The Essential Zizek [Paperback]

Slavoj Zizek's achievements are rather large, but as an author he should be lauded even more given the fact that he writes in English (not his native language). Being form Slovenia, he has the first-hand experience growing up in the semi-communist "Eastern Block" country, which I think positively influences the mode of writing, giving it a new fresh twist, adding a certain *je ne sais quoi*. Zizek leaves no topic or phenomena unexamined. He is the only one I know who can write (with authority) about Lenin and Stalin, Wagner and Shostakovich, Freud and Lacan, Hegel and Heidegger, Hitchcock and Lars von Trier practically on the same page and spice it up with jokes and anecdotes from the Eastern Europe. He is not perfect - he repeats himself, diverts, his books are not an easy read, but they could be very rewarding for the readers interested in philosophy, politics and the popular culture.

In his Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin wrote that everyone who aims at really understanding Marx's Capital should read the whole of Hegel's Logic in detail, as he did himself. It could also be said that anyone who wants to understand Zizek should first read not only Marx and Hegel, but also Marx through Hegel, Marx and Hegel through Lacan, Kant avec Sade, Plato contra Aristotle, not to mention Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Deleuze, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, and a bunch of modern social critics including Laclau, Mouffe, Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Ranciere, Balibar, Miller, Butler, and others I didn't care to name check. Prior knowledge of these philosophers' work seems to be a requisite for reading Zizek, who specializes in fiddling with philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical studies all at one fell swoop.

But at that rate, Zizek would lose most of his readers. A majority of people, including myself, pick up his books because they provide an entertaining experience in light philosophy, mixing intellectual discussions with humorous quips and passing remarks on Hollywood movies. People like me read Zizek for fun. A hardcore of devotees adhere to his left-leaning political agenda, which does not particularly square with mine and which can be utterly repulsive unless one takes him with a heavy pinch of salt. Others use him as a guide to Jacques Lacan's key concepts, as Zizek provides an easily accessible version of this markedly obscure brand of psychoanalysis. Few readers take him at his philosophical face value.

Indeed, it is fortunate that most readers engage Zizek with a light philosophical baggage and little interest for logical arguments. True philosophers with an attention to detail would often catch him with his intellectual pants down. He writes at such frantic pace and with such intellectual fury that he often seems to be running ahead of his shoes. He seems to lose any sense of logic whenever Lacan comes up, which happens quite often. He is the kind of person that prefers to be wrong than to be dull, and his taste for paradox and dialectical reversals sometimes obfuscates the rather simple points that he is trying to make. Zizek is more concerned with offending people (sometimes in admittedly funny ways) than with writing philosophy books. As one Amazon reviewer put it, he is vaguely reminiscent of a poