
  disciplines are separate for a reason, and it takes a long time become skilled
• 15:05
  and adapt and actually understanding the kind of technical implications of this that scientific theory.
• 15:11
  So you're probably better off just not engaging with that, you know what
• 15:13
  I mean. My thought really doesn't derive from his work, or a judgment
• 15:20
  of this work. I think to be interesting, or to make philosophy and
• 15:24
  theory interesting, you have to be a bit of a provocateur, and he
• 15:30
  fills that role exactly perfectly. So to that end, I'll transition to our
• 15:35
  second part of our structure here, and that is to ask what is philosophy
• 15:41
  for? According to you, guys, I don't know if you know what
• 15:46
  he says, but it's in a I think parallax view. He pretty much
• 15:52
  states philosophy is to articulate problems well, which is quite different from someone like
• 16:00
  deluz or bad Like for deli'z, philosophy is about creating concepts. So it's
• 16:07
  meant to be a productive enterprise. And another reason that has chastised often is
• 16:12
  for not being productive, Like what am I supposed to do with this?
• 16:15
  How does this benefit the left cause? But according to himself, that's not
• 16:21
  what philosophy is for, and that's not what he's doing as an author.
• 16:25
  So I don't know, sound off what you guys think philosophy is for,
• 16:29
  and then maybe we can find out what is jijik for thanks to current affairs?
• 16:34
  Well, I remember him talking about that somewhere in one of his talks.
• 16:38
  You know, he described he describes philosophy as I think he even said,
• 16:41
  it's a very modest task, right, It's not going to solve some
• 16:47
  huge things. It's just like you have to get clear on what the issues
• 16:49
  are. What are the philosophical puzzles? State the question better? You know,
• 16:53
  like what is like what is reality? I don't know the philosopher's job
• 16:57
  should be to, you know, irrogate the question, but not necessarily expect
• 17:02
  to find a solution to that question, but like get clear on what we
• 17:04
  even mean. And I think I think that that's right. I mean,
• 17:07
  I think I think philosophy I agree with that definition. I do think philosophy
• 17:12
  is just about is for asking those kinds of fundamental questions and trying to get
• 17:18
  clarity on them and trying to state them in a clear way. Like but
• 17:22
  I suppose I would say, like, you know, you'd hope you might
• 17:23
  get some sort of answers from it. But I think it's true that that
• 17:29
  at least for those answers to be anything worth anything at all. I think
• 17:36
  Jack's answer is important and correct that you have to get clear on what the
• 17:40
  problem is before you before your answer is going to be worth anything at all.
• 17:44
  And it's true that most of the time, in reality, philosophy is
• 17:48
  and probably good philosophy would be preoccupied with getting clear on what the question is.
• 17:53
  I think. And definitional, yeah, I think I don't know if
• 17:59
  I could give it like a definite answer, but I mean that kind of
• 18:03
  definition of like clarifying issues like I mentioned like in the in the Michael Brooks
• 18:10
  tributes that are going on right now, and when Cornell West and Gijk we're
• 18:15
  on, they pretty much agreed on the same sort of thing, right Like
• 18:18
  the role of philosophy is to clarify questions for people so that they can understand
• 18:25
  or engage more effectively with issues. But I mean that also has the sort
• 18:30
  of lingering idea of like the professionalization and institutionalization of philosophy, that it's going
• 18:37
  to produce people who are public intellectuals who have a relatively one way relationship with
• 18:44
  their audience, right Like, they're talking to them, but they don't get
• 18:47
  talked back to very much, So they have a pedestal and they have a
• 18:49
  voice. And so in that situation when you're a public intellectual, yes,
• 18:55
  you can clarify problems or what you think are problems for people. But I
• 19:00
  think, like from seeing the way that fans react to this sort of material,
• 19:03
  like podcast fans, fans of theory, these people are not interested solely
• 19:10
  in like, oh, there's problems in society, what do I do?
• 19:12
  I'm going to turn to podcasting, Like they themselves are looking for a more
• 19:17
  therapeutic effect of philosophy on themselves in their lives. Right, Like, people
• 19:22
  tend to like this sort of stuff because they think it not clarifies issues that
• 19:29
  we have to engage with in more effective ways, but that it seems to
• 19:33
  bring i don't know, things in their personal experience with the world into more
• 19:38
  relief. So it has a more, I guess I'm saying, as a
• 19:41
  more therapeutic than a sort of social justice kind of effect on a lot of
• 19:45
  people. And those are the sorts of people who are not doing philosophy as
• 19:49
  a profession. They're not public intellectuals, they don't have a large audience with
• 19:53
  which they have like sort of a one way communication relationship with. They are
• 19:59
  listening to this stuff and reading this stuff because they think it clarifies things about
• 20:03
  life and meaning and purpose, and so again, yeah, they're more of
• 20:08
  a therapeutic effect, and that's not I guess maybe totally the answer, but
• 20:15
  that's something that I'm thinking about. I pray with somewhat differently, although I
• 20:18
  think that like Victor and Eric bathin On, like key aspects of his thought
• 20:22
  are certainly there. I see his music, at least in my interpretation,
• 20:26
  as performing a kind of denaturalizing unmasking of our interpretation of the world, and
• 20:33
  he articulates this very well through a number of different metaphors, where he says,
• 20:37
  one of the problems with classical theories of ideology, for example, is
• 20:41
  that we assume that ideology is just about taking off our glasses to see the
• 20:45
  way the world really is, right, when actually we have to recognize that
• 20:49
  the way that we see the world is indeuibly stamped with ideology, right,
• 20:55
  and various different naturalized ways of thinking about things. And so this is why
• 21:00
  a philosophy has in some sense an ending task, because its goal isn't to
• 21:04
  try to tell you how the world really is. It's merely to kind of
• 21:08
  break down or deconstruct or dialectically implode the various, differently overdetermined way the various
• 21:17
  different overdetermined ways that we try to conceive of reality and give it a kind
• 21:22
  of solidity and naturalness that isn't actually there. And you find this also when
• 21:27
  he talks about his own ontological preferences right, where he says, virtually every
• 21:33
  kind of ontologist who's ever written on the subject assumes that reality has to be
• 21:37
  complete, perfect and whole, right, whereas I'm saying, actually that reality
• 21:44
  is a lot more like a Pokemon game, which is one of my favorite
• 21:47
  metaphors he gives, right, because you know, in a Pokegon game,
• 21:49
  you're wandering around and you assume that there has to be something outside of the
• 21:53
  forest that you're currently trapped in, when really there's nothing outside of the forest,
• 21:59
  right, because nobody ASTs bothered to put anything there. And the reason
• 22:02
  why he interprets this ontologically is he says, I see reality as being fundamentally
• 22:07
  some kind of catastrophe. Right. It's incompletated, it's driven with mistakes,
• 22:11
  it has deep problems within it, and most of the history of Western philosophy
• 22:15
  has been some effort to try to explain away this incompleteness of the world by
• 22:19
  suggesting that it has a law like character, or there's some kind of imminent
• 22:25
  t los to existence that we should all be beholden two and so on and
• 22:29
  so on. It is. It is definitely about this unmasking, and I
• 22:33
  think that's one of the draws of like public intellectuals as opposed to academic intellectuals.
• 22:41
  But I think it's a product of this probably like celebrity culture, that
• 22:45
  we feel like you have to produce something that's going to be effective. What
• 22:51
  are you doing for the cause and whatever. But yeah, my interest in
• 22:56
  philosophy has nothing to do with that. It's more like, I guess,
• 23:00
  a ritual like religion without religion. Almost it's a way to see coherences,
• 23:07
  to produce coherences, but really to feel less alone in the world. And
• 23:12
  I know that sounds kind of like soy to say, but but when you
• 23:17
  when you read someone that is articulating the thing that you are trying to get
• 23:23
  a grip on. That's really the reason that I think philosophy is important and
• 23:29
  and Jijak definitely is one of the Like his objects are cultural objects. It's
• 23:36
  it's Starbucks, it's porn, it's the Batman movie, it's Titanic. And
• 23:41
  this is like the if if you learn to I think people wish I mean,
• 23:47
  I wish that I was able to see as much as he sees in
• 23:51
  every little object. And that's kind of why I admire him. Yeah,
• 23:56
  no, I I agree with that a lot. I think what's what's interesting
• 24:02
  about Jijik and the way he's taken up or his critique too, is I
• 24:06
  think people see him uh you know, commenting on the cultural realm, on
• 24:11
  the political realm, and he does it in a kind of like irreverent,
• 24:15
  amusing way, and then he calls himself a Marxist, so then like Marxist
• 24:19
  who are more practical, well like, but he'll say things that the same
• 24:22
  contrary Marxism, and he'll be like kind of a buffoon, and they wan't
• 24:26
  understood, but they don't. But all these people don't actually go bother read
• 24:29
  it, to read what his philosophical core is, which is I think the
• 24:33
  platform with which he then makes the comments he makes about culture at about politics.
