Sunday, April 11, 2004
(1:59 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Prayer for Slavoj Zizek
From the preface to the second edition of For they know not what they do:
There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although practically no one has actually read them page by page (John Rawls' Theory of Justice, for example, or Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit) -- a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us. I hope For they know not what they do avoided this fate by, at least, really being read. Although it was overshadowed by the more popular Sublime Object of Ideology, my first book in English published two years earlier, I always considered it a more substantial achievement: it is a book of theoretical work, in contrast to the succession of anecdotes and cinema references in The Sublime Object. For me, the reaction of individual readers to it was a kind of test: those who said: "I was disappointed by it, finding it a little bit boring after all the firecrackers of The Sublime Object," obviously missed the crucial argument of both books. Even today, my attitude is: those who do not want to talk about For they know not what they do should remain silent about The Sublime Object.
I wonder if this is something of a key to Slavoj Zizek, a way of understanding the depressing succession of hackwork that has flowed out of him for the past several years. (By way of confession, I have not yet read For they know not what they do in its entirety; I have, however, read Tarrying with the Negative, The Indivisible Remainder, and The Ticklish Subject, and I don't plan specifically to discuss The Sublime Object of Ideology.) He worked insanely hard for a decade in order to establish himself on the American scene, putting out tome after tome of heavy theoretical work, a period culminating in The Ticklish Subject, with an aftershock in The Fragile Absolute.
Then, come to find out -- people like him not so much for his cutting-edge ideas, but for his agreeable, "wacky" writing style. He has spent ten years trying to reinterpret and reapply Lacan and Hegel to the contemporary scene, and all people want to talk about is dirty jokes. In short, people aren't willing to do the work. So he gives them some crap. He throws out article after article that's pieced together from little bits of previous articles -- because no one's really reading anyway. He makes ridiculous references to Lenin, which I take to be highly exaggerated -- a way of distancing himself from the stasis of "liberal" Americans who allow realism to push them to drift further and further right. Since the ideological right has a stranglehold on the terms of debate, severely limiting what could be considered reasonable -- he gestures toward the courage to go beyond reason (and arguably misuses Kierkegaard). If you can catch him in an honest moment, when he's talking with someone he knows to have been a sympathetic and thorough reader (as in this interview), you can still get some good stuff out of him, but when writing for a popular audience, he's not going to overwork himself.
Hopefully this will turn out to have been a "middle period" in his work. He seems to have taken his orthodox Lacanian/Hegelian thing as far as he can for the moment, and now hopefully he'll work on really assimilating some new stuff -- rather than simply making authoritative pronouncements on it. That's my prayer for Slavoj Zizek: that within five years or so, he will have greatly expanded and perhaps even fundamentally transformed the scope of his philosophy, rather than simply trying to "relate" new developments to his previous ideas in a superficial way. The fact that he's producing hackwork for now gives me some hope that this might happen -- clearly, he still has plenty of time to do serious inquiry after republishing the fifth, slightly altered draft of his Iraq piece.
