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Raphael Shklarek's avatar

Absolutely brilliant. Even though I appreciate Žižek, nothing sparks interest more than a good critique.

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Luca M's avatar

Totally agree

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meika loofs samorzewski's avatar

Indeterminacy dances incompleteness.

There. I fixed it.

The Janus dance is a gastrulation, a hindsight of success forgetting its complexity, because it is so hard to remember without a memory. Reports of survivorship bias are always a shock.

Here we are.

Amid a flow of protons whirlgiged into a cavity, a host, a stelliferous relic, _the-process_ slips it moorings, immediately gives a wide berth to its birth, and so born it is then all the while constantly carrying itself as if it were a godhead without feet, or, at least as if the grounds for its departure where not a substrate but a terrain, forgotten, not a terrain but a territory, deferred, were not a territory but a landscape, denatured, were not a landscape but a heaven—

The world is hyperreal, then, and so, of the 'collective unconscious' we can now begin to call it social learning, and see that it does in fact have a history, if only because we can give it a name now. Then.

…were not a heaven, but a day in the life of.

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dk's avatar

I really appreciated this piece—beautifully done. It intersected with some ideas I was already developing around recursion, overflow, and collapse, so I ended up writing a long response that uses your idea of hyper-completeness as a launch point to trace overflow across a few domains. If you ever have time to read, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Rafael Holmberg's avatar

Thank you for your comment. I’m very interested in your piece, and would be happy to read it. Is it the latest one on your Substack?

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Luca M's avatar

Do you reckon Hegel is really worth my time?

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Rafael Holmberg's avatar

I think combating the misconceptions about Hegel is more important than Hegel himself!

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Luca M's avatar

I know it’s probably a dense and nuanced issue but if you wouldn’t mind explaining the core details/misconceptions briefly I would be grateful!

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Rex Eloquens's avatar

It seems to me that most who have put in the effort to read Hegel and not just the Phenomenology or the earlier essays will understand that Hegel was vying for both completeness and certainty. Zizek's reading of Hegel is strange, to say the least, and we also have letters to show that Hegel's teleology was an effort to show that human existence and suffering were in fact for something rather than nothing; he admitted this much.

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meika loofs samorzewski's avatar

Your writing, is is very useful reading for me, and it is only my second visit but not feeling antagonistic at all, I find Nielsen's View from Oregon useful in the same way, if differently poised.

https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/

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John Powell's avatar

While God is intentional he cannot predict the outcome of his intentions even though he created/creates the reality in which those intentions get formed. So it appears. It cannot be clear in this if or how that process is "limited" to the present moment (i.e. reality) if nothing else exists - but the present moment. Reality. And the lack of its prediction. While at the same time (!) ostensibly an intention is prior to the present moment.

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LC Dodson's avatar

I think you would appreciate the works of William Desmomd

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Dr. Eknoor Azad's avatar

Amazingly written article. Curious to know if there are other mainstream philosophers with similar take on Žižek.

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Rafael Holmberg's avatar

Thank you! None that I’m aware of - although I’m not aware of many who systematically go after his philosophical position.

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Seeds of the Remainder's avatar

Nice article - I definitely think there are some weaknesses in Zizek’s ontology, but I don’t have the expertise necessarily to argue against it. I just finished reading Less Than Nothing as well as Christian Atheism. Are you sure that Zizek is a partisan specifically of incompleteness and not indeterminacy? It seems to me like he is saying reality is both. Also there is an interesting example in Christian Atheism where he mentions that reality is like a holographic card, the parallax view is not just approximation from different angles but the incompatible perspectives are somehow inscribed into reality itself, only accessible from different perspectives. What if incompleteness and hyper-completeness are just two different ways of saying the same thing, a holographic illusion depending on one’s perspective? Zizek certainly thinks that the observer is inscribed in reality and that the ultimate ideology is to believe you have escaped it. I’m pretty sure he applies that to his own perspective - even as it is a perspective of what he describes as universal.

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meika loofs samorzewski's avatar

some version of this occurred to me too, but I do not have the depth of reading and agonising to work it out

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Snopenhauer's avatar

He must be crushed upon learning this.

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Inkstead's avatar

I can't believe this hasn't found its way here yet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80X0pbCV_t4

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