Monday, September 29, 2003
(10:30 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Report from the Zizek lecture
Tonight I attended the Zizek lecture at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. He was brilliant and challenging, but at the same time very accessible and honest. He mocked Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and also, at times, himself -- for instance, he was very frank about his habit of repeating the same illustrations over and over. In the end, he said that leftists arrogantly presume to know what's going on in the world and what the solutions are and believe that their only task is to get their message to the people. In Zizek's view, we don't know what's going on, and we have a long, arduous task of figuring out what that is. That, it seems to me, is one of his most succinct formulations of the goal of his philosophy.
Of particular interest to Kotsko fans was the fact that Zizek made reference to Donald Rumsfeld's "known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns" in almost the exact same way that I did almost six weeks ago on this blog. I am not a plagiarist (though I suppose it is certainly possible that he is in this case), but in any case, being there and hearing him develop the same point that I developed, based on my study of his philosophy and its forebears, seemed almost like a sign from God, telling me that I actually do understand what Zizek is doing, at least in part.