It’s the sort of shift you have to recognize looking at an ad for Dove soap, for example: it’s the same old co-opting of threatening texts, but in a new way and context, thus demanding a new analysis and also clearer ways of identifying it. On the surface, an ad which promotes body positivity seems like a success, and in one way it is, but it’s not the success of the ad or capitalist mechanism itself. In another sense, it’s a total inversion on the capitalist narratives from 40s-70s/80s of “here’s what you lack, and what you can buy to fill that.” That’s the kind of valuable newness that I think he’s good for.

And in terms of “out of context,” I think it’s not even comparable to hold up his manipulation of Deleuze/Spinoza with the TNR’s distasteful and deliberately dishonest handling of Zizek’s rhetoric. In particular, discussing his unique understanding of “violence” without setting up how he explicitly broadens the term to reach way beyond the mainstream reductive definition to the “cause of bodily harm” is straight up lying.

It’s not that I am such a subscriber to all of his nuances, but I am more ultimately defending his critique of democracy, and pointing to the TNR as the saddest example of a lack of depth or integrity when trying to critique “big ideas” in readable discourse. Just more anti-intellectualism, frankly.

i couldn’t make it even halfway through the TNR hitpiece, thinkpiece. it was like maybe, MAYBE, one level above a stanley fish editorial – much like this comment, it doesn’t at all attempt to find anything new.

“When hateful appeals to the most reptilian tendencies…” – why you hating on reptiles?

one extremely irksome thing about your post and any number of other posts criticizing the TNR article is the cry of an insincere reading by its author, a reading produced by taking this out of context. umm…isn’t that one of zizek’s most used tools? he spends an entire chapter in “organs without bodies” criticizing Deleuze’s philosophy because of its love for Spinoza, and begins with a quote from the last, unfinished chapter of Spinoza’s unfinished, posthumous text on politics. though, obviously, there IS a difference between the way zizek pulls off this trick and the way what’shisname? from the TNR does…