• 24:40
  Like so they just see like the comments he's making and the humor and
• 24:42
  the irreverence, but a lot of the time and then they also see that
• 24:47
  he's not being loyal to some Marxist vision of Praxis, but they don't actually
• 24:52
  bother to do the work. And then I think his irreverence that he doesn't
• 24:56
  act like a normal academic puts a another puts a brighter target on his back.
• 25:03
  I think. And there's an example of this that I can give real
• 25:07
  quick is the political correctness thing. Because he's against political correctness. People are
• 25:12
  upset that he's against political correctness. Because you know, you don't care about
• 25:18
  the people of color or whatever. But his reason for being against political correctness
• 25:23
  is very specifically Lacanian, because lacan has this sort of dialectic too, where
• 25:30
  you have these encounters or ruptures from a negative and it kind of collapses your
• 25:37
  system, but then you have to rebuild around or you have to rebuild a
• 25:41
  symbolic and the symbolic is where you find all these codes and then you get
• 25:45
  something called a master signifier, which Lacon calls it. And he just sees
• 25:51
  political correctness as being the opposite of amounts of emancipation because you rebuild basically a
• 25:57
  speech code. And so there's a reason for why he says, I don't
• 26:02
  like political correctness because it's against his project, which is ultimately to like annihilate
• 26:06
  the subject or bring subjective destitution. So, uh, yeah, it's inflammatory,
• 26:12
  but like you said, it's grounded somewhere. It's not like he's just
• 26:15
  being reactionary. And you can't you can't make me call trans students by their
• 26:21
  preferred pronoun and like Peterson as he's giving reasons, but yeah, exactly,
• 26:26
  and like do you think that his I'm curious what you want you guys all
• 26:29
  think because the humor aspect, Like, I think this is one of the
• 26:33
  things that makes that makes Jujek unique, right that he and I wonder,
• 26:37
  like I've I've I've often wondered, like, you know, I think that
• 26:41
  his phil his philosophical insights. You know, I do see him in a
• 26:45
  lot of ways as a philosopher of like the fallible human animal. Like like
• 26:52
  he's very focused on like how fallible we are. Like that's you know,
• 26:55
  because a lot of his his his interest is exploring like the disconnection and the
• 27:00
  nothingness that's at the core of us, you know, the way we try
• 27:03
  to cover it over with our desire and all these things. You know that
• 27:07
  this futil this futile kind of dialectic of desire that we're all in. And
• 27:12
  I think there's a humor to that, you know, I think there's a
• 27:15
  connection that he sees, he sees the absurdity and you know that things should
• 27:21
  be laughed at. I mean, some of it, I'm sure is just
• 27:22
  a personal like like a kind of personal character trait that he has that he
• 27:26
  likes humor. But I do think it's compatible with his philosophy. But I
• 27:30
  think I've said it before on it maybe on a different episode, or maybe
• 27:33
  it was off the air, but you know that I do think this this
• 27:37
  kind of collides with what I often see many academics as having a personality type
• 27:42
  that is kind of like an ascetic ideal. There is very much a kind
• 27:45
  of asceticism with academics. There's a seriousness, there's a smugness with many of
• 27:49
  them. There's like this care that we have to be careful about everything we're
• 27:53
  saying, and we have to be precise. And I Thinkjak's kind of like,
• 27:56
  well, look at all the you know, chaos that's inside of our
• 28:00
  subjectivity already, like this this trying to be precise, Like what are you
• 28:03
  doing? Why are you wasting your time? Like you got to laugh and
• 28:06
  you've got to just say what's on your mind? Like why are we pretending
• 28:10
  that there's this you know, this tranquility or this this what's the word stability?
• 28:15
  I remember the movie Life. He literally went like his segment like you
• 28:18
  has anybody seen the movie Examined Life? The documentary? Yeah, good one
• 28:22
  it is. He's got a ten minute segment on there exactly. But like
• 28:25
  almost every other academic is in some like hyperformal setting, like Martha Nosbaum is
• 28:29
  like walking along the water I think. I was like, uh yeah,
• 28:33
  Michael Hart is like literally rolling in the middle of Central Park and Jesu just
• 28:37
  goes into a dumb through the trash, like he finds a porn magazine and
• 28:42
  he's like, you call this porn double fisting hot dogs. I was watching
• 28:49
  it with my room ahead at the time, and he's like, man,
• 28:52
  if you didn't know any better, like knew who jesuic was, you think
• 28:55
  he was just like some homeless guy like literally rummaging through the crack, like
• 28:57
  beating him off to like scarreded porn or something like that. But just to
• 29:03
  like your point, Victor n pills that he has a really good joke that
• 29:07
  always I think testifies, I think to the kind of analytical power behind your
• 29:11
  humor, because he uses this to make a point against political correctness, which
• 29:15
  is what we were talking about before, where he says, what's the worst
• 29:18
  hell you can put a child through? It's telling your kid you have to
• 29:22
  go to grandma's house, right, because the kid doesn't want to go to
• 29:25
  grandma's house. You'd rather stay at home playing his PS three PS four,
• 29:29
  PS five right, and he says, in classical understands, the authority,
• 29:36
  the patriarchal figure would just say you have to go to grandma's house. There's
• 29:40
  no ifn or butts about it. And this is obviously bad. But on
• 29:45
  the other hand, you know, at least authority was avert. You could
• 29:48
  know who the oppressor was and you could try to resist it that way.
• 29:51
  And he so probably with this new political correct politically correct funds authoritarianism is they
• 29:56
  work subversively to change your subjectivity. So the examp Belie is is rather than
• 30:00
  your dad just saying you have to go to grandma's, your dad will sit
• 30:03
  there and be like, of course, it's up to you whether you want
• 30:06
  to go to see grandmother or a grandma or not. But you do know
• 30:08
  that your grandmother is very sick and very old and she misses you, so
• 30:11
  do whatever it does you want. And Jesus is like this as well.
• 30:15
  The true horror comes in because you are expected now not to just go to
• 30:19
  Grandmas. But you want to go to Grandmas. You have to desire it
• 30:25
  and you know and he says, this is the kind of attitude that you
• 30:26
  see what political correctly is right, This is a much more radical form of
• 30:32
  coalision. I claim it's a much more authoritarian It's like a covert authoritarianism,
• 30:37
  because it doesn't just prescribe your action, but it prescribes your subjective state.
• 30:41
  You have to desire, you have to want exactly. It's a it's a
• 30:44
  kind of melodrama thing he does, but it's it's always it's consistent with the
• 30:48
  point he wants to make, but it's still kind of melodramatic, and that's
• 30:52
  what I love. The other thing with these jokes is that they stick in
• 30:56
  your head. They really make they make theory matter, and they make theory
• 31:02
  not boring, which is pretty much the only goal of my life at this
• 31:04
  point, a little more accessible than it might have been before, because like,
• 31:10
  his big thing is to be a popularizer of Lacan, who is one
• 31:12
  of the most difficult writers you could possibly read. Yeah, jokes, Yeah
• 31:18
  they are, I'm holding up that book. Yeah they're helpful. They're helpful,
• 31:22
  and they make it like I love his sensibilities with those things, like
• 31:26
  it's great exactly, And whenever I think about that joke, I'm just reminded
• 31:30
  of like any relation, bad relationship I've been in, where like the girl
• 31:33
  sits there and it's like, no, I know that you're doing what I
• 31:36
  asked you to do, but that's not enough. I need you to want
• 31:37
  to do what I asked you to do right. And just like the sheer
• 31:41
  feeling of impression that comes right, it's like a no Fear philosophy book come
• 31:45
  to life. He's just funny. He plays with concepts, he plays with
• 31:49
  ideas, and he's he's not shameless, but he's He's irrepressibly funny in situations
• 31:57
  where he shouldn't be. But it's fine because you know, seriousness and comedy
• 32:04
  are always like so close to each other. I find that I have a
• 32:07
  sensibility where I love comedy more than drama or anything else. That's why Jijak
• 32:13
  appeals to me quite a bit in his mannerisms as a way of doing philosophy.
