An early thought on Less Than Nothing: Or, What ever happened to The Parallax View?

Voyou observed on Twitter that while The Parallax View was supposed to be Zizek’s magnum opus, it hardly figures at all in Less Than Nothing — in fact, it seems to have disappeared down the memory hole to a certain extent. I am still enjoying “The Drink Before,” but Zizek’s presentation of the project of Less Than Nothing is pretty clear:

However, the aim of Less Than Nothing is not simply (or not so simply) return to Hegel, but, rather, to repeat Hegel (in the radical Kierkegaardian sense). Over the last decade, the theoretical work o the Party Troika to which I belong (along with Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupancic) had the axis of Hegel-Lacan as its “undeconstructible” point of reference: whatever we were doing, the underlying axiom was that reading Hegel through Lacan (and vice versa) was our unsurpassable horizon. Recently, however, limitations of this horizon have appeared: with Hegel, his inability to think pure repetition and to render thematic the singularity of what Lacan called the objet a; with Lacan, the fact that his work ended in an inconsistent opening: Seminar XX (Encore) stands for his ultimate achievement and deadlock–in the years after, he desperately concocted different ways out (sinthome, knots…), all of which failed. So where do we stand now?

My wager was (and is) that, through their interaction (reading Hegel through Lacan and vice versa), psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics mutually redeem themselves, shedding their accustomed skin and emerging in a new unexpected shape. (pg. 18)

This is the “positive” equivalent to Zizek’s candid admission in another book on German Idealism, The Indivisible Remainder, that the “traditional” readings of Hegel as an absolute idealist and Lacan as a structuralist actually are there in the texts — they’re just not what he’s interested in. Now, he’s saying that “what he’s interested in” in each figure is limited, but in such a way that they must supplement each other in order to move forward.

What happened in between those two moves was The Parallax View, which now appears as a failed attempt to take the “what he’s interested in” and turn it into his own thing, using the notion of parallax to dislodge the conceptual patterns he had been attracted to in Lacan and Hegel from the superstructure of Lacan and Hegel. In other words, it was a premature attempt to find a way out of the hermetic project of reading (a certain) Lacan together with (a certain) Hegel.

Zizek on Why We Love Sociopaths

Via @MrTeacup, I learned that Zizek recently concluded one of his public lectures with a summary and endorsement of my book Why We Love Sociopaths. You can watch it here (embedding is disabled, but the link skips straight to the revelant part).

This is obviously one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me. And what better way to celebrate than to buy the book (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository)?

Who gate-keeps the gate-keepers?

Zizek has an article up about Islam over at ABC Religion and Ethics, which is obviously one of the Official News Sources of AUFS. It makes some interesting points, but I was disappointed to see an obvious error:

But let me now move to a further key distinction between Judaism (along with its Christian continuation) and Islam. As is apparent from the account of Abraham’s two sons, Judaism chooses Abraham as the symbolic father; Islam, on the contrary, opts for the lineage of Hagar, for Abraham as the biological father, thereby maintaining the distance between “the father” and God, and retaining God in the domain of the un-symbolisable.

It is nonetheless significant that both Judaism and Islam repress their founding gestures. According to Freud’s hypothesis, repression in Judaism stems from the fact that Abraham was not a Jew at all, but an Egyptian – it is thus the founding paternal figure, the one who brings revelation and establishes the covenant with God, that has to come from the outside.

Emphasis mine.

On a dismissive tone recently adopted

Among young students of continental philosophy, a certain orthodoxy seems to be taking hold. Heidegger and Derrida are out, and with them the various approaches to philosophical discourse that proceed via commentary. Suspicion of system-building is out, and accordingly Hegel is reemerging as a major point of reference — and one must have very firm convictions about the proper reading of Hegel, dismissing vast swathes of the existing traditional commentary. More generally, caution and qualification seem to be out. We must boldly speculate into new realms, it seems, having developed our own axiomatic ontology by the age of 23.

Alas, I have come too late to partake in such trends. I still think we have a great deal to learn from Heidegger and Derrida. I view commentary on past philosophers as a necessary education in philosophy, a productive grappling with vast minds. I’m more sympathetic toward Hegel than some, but I am willing to admit — as Zizek does in The Indivisible Remainder — that the traditional reading of Hegel does have a basis in the text and moreover I’m reluctant to take too firm a stance on the true meaning of an author who can be construed as embracing virtually every possible position. Most of all, though, I am unwilling to speculate out into the air, without the guardrail of working through the thoughts of those who have gone before me. The world will have to look elsewhere for a bold new form of jargon purporting to capture the essence of the things themselves.

I am, in short, an old man now.

News on Zizek’s Hegel book

Peter Thompson of Ernst Blog has posted the TOC for Zizek’s forthcoming Less Than Nothing, as well as a review.

