Bradley Kaye > Quotes

“Another can do the activity for you; even enjoyment itself can be outsourced. The common example given by Žižek is the laugh track that occurs in most comedic sit-coms (now, sadly a dying form of entertainment with streaming services superseding network television), but the idea is that the television show is fully equipped with a canned laughter which then laughs at the point in the show when the actors make a funny remark. The point is not that the audience laughs along with the canned laughter, but that after a long day at work when you are tired, the canned laughter does the laughing for you. You are relieved of the need to act, and you imagine that there is a real person somewhere laughing at the joke in your place. Ideology functions in this gap, because the reality is that canned laughter is just a machine recording of laughter and there are no real people who are actually laughing. Žižek’s thesis is that this creates a “subject supposed to believe'' that there is someone out there doing the work that we are not doing. In instances when we give to charities we want to believe that the money is going to a good cause and that the problem of say, hunger in Africa, is being resolved by our donation. Not by the person donating the money, but by someone else who will allegedly act on our behalf and put in the work necessary for consumerism to continue unabated. Consumers can remain docile, or even active in their own hedonistic desires. Interpassivity implies that a decentered subject has emerged, where even the innermost desires of the subject can be externalized.”
― Bradley Kaye

“Even though the threat of violence constantly lingers in the air, we can laugh and be amused while watching endless amounts of entertainment in which “transgression itself is solicited, [and] we are daily bombarded by gadgets and social forms which not only enable us to live with our perversions, but even directly conjure new perversions,” and which allege to express the “truth” of our concealed desires. We are on the brink of extinction-level catastrophes such as global warming, which are making large parts of the Earth uninhabitable for human life, and yet life goes on in the realm of myth, a realm of denial. Myth is thus the Real of logos: the foreign intruder, impossible to get rid of, yet simultaneously impossible to remain fully within.”
― Bradley Kaye

“Even Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, make a very clear point early on that capitalism is
a process of social-reproduction into which the class arrangement of wage-labor exploitation must involve the proletariat as-if willingly selecting their own submission to the system. Workers have to choose to subject themselves, or at the very least, have the true-belief that they are themselves free and willing participants in the process.”
― Bradley Kaye

“Zizek's thesis is that 'an epistemological shift in the subject's point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.' I believe that Graham Harman is correct to assert that this is most likely the core contribution to philosophy for which Slavoj will be remembered.”
― Bradley Kaye

“Capitalism today functions without social norms, and somehow maintains a semblance of order without social repression. Capitalism does not give anyone a solid base of material security in anything. It figures its subject in a social disorder that nervously cogitates from crisis to crisis without any planning, without building any stockpile of material reserves in terms of food, clothing, shelter, or anything remotely resembling the kind of communism that Marx actually wrote about in his later work in the sense of a shared stockpile of resources where people pitch in through rotating labor power (rather than a specialized “division” of labor). This is why, in capitalism, even rebellion is conducted by conformists.”
― Bradley Kaye

“Therapy turns an analysand into a docile body, and [Zizek's] methodology is that of 'hysteria' insofar as it does not make sense to domesticate anxiety over political problems that require anxiety as an authentic response (e.g., global warming, class conflict, etc.). Those issues won't be resolved through talk therapy.”
― Bradley Kaye

“If you search for a divine meaning in everything,
even the most evil and violent acts, the subject winds up disgustingly rationalizing heinous acts to accommodate the true-belief in the infallibility of an all-powerful messianic power guiding the hands of history.”
― Bradley Kaye

“Same premise holds for the liberal critique of “American hegemony” (a term from the 1990s and early 2000s that is very rarely used anymore, but the premise still holds); from the position that America will hold a permanent hegemonic position. This cynical disbelief in the *end* of the
Empire’s hegemony is what sustains the decadence that accelerates its precipitous decline. Same thing with global warming or any other exigencies. The denial of the “end” is what accelerates the end. The admission of the crisis is what accelerates the action necessary to negate the crisis and, therefore, turn the cynic into someone who can justify non-belief in the
crisis because in the evaporation of the emergency, the proof that the emergency existed is removed, and, therefore, the cynic becomes even more assured that their cynicism is justified. If you do not believe in global warming and policies change to the point where carbon emissions
are reduced and global warming is averted, the first thing a cynic will say is, “See! I told you global warming was nothing to worry about!” Same thing with the COVID quarantine and vaccine measures. If they did not work to evade the virus the cynic would cry that the measures were not
effective and therefore nobody should trust the government. If the measure did work and the virus was evaded, the cynic would cling to the cynicism and say, “See! The crisis of the virus would have been averted! What is all the fuss? Why did everyone worry?”
An ideology succeeds when the facts that at first appearance should serve to contradict it start to serve as arguments in its favor. There is a sense that “enjoyment itself, which we experience as ‘transgression’, is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered—when
we enjoy… this obscene call ‘Enjoy!’, is the superego.” Cultural downfall is pressed into action—by the decadent attitudes of those who suspend disbelief even as the demise of hegemonic power is unfolding before their eyes. The same holds true for those who disbelieve
that the Other can actually overtake them, and the downplaying of cunning tendencies in the Neighbors.
There is an infantilizing process that misunderestimated the possibility that the Other can mobilize itself into a force that can become a “master”-signifier where you are the “subject” to the Other, the condescension that “their” power will remain virtual and never become fully realized as an actual force enacting violence upon you, this is the condescension of liberal compassion towards the “Neighbors.”
― Bradley Kaye