• 32:17
  Even if I don't agree with everything he says, I don't like I
• 32:21
  could go on this philosophical level. I don't agree with him, but otherwise,
• 32:25
  like his delivery and his overall politics and project is like, I'm fine
• 32:30
  with it. I have no problem with it, but I think it's really
• 32:34
  useful though. I mean, like I was trying to explain ideology to a
• 32:37
  bunch of students, right, And I played them this video where talking about
• 32:39
  coke, and he's like, you not to remember that the slogan of Coca
• 32:44
  Cola back in the nineteen eighties was just this is it. Here we see
• 32:49
  ideology at its purest, right, Well, this signifier album the cooke in
• 32:53
  and of itself, because it's almost a transcendental kind of quality where you invested
• 33:00
  with all of your desires and it is literally the be all and end all
• 33:05
  of existence. And like they were watching that, They're like, I never
• 33:07
  realized a commercial had so much evolved in it, And I'm like, fucking
• 33:10
  neither did I. But I'm never gonna look at a Coca Cola the same
• 33:14
  way again. And it does do a really good job of showing you how
• 33:16
  not to use Paul's term. You know, the symbolism of ideology and it's
• 33:21
  kind of determinacy is saturated through the life world. Right, that was a
• 33:27
  good Halloween German Ji costume voice. Yeah, was it supposed to be ination
• 33:36
  like a Looney Tunes freud. I don't think we can get canceled for this
• 33:40
  though, because it's anyway, well not to be the authoritarian father. But
• 33:46
  would you all like to move into the section where we talk about his philosophy?
• 33:52
  Sure? Yeah, I mean I was actually gonna say, like why
• 33:55
  I find him useful for my own work, like his philosophical insights. I
• 34:00
  think that fits in this section. Yeah, okay, Well if you want
• 34:05
  to figure out how to do this, because I my video is going to
• 34:07
  exp why don't I summarize what my video is going to explain? Yeah,
• 34:10
  okay, do that people, I've already probably seen that. But yeah,
• 34:14
  we can like take off from there so we don't repeat. Yes, I
• 34:17
  mean, you start with Hegel, and the important part of Hegel is the
• 34:21
  dialectic and sublation or alfai bong the special word, where over there's an overcoming
• 34:29
  and in this progress, there's always a development. So you're trying to develop.
• 34:35
  For Hegel, it's like history develops, the concept of freedom develops,
• 34:39
  and that and you want to be more self determining because that's what freedom is.
• 34:45
  But the problem with this development that's always going forward presumably. I mean
• 34:52
  that's kind of bad Heglienism to say that, because it doesn't always go forward.
• 34:57
  But you know, there's a movement, a progressive direction and the reason
• 35:01
  that doesn't work all the time for Jujak is what Matt was talking about earlier.
• 35:07
  Lacan this like whole oh no, sorry, is victor the whole in
• 35:10
  subjectivity and all the contradictions in subjectivity where we're just desiring endlessly, So desire
• 35:19
  never has an end and there's no free will in Lacan. There's no like
• 35:22
  free will argument that could be made based on Laketian philosophy because you're just stuck
• 35:27
  forever rebuilding the symbolic desiring forever. Sad boohoo. I was going to say
• 35:34
  that if we are going to be talking about desire and repressed desire especially,
• 35:37
  this is where I'm going to start hitting on Eric. It doesn't feel very
• 35:44
  it doesn't feel very repressed to me. Can't help it. We're bringing we're
• 35:47
  being brought out of ourselves juissance exactly. I mean beyond the limits. All
• 35:53
  right, So that was stage one and stage two, But then you need
• 35:59
  to return to you're gonna use Lacan's what's called the uh oh, what's it
• 36:05
  called the excess of desire or the lack of the lack the less than nothing
• 36:08
  thing. There's a little interminable excess oh there you go. That's it.
• 36:14
  Now, based on this, you refuse to be yourself like Christ did on
• 36:21
  the cross. You're abandoned by God. There's nothing left except that one little
• 36:24
  bit that is you, which is the nothing of a nothing, and you
• 36:28
  can use that as your freedom to push into an uninhibited new Hegelian land of
• 36:37
  like a new alphae Bung. But you're kind of outside of history, and
• 36:40
  of course this gunment this comes along with all of the sorry I said,
• 36:45
  you're outside of history, you're not determined by history, You're self determined at
• 36:50
  that point. And then you just toss in all the Marxist stuff we know,
• 36:53
  commodity, fetishism, ideology obviously an updated Altwoser version of ideology, and
• 37:01
  then we can have like an egalitarian future with destroyed subjects that see themselves as
• 37:07
  self determining and free instead of, as you know, stuck in these loops.
• 37:13
  Does he actually think that that's but does does he actually think that it's
• 37:15
  possible to overcome that or just momentarily maybe I think to be consistent, they
• 37:22
  would be moments of freedom, but the communist aspect of it, or the
• 37:27
  egalitarian class list society is kind of the driving force behind why we would want
• 37:34
  to become free subjects, so capitalism obviously has to go. He does sometimes
• 37:38
  imply that love can provide that kind of not ultimate and un ending, but
• 37:43
  like at least quasi permanent reconciliation right where he says that the thing about real
• 37:49
  love is that false love, the kind of love that you see, you
• 37:52
  know, prevalent in the capitalist society, is one where you value other individuals
• 37:58
  as objects, so you only really value them insofar as they gratify your desire,
• 38:02
  whereas true love, of course, comes from recognizing this other person as
• 38:07
  somebody who has fundamental flaws and not loving them in spite of but a part
• 38:09
  because of their flaws. So their flaws are determinative. Right. And when
• 38:14
  you get kind of recognition from another person, right who says, I don't
• 38:17
  just love you in spite of your flaws, but because of your flaws,
• 38:20
  because that's what you are, it provides that sense of completion and fulfillment that
• 38:23
  we can't get. And I imagine his perception of communism is meant to politicize
• 38:29
  this, right, Yeah, in terms of universal kind of love and recognizing
• 38:32
  think, I think that's I think that's consistent with what I see as like
• 38:37
  the Ju's main point, which is just like really dwelling in, as I
• 38:40
  said before, the fallibilism of the human animal. And I think, like
• 38:44
  that's that makes sense to me, because like you're loving another human because you're
• 38:47
  you're cognizant of all the flaws and the way we're constantly being tempted to like
• 38:52
  to lie to ourselves, to build these imaginary symbolic structures that try to try
• 38:57
  to reach some kind of you know, shiny, like smooth wholeness to give
• 39:02
  us that. But like we're always we're always falling into this kind of conception
• 39:07
  in our mind that is making it feel like we've achieved this wholeness. But
• 39:13
  I think I always I've always read Gijaka is saying that it's like impossible to
• 39:15
  get away from that, that that like you know, you can have moments
• 39:19
  maybe but like you know that like love is just a momentary, like like
• 39:23
  really recognizing you know that those real moments of love is kind of in those
• 39:28
  moments, not of not when you have this you know, like transcendent feeling
• 39:35
  of that is like kind of intoxicating, but maybe it's actually in those moments
• 39:38
  you know, of seeing the flaws of like the crisis, but then you
• 39:42
  still love in spite of all that, because like that's the rupture in your
• 39:45
  fantasy of you know this person, but yet you still love even though you've
• 39:50
  been exposed to the horror underneath it, but you still love, Right,
• 39:52
  So that's the moment. So it's not so I would just hesitate like or
• 39:57
  pushback against any sort of conception that makes it seem like it's something that resembles
• 40:01
  like smooth, you know, harmony or something like that. It's really not.
• 40:05
  It's really like the moment of it's being confronted with the horror and then
• 40:07
  still kind of going beyond even gives us a nice materialist twist where he says,
• 40:13
  like, this is one of the reasons why you see so many people
• 40:15
  who don't actually genuinely love one another, right, And it's precisely because they
• 40:20
  de materialize in the individual they're supposed to be in a relationship with, and
• 40:23
  then they're horrified when they found out that that individual has a body with all
• 40:27
  the things who associate with. And this is also kind of a testament to
• 40:30
  like why the kind of jokes that he makes are funny, right, because
• 40:32
  he likes to make like shit jokes and sweat jokes and sex jokes, right,
• 40:37
  but all these re emphasize the fact that we're embodied beings, right that
• 40:43
  with bodies that have all kinds of flaws and disgusting features and abderralities and stuff,
• 40:49
  and being loved in part for having that is what provides us with a
• 40:52
  sense of security and completion. Right. So, really, you know,
• 40:55
  and this is what I think, this is pretty common sensical, right.
• 40:59
  I mean, it's why you tend to care for somebody more when you know
• 41:02
  they carry you home because you're drunk, or you know they forgive you for
• 41:08
  farting really loud in public or whatever it happens to be, because you know
• 41:12
  they kind of acknowledge that you have a body and that it has its laws
• 41:15
  and that you have your weaknesses, and it's they care about you regardless.
