Monday, January 02, 2006
(6:53 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Why John Holbo Is Wrong In Every Respect
I was unpersuaded by John Holbo's published essay on Zizek and Trilling. I remained unpersuaded throughout every iteration thereof, including the latest. As always, I became involved in a "burden of proof" dispute wherein the debate was over the transcendental conditions of what it would be like to have a conversation, rather than about the topic at hand -- and indeed, I am starting to think that the most appropriate use of blog comments is for either breezy dismissals or personal invective; anything else gets too long and no one will read it (except Rich Puchalsky, archbishop of the Most Holy Church of John Holbo). In short: it's a genre problem. That's the deadlock here, why we end up in the same place every time. I've been writing blog comments when I should have been writing blog posts! What a fool!And so: the post itself. This one, the post in which I finally answer my critics, or rather, the critics of my criticism of Holbo. I'll have to get this out of the way -- although I like John and like his posts and even like (in moderation) his eponymous writing style (the "Holbonic"), I don't much like the concept of The Valve. I find the whole thing to be rather annoying, to be frank. Even though I don't have any personal or professional investment in the MLA, I instinctively defend it, at times allowing my arguments to outstrip my means on a variety of levels. If it was just a site for literary bloggers to come together and talk about their professional and scholarly concerns in an informal manner, that'd be awesome. And let's say about half of it actually is that -- Ray Davis, et al. Ray doesn't like Lacan, and that's fine. No one is required to like Lacan, and there are really good and obvious reasons not to.
By the same token, I'm not required to like the concept of "Higher Eclecticism." Why not deal with a variety of thinkers? Did anyone really think they were creating a huge overarching system using bits and pieces from Foucault, Habermas, Irigaray, etc.? I mean, really. Sure, there's a lot that's dilletantish in the literary reception of continental thought (which need not even have occurred at all if it weren't for the absurd narrowness of American philosophy departments!), and I'm as annoyed with it as the next guy.
Here's the thing, though: so is Zizek! He is very explicitly not doing a little of Derrida here, a little of Foucault there, just because the names impress people. He has a very specific agenda: he thinks that we need to reclaim the insights of German Idealism (epitomized by Hegel), and he thinks that we can best do that by reading psychoanalysis (specifically Lacan) as a continuation of that philosophical tradition. I find this to be a very creative position and in many ways very appealling, particularly in the area of the theory of subjectivity (which is a special concern to me, as a Trinitarian "theologian"). It's a weird position, maybe not anything that anyone else would have come up with -- certainly not self-evidently true, but just as certainly not completely arbitrary and not simply dictated by the winds of fashion. We're going on close to twenty years that Zizek has been working on and developing this basic idea, applying it to various areas, bringing it into contact with various other bodies of thought -- so any argument that starts with the presupposition that Zizek is a representative of the Higher Eclecticism is deeply flawed as far as I'm concerned. It's a straw man argument, which is basically serving the end of grinding an already well-ground axe ("Theory people are decadent!").
Second, I find John's readings of Zizek to be tone-deaf to a significant degree. John seems to me to display nothing but disdain for Zizek's writing style. He is not required to like it, of course. There are a lot of annoying things in there. Yet this disdain seems to me to be symptomatic of a certain superficiality of reading. For instance, he has said before that Zizek has no reason to write long books, because his books are all just totally random. (I don't want to track down this link. Sorry.) This strikes me as simply wrong. On the surface, Zizek is easy enough to read, with all the italics and the dumb jokes and such -- but I have yet to detect any sensitivity to Zizek's larger argumentative strategies in John's writings on Zizek. Now here I go again, bringing up something I can't exhaustively prove in the context of a blog post of reasonable length -- but anyway, there's a dialectical movement at work (at least in his best books, which we've established that On Belief, for example, is not). It's reasonable to get to the end of The Ticklish Subject and be befuddled about how we ended up here, but the initial lack of clarity is not sufficient grounds to declare that it's all random. My best example of this phenomenon would be The Fragile Absolute, which on the first reading appears to be a more or less random collection of hobby-horses, but on the second read through becomes a powerful enactment of Zizek's assessment of the contemporary world as a "pagan"-like setting into which a Christian-style intervention is necessary. All the Heidegger stuff, the stuff on racism, the reading of The Phantom Menace -- it all falls into place. On a larger scale, this is true of each of his works, particularly the "big books," where the chapter headings give a more explicit organizational scheme.
I wish that Zizek would do fewer (and better) popular articles, and I also wish he hadn't agreed to crap out something for Routledge's stupid "Thinking in Action" series, but if one is going to contest Zizek as such, his philosophical method as such -- then pretending that the mediocre stuff is all the Zizek has done is simply disingenuous. In theory, one could simply argue against On Belief or against one particular article Zizek wrote, but I don't think that John has ever limited himself to that -- and I think that if he's reading the more central works (which I am sure he actually is), we'd better see some evidence of it the next time he decides to address the issue of Zizek's badness.
If he comes away from his readings of the main books with his main points unproblematically reconfirmed, such that it is fair to take his worst book as a representative for his entire oeuvre, I will be forced to conclude that John went into that reading expecting his main points to be confirmed and mainly knew that he would have to be able to say that he's read the other books if he is to continue the Zizek show in the future. Not that one is forced to agree with Zizek, but I have a feeling that if one were to have serious objections to Zizek, one would have different objections after reading several of his best books as opposed to reading arguably his worst.
Please note: None of this is an argument in favor of Zizek as such, but rather an argument that John's critique of Zizek misses its target. This shall not devolve into a burden of proof dispute -- insofar as John has written an essay and a conference presentation, the burden of proof on me in critiquing John is solely to show that his critique as such is inadequate, not to argue in favor of the value of Zizek's intellectual project as such. The fact that I obviously ascribe some value to that project is, strictly speaking, beside the point here.
