Friends dragged me to Inside Out 2 and it was saccharine dogshit that mostly made me think of my awkward moments in high school sports. To its credit it was only 90 minutes long. Anyway Zizek’s idea would have been much more unhinged and interesting.
I read it differently, it seems to me that Zizek is coming from a place of empathy and trying to humanize the Palestinian cause.
Most people are woefully uninformed, and they naturally ask “Why would Hamas do Oct 7th?” The answer often comes in the form of pro-Israeli propaganda: they’re antisemitic, they’re animals, they have been taught to hate.
The best way to break through this propaganda is by showing what the Palestinian people have suffered over the past 70 years, and especially the last 16 years. When people learn of the apartheid conditions, the brutal blockade, the Great March of Return, etc, many come to the conclusion that they too would be driven to violence if they were treated in such a horrific and unjust manner.
Anyway I might be wrong about Zizek, but I would totally pay to see this movie.
Zizek lets half of his real views slip when he talks about “psychic breakdown and suicidal acts of violence.”
We know from Zizek’s condemnations of Hamas and his giving Israel a right to defend itself (per his words) that he not only offers up the view that Palestinian resistance is essentially hopeless squirming, that the “Palestinian plight” is sad and heartbreaking and yet there is nothing that can be done but gaze into an idealized future divorced from all conditions (this is Stephen Gowans’ wonderful view), but Palestinian resistance is both suicidal and evil, and whatever liberal weaseling within this we get it’s no different than Nietzsche’s eternal slavery.
The only truly just and correct thing for this Palestinian child to do in Zizek’s view is die in silence or wait to be saved by some Western country (whether it’s the US through his Kautskyite vision of the future of Western military intervention or NATO the peacekeepers, who knows!). He only plays the empathetic mouthpiece so that he can use the oppression of Palestinians to make some idiotic point about a mundane Disney movie. This is what Zizek does, he is worthless.
Yeah no, Zizek is no fan of Palestinians or Arabs in general, usually he coaches his racism in ambiguous and vague phraseology like he’s doing here, but in the past (especially the last year) he’s made clear his racial (or “cultural” as he would put it) antipathy to anyone with a skin color darker then uncooked pizza dough
He believes Palestinians are brainwashed savages with no right to resistance or even complaint that isn’t coached in acknowledging western cultural supremacy, those are his views on culture and race in general, he’s just spitting acid at the annoying ethnics who’s “savagery” would according to him make for more entertaining television