• 41:19
  Right where It's exactly like like you see dissociated from the body and try to
• 41:22
  have this ideal image of what we are dissociated for the moment, right,
• 41:27
  Yeah, I think I think that a Jiujekian view of love would would would
• 41:30
  say that you know, all these conventional ideas of like why we love somebody,
• 41:34
  you know, like all these idealizations like that's really just a house of
• 41:37
  cards that you're standing on, Like that's not the thing. Those aren't the
• 41:39
  really the things that are going to be like love. Yeah, I'll just
• 41:43
  give an example from a buddy of mine once where he said that he can't
• 41:47
  He went walked in once and he saw his girlfriend taking a shit, and
• 41:52
  he said, like, I thought about it for days afterwards, and it
• 41:54
  just profoundly bothered me because like I knew that she must do that, but
• 41:58
  like seeing it happen really really bothered me. And I was like, well,
• 42:01
  you know this is true love now, right, like you share it
• 42:04
  like in the intimate processes, and yeah, now you can love her for
• 42:08
  now. You can lever her for who she is, you know, detranscendentalized
• 42:13
  as it were, as material being, you know, exactly exactly. I
• 42:15
  mean. This is for me why I find Jack so important, and like
• 42:19
  you know, maybe just this is connected to just my love of la Canian
• 42:22
  thought in general, but I think is very useful for this is just for
• 42:25
  me, Like my my interest is you know, political, I'm in a
• 42:28
  political theory department, and like for me, my my interest is about you
• 42:32
  know what, like is kind of trying to clarify the question what does it
• 42:36
  mean to be emancipated, what does it mean to be democratic? Or whatever?
• 42:38
  And I find Jaques useful for you know, really dwelling on the fallibility,
• 42:43
  and I guess I find a lot of I find one of the things
• 42:46
  I find frustrating and unconvincing and democratic theories that come from the continental tradition is
• 42:52
  they will often take continental insights that kind of unravel like the myth of progress
• 42:59
  that they make things contingent, so therefore, if everything's contingent, then anything's
• 43:01
  possible. But I always feel like there's another move that needs to be made,
• 43:05
  which is to recognize the fallibility and like the weakness and the and like
• 43:09
  the reason why, you know, we should try to limit our expectations of
• 43:14
  the everything is possible because other things are contingent. And I THINKCK is useful
• 43:19
  for thinking about something like, you know, like how likely is it that
• 43:22
  we're going to you know, develop as you know, democratic citizens who all
• 43:28
  want to like work together and deliberate on things, you know, and like
• 43:30
  see each other for you know, a valuable other citizen. Right, this
• 43:35
  is all to me really unconvincing stuff, and I feel like you need someone
• 43:38
  like Gijck to is useful politically for thinking about that those kinds of points of
• 43:44
  fallibility and the way these kind of democratic dreams can be a bit fantasmical.
• 43:49
  And maybe that's also why Jijack comes into conflict with other Marxists, perhaps because
• 43:54
  there is this other aspect of him is very much about desacrilezing, I think
• 44:00
  exactly deft, like destroying the fantasy, destroying, denobilizing. And that's like
• 44:06
  again, I mean, I don't want to hate on political correctness, but
• 44:08
  because we already use the example, that's the thing that's like compelling love,
• 44:14
  but doing it through coercion, through a threat of punishment versus a law,
• 44:19
  so that or or you just feel like you're gonna guilt someone into doing it,
• 44:22
  because when you're guilting someone, then you're using their psyche against them and
• 44:24
  their whole you know, father apparatus. So the idea is, if we
• 44:29
  could get rid of all of all coercion, of all types, all ideology,
• 44:34
  all fantasy, then it would take a brutal honesty. But that's the
• 44:38
  only way to you know, resurrect ourselves in a christological metaphor. Yeah,
• 44:44
  it obviously makes them different from other people who use psychoanalysis too, because obviously,
• 44:50
  like sexuality and love and desire is very central to like psychoanalysis Freud and
• 44:58
  Lucan. But what make them different is what what Pills was saying too,
• 45:01
  is that he's not he's not using this to sort of sacrileze like when when
• 45:07
  when Jordan Peterson brings up sex and love and marriage, it's usually to the
• 45:12
  sacred union of the nuclear family, and it's not. It's not he's not
• 45:15
  using it to poke fun and he's definitely not using it all to make these
• 45:20
  like larger philosophical points like those are the things that we need to justify in
• 45:23
  his world, whereas like Jijk's ideas is like, oh, the female orgasm
• 45:30
  is the new version of the ontological proof of God, he says, And
• 45:35
  he says, instead of dismissing this, let's undermine it from the inside.
• 45:40
  Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of moves that Jack likes to
• 45:43
  make, like reversing things right. And I think, you know, if
• 45:45
  we could also you know, use the term nobling ignoble, like there's a
• 45:51
  temptation to want to not like make things like the family and love and you
• 45:54
  know, establish them as these noble ideals. And he's obviously trying to undermine
• 45:59
  that. But beyond undermining that, I think what he's trying to identify with
• 46:01
  his comments about love and all these other things is that the very nobility of
• 46:05
  those ideas actually lies in the core of their ignoble aspects. Like so you
• 46:09
  locate like true love right in a sense in like the most ignoble instances,
• 46:15
  the things that are most embarrassing, the most the points that are most crisis
• 46:20
  laden and most you know, embarrassing and are and are revealing the flaws and
• 46:24
  and fallibilities of the human being. You know, that's the location. So
• 46:29
  it's like reversing it. And really the ignoble exists in all this fantasy and
• 46:34
  and you know, like imaginary symbolic structure that we try to overlay all of
• 46:37
  those things on. That's where the ignoble, I think lies for him.
• 46:39
  Maybe this is why he is so hated by the professional opinion havers, because
• 46:45
  they it exposes to them their own humanity in a way that they find revolting.
• 46:52
  With their little fact with their feather caps, they can't be self serious
• 46:59
  I think applies to his interpretation of reality itself though, because I mean,
• 47:04
  you see a lot of these affinities in the ways he thinks about human sercrativity,
• 47:07
  in the way he thinks about nature predictably, since he's a Gellian,
• 47:10
  right, because he says, think about the way that most of us have
• 47:13
  tried to perceive nature. It's almost always been in this highly reactionary way where
• 47:16
  we say that nature is perfect. Right, Nature is harmonious, Nature is
• 47:21
  teleological, and it's aps we need to say. Nature is basically conceived of,
• 47:27
  created by, and ordered by God, which makes it a divine creation
• 47:30
  and the only reason why anything bad happens because human kind fucks it up.
• 47:35
  Right, it's our fault. It's like a Rousseau type view exactly. And
• 47:38
  Jesus, I think it is actually kind of refreshing by saying, you know,
• 47:42
  no, what does he say, like nature is a catastrophe? Right?
• 47:45
  You know, nature has kind of all all kinds of weird idiosyncrasies and
• 47:49
  destructive of tendencies. It's not sacred at all, and so we shouldn't be
• 47:54
  all that surprise when sometimes bad things happen and just look, yeah, well,
• 48:00
  I mean This goes back to an episode we did on conspiracy theories,
• 48:01
  right, because he says, when you buy into this reactionary vision of nature
• 48:06
  and the world is harmonious except when interfered with bio human activity, you're very
• 48:09
  prone to thinking in conspiratorial terms by saying, Wow, something bad happened.
• 48:15
  It can't be because nature is a fault, or it can't be because sometimes
• 48:17
  shit just happens. It has to because somebody is responsible for it, right,
• 48:22
  somebody disrupted the perfect perme whereas music is kind of refreshing by saying no,
• 48:25
  sometimes catastrophe just occurs, because in a lot of ways, nature is
• 48:30
  catastrophe. Right. And this kind of connects to his whole critique of New
• 48:35
  Agism and Western Buddhism as he likes to call it, because we present these
• 48:39
  things as like false, false, re sacrilizing, try to re enchant the
• 48:46
  world, but doing it on like very shaky grounds like the Buddhism or whatever
• 48:52
  Western Buddhism that we have is basically colonial, a colonial product taken from these
• 49:00
  places where they wanted to make their religion seem more appealing so that the Christians
• 49:04
  wouldn't just like wipe them out. So they said, no, it's about
• 49:07
  nature. It's not really a religion. It's just like a way of life.
• 49:10
  When no, it's like it is a religion. It's a religion here,
• 49:15
  here, here, and here. And then he tells this story about
• 49:17
  the Japanese Buddhist monks that justify war crimes in World War Two, saying like,
• 49:24
  no, it's not actually you killing them because it's the bullet, the
• 49:28
  bullets flying through the air. It enters their skin, but it's not actually
• 49:32
  murdering anybody, because this is just a natural process of material interacting. Yeah,
• 49:37
  I do think there's some room to criticize him on this point, and
• 49:40
  I imagine Eric would want you though, because he's sometimes critical of the environmental
• 49:45
  movement on this basis by saying that absolutely we should care for the environment da
• 49:51
  da, but primarily for anthropocentric reasons, right that you know, we need
• 49:53
  to care for the environment because it is material that will need in the future.
• 49:59
  But we should at all points resist the temptation to resacralize nature and say
• 50:04
  that, well, nature was harmonious and my chure was healthy, and the
• 50:07
  only problem is humanity has come in here and kind of disrupted that with its
• 50:12
  solution and so on and so forth. And the example he usually is to
• 50:15
  criticize environmentalist is the creation of oil, right where it says, you know,
• 50:20
  eight hundred million years ago oil was created basically because the planet exploded into
• 50:23
  a new volcanic age and billions and billions of species died and then their remains
• 50:29
  were compressed into oil. And you know, that goes to show you that
• 50:31
  the idea that man find is somehow uniquely a disaster for the planet is wrong.
