This is why I still love reading this guy:
As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Žižek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of Hitchcock films and other Hollywood products; references to current events; disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific ‘advances’. These are lined up in what Eisenstein liked to call ‘a montage of attractions’, a kind of theoretical variety show, in which a series of ‘numbers’ succeed each other and hold the audience in rapt fascination. It is a wonderful show; the only drawback is that at the end the reader is perplexed as to the ideas that have been presented, or at least as to the major ones to be retained. One would think that reading all Žižek’s books in succession would only compound this problem: on the contrary, it simplifies it somewhat, as the larger concepts begin to emerge from the mist.
All of which makes me wonder whether the desire to find a system within Žižek’s thought is a little misdirected (here we should ignore his own claims), for he is more like Badiou’s anti-philosopher – Paul, Kierkegaard, Lacan etc. That and the need to read Žižek’s work as a massive compensation for or response to the ‘former Yugoslavia’, since he played his own eager role in its breakup.
3 November, 2010 at 5:53 pm
At the end of this old post, my suggestion is the best was to read Žižek is to browse the index:
http://numenoldmen.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/zizek-and-2012/
3 November, 2010 at 6:17 pm
lol, as my daughters write in texts.
3 November, 2010 at 9:41 pm
I laughed out loud at that one – selling balls for kidneys. But as I said, a reading of Zizek as a response to the destruction of Yugoslavia is one that yet needs to be done. That and the fact that I have not met one person from the former Yugoslavia who has any time for him.
3 November, 2010 at 10:48 pm
This is exactly the kind of analysis needed. I can already see a paper: ‘The under-arse fly: Zizek the (former) Yugoslav’.
3 November, 2010 at 11:31 pm
No, I was thinking you would write it!
4 November, 2010 at 12:00 am
I will say that Zizek has, perhaps in spite of himself, at least made some Americans think about Marxism and critical theory who wouldn’t have otherwise. Perhaps he’s a dime a dozen in Lublijana, but I’d rather listen to Zizek than most of the lukewarm neoliberal crap that has replaced theory in the humanities. But, granted, he’s no Adorno!
4 November, 2010 at 1:58 am
I won’t argue with the statement about America’s sad state, politically and intellectually speaking. It’s true. But there’s a lot of folks out there- I know many myself- who would never have thought about Marxism for one second had it not been for the twitchy, oddly captivating Zizek. I know he’s a buffoon, but his kind of buffoonery is less worrisome to me than the neoliberal wanking that passes itself off for the “left” in America these days.
4 November, 2010 at 4:50 am
Now I realise what I like about reading Zizek: it is like sitting in one of those Balkan cafes or bars, listening to the conversation, watching the posturing and posing, the dismissals, but also feeling some life and passion. Not quite the real thing! As for Z’s Marxism, I agree with a thesis I have just read: deep down he is a dialectical (Hegelian) Lacanian. Ugly term I know (and the first impression I had of his work), but he remains deeply enamoured with German idealism and Lacan simply won’t let him go.
4 November, 2010 at 11:01 am
But ish thish romanitishizashun of the Balkan Other itshelf not shimply the reversh racism of tolerant liberalishm? Thish is precisely why the filmsh of Emir Kushturica have attained such popularity in the Wesht. Or Shomething. Etshetera, etshetera.
4 November, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Deane, you can take the muffle from your mouth while talking into the payphone … Part of my argument is that the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the ‘collapse’ of communism in Eastern Europe was an excellent career move/moment for Zizek.
4 November, 2010 at 5:59 pm
I don’t know what came over me.
Anyway, things were obviously already fucked up in the former Yu, so we can’t really blame poor Zizzy. The living Yesterdays proved too resistent to socialist baptism. Violent eruption was inevitable; the communist denial only delayed it. People just ain’t no good.
4 November, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Don’t be sorry, I already know that I often talk crap. But can you give me a non-crap version?
I think I have too many questions in reply to your single sentence. Western dismantlement of Yugoslavia? That sounds very centrally controlled and conspiratorial, like the idea prevalent in the US South and Middle East (among the prevalent communities of religious nutjobs in both places) that the West ‘organized’ the 9/11 attacks. Instead, isn’t the truth that the communist party fucked up the economy and relied on western loans to prop up the economy until these inevitably went bust, too? If so, how is this a solely western dismantling? Was the rot not already there?
Tito was a lassez-faire economist? Weren’t his government’s dumb economic decisions the cause of the eventual economic breakdown?
What about the Serbian versus Croatian fights all the way through communist rule? The killings of Serbs and removal of other Serbs, imprisonment of nationalist Croats by Tito? The granting of semi-autonomy to ethnic areas? Don’t these things show significant continuing ethnic-religious problems, which never went away and which were exacerbated when the economy imploded? Did the communist state’s support of Croats provoke any resentment from Serbs, or vice-versa? Did ethnic conflict disappear during communist rule, and then develop from scratch afterwards? Did religious affiliation and opposition also stop with communism and start again afterwards?
4 November, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Deane, I was going to forgive you the first lapse of intellectual rigour, but two in a row is well nigh impossible. First, you offer a standard idealist position, along with a dose of ‘those fucking barbarian balkans’. My own experience on a number of visits now is that it is almost impossible to make ethnic-religious distinctions because the histories of people are so entwined. But to attribute such things to religious causes is simply idealist; religion doesn’t do anything, nor indeed do the ideas people have. Problem is that intellectuals are default idealists because we like to think that we can change the world, make it a better place and all that bullshit. It is also an extremely convenient argument, since anyone else can simply absolve themselves of the blame. But if so, then it becomes a little difficult to explain the NATO invasion.
