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Slavoj Zizek "The Sublime Object of Ideology" (Verso)
Odd to come at this after having already read a fair amount of Zizek (Parallax View, Desert of the Real, Violence, Enjoy Your Symptom!, Plague of Fantasies, chunks of Puppet and the Dwarf): everything new is old again. Key Zizekian concepts first articulated here include interpassivity and the subject/object supposed to believe; the desire to abolish contradiction in a rational totality as fascist; antisemitism and jealousy over the unified pleasure of the Other; and the Other as subject supposed to enjoy; the sublime nothing as the radical thing-in-itself; "cynical reason" as already accounted for in ideology and capitalism; the obscene sustaining excess of the Law; "fantasy is on the side of reality"; retroactively changing the past in a standard psychoanalytic reversal of cause and effect; quilting points; anamorphis; renunciation and surplus enjoyment; and etc. Baring the thick reading of Hegel in the last chapter, it's all familiar. That's fine.
Strikes me now that Zizek's method is primarily phenomenological: how does it appear to consciousness, specifically, HUMAN consciousness.
He remains a humanist or at least an anthropocentrist through and through. There may be a Real out there, but he's ultimately concerned with the internal, constitutive alienation of human (primarily male) pretensions to identity. And his approach would work equally well whether that human had just woke up in a blank white room or if that human were in a crowd or if that human contained a (intestinal bacteriological) crowd. So that's a problem. Second problem: the Hegelian method, as a method of binaries, only inadequately describes actually existing networked processes of change. I'm interested in a world bigger than the one I find in my head.
Intense. I've got a much better understanding of what Lacan is getting at, or at least what Zizek is getting at in his other books when he talks about Lacan.
After reading this, you'll never think about ideology the same way.
Odd to come at this after having already read a fair amount of Zizek (Parallax View, Desert of the Real, Violence, Enjoy Your Symptom!, Plague of Fantasies, chunks of Puppet and the Dwarf): everything new is old again. Key Zizekian concepts first articulated here include interpassivity and the subject/object supposed to believe; the desire to abolish contradiction in a rational totality as fascist; antisemitism and jealousy over the unified pleasure of the Other; and the Other as subject supposed to enjoy; the sublime nothing as the radical thing-in-itself; "cynical reason" as already accounted for in ideology and capitalism; the obscene sustaining excess of the Law; "fantasy is on the side of reality"; retroactively changing the past in a standard psychoanalytic reversal of cause and effect; quilting points; anamorphis; renunciation and surplus enjoyment; and etc. Baring the thick reading of Hegel in the last chapter, it's all familiar. That's fine.
Strikes me now that Zizek's method is primarily phenomenological: how does it appear to consciousness, specifically, HUMAN consciousness.
He remains a humanist or at least an anthropocentrist through and through. There may be a Real out there, but he's ultimately concerned with the internal, constitutive alienation of human (primarily male) pretensions to identity. And his approach would work equally well whether that human had just woke up in a blank white room or if that human were in a crowd or if that human contained a (intestinal bacteriological) crowd. So that's a problem. Second problem: the Hegelian method, as a method of binaries, only inadequately describes actually existing networked processes of change. I'm interested in a world bigger than the one I find in my head.
Intense. I've got a much better understanding of what Lacan is getting at, or at least what Zizek is getting at in his other books when he talks about Lacan.
After reading this, you'll never think about ideology the same way.
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