• 50:37
  Right. The planet has always been a disaster, and we're not uniquely
• 50:42
  responsible for the crises that are befalling it, even if we should manage them
• 50:45
  better. Right, And he calls that he almost he calls that like a
• 50:49
  modern retelling of the story of the fall. Yeah, finis so he's time
• 50:52
  to think about It's comforting to think about us coming here and ruining some harmony.
• 50:57
  It's like better, it makes more sense, it's less you know,
• 51:00
  it's less traumatic to think about it that way, because we're the problem.
• 51:04
  It's not just that nature intrinsic to it is chaos and like and the potentiality
• 51:08
  of destruction exactly. And it says, you know, you can watch movies
• 51:12
  like fern gully or Avatar criticize after on this basis, right, And it's
• 51:15
  always exactly this kind of biblical metaphor. Right, It's like nature was perfect,
• 51:19
  everyone lived in harmony, and then man arrived and man destroyed everything by
• 51:22
  building factories and waging war and putting pollution into the environment. Whereas his argument
• 51:29
  is, nature isn't all that is cracked up to be. Nature is pretty
• 51:31
  fucked up and useless and a lot of garbage, and so we shouldn't be
• 51:36
  sacrilezing it, even if we should be trying to tend to it better for
• 51:38
  human purposes. So he's very critical of deails and for very specific, contextual,
• 51:43
  pragmatic reasons. We need to be like correcting things right, for very
• 51:45
  specific, like kind of down to earth reasons, as opposed to like some
• 51:50
  ideal of like an undisturbed nature or whatever. Exactly. I just imagine that
• 51:53
  if you're a deep apologist, right, you'd probably take serious issue with this,
• 51:57
  right, because he's essentially calling you a spiritualist, right, that you
• 52:00
  think that there's some beauty to nature and some imminent qualities to it, when
• 52:05
  really nature is just the dump that in the movie. Right, It's a
• 52:07
  whole lot of nothing, and of course, at the same time constantly talks
• 52:12
  about how like climate change is, like is a huge threat, right,
• 52:15
  So like it's not like he's some anti climate change person, Like he he
• 52:19
  knows it's like a huge threat. He acknowledges that it's you know, he
• 52:22
  talks about it as one of the main potential future problems. Right. He
• 52:25
  talks about like genetic stuff one of the like the main points of crisis,
• 52:30
  right, like an environmental So he's certainly not you know, some person who
• 52:34
  doesn't care about the environment. He just sees it. He thinks it needs
• 52:37
  to be conceptualized in a more precise way. I suppose that doesn't doesn't fall
• 52:42
  into this kind of idealizing fantasy. Yeah, but that's why I like him,
• 52:45
  right, Like he has a unique take on the subject matter because usually,
• 52:47
  like people who tend to be environmentalists also tend to explicitly or not adopt
• 52:52
  a deep ecological view kind of like the story of the fall that you were
• 52:55
  talking about, right that he still to say, we see the same kind
• 53:00
  of fantasy go on too, Like I notice it with like indigenous politics stuff.
• 53:04
  I feel like, you know, like like white critical theorists often just
• 53:08
  like to think about indigenous cultures if it's this harmone like with this harmonious,
• 53:13
  like peaceful, you know, and totally ignores that the actually indigenous people are
• 53:16
  human beings just like the rest of us, and they had wars, and
• 53:19
  they had like horror and torture and all kinds of stuff too. Well that's
• 53:22
  why Juja hated Avatar, right, because it bodied all of those things.
• 53:25
  Right. I had this very nostalgic and spiritualist to mention to it, where
• 53:31
  it's like, oh, there's this beautiful planet and the people there live in
• 53:34
  harmony, and then human beings come with industrialization and modern irinity and everything falls
• 53:38
  to shit, right, And he's like, well, no, first off,
• 53:40
  like these are human communities, or at least anthropic communities when people have
• 53:45
  all the problems that they do back on Earth. And secondly, you know,
• 53:50
  this planet is just matter like anything else. It's not sacred or special
• 53:53
  in some way, shape or form. So people can use it to you
• 53:57
  know, empower themselves and that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as they
• 54:01
  do so in a responsible manner. Right, Yeah, I don't I don't
• 54:06
  disagree with the things I don't disagree with most of what Jijik says about Like,
• 54:13
  I think he's a very he has a very measured like perspective on environmentalism,
• 54:19
  and it's good. And I think you should always approach environmentalism with the
• 54:23
  idea of ideology as like a lens, because obviously environmental groups are pure ideological
• 54:31
  assemblages as well, right, so you should always approach them with the idea
• 54:37
  that they have a system of ideas and beliefs and there there there's no necessity
• 54:42
  that those correspond to anything in reality, Like if you want to just win
• 54:46
  the game by definition, then yeah, no, no modern biologist, systems
• 54:52
  biologists, no modern ecologist believes nature is a harmonious system. That's just not
• 54:58
  that hasn't been a thing since, but that it was a thing up until
• 55:00
  the sixties. Right up until the sixties, everyone assumed that everything like humans
• 55:05
  did to the planet, the planet would sort of correct and absorb the problems
• 55:09
  and impact and return to a state of sort of harmony. And now we
• 55:13
  regard all living systems as far from equilibrium systems. They are pretty much the
• 55:19
  definition of like not like a pure state of equilibrium would just be like nothing
• 55:25
  like total entropy, no order, nothing, It would just be pure even
• 55:30
  distribution of all heat and matter, right, which is not obviously not a
• 55:36
  state we're going forward. That's not what environmentalism is shooting for. But you
• 55:40
  have to be aware that environmental groups like green Peace and whatever, the Sierra
• 55:45
  Club and all those big environmental groups have agendas, they have ideologies, they
• 55:51
  have optics, and they're involved in politics. So all of those things means
• 55:55
  that Jijek's view of ideology critique is going to be always an important thing to
• 56:01
  consider when you want to get into environmentalism and not just be like a naive
• 56:07
  realist about the world and greenhouse gases and the impact of nature on human affairs.
• 56:16
  If you're not going to do that, then you should listen to Jijiak.
• 56:20
  He's really against any sanctimonious reasoning for anything, even if it's like the
• 56:27
  sanct meanius reason like for a good reason, so like, what's wrong with
• 56:31
  believing that the planet is an interconnected hole because at least we might take care
• 56:36
  of it. But he's also going to say, no, you can't do
• 56:38
  it that way. He does have a good reason for this, though,
• 56:42
  And actually I think there was a really clever observation than he made, because
• 56:45
  he says, one of the problems we're seeing nature as kind of a harmonious
• 56:47
  wole that we just tend to disrupt is we have this sense that there's some
• 56:52
  kind of an inner purpose or narrative to existence, and this tends to play
• 56:58
  into our fantasy that somehow we're uniquely special, that we're here for a reason,
• 57:02
  and that there's a divine or some other power that's looking after us,
• 57:06
  which can of course be another reason why we say, well, we don't
• 57:08
  need to worry about climate change because just like at the end of the movie,
• 57:12
  how everything winds up okay because of some kind of natural intervention, will
• 57:15
  be fine. And Jesus says, no, you know, we're just part
• 57:19
  of nature as well. We're here because of entirely contingent accidents. There's absolutely
• 57:22
  nothing special about us, right. It could dary well be that will be
• 57:27
  destroyed tomorrow, So you better fucking wake up and realize that there's not gonna
• 57:30
  be something the eleventh hour rescue. If you allow the planet to fall the
• 57:34
  shit, Right, if the planet falls to shit, we're gonna be wiped
• 57:37
  out with it. It reminds you of a George Carland joke where Carlin was
• 57:40
  like, hear everybody talking about the planet, Save the planet, Save the
• 57:45
  planet. The planet will be fine. The people are fucked, but the
• 57:51
  planet will be fine. It'll carry which normally does. And like this is
• 57:54
  kind of the essence of Jesus environmentalism, right where it says, stop presuming
• 57:58
  that there's some kind of interpurpose nature or your own life, because that leads
• 58:01
  you to believe that there's something special about you, which means the universe will
• 58:05
  correct itself in order to save you. That's not the way things work.