Economically a simple fact: apart from Poland and perhaps Bulgaria, none of the eastern European countries has even returned to their GDPs of 1989. Obviously capitalism has been hugely beneficial in economic terms.
And … Yugoslavia actually dates from 1918, which is about as long as Australia and New Zealand have been states.
5 November, 2010 at 5:15 am
Oh – so the “intellectually rigorous” idea is that there is that all explanations should be solely in terms of.. what shall we call it… an economic “base”, and that any culture, ideas, etc (let’s call it a “superstructure”, say) are only to be analyzed as effects? That’s simplified things greatly! But more simple than reality, too. The truth is almost in the reverse: without ideas, nobody does anything in reality – this is the only true realist stance, in true opposition to your ongoing attachment to Hegelian idealism as mediated via continental philosophy. But in reality, ideas are part of the complex of reality that has effects.
But who said “barbarian”? Not me. Conflicts involving ethnic and religious differences are defined simply by (to some extent) such pre-existing differences. The civilized-barbarian distinction is not at all relevant: the ethnic-religious differences versus uniform culture is determinant of the type and extent of violence produced in an economic slump. The extent of differences (ideas), and their greater irrationality (ideas), determines the nature of the violence (in reality). It is also only ever a part of the cause – there would be no such violence without inept communist economic policies, or without centralized totalitarian control over the disaffected masses.
And as for the economic state of Eastern Europe since 1989, it is largely irrelevant. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The communist economy fucked up the economy beforehand, and capitalist economy fucked it up afterwards. Both are fueled by unsustainable desires. NATO arrived late on the scene, a part of the cause, but difficult to see it as primary outside a conspiratorial view.
5 November, 2010 at 6:56 am
I see there’s a new Althusser journal edited by a respectable Altheusserian.
5 November, 2010 at 8:14 am
Non sequitur?
5 November, 2010 at 8:28 am
No: Obtuse connection.
5 November, 2010 at 8:18 am
Too slick, Deane: the scandal of a materialist analysis is that it challenges the common-sense narrative you have provided. Very similar to the ritual dismissal fo Marxist analysis in (mostly American) biblical criticism even today: reductionist, in which everything depends upon the ultimately determining instance of the economic. By resisting such crass and ‘vulgar’ ‘reductionism’ they mean we should still allow room for ideas – like God. You certainly keep strange company!
Time then for a paper: The Default Idealism of Biblical Critical: Towards a Recovery of the ‘Vulgar’ in Vulgar Marxism.
5 November, 2010 at 8:42 am
‘God’ is a reification of an idea: idealism. The analysis of early Christianity or emerging Judaism solely or primarily as a history of ideas (the typical move of biblical studies) falsely reduces the socio-economic-intellectual complex to ideas: bad reductionism; probably idealism. But analysis of the ideas of an unemployed Kansas creationist who believes Obama is a Muslim and a socialist for bailing out the banks with taxpayers’ money involves a complex of ideas and socio-economic factors, all facts; the analysis of this complex as complex is realism.
5 November, 2010 at 8:59 am
Now we come to some weird agreement, as usual: in Capital Marx coins a curious phrase, ‘socially valid as well as objective thought forms [gesellschaftlich gültige, also objektive Gedankenformen]’ (German ed, p. 90), in order to try to express the fact that the apparent transfer of properties between commodities is also real and not merely an illusion.
5 November, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Really? Well I never; that surprising Karl. This is not at all vulgar, though, and a little Althusserian.
5 November, 2010 at 8:34 am
Is thish classical Marxist conception of the economic base not simply a repetition of the Christian doctrine of Original sin – with the most significant parallel that although corrupt humans can try to sin less, it takes an apocalyptic Event to eradicate it altogether? Muntzer as proto-Marx.
5 November, 2010 at 8:55 am
Now, now, you’ll have to be a little more original than that. Ever since Berdyaev, Loewith and Taubes, the old saw of Marxism being secularised theology has been trotted out, without any textual references or decent arguments – since then it simply falls flat.
5 November, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Adam was the only original person.
5 November, 2010 at 6:53 pm
I’d be fascinated to hear what you think of Eric Hobsbawm’s mention of “eschatology” in his introduction to The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (1998). Well, I guess I’ll get to find out since it comes up tangentially in my paper for December!
5 November, 2010 at 6:29 pm
Not everyone who claims to represent Marx has read him (and Engels) as well as they might have – says he with the weary memory of reading the longest novel ever: the 50 vols of the collected works.
16 November, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Is this your constitutive exception to your normal readings – getting Marx’s original reading precisely right?
5 November, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Much, much better than reading Barth’s KD.
5 November, 2010 at 8:10 pm
John, I would say that Hobsbawm is wrong in a simply sense and unwittingly correct in a roundabout sense. I have an article coming out in Mediations that shows, through detailed textual and contextual analysis, both Marx and Engels setting themselves resolutely against the eschatological and even apocalyptic nature (much of it explicitly biblical) of communism at the time. This did not stop those commentators in the 1930s first making the suggestion that Marxism is a secularised eschatology – on the basis of no textual analysis at all. However, it was Ernst Bloch who first introduced the argument that Marxism should consider the political value of biblical eschatology and apocalyptic. At that point eschatology does come into the debate, but as a secondary phenomenon.
16 November, 2010 at 5:58 pm
I got distracted. I read this and laughed and laughed:
http://www.observer.com/2010/slavoj-zizek-bourgeois-snob
You can’t but laugh. I reckon.
16 April, 2012 at 7:04 am
[...] and/or justification of power. Here we might echo, among many others, Žižek’s critiques (sorry Roland) which partly function as an attack on a postmodern penchant for praising displacements, [...]