Wednesday, September 29, 2004
(8:31 PM) | Anonymous:
6 Degrees of Slavoj Zizek.
Everyone should remember the game "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" and the way it worked (you linked people to Kevin Bacon in 6 moves). Any movie nerd could actually do this with any actor that has had a prolific career but for some reasons Kevin Bacon was the go to man because he was both respected and kind of a joke depending on what movie you thought of.Zizek has become this sort of character in academic publishing. He holds the same precarious position of respect for his works in the German Idealists and on ideology critique through psychoanalysis and also derided for his sometimes polemical style and eccentric bombast. It is impossible to deny that Zizek has become immensely popular but in a pop star kind of way and it really remains to be seen, despite his talent, what his legacy will be. But one thing is certain, there is only 6 degrees that separate Zizek's works from all of us.
Take his "blurb" contributions. Whenever I find myself in a bookshop I read these words of praise to decide if I want to buy the book and I've found Zizek on a lot of the works. Diverse works such as Negri's Time for Revolution and Milbank's Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon. It might be fun to figure out if you can take the contributions all the back to Plato but I don't have the drive for it.
Of course Zizek isn't the only person who whores these blurbs out. Fredrick Jameson is quite common to find, Simon Critchley also, and Hauerwas also fits into this category. Still it only seems fun to do it with Zizek.