• 58:08
  If you don't fucking like take some responsibility for what's going on, then our
• 58:13
  delicate ecosystem will be destroyed and will be wiped out. Yeah, Like yeah,
• 58:16
  I always say, like, like when we talk about the anthropis scene,
• 58:20
  for example, as the successor period of the Holocene, that comes with
• 58:24
  an ideology attached to it, right, like it was proposed in two thousand
• 58:30
  by some scientists, But the way that it's been uptaken into media and the
• 58:34
  humanities is that anthroposts means human and it's our fault that we've done this to
• 58:39
  the planet kind of thing. And then and then you have to ask a
• 58:43
  series of questions after that. If you want to be rigorous, though,
• 58:45
  you say, well, like who's responsible? Who is it an anthropiscene for
• 58:50
  like, who's fate is really at stake here? And then we ask,
• 58:53
  well, like, isn't it better called something like Jason Moore calls it the
• 58:57
  capital o scene, right, like, maybe we should point to capitalism as
• 59:01
  as a kind of dynamic force. That's that's changing our human nature relationship and
• 59:08
  the whole the whole idea of the deep ecology movement too, right, It's
• 59:13
  it's been critiqued from within as well, and it comes with an ideology as
• 59:16
  well, just like anthropscene deep ecology, right like, that's that's a Norwegian
• 59:22
  guy named arm Ness started the deep ecology movement and he based it quite heavily
• 59:28
  on his reading of Heidiger. And so it promotes a kind of localism,
• 59:31
  right like, like withdraw from the global community and get involved in local projects,
• 59:37
  you know, farm your own food. It's like it's a real localism
• 59:42
  and a lot of people today are going to say, well, you know,
• 59:45
  we live in a globalized world, and like obviously neoliberalism. Part of
• 59:50
  the force behind that ideology is the global trade and economy. How our economy
• 59:54
  in our lives are completely interconnected with the rest of the world. So is
• 1:00:00
  deep ecology going to be an environmental movement that's going to be very helpful or
• 1:00:06
  successful in the future. Probably not, because we need to take that sort
• 1:00:09
  of globalist element into account. And that's so you always have to take,
• 1:00:15
  like GJX points seriously about these things, even if you don't agree with them.
• 1:00:20
  My disagreements tend to lie more in his sort of metaphysics and his ideas
• 1:00:24
  about nature and ontology rather than in these sorts of cash outs on the public
• 1:00:30
  facing end about what he says about environmentalism. I don't have as much a
• 1:00:35
  problem with what he says is as maybe sometimes where it's coming from and how
• 1:00:38
  I'd frame it, But otherwise it's usually very sound and you shouldn't disregard it.
• 1:00:45
  Can I just say that, you know, this is millennial podcast because
• 1:00:49
  I can't think of any single philosopher that we've discussed. We're all in unison
• 1:00:53
  that we like the guy pretty much for that. That's true. It's true.
• 1:00:57
  Pretty much every single one of us is like, yeah, great,
• 1:00:59
  you know that's a very helpful dude. To disagree was very helpful. He's
• 1:01:02
  helpful. He's helpful for a lot of things. And like I wanted to
• 1:01:06
  bring up, you know, like just emphasize the point and shifted a little
• 1:01:09
  bit to politics, because I think he's so good on pointing too. And
• 1:01:15
  this is probably why he makes enemies on the left, because I think his
• 1:01:19
  whole philosophical system, right, everything we've been talking about also, like of
• 1:01:22
  kind of calling out these fantasies, right, works really well. And he's
• 1:01:25
  pretty merciless and criticizing. I think when the occupy movement was happening, right,
• 1:01:30
  he was pretty merciless and kind of being like what now. And then
• 1:01:32
  you know he talks about I remember at a talk once he was saying,
• 1:01:36
  you know, I always talk to these activists, you know, and they're
• 1:01:37
  like, oh, fifty thousand people at tyre Or Square and for oh and
• 1:01:43
  at Saintagma Square and we were all, you know, so ecstatic and so
• 1:01:46
  and he's like, I'm not impressed by that at all. You know,
• 1:01:49
  he's like this this kind of and he's so good at criticizing, you know,
• 1:01:52
  the the ecstatic moments of political mobilization, and he's always pushing I think
• 1:01:59
  activists and being like okay, so you have your little like static moment,
• 1:02:01
  but like what now, like what next? And that's where he makes the
• 1:02:04
  point about, you know, V for Vendetta how he wants to see He
• 1:02:07
  said he would sell his mother into slavery to see V for Vendetta too,
• 1:02:10
  which is like, you know, after so they get they burn down Parliament,
• 1:02:14
  they get there, they're all there, So what now how do you
• 1:02:15
  organize things? Are the what are the actual steps you take? Like how
• 1:02:19
  what kind of political system are you going to build? Like he did say
• 1:02:22
  if he had this hilarious little monocologue about this that actually wasn't keeping with my
• 1:02:24
  own experience about a lot of the occupy people in Toronto where he's like I
• 1:02:28
  went there and I asked him like what do you want? What do you
• 1:02:31
  want then? And he'd say like, well, and they would give me
• 1:02:35
  like the stupid platitude like blah blah blah blah blah, like money should work
• 1:02:38
  for people. And he's like, and my god, you know Hitler would
• 1:02:40
  have agreed with something like that. But I mean an issue, right,
• 1:02:44
  and I think we all have that kind of dissatisfaction sometimes with left wing politics
• 1:02:47
  where I mean, I made the show last week, right, everybody says
• 1:02:51
  we need a more radical kind of politics, and radical almost always seems to
• 1:02:53
  be just a throwaway term for basically saying I don't know what exactly I want
• 1:02:59
  to achieve, but it has different than this. But is so good at
• 1:03:01
  revealing at like, you know, kind of exposing that so much of this
• 1:03:06
  more radical alternative with his kind of like Lacanian and Hegelian like underpinnings, how
• 1:03:12
  like he can connect it. And that's maybe why people are hostile towards him
• 1:03:15
  to being like, oh, you're actually like enjoying, like you're there's like
• 1:03:19
  jewiy soance happening here, Like you're loving this esthetic, this ecstatic fantasy,
• 1:03:23
  and you're kind of having a little mental orgasm thinking about a more radical alternative,
• 1:03:27
  and he kind of sticks it in people's faces. I think that,
• 1:03:30
  yeah, science is the perfect theoretical word for all of those things that he's
• 1:03:36
  tearing down because you're not allowed to have any sacred cows. And that's kind
• 1:03:40
  of why he attacks so many different things through jokes. Often it's not like
• 1:03:45
  a it's not like he's just shitting on everything, but he always is able
• 1:03:51
  to point out, here's your sacred cow, here's why it's wrong, he
• 1:03:54
  or here's the history of it, or here is it in context? Or
• 1:03:58
  what do you do next? It's all he's pushing against or or tearing down
• 1:04:01
  those re sacralizations, which is funny because he I think he is really a
• 1:04:09
  secularist Christian. Yeah, his philosophy is a materialist Christian. I should say
• 1:04:16
  it's a materialist Christianity, and he says the like. For him, the
• 1:04:20
  most important moment in Christianity is not like Christ dying, but Christ being abandoned
• 1:04:30
  by God. That's the moment he points to as like, this is the
• 1:04:33
  destitution of the subject. This is when even God falls. We have no
• 1:04:38
  idols left. Now what do we do? And that's the moment of you
• 1:04:42
  know, liberation, the final the final step into Hegel. It's a stage
• 1:04:45
  in the transition when Willem Dafoe's on the cross and he's looking around at everybody.
• 1:04:50
  He's not in pain, he's not registering anything anymore. He's just kind
• 1:04:55
  of looking around with the blank stare. I'm actually really happy you mentioned that
• 1:04:58
  because that's my favorite Christian movie. Eric Last of Price by Martin Scorsese.
• 1:05:02
  But yeah, that's that like almost that absolute recoil moment where you just sort
• 1:05:06
  of you just completely separate and then like he has, I don't know,
• 1:05:12
  I'm tempted to just bring anything. You know, you traverse the fantasy you
• 1:05:15
  you you get you get to the revolutionary consciousness through that like moment of subjectivity.
• 1:05:23
  Yeah. Can I just clarify too quickly about Jewey Sans too. I
• 1:05:26
  don't think that he's like against Jewy Sans, right like, or like people
• 1:05:29
  experiencing it. I think he just wants those things to happen responsibly in a
• 1:05:32
  way, right like. I think he's just pointing to how easy it is
• 1:05:35
  for subjectivity to be like get like caught it, caught up in these cycles
• 1:05:40
  and like not move beyond. So I think, like, you know,
• 1:05:43
  so it's not like, you know, just I'm just worried. I don't
• 1:05:45
  want people to think, you know, that he's some kind of you know,
• 1:05:48
  has some sort of aesthetic ideal that you just have to be like,
• 1:05:51
  you know, contemplative all the time and be thinking beyond those things. No,
• 1:05:56
  like life has to be enjoyed, I mean, you have to have
• 1:06:00
  Jewey sance. Just understand what they are, and you have to understand what's
• 1:06:02
  underneath them, and like, yeah, just to make just to make like.
