The thing that has been doing the rounds of the internet is the 10-minute animated clip, not whatever longer talk Žižek may have given, nor the entirety of any of his books (still less his whole oeuvre).
It seems perfectly reasonable to write a rebuttal of that.
Of course it might fail to be a good rebuttal on account of considering only the 10-minute animation, in two ways. (1) By criticizing Žižek for failing to do something that in his fuller work he actually has done. (2) By rebutting with bad arguments that Kaufman would have discovered to be bad, had he read the fuller work.
I don’t think the rebuttal does #1, simply because most of it isn’t criticizing Žižek for failing to do something. Yes, at the end K says that Ž needs to do more than just argue that capitalism is bad. That bit might be invalidated by a more complete consideration of Ž′s work. But that’s not remotely the main point of the rebuttal, which I take to be: Helping people is not worse than letting them suffer to encourage the smashing of the system that harms them, unless not helping them is actually likely to lead to replacing that system with a better one.
So maybe that point is wrong; that would be an instance of problem #2 if Ž has refuted it somewhere. If so, then it seems to me that K’s critics should at least be pointing to some such refutation, rather than just “highly doubting” that Ž has left important points unanswered.
Note that even if Ž has some concrete better system in mind, and an idea of how it might be achieved, that’s little reason to believe that letting people starve will actually make it more likely that that better system will come about. Yes, when things get really bad the result is sometimes a revolution, but revolutions can turn out very badly (as witness the example of 20th-century communism, which as K points out Ž himself agrees was disastrous).
The thing that has been doing the rounds of the internet is the 10-minute animated clip, not whatever longer talk Žižek may have given, nor the entirety of any of his books (still less his whole oeuvre).
It seems perfectly reasonable to write a rebuttal of that.
Of course it might fail to be a good rebuttal on account of considering only the 10-minute animation, in two ways. (1) By criticizing Žižek for failing to do something that in his fuller work he actually has done. (2) By rebutting with bad arguments that Kaufman would have discovered to be bad, had he read the fuller work.
I don’t think the rebuttal does #1, simply because most of it isn’t criticizing Žižek for failing to do something. Yes, at the end K says that Ž needs to do more than just argue that capitalism is bad. That bit might be invalidated by a more complete consideration of Ž′s work. But that’s not remotely the main point of the rebuttal, which I take to be: Helping people is not worse than letting them suffer to encourage the smashing of the system that harms them, unless not helping them is actually likely to lead to replacing that system with a better one.
So maybe that point is wrong; that would be an instance of problem #2 if Ž has refuted it somewhere. If so, then it seems to me that K’s critics should at least be pointing to some such refutation, rather than just “highly doubting” that Ž has left important points unanswered.
Note that even if Ž has some concrete better system in mind, and an idea of how it might be achieved, that’s little reason to believe that letting people starve will actually make it more likely that that better system will come about. Yes, when things get really bad the result is sometimes a revolution, but revolutions can turn out very badly (as witness the example of 20th-century communism, which as K points out Ž himself agrees was disastrous).