The Christmas Pine is not a tropical tree. In Brazil you can see native pines in the south or in very specific mountainous regions, but seeing one of these well-grown in a big city like São Paulo is something very rare.
In 1983 Mr. Adão Borges received a small Christmas tree as a gift . The Pine was decorating the restaurant where he worked. His Boss asked If He wanted to take It home, He said: “Yes, I do.”
At first, the pinheirinho was planted in his house in the First floor. Soon Mr. Borges had to expand the house, as his family started growing. Mr. Borges added one more floor to his home, but left room for the beloved tree to grow.
So, each time he was forced to renovate his house, Mr. Borges, did it around the tree that grew strong and healthy. He cut a nice hole, a kind of windows/door for the tree. Now the pine, that actually is an Australian Auracaria, is 19 meters tall and the family every year uses more than 5,000 led lamps to decorate the pine.
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Bookmarked to read at a later date.
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Great takedown of “the Evil Knievel of the theory industry,” Slavov Zizek.
Sample:
I devoured each book when it came out in the 1990s and early 21st century. I also followed on his heels by pursuing a Ph.D. under the direction of his intellectual father figure in Paris: Alain Badiou. However, as I continued to educate myself, I began to tire of his repetitions, theoretical superficiality, and rote rhetorical moves. I increasingly saw his provocative antics as a poor ersatz for historical and materialist analysis. This came to a head in 2001 when he endeavored to explain the events of September 11th through a cheeky Lacanian interpretation of The Matrix. His hot takes, while they sold like hot cakes, paled in comparison to rigorous materialist analyses of the history of U.S. imperialism and the machinations of its national security state, if it be in the work of Noam Chomsky, or much better, that of Michael Parenti.[14]
I then had a unique opportunity to see how Žižek’s discursive sausage is made when I translated a book by Jacques Rancière as a graduate student. Since Rancière was largely unknown in the Anglophone world at the time, every single publisher turned down the project. When I was finally able to talk one of them into considering it, after a hasty initial rejection, the acquisitions editor for the publishing house—which is now defunct—imposed one condition: to guarantee lucrative sales, I needed to secure a preface by a major marketing force in radical theory like Žižek. The latter agreed and later sent me a jumbled text that bore more than a striking resemblance to the section on Rancière in his book The Ticklish Subject.[15] He had added to this some free-associative ruminations and prefatory comments for one of Rancière’s books on cinema, which demonstrated little to no knowledge of the latter’s work on aesthetics or the book in question (I had translated Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique). Disgusted by this shameless disregard for scholarly rigor, yet devoid of any institutional power or a deeper political analysis at the time, I felt that my hands were tied because I needed to accept the theory industry’s use of this charlatan to promote its commodities if I wanted my translation to see the light of day. I sought to bury the preface by turning it into a postface and surrounding it with scholarly elucidations of Rancière’s work. In retrospect, however, I should have simply halted the project.
In looking back on my experiences with the so-called Elvis of cultural theory, I now see that, as part of the ascendent and miseducated professional managerial class stratum in the imperialist core, I was the target audience for his antics. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and Žižek’s first major book came out in English with Verso: The Sublime Object of Ideology. With a preface by the post-Marxist—viz. chichi anti-Marxist—radical democrat Ernesto Laclau, it was presented as a flagship publication in his new series with Chantal Mouffe. The series sought to draw on “anti-essentialist” theoretical trends, like those in France inspired by Martin Heidegger, in order to provide “a new vision for the Left conceived in terms of a radical and plural democracy” rather than support for socialism.[16] These two radical democrats—whose political orientation resonated with the anti-communist movements that were presented as ‘pro-democracy’ and used to dismantle socialist countries—played a central role in promoting Žižek. They invited him to present his work in the Anglophone world and opened up prestigious publication platforms to him. He reciprocated by explicitly using their post-Marxist pronunciamento, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), to frame his first book, based on their shared opposition to “the global solution-revolution” of “traditional Marxism.”[17] In 1991, the USSR was dismantled, and the aspiring post-Marxist theorist catering to the West published two more books: another in Laclau and Mouffe’s series, and one as an October book.[18] He thus definitively caught the rising theoretical wave of radical democracy just as dissident ‘pro-democracy’ movements backed by imperialist states and their intelligence services were aggressively rolling back the gains of the working class in order to redistribute wealth upwards.
As Soviet-style socialism was being dismantled, this Eastern European native informant increasingly presented his post-Marxism as nothing short of the most radical form of Marxism. Not unlike Elvis, who notoriously rose to fame in the music industry by appropriating, domesticating, and mainstreaming music from Black communities that was often rooted in very real struggles, Žižek became a front man in the global theory industry by borrowing his most important insights from the Marxist tradition but subjecting them to a playful postmodern cultural mash-up to crush their substance, thereby commodifying them for mass consumption in the neoliberal era of anti-communist revanchism. It is essential to note in this regard that, while the capitalist establishment celebrated the supposed end of history in the 1990s, it also promoted, for the rather niche social stratum of the radlib intelligentsia, the symbol of Marxism, purportedly set free from its substance, like a red balloon floating whichever way the—capitalist-driven—wind would blow. This was Žižek: he was to become the most well-known ‘Marxist’ in the neoliberal age of accelerated anti-communism. The mystery man from the East—a literal caricature of the ‘crazy Marxist,’ best captured by the sobriquet ‘the Borat of philosophy’—rose like a perverted phoenix publicly masturbating over the flames that had destroyed Soviet-style socialism.
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The king of academic gish gallopers.
In a way a woman could never be the queen of, since women never get listened to with that kind of rapt reverence.
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Well, you know, we could never be that brilliant after all! /s
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An interesting report on friendship:
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Reading that now… Not sure how I feel about it…
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Yeah, this seems off to me. A mélange of examples from progressive/regressive groups, postwar nationalism, and movements that use identity as one of their tenets:
Until recently, those confronting inequality and oppression did so in the name not of particular identities but of a universalism that fuelled the great radical movements that have shaped the modern world, from anticolonial struggles to campaigns for women’s suffrage.
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That struck me too… it also seems like he’s blaming the people who turned a negative into a positive in the face of oppression (embracing Blackness as a positive, for example - the Black power movement), rather than blaming the system that oppressed them in the first place.
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I’m part way through the article… he makes some great points… and then he starts pushing that tired old line that Milosevic was maligned by the west and that the violent acts of genocide were not “real”… Um, nah. That is a huge thing that Chomsky gets wrong about what happened in Yugoslavia. Both things can be true - that Milosevic was connected to war crimes, and that the CIA played a role in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. It’s the same problem I have with people defending Russia - the US and western powers being imperialist doesn’t mitigate Putin’s own imperialism. But for Chomsky and others to excuse Milosevic JUST because he “opposed” the US really irritates me. It’s just wrong, because people were killed in genocidal acts, and Milosevic bore real blame for that. Much like the Cold War, there was blame to be laid at the feet of both sides - which was a major point that Tito and others made about the whole era by founding the Non-Aligned movement. Tito knew very well how the Soviet Union was controlling their satellite states, and he understood it was imperial in nature. Hence him getting kicked out of COMINFORM and aligning with the Global South.
It’s interesting to see the possible connections between the CIA and Zizek…
Over all, some real food for thought!
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I certainly thought so. Malik is usually an interesting read, even if I don’t always agree with all of his points. I particularly liked his description of how the right simultaneously embraced and scapegoated identitarianism, leaving us in today’s situation where liberal or socialist universalism is now completely outwith mainstream discourse.
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I was talking about an article upthread about Zizek…
I’ll get back to the article you posted in a second, I swears! 
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My mistake. I messed the threading up and thought this was a reply to that article.
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So he’s my problem… from the section directly from the book, none of that seemed particularly new or insightful? Plenty of folks have been writing on the construction of race in just that way for years now. Whiteness studies are newer, for sure, but I’m not sure if he’s offering anything novel in his approach to how white supremacists are embracing identity politics today.
She doesn’t really cover white supremacists but she does show how outsiderness that had a racial component (think of the white negro argument that Norman Mailer made, for example) became fashionable among white middle class people…
And I’d also argue that identity politics has always been a huge component of white supremacy, so I don’t find the argument that it’s a new approach particularly compelling. He seems to just take the white supremacists at their word that they are taking influence from Black power, or whatever. He seems to flatten a bit what things like Black power actually do mean, too. Like, he’s letting the white supremacists define what those things mean, rather than looking to those movements and seeing how they view themselves. When you start to dig into these movements that emerged out of systemic racism (or homophobia, or misogyny, etc), you pretty quickly find out that there are and always have been a variety of view points being expressed on how to deal with white supremacy, with Black Nationalism always being a key positions in those debates. This goes back to at least Garvey, if not much further. It’s a very conservative position in many ways, that advocates for separatism, which helps to explain how a group like NOI, which promoted that Garveyist position, could at times make common cause with groups like the Klan. They share a belief in biological race, for one. That’s not even true of all Black Nationalists, either, it’s just one position held among many within Black Nationalist thought.
White supremacists are always having to find ways to dress up their beliefs to fool people into buying into it, because when they state it plainly, people can see it for the genocidal worldview it actually is. That’s what makes it different from other forms of identiy politics - that those other identity communities are not seeking to violently eliminate others - they are seeking to exist as free people and live their life as they see fit, not as someone imposes on them.
That’s my thoughts on it! Maybe the whole book will be more detailed, but just his intro and the excerpt don’t leave me particularly hopeful…
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