• 1:06:05
  The important theoretical point about Jewey's sance is that because jewey sance is that
• 1:06:12
  kind of idea of desire transgressing some kind of boundary. But for for for
• 1:06:19
  like, desire is non sensuous in a way, in the same way that
• 1:06:25
  Kant thinks of of reason or rationality is non sensuous, right like, For
• 1:06:30
  Kant, desire is sort of a sensuous desire, and we have to get
• 1:06:34
  rid of that, we have to become disinterested, and we have to submit
• 1:06:39
  to like reason, whereas would say with Lacan that desire also has that non
• 1:06:45
  sensuous aspect of it too. So when you encounter something that short circuits reason,
• 1:06:51
  like the sublime, for example, right sublimity, the mathematical and the
• 1:06:57
  dynamical, right the large or the forces of nature that dwarf your capacity to
• 1:07:04
  understand those things, and desire actually follows the same pattern, whereas Kant wants
• 1:07:12
  to sort of relegate it to sensuousness and the body, for Jik it's also
• 1:07:18
  part of the sort of transcendental fabric of our subjectivity. Too, that desire
• 1:07:23
  is also a kind of non sensuous thing. So when you encounter the mathematical
• 1:07:29
  sublime, where something is so large and then reason sort of steps in,
• 1:07:33
  that's the sort of thing when desire is frustrated, the sort of pure desire,
• 1:07:38
  the ideas of the pure desire step in and drive you in certain directions.
• 1:07:43
  And that's the sort of transgressing aspect of juiy songs that follows the sublime
• 1:07:47
  in certain ways. Well, just to kind of play off a victor's political
• 1:07:51
  point, I actually think that one of the really virtuous things about Jesus approach
• 1:07:57
  is precisely how we desupplements so much of the world, as supposed to put
• 1:08:00
  it, like knocks down our sacred cows or desacralzes them one after another.
• 1:08:05
  Because if you think about like the orgins of monarch conservatism in Edmund Burke right,
• 1:08:11
  Edmund Burke's first book was on the Sublime and the Beautiful and that distinction,
• 1:08:15
  and there's a clear political implication to this book where Burke essentially says,
• 1:08:20
  look, some things are just too big for the human mind to apprehend,
• 1:08:25
  and they fill us with dread and a sense of impotence, and so we
• 1:08:29
  should be acquiescent towards them, defer to them, as it were. And
• 1:08:32
  it brings up a lot of religious examples, and there's a clear connection between
• 1:08:35
  that and Burke's conservatism. Right. There's this idea that the human mind is
• 1:08:39
  too small to ever apprehend society in all of its complexity, so we should
• 1:08:44
  be cautious and incremental in changing anything, if at all. And what Jgic
• 1:08:47
  does that's really spectacular is just say no, you know, most things aren't
• 1:08:51
  particularly sublime. In fact, a lot of the things that we supplemate are
• 1:08:57
  just like the emperor and the fable, right, they have no clothes.
• 1:09:00
  Once you kind of strip them of their ideological veneer, you realize that they're
• 1:09:05
  just as human or just as pallable as everything else, And consequently it'll be
• 1:09:11
  less willing to defer to them as a source of authority or a source of
• 1:09:15
  signification. Right. And you know, he brings up a lot of funny
• 1:09:19
  examples about totalitarians, right, and precisely how totalitarian and authoritarian figures like Nazis
• 1:09:25
  try to supplement themselves into these incredible figures when really, if you deconstruct them,
• 1:09:30
  you realize they're quite comical at their base in a Benaminian sense of the
• 1:09:34
  word right. And that's part of Jijk's sort of self image too, is
• 1:09:40
  he always he loves talking about Stalin because Stalin was the perfect example of the
• 1:09:46
  kind of ideology where it has to take itself seriously, but like at its
• 1:09:51
  center, it knows it's not serious, Like it knows it's not legitimate,
• 1:09:56
  Like when Stalin goes out there surrounded by bodyguard, it's like carefully kept away
• 1:10:01
  from the common person and says, this is the worker's Party, Like they
• 1:10:05
  know it's not serious, but their ideology runs on that denial. Says,
• 1:10:11
  so if anybody sort of talks in a public way about how it's not serious,
• 1:10:15
  they'll be executed. Yeah, wasn't great a reshuffling those elements too,
• 1:10:18
  Sorry, what were you gonna say? I was just gonna say. Isn't
• 1:10:21
  there a joke or like an anecdote he has about how if you were like
• 1:10:27
  in whatever, the council, the Stalinist like USSR, like parliament or whatever,
• 1:10:30
  and you know, somebody gets up and starts criticizing Stalin and saying like
• 1:10:34
  you're a murder and you've done all these things. But then if somebody else
• 1:10:38
  gets up and says, how dare you say those things about him? Gig
• 1:10:41
  claims that guy who called out the guy would get killed first before the actual
• 1:10:45
  guy who criticized the party, because you have to keep up the illusion that
• 1:10:49
  you can have free discussion. That's like more important, yeah right than the
• 1:10:54
  like then the guy shows solidarity. And again that's kind of why we need
• 1:10:57
  that had to maintain that peer contradiction philosophically, that's why he keeps Lacan or
• 1:11:04
  reads Hagel through La Khan because the Kan speaks to these true contradictions. Or
• 1:11:09
  we believe something knowing that it's false, and then act like we believe it
• 1:11:15
  anyway, and then we think that, no, they did this in Soviet
• 1:11:18
  Russia. But this happens. This is American capitalism. This is like Starbucks,
• 1:11:24
  like I'm gonna I'm gonna buy ethically ground coffee, so one percent of
• 1:11:29
  my four dollars cappuccino goes to I don't know, a Bolivian child or something.
• 1:11:34
  You know. It's great like his reversals in the ways he kind of
• 1:11:41
  reshuffles all the elements of what he's talking about too, because then you have
• 1:11:45
  this situation where stalin you can't really joke about him publicly, but he's like
• 1:11:49
  say, perfect material for South Park or something like that, because he takes
• 1:11:54
  himself so seriously. And then you have this situation in America where the South
• 1:11:59
  Park guys like fuse to make episodes about Donald Trump because he's already like his
• 1:12:03
  own joke. He's already the butt of everything he says, and we we
• 1:12:08
  all like he projects taking himself seriously, but he probably doesn't take himself seriously,
• 1:12:13
  and even our even our funniest writers of political commentary just don't touch him
• 1:12:17
  because he's just a joke already in his being. And he sort of reshuffles
• 1:12:23
  that idea of Stalinism and the and the the lack of comedy. But everyone's
• 1:12:27
  sort of privately making jokes, but the jokes are show that you love him.
• 1:12:32
  Isn't this exactly precisely why like academics, maybe like priestly aesthetic academics hate
• 1:12:38
  him because he just is focused on, you know, that nothing should be
• 1:12:41
  taken seriously, and like, I don't know, I think a lot of
• 1:12:45
  you know, uptight academics, I think they're defined by seriousness. You know,
• 1:12:47
  we don't have time to philosophy, we need to have a revolution.
• 1:12:53
  Well that's not academics. Those are leftist magazine right, Yeah. Magazine writers
• 1:12:58
  are say, we don't have time to fallies about this because you know,
• 1:13:02
  we have to take care of the cause of workers' rights or whatever. Yeah,
• 1:13:08
  and then the academics are taking themselves totally seriously because they think that they're
• 1:13:11
  like reinterpretation of I don't know, can't antinomies is like world changing and everybody
• 1:13:19
  needs to read this book immediately. I think. Actually one of the most
• 1:13:24
  last writing political crepiques he ever gave him a major figure was actually his critique
• 1:13:27
  of Heidegger, who appropriately enough he called the philosopher without a sense of humor,
• 1:13:30
  right, yeah, and he pointed out that hidagra and bodies a lot
• 1:13:33
  of everything that we're talking about, right, really took himself incredibly seriously,
• 1:13:40
  right, like, wanted to speak with the voice of a prophet, you
• 1:13:43
  know, capitalized, you know, talked about big b being in kind of
• 1:13:46
  divine terms, resacralized the world in a certain sense, and then wind up,
• 1:13:51
  of course, repording all kinds of reactionary views and being kind of a
• 1:13:55
  nicla poop. If you think about it politically right, And the criticism of
• 1:14:00
  Hatdigger really works in part because it operates on all these levels. Right.
