Interrogating the Real by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Many of Zizek’s books that are less well known are kind of transistional periods for him. He writes books the way I write on tumblr, to digest information and to posture so as to try it out. If the pose doesn’t work, he discards it later on to try something else.
With this tight but small book, it becomes apparent that Zizek is after the non-changing invariance that is found in all thought, reason and experience. Through the figures of his most favorite philosophers, Zizek does two things. To show us the applicability of these concepts. And to explicate these ideas. The explication part is easy, because it’s right in our face 24/7. The applicability is more difficult. What are we to do with the organization these ideas create for us? Perhaps this is unanswerable, as Zizek himself doesn’t seem to know what to do with his own ideas. So many of these articles are poses, self-wrapping thoughts that reiterate themselves. Sometimes self titled like “beyond discourse analysis” or “hair of the dog that bit you” we get his explication of that theme through a particular theoretical angle. In his most theoretical however, we see the bare parts of the theory eventually spread out, that this maximal difference within this concept is signified, and so these two positions remain, unsynthesizable.
Later on, I believe, Zizek will realize that the Real of Lacan is breakable into two parts, the first being the Real that is unswallowable by the symbolic (so as to be expressed through pathological difference that is the characteristic of a symbolic that is always applied). The second being the pure code that is pure symbolic self-reference but lacking any way for anyone from the outside to gain access to its inner sanctum of difference. In a very real sense, this book, as I suppose all if not most of Zizek’s books, goes ahead to indulge in their philosophical rhetoric as a literal application of the first (because what else would you apply, but this philosophy?) to lead us into the heart of the second, where we have Lacanian mathemes that are left in their solemn ratios without alteration.
We are introduced to a concept, and then left holding it without any direction as to how to use it, what to do with it. Zizek is leaving us his reading glasses.
Perhaps that is the fun of Zizek. That he leads us on these journeys that act like light comedies, taking us to various different areas the way Family Guy or South Park might. Defamiliarizing familiar cultural references enough to reconfigure them in an amusing and strangely upside down deployment that shows us how their logic works backwards to resemble what they always were: purely logical organizations that take in nonsense to create nonsense. In the end these (re)organizations changing nothing about our world yet giving us insight into the way arguments by extension continually intrude in our lifeworld. This parrots the the way market brands, as material orderings, will some day arise to only quietly disappear into the void of capitalist intention, the way we visit one philosophy to briefly see who we are through them.
I would say this is an above average book of Zizek’s. It could work as an introduction as well, if you are interested.
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