Thursday, March 17, 2005
(8:45 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Žižek Wars Continue
John Holbo continues his Žižekian explorations. Ogged deserves a prize for a comment that basically undercuts the empirical occasion of John's complaint, though the objection as such does not depend on the particular example. I have apparently taken it upon myself to defend Žižek against every possible attack; Jodi Dean responds in a more general way at her site.I'm sure there will be more posts in this continuing saga, since John has to present on Žižek at the MLA. (And indeed, there have been many previous posts, such as this one that remains on the front page of
At the same time that I feel increasing blog fatigue, I am also feeling increasing blog fellow-feeling. Perhaps it's just that familiarity makes the heart grow fonder, but I have an increasing respect for John's objections to Žižek and (since I cited them approvingly in comments) many of Tim Burke's most characteristic intellectual moves. My blog career is actually the longest time that I've been part of an intellecual circle made up of people with whom I broadly agreed and with whom I did not share some sense of being an embattled minority. For instance, in the intellectual circle I ran with late in my college career, there was a distinct sense of embattled minoritihood, because we actually were an embattled minority, and in public discussion forums, I was merciless to people who fell outside that circle (which in some cases seemed to include only me), sometimes just for the sake of it. And of course, during the election season, for a priori reasons, I had to participate in the left-wing/liberal tradition of shooting each other in the foot for insufficient fear of a Republican victory. Now, though, things have calmed down somewhat, and I've been in conversation with some of these people for well over a year now -- which is kind of a long time to be in conversation with someone you've never met in person -- and maybe now it just feels like there's time. We're talking about important stuff here, and there is a certain urgency, but there's time. We don't have to have the orthodoxy completely hammered out quite yet (people often forget that Christian orthodoxy, that orthodoxy par excellence, took at least 400 years to reach its most characteristic forms, and it continues to develop even today).
Or maybe I'm just becoming one of those pansy-ass liberals.
