Žižek The Plagiarist

Blah blah blah: Newsweek can has an article on Did Marxist Philosophy Superstar Slavoj Žižek Plagiarize a White Nationalist Journal?, the answer to which appears to be ‘Yes’. The White Nationalist Journal in question is American Renaissance, a group and publication often getting into trouble with the fine folks at One Peoples Project.

This isn’t the first time Žižek has got into trouble for talking or writing shit. In September 2012, Jay Pinho wrote of The Year of Writing Dangerously: Slavoj Žižek’s serial self-plagiarism; Chomsky writes of Žižek’s ‘Fantasies’ of him on Z here; while the philosopher Simon Critchley and anthropologist David Graeber have also crossed swords with the Slovenian. In any case, you can read moar about Žižek The Plagiarist at Slavoj Žižek: Philosophaster and Plagiarist. and also view the two competing texts on diffchecker.com here.

See also : Resistance is Utile: Critchley responds to Zizek (Harper’s Review, May 2008) [May 16, 2008].

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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7 Responses to Žižek The Plagiarist

  1. ulicar says:

    Žižek is an idiot who managed to persuade a number of people that he is somehow a thinker. He is not, he is shit. He says such stupid things, racist, sexist, idiotic things, that are so stupid one cannot criticise them, and that is perceived as a win by his followers.

    He is an idiot in a global village.

  2. Butt Darling says:

    Some years ago now – when he went along with some local to him anti-Roma stuff, a few obscure Marxists in the UK disowned him. They also said he was driving VERSO books into serious disrepute.
    He is definitely in the Leninist revolutionary tradition of Marxism – as opposed to the electioneering tradition. Search on “Verso”, “Trotsky”, “Zizek”.
    Marx himself was not terribly anti-racist – search “Marxwords”.

  3. Who cares? I find his books on the whole enjoyable to read and many of his arguments useful to understand the world we live in. Others don’t, fair enough. He did something boring, stupid and a bit gross… but that doesn’t invalidate the usefulness of his work- especially ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’.

  4. @ndy says:

    @withsobersenses: Some do. Both because it’s plagiarism and because of the source but also on account of what, if anything, it reveals about his perspective and standing. His writing will continue to retain whatever qualities it has, though I suspect some might like to run some of it through turnitin and the like.

  5. J@son says:

    Žižek’s email to Critical-Theory: ‘A CLARIFICATION: With regard to the recent accusations about my plagiarism, here is what happened. When I was writing the text on Derrida which contains the problematic passages, a friend told me about Kevin Macdonald’s theories, and I asked him to send me a brief resume. The friend send [sic] it to me, assuring me that I can use it freely since it merely resumes another’s line of thought. Consequently, I did just that – and I sincerely apologize for not knowing that my friend’s resume was largely borrowed from Stanley Hornbeck’s review of Macdonald’s book. (These passages are also taken over in Part III, Chapter 1, of my book The Parallax View.) As any reader can quickly establish, the problematic passages are purely informative, a report on another’s theory for which I have no affinity whatsoever; all I do after this brief resume is quickly dismissing Macdonald’s theory as a new chapter in the long process of the destruction of Reason. In no way can I thus be accused of plagiarizing another’s line of thought, of »stealing ideas.« I nonetheless deeply regret the incident’ (ref: http://www.critical-theory.com/i-nonetheless-deeply-regret-the-incident-zizek-responds-to-plagiarism-allegations/ ).

    And Žižek’s response to Chomsky’s Fantasies: Some Bewildered Clarifications, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1365-some-bewildered-clarifications-a-response-to-noam-chomsky-by-slavoj-zizek .

  6. inglourious_basterd says:

    Žižek is crazy – yes. Is he a deliberate plagiarist? – probably.

    Are we likely to see him again on Q&A – maybe not.

    Somewhat disturbing comments after the article in Newsweek as well – obviously the AmRen crowd in its usual paranoia mode had decided to shout down anyone who remotely looked normal and rolled out their Daleks complete with tanty-white mantra.

    Would be nice if natural selection veered towards the progressive.

    *sigh*

  7. Ablokeimet says:

    “Somewhat disturbing comments after the article in Newsweek as well – obviously the AmRen crowd in its usual paranoia mode had decided to shout down anyone who remotely looked normal and rolled out their Daleks complete with tanty-white mantra.”

    The language is very unclear and gives the impression of there being some “in crowd” of people who would understand the cryptic references. A translation into plain English would be appreciated.

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