Tuesday, July 06, 2004
(5:30 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Review: Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow
“The miracle of love is a funny miracle.” This quote is an aside in “Love as Comedy,” the concluding appendix to Alenka Zupančič’s The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Theory of the Two, but for me it indicates one of the most valuable aspects of Zupančič’s work, which is her sheer talent as a writer. A member of the Lacanian “Ljubljana school,” Zupančič shares many traits with her teacher, Slavoj Žižek—first among them being an almost religious devotion to Lacan. Yet almost miraculously, she shares remarkably few of his negative traits. Her writing style is superior by far, and she very rarely repeats herself. She chooses examples with much greater care, making them believable as examples, rather than as some bedside reading she decided to include in her book.
In perhaps the greatest contrast from her mentor, Zupančič does not so often seem to argue from authority. I have no doubt that Žižek is sincerely convinced, on rational grounds, that his particular mixture of Lacan and Hegel adequately accounts for all areas of human experience, but in practice this often leads him to deploy passages from Lacan or Hegel as though they were scripture. Zupančič, though very clearly a Lacanian, shows herself to be much more adept at walking the line between rearticulating Lacan’s ideas in an argument that is convincing on its own terms and simply advocating Lacan. The final essay on “Love as Comedy” is the clearest example—Lacan’s name comes up on every page, yet the argument is never simply “about” Lacan. This skill is in large measure what allows her to interweave Nietzsche with Lacan while carefully avoiding any impression that she is simply reading in Lacanian ideas, such that Nietzsche himself becomes dispensable (a feat that Žižek does not quite manage vis-à-vis Deleuze in Organs Without Bodies).
Even more important for the effectiveness of her argument, however, is Zupančič’s rigorous scholarship. She actually quotes Nietzsche, at length. She delves into close readings when necessary. She carefully explains Nietzschean concepts on their own terms, and her explanation of Nietzsche’s relationship to Christianity and his concept of nihilism is one of the best and most creative I’ve read. When she does refer to other thinkers, most notably the Russian painter Malevich, she does so only after providing significant justification, and the comparison is genuinely illuminating. Her approach is scrupulously scholarly without being stilted, making unexpected connections that are nonetheless convincing as connections.
The Shortest Shadow is, in short, a creative and insightful theoretical achievement that also succeeds on an aesthetic level. The student may not yet be greater than her master, but that trajectory is most certainly in evidence.