Stalinism and the Psychoanalysis of Politics

One of the biggest disappointments in the new movie adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy comes when the mole explains himself to Smiley upon being found out. The television series had had him launch into an anti-American diatribe, talking about the evils of consumerism and essentially the need to resist the capitalist degradation of all culture. In the film, however, he simply says claims that he had to choose a side and that the West has become “ugly” in some unspecified way. The mole becomes a shallow aesthete, impotently and arbitrarily “acting out,” whereas in the television adaptation, one could see a certain nobility to the character. I think one could read this shift as symptomatic of the historical shift that occurred between the two adaptations: after the fall of the Soviet Union, the appeal of communism, even as an alternative to what is undesirable in the West, has become unthinkable.

It is here that I think Zizek’s obsessive investigations of Stalinism are most important. On a certain level, he is simply following a “psychoanalytic” approach to politics, focusing on the pathological in order to shed light on the so-called normal (in this case, liberal democracy). Yet after reading Adorno for the last few months, I’m increasingly convinced that Zizek’s insistence on the distinction between Stalinism and fascism and his choice of Stalinism as the privileged object of critique — and his criticism of the Frankfurt School for taking the opposite approach on both counts — is justified, at least as a strategic choice. Choosing fascism as the “pathology” that is supposedly revelatory of the real content of the “normal” can fall much too easily into familiar patterns of liberal political analysis: moralism, progressivism (i.e., fascism shows that pre-modern national loyalties “still” hold great power), and the easy dichotomy between Enlightenment reason and its irrational other.

The privileging of Stalinism gets around that, because one can position it specifically as a failure within the Enlightenment tradition, rather than a failure of the Enlightenment to overcome the forces opposed to it. Adorno (and Horkheimer) are much more sophisticated than your normal moralizing critique of “totalitarianism,” yet I do think their work can very easily be appropriated by such discourses — whereas Zizek’s valorization of Stalinism, at least so far, apparently cannot. Another advantage of the emphasis of Stalinism is that it can shed a more interesting light on contemporary power relations. It’s much too “easy” to prove that supposedly “pre-modern” forms of power (patriarchalism, tribalism) are on the loose — and then we get to feel a nice buzz of liberal righteousness denouncing these people for failing to get with the program. It’s a lot more interesting and surprising to hear Zizek say, as he did once in a public lecture I attended (but has unfortunately not followed up on yet to my knowledge), that Stalinism has finally come into its own in contemporary corporate culture.

DIY Hype

My recent study of Adorno has me looking at popular culture and everyday interactions through Adorno-shaded lenses. One phenomenon that jumps out at me is the tendency toward spurious “ranking,” that is, the expression of personal preference as an objective feature of the work. We don’t hear that our friends really liked a given album, for instance — we hear that it’s probably one of the best albums of the year. Even on purely personal measures, there’s a tendency toward ranking, as when one declares a given film their “favorite movie of all time.”

Why do we talk like this?

The Monstrosity of Christ as the Moment “Religious Thought” Jumped the Shark

While the exchange between John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek in The Monstrosity of Christ has become one of the most widely discussed books in religious thought in the past decade or so, the real question remains: why does it matter? (Carl Raschke)

This comes via a strangely frustrating feature on the book in the most recent JCRT, and it struck me that, intentionally or not, in a single line Raschke manages to cast damning praise on both a single book and an entire profession.

My review of Living in the End Times

I have a review of the expanded paperback edition of Living in the End Times up at Emmy Manuel’s excellent Global Comment. It is a partial refutation of Zizek’s own review of the book as largely bullshit.

Interpreting Zizek’s blurbs

Zizek supplied the following blurb for Awkwardness:

It is easy to write a deep book on a big crucial concept like anxiety love or evil but it takes a true master to do for awkwardness what Heidegger in his Sein und Zeit did for anxiety and this is what Kotsko does. In his book which combines philosophical stringency with references to popular culture awkwardness is elevated into a universal singularity: a prismatic knot in which our entire historical moment is reflected. If this will not become an instant classic then we really live in awkward times.

Now I see the following Zizek blurb on Santner’s latest, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty:

Eric Santner’s The Royal Remains stands out, not only as the most important book on political philosophy of the last decade, but as a classic at the level of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ or Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies. It prolongs their analyses into today’s world of micro-politics, raising the key question of what happens to the king’s other sublime body in a democratic society where the people-collectively-are the new sovereign. My reaction to reading this book is of wonder and awe; it is as if a new Benjamin (with the added features of Freud and Lacan) is walking among us.

My advice for anyone who receives a blurb from Zizek saying merely “this is a strong contribution to the debate, providing often incisive insights into difficult texts, etc.”: don’t use it! It means he hated the book!