Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Of course, here is Zizek again. Second time reading this book. This is a light book for him, as the chapters are short and the theory isn’t thick. Nonetheless, as always, with his dialectical switching, Zizek is interesting and insightful. One of the primary problems with those equating philosophy with truth is that it needs to be true all the way through.
Yes, okay so much of what Zizek says is sometimes conjecture. But the point is taken, and if it’s not then it doesn’t stick and it’s not useful.
What Zizek is doing here is presented 9/11 as an event in which we have a choice about the kind of world we want to live in. Nonetheless, 9/11 allowed for a further refinement in division as separate entities, like the American government, went ahead to define the field for itself (we are the victims), rather than melding the field. That conservative move to hole up created a differential in logic which of course, creates the antagonisms that we face today. This is perhaps the underlying motif that Zizek wishes to highlight through the figure of homo sacer, that much of our laws and understandings of class are determined through the difference of who is left out and how that leaving out is expressed beyond whatever political justifications may be given.
All in all entertaining to read, but simple in his point. The complexity involved is how he builds his simple point through the mediation of abstract universal figures. After all, only through mediated complexity can one arrive at a more abstract point of reference. Without that mediation, a given simple object is only itself, without extension.
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