Sunday, December 28, 2003
(10:01 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Unelectable / Zizek
In Google, type in "unelectable," then hit "I Feel Lucky."
Also, check out this review by blogger Steven Shaviro of Zizek's new book on Deleuze. Here's a snippet:
Indeed, the overall problem with Organs Without Bodies (and more generally with all of Zizek’s work) has to do with his ultimate loyalty to Hegel and Lacan: quite literally everything gets ultimately framed in Hegelian/Lacanian terms, and this means that Zizek is not really able to encounter any texts or thinkers lying outside this orbit.
[...]
Zizek’s Lacanianism, no less than any other philosopher’s formula, is justified by all the great insights it produces along the way. but still I find it suffocating that Zizek’s marvelous interpretive machine is not just a producer of sparks, but that the circle always has to be closed at the end, so that we always end up back with assertions about, for instance, the obscene supplement of superego enjoyment, or the price to be paid for denying castration.
Loyalty seems to be lacking in today's world. We should applaud Zizek for being an honest party hack.
On a more serious level, I'm sure we're all familiar with Descartes' declaration that if one is lost in the woods, it's better to pick one direction and stick with it than to turn every which way -- at least if you pick a direction, you're bound to get somewhere which will surely be preferable to being lost in the middle of the woods. Zizek has clearly chosen his direction, and perhaps his doggedness in sticking with it should indicate to us not a supreme confidence, but rather an admission that he hasn't yet gotten out of the woods. Zizek praises Lacan precisely for making bald assertions, yet no thinker in the history of the world has ever been so inconsistent and so difficult to periodize -- when you cite Lacan, you practically have to say, "Well, I mean the Lacan of Seminars VI to VII; the later Lacan would say something else entirely." Lacan doesn't have to say that he doesn't yet have a grip on exactly what's going on, because that's implicit in his often awkwardly formulated, off-the-cuff insights that sometimes even contradict each other or themselves -- all in a public forum, attended by all the great luminaries of France during the period when France was at the very forefront of the world of ideas. It's interesting that Lacan gets paired with Hegel, then, since Hegel of course was the only person who fully understood what was going on at his time -- maybe pairing Hegel with Lacan ends up being the only way for Zizek to say, as in The Sublime Object of Ideology, that Absolute Knowledge is the acknowledgement of a fundamental loss.
(For those keeping score, I have approximately 338 pages to go before I myself reach Absolute Knowledge.)