“Life exists as a contingency, and only retroactively is understood as a necessity, through the concept of love, love is the quilting point upon which, retroactively, the contingency must be understood to make sense.”
― Bradley Kaye

“Hence, a provocation requiring a radical change in perspective can only ever produce a shift along the immanent parallax view. A new world that is not yet here. It must be created. This is the meaning of “u-topos” or utopia, a world that has not yet become real, an unmappable, non-topographical space. Nevertheless this utopia of the parallax view is always possible, and there is never freedom without unbearable anxiety19 because we are caught in a causal nexus that is not readily apparent to us, the subject must “predestine himself” and produce a “cipher of his destiny” where the free decision appears in the guise of its opposite as an inexorable necessity.”
― Bradley Kaye

“This is useful as a research tool and for diligent scholars of philosophy who are serious about studying Žižek’s theory of freedom. I try to condense difficult material and zero in on key passages in Žižek’s writing in order to distill a functional, serviceable philosophy of power and ideology and how it relates to freedom. Tis also means that there is no way to reify a concept such as “freedom” (because doing so would negate that which is free by trapping it in some kind of form); and also because Žižek’s work has taken so many twists and turns that it is impossible to encapsulate every single thesis he makes in the space of a single book. It would be absurd to think that I can encapsulate a thinker as wide-ranging as Žižek. A thinker and activist-philosopher, who calls himself a madman, who is not trying to be domesticated or grounded, and yet claims that he grounds his thought in “Hegel” and “Lacan.” People miss the mark as to why he does this, mistaking that there is some affinity towards the personage of a once-living corporeal being called “Hegel” or “Lacan”—rather, these are interesting historical figures because they were unique inventors of radically new methodologies. Hegel as forwarding the methodology of the dialectical process. Lacan as utilizing psychoanalysis to reveal the process of the shifting tides of desire as the ungrounded ground of truth rather than forwarding any kind of “truth” that can be stabilized in the form of propositional logic. Even these two points of reference are not enough, as most people approach Žižek’s work through these two entryways—whereas what I want to do is to show that there is something radically undomesticated about this work. When forwarding a criticism of “ground rent,” for example, he does so as a communist who totally understands that ground rent is a delusion of capitalist ideology, rather than as some so-called “Marxist”- infected economists who study ground rent try to understand it through their own reified consciousness as an actual “thing,” rather than as the force of law imposing a “stratigraphic superimposition”33 (an ideological superstructure) atop of the commons as the a priori condition of land as a thing-in-itself.”
― Bradley Kaye

“It is one thing to critique from a position of “disbelief ” in the sense that what you say in your critique will never actually come into fruition. In other words, it is easy to posit a critique of religious belief that takes
the form of the “Death of God,” while cynically disbelieving in the notion that an eternal and immortal being will ever actually die. What does it mean to posit the death of a being that is allegedly eternal? It means that the death is a cynical death, not an actual death, that the death never actually happened. It is much more difficult and radical to think that there is a nihilism underpinning the death of God, visible to philosophers who dig deeply into these subjects, but not yet rendered actual; that when this nihilism actually sets in, there will be terrifying consequences.
The same holds true for a typical anarchist critique of the state. There is a way that someone can go to protests and cry for change without really believing that what they say will be taken seriously, the protesters can walk away venting and in a homeostasis of complacent frustration, whereas, actually getting the changes you want puts the person in a rather
uncanny position—what to do with the boredom that inevitably arises from no longer having any problems over which to complain?
Or, the death of God posed as a problem that is a think-piece, but deep down there is a disbelief regarding the certainty in the mind of the criticizer who truly believes that people will never actually shed their belief in God. To critique the state under the premise that the state will never actually wither away.”
― Bradley Kaye

“A synthesis of metaphysical diference into a “one-all” universality of
identical-sameness is epistemologically impossible, because the occurrence of an insurmountable parallax gap makes it such. Tis gap is constituted by “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between
which no neutral common ground is possible.”3
Such a one-all synthesis
is impossible because what philosophers of epistemology might refer to as
the “real world”, as something external to the subject, is always unfnished, unstable, and incomplete. We can only ever obtain a partial knowledge of reality, and therefore no objective truth exists as a fully rendered
form. Truth is incomplete and partial, like in an open world video game
where a character navigates a world only to discover a doorway to a building that cannot be opened because the programmers did not have the
space to create something behind the doors. Some aspect of the Real must
remain bracketed.”
― Bradley Kaye