• 1:14:04
  He's criticizing howdegariant metaphysics, he's criticizing Hotiger's personality, but he also says,
• 1:14:10
  you know, one of the things that's most problematic about Hoteger is this kind
• 1:14:14
  of really oscientatious sense of self importance, where it says the history of the
• 1:14:17
  Western world is essentially the story of its metaphysics, which of course puts philosophy
• 1:14:25
  at center stage, right, when really, like the whole history of all
• 1:14:30
  these nations, all the people who made them up, is really just a
• 1:14:31
  dispute between philosophers. And I find it really refreshing that music says, you
• 1:14:34
  know, how silly is that right to assume that really, you know,
• 1:14:39
  publishing, you know, a paper on Chriseral's phenomenology, et cetera, et
• 1:14:43
  cetera, is vastly more important than the tectonic events that impact millions of people
• 1:14:47
  out there, Right, I mean, how stupid do you have to be
• 1:14:50
  to think that this is really what matters? Right? Yeah? Do you
• 1:14:57
  think that probably the reason that we are kind of drawn to him and maybe
• 1:15:00
  our generation is drawn to him is because of this uh profound opposition to sanctimonious
• 1:15:12
  people that are you know, I don't know, just believe dreams that we
• 1:15:17
  don't believe anymore, or that we can't believe. They looked they looked too
• 1:15:20
  stupid to us. So I don't know, guys like I think I was
• 1:15:27
  actually thinking about it more just like the four of us, that maybe we
• 1:15:29
  have a compatible personality type that we all find him, we all see eye
• 1:15:33
  to eye on on these issues and kind of a hostility towards sanctimonious as you
• 1:15:39
  put it, because I feel maybe it's different in the departments, in the
• 1:15:43
  academic departments you guys were in, but in my department, like with political
• 1:15:46
  theorists, I would I'm probably the only one who likes Shijiak of anybody that
• 1:15:50
  I, you know, come across, probably, I mean there might be
• 1:15:55
  like one person who likes some of most of them might have like some affection,
• 1:15:59
  but kind of vague and they don't really know. They don't really take
• 1:16:00
  them. They don't bother paying attention, you know, they kind of listen
• 1:16:03
  to what their professors have said about not taking him seriously. I think he's
• 1:16:09
  I hate to say it, but I think Shizhekin is developing a reputation in
• 1:16:14
  certain departments to just be like one of those clownish academics so you don't need
• 1:16:18
  to take seriously, which is a real shame and a real mistake. Of
• 1:16:21
  course we all, I'm sure would agree. And what's funny is, way
• 1:16:25
  before YouTube was a thing, like his book, Sublime Objective Videology was like
• 1:16:31
  praised and everyone thought it was a new thing in psychoanalysis. If you buy
• 1:16:35
  anthologies from that time, Sublime Objective Videology is always in it. I don't
• 1:16:42
  know if they still are, but like it's it's like his image overcame his
• 1:16:45
  academic reputation when he definitely had in the nineties an academic reputation before people saw,
• 1:16:53
  you know, the baggy, sweat stained shirts. And he touches his
• 1:16:57
  face a lot, But that is almost like a cruel irony that proves his
• 1:17:00
  point. Is like they found out that this guy wasn't you know, a
• 1:17:06
  buttoned up suit, feather cap academic sitting in front of a bookshelf. He
• 1:17:12
  was like walking down the street double fisting hot dogs or whatever. So he
• 1:17:19
  proves that he kind of proves his own point by doing that, I mean,
• 1:17:23
  there's we're praising him only, of course, and he does reuse his
• 1:17:27
  own quotations all the time. He's he's he sucks at writing, like it
• 1:17:31
  actually sucks. But so it's not like everything's good. But I think we're
• 1:17:38
  we're kind of responding to the project as a whole, as something favorably humor
• 1:17:44
  about himself though, Like I actually met my my wife when we were lecture.
• 1:17:49
  It was a three day thing, and I was shocked because he two
• 1:17:53
  weeks sorry, he gave this story where he was like, this is the
• 1:17:57
  thing, like I was seriously thinking about killing myself, which is kind of
• 1:18:00
  shocking to hear him say that, right, because like as it would be
• 1:18:02
  with anybody, right, And he's like, I was thinking about killing myself.
• 1:18:05
  And I went to talk to like my psychoanalyst and like I was like,
• 1:18:09
  I'm gonna kill myself this week, and he said and my second one
• 1:18:11
  I was turned to me and was like, no, you can't do that.
• 1:18:13
  You've already paid for the next two sessions. And I paused, and
• 1:18:15
  I was like, she's right. I'm not gonna let her like cheap it,
• 1:18:18
  like griff me out of this money. So I showed up for the
• 1:18:21
  next two sessions, and then at the end of like the first one,
• 1:18:24
  she was like, make sure you pay me more. So I did,
• 1:18:27
  and then I realized like, well, hell no, I'm not gonna let
• 1:18:29
  her grift me out of like a few more sessions. I'm gonna stay alive
• 1:18:31
  just to show up for these things. And I was like, he's got
• 1:18:33
  a good sense of humor about himself, right, Like it's kind of a
• 1:18:36
  very dark story about yourself. He's gonna he's very relatable. He's very transparent
• 1:18:43
  about how embarrassed he is at his own appearance, at his own like he
• 1:18:45
  he talks about how those movies he was in, right The Perfect S Guy
• 1:18:48
  to Cinneima and The Perfect S Guide to Ideology and an interview I saw,
• 1:18:51
  like someone was like, oh have you seen them? Like what do you
• 1:18:54
  think? And he's like it's impossible. He's like, I can't look at
• 1:18:56
  myself. He's like, the trauma is too the horror and the trauma is
• 1:19:00
  too great to just look at myself. I can't stand it. Yeah.
• 1:19:03
  Yeah, it's it's nice that he can combine that level of hilarity with saying
• 1:19:09
  pretty fairly profound and cojing things. And you know what, he's really nice,
• 1:19:13
  like he was. I mean I met him only once, but like
• 1:19:17
  he's willing to just talk to anybody about what they want to talk to,
• 1:19:21
  even though he's trying to be ushered into a car because he's late to get
• 1:19:25
  to the airport. Just like having chats with people, it's impossible to get
• 1:19:30
  a word in though, Like I don't think we could ever here. He
• 1:19:33
  just talks endlessly. Oh but if you wanted to come, we should just
• 1:19:36
  have him come just to talk. I will just all sit here. We'll
• 1:19:41
  have like a skeleton crew, and we'll ask him some questions. Yeah,
• 1:19:45
  that would be pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, I mean it seems to
• 1:19:49
  me like we all really like the guy. And I know, I think
• 1:19:53
  like Pills was kind of right. Maybe it's a generational thing because when I
• 1:19:58
  started reading Theory, his books were very very popular and only became more so
• 1:20:01
  over time. But I also do think it's kind of an attitudinal issue.
• 1:20:04
  Maybe he's what we want a boomer to be. Yeah, it really fits
• 1:20:09
  with our kind of independent media, get it out of the university, make
• 1:20:14
  stuff widely available for free kind of idea because most people know him from YouTube,
• 1:20:19
  not from his books. I mean, one example that I saw people
• 1:20:23
  talking about was his debate with Jordan Peterson just to bring Daddy back for two
• 1:20:28
  seconds, right, because people expected that this was going to be like a
• 1:20:30
  heavyweight boxing match, right where you had like the lead philosopher on the political
• 1:20:34
  right, however you want to characterize, you know, Peterson versus like the
• 1:20:39
  lead philosopher on the political left. And I think as Peterson does speak with
• 1:20:43
  as like an authority figure, quite deliberately sometimes right where you know, he
• 1:20:46
  has this authoritative, almost prophetic kind of rhetoric that surrounds um or at least
• 1:20:53
  did prior to twenty twenty, right, And when Jizuk appeared and was kind
• 1:20:59
  of congenial, kind of funny, a bit laid back, wasn't taking it
• 1:21:01
  too seriously, people were initially disappointed. But one of the things that I
• 1:21:04
  think is interesting is that over time more and more people seem to have conceded
• 1:21:09
  that he won that debate. And I think one of the reasons is because
• 1:21:13
  he refused to be an authority figure. Right. He more or less pointed
• 1:21:16
  out the problems with Peterson as an authority figure and the kind of associated difficulties
• 1:21:21
  with that and said, hey, listen, I'm just here for you to
• 1:21:25
  to to provoke you to be more critical and ask questions about things. And
• 1:21:30
  people were inspired by that and thought it was insightful, right, And a
• 1:21:33
  lot of them did. And that's one of the reasons that I think he's
• 1:21:38
  popular. Right, he refuses the mantle that a lot of people have tried
• 1:21:42
  to shove on to him. He's the YouTube philosopher. And I mean that
• 1:21:45
  in a positive sense, negative sense. Yeah, all right, shall we
• 1:21:51
  wrap it up there? Yeah, that sounds good. That sounds good to
• 1:21:55
  me. All Right, I'll see you guys. Well, I don't know
• 1:21:59
  en you guys. Well, hopefully there'll be that video I'm looking for that
• 1:22:02
  new video pill. Yeah. I gotta puzz bust my ass to get it
• 1:22:05
  done. So that's what I'm gonna be doing for the next five days straight.
• 1:22:12
  Should be spicy. Thanks guys. Seeing Matt Eric Pictor. I want
• 1:22:16
  if I see you first,