A primer for the unfamiliar.
Slavoj Žižek walks into a barbershop without making an appointment
he sits in the nearest empty chair
“I want a haircut,” he says to no one
and to everyone
“Cut my hair. Make it look terrible.”
“And do not look me in the eyes.”
being a Marxist
is no excuse
for not looking your best
Slavoj Žižek, what are you really angry at
capitalism
or scissors?
Slavoj Žižek
next time why don’t you try plagiarizing
a different hairstyle
Slavoj Žižek
your haircut is like late-stage capitalism
devoid of integrity
and propped up on a faltering infrastructure
Slavoj Žižek
your beard
like Communism
works better in theory
than in the real world
Slavoj Žižek
remember that Derrida objected to clearly defined theses on philosophical grounds
not personal grooming
even your haircut misreads Hegel
remember
your ontology can give primacy to the creative subject who manipulates discourse
and use a comb
at the same time
Slavoj Žižek
would it kill you to smile
take a shower Slavoj Žižek
get some rest
you look awful
your friends are worried about you, Slavoj Žižek
your friends are worried about you and your hair, Slavoj Žižek
your friends are worried about you and your hair and your views on subjectivity, Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek walks into a barbershop
and walks out again
Nothing has changed.
“Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence—by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present—but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word ‘quarters’ the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.”
your haircut
is murder
of your head
Tags: bad haircuts, communism, honestly though fuck theory most of the time, i honestly don’t think what he did was plagiarism quite so much as laziness but let it be a warning to double check the summaries of your de facto research assistants lest they grab a few lines from c, lol remember the time zizek wrote ad copy for abercrombie & fitch, marxist cultural critics, poetry, Slavoj Žižek, theory
This is brilliant.
My various meetings with self-proclaimed communists has often made me wonder some things. Is it vile capitalism to have a shower and get some sleep some time? Is it protesting the bourgeoisie fat cats to NEVER mop the greasy demonstration sweat off your great big red face?
Grooming is for sheeple
Did once have some greasy, dirty unbrushed white man tell me that personal grooming was an ‘oppressive, capitalist standard that demands we be unnatural’.
I pointed out that evidence suggest that even stone age peoples washed as often as they could, in order to prevent parasites and skin disease and predators seeking them out from the stink, and he got very angry with me. Ended up calling me a sheep.
I told him his breath stank.
Do you have any idea how hard he had to work to get up that BO, like a real honest 1920s coal miner after a twelve-hour day in the tunnels? And, what, he’s just going to throw it away now, like some manicured bourgeois parasite?
Whoa, I was joking, but an actual human actually said that. Awesome. D:
Awesome comeback! High fives!
It’s funny how “sheeple” really means “people who follow basic niceties of respect and decency when interacting with other people.” (It obviously also means “people who adhere to basic rules of hygiene.”)
oh no! I am a very well-groomed communist! I wear tea dresses and cute pointy shoes and I exfoliate!
…aaaaand I just realised I’m doing the problematic “this is what a feminist looks like” thing. Poor grooming does not invalidate communism as a theory of social justice! Okay!
It absolutely does not! And I hope I didn’t accidentally imply that it does.
Just heavily imply that many of the most ill-informed and obnoxious self-proclaimed communists I ever met stank.
(but never ever ever washing or brushing you teeth DOES mean that people won’t want you to talk to them, at least in the societies where we have all quietly agreed that It Is Good To Be Clean)
actually it does. That’s the point of 1984
1984 Beauty Tip: For exfoliating the face, use rats.
Che said that cleanliness is a bourgeois obsession, but correct hygiene is a revolutionary necessity. So.
About two weeks ago, I had one tell me all about how when Native Americans were drafted into the Vietnam war and “forced to cut their hair”, they “lost their innate tracking abilities”, and that was why he was never shaving again. And then my eyes rolled so far back into their head that I lost them forever.
INNATE
TRACKING
ABILITIES
from HAIR
If you’re going to eschew certain grooming practices, make sure you have a batshit, racist rationale for it.
Damn, Mallory, you must be a good tracker, just check out all your GPS-looking hair
Presumably, all Native Americans are secretly Samson, and their Indian magicks are stored inside their identical flowing twin braids. (But HONESTLY has this jackass ever heard of Mohawks?)
I… forcing Native Americans to cut their hair was one component of many in a cultural genocide. So, that’s not only ridiculous and completely false, it’s also pretty appropriative and dismissive of actual struggles.
Perhaps he was thinking of Samson.
it’s not just the haircut though, it’s the whole sort of… facial hair situation. The haircut misreads Hegel, the mustache misreads Kant. Here’s hoping for a follow-up about the beard. (fingers crossed)
And the beard misreads Lacan :3?
His whole fashion look plagiarizes Derrida
About two years ago when I was in college I went to a lecture he gave, and as I was walking over there I spotted him on the street carrying a bag from the local independent bookstore. As I watched, he stopped in front of a trash can, took out the books (new hardcovers) from the bag, and one by one took off their dust jackets and threw them in the trash. Then he replaced the coverless books in his bag and went on his way.
The lecture was, as I should have expected, fairly silly and packed with young bearded men wearing tiny round glasses.
What, he couldn’t be bothered to recycle them? Twit.
I don’t think he believes in recycling…unless it’s of someone else’s research and writing!
*SELF-FIVE*
BUUUUURN!
All we are is dust jacket in the wind
A short film
By Slavoj Žižek
at least 2/3 Mallory posts me me feel like I am doing exactly the WRONG THINGS with all the theory and literature I’ve studied.
I think this image explains everything http://www.american-buddha.com/pervertguidescreen…
I just laughed SO loud by myself in my office.
Thank you for this.
I have literally no idea who this guy is, but this poem is 1000% perfect
THIS IS EVERYTHING.
(And theory is ruining my life. I’m convinced that by the time I am 40, I will look just like Slavoj but with bigger boobs.)
I had a self-described Marxist prof in college who once told us that he took the street numbers off the front of his house so that the government wouldn’t know where he lived.
god, i can just imagine the self-satisfied smirk. “yep, that’ll do it! no one will find me now!”
Bonus: the course I took with him was called “The Nature of Propaganda.”
I’m imagining the actual community organizers who might be able to get this guy out of his own butt and into an effective movement walking around in front of his house with a clipboard like “where the hell is 1234? Bad address I guess.”
“Even your haircut misreads Hegel” is my new go-to insult for my fellow philosopher friends.
If the description of a thing kills the thing then isn’t he just, like,
killing his entire philosophy
including the very idea that words kill things
by describing said phenomenon?
it’s all very clever and ironic, isn’t it.
Abercrombie & Fitch. HA! The tags get me every time.
Slavoj Žižek
your hair is as you wish your students were:
it is trying to off itself
rather than ask for your help
Adding
“your haircut
is murder
of your head”
to the next line of the toast pillow embroidery kits.
Re: the tag, I don’t think it being laziness makes it NOT plagiarizing. In fact, I would rather argue that plagiarizing exists only as a subset of laziness. Like the square-rectangle thing, all plagiarizing is laziness, but not all laziness is plagiarizing. I mean, what other possible reason is there to plagiarize? I suppose I can theoretically imagine someone plagiarizing because they think they are too stupid to come up with anything better themselves but…I can think of almost no people who would admit to being that stupid?
When I was teaching undergrad classes I caught several students engaging in plagiarism that almost certainly took more time than writing the actual essay themselves. We’re talking frankensentences from multiple sources on a one-page “reflection” paper. I never understood it.
Because their reaction to being caught was always just sheer terror, I was never really able to ask the question in a way that allowed them to see I was genuinely curious about WHY they did it when it probably took just as long. At least with the lazy ones I knew they were being lazy!
“being a Marxist
is no excuse
for not looking your best”
I’m silk-screening it onto something, SOMETHING, stat
I mean, even Karl Marx washed his face and brushed his hair+beard. Sure he had a ridiculous amount of hair, but it was groomed .
My eyes are lost, too. All the Native American peoples in the entire U.S, millions of individuals who belong to hundreds of nations. According to that dude, they're all the same, and that's why he can grow a beard at people.
Nope. No o o o p e.
YES. HE GOT TOLD.
Also it's like these white people can afford to be crustyup. If you're a POC, your body is already loaded with degraded meaning when looked upon with the white gaze; we are thought dirty, smelly and wrong, even if our cultures have extremely high standards of bodily cleanliness and personal grooming.
There are legit reasons for not washing at the frequency considered normal, e.g. people with sensory processing issues who can't bathe regularly due to pain/co-ordination, and also some hair textures are damaged if washed too often. But that is so different to just being like YEEAAHHH I'M WAFTING MY RADICAL STENCH AT YOU, SHEEPLE.
In other Zizek news, for the 20th Anniversary of Forrest Gump someone on Buzzfeed recently plagiarized (a tribute?) Zizek’s opinion of the movie “Forrest Gump” — i.e. Gump as the perfect subject of ideology, in a cynical age wherein ideology is free to reveal its constitutive idiocy with impunity — but with fewer syllables because Buzzfeed. Oh my, the comments section. Pure popcorn.
Engels wrote tons of letters on proper grooming of facial hair
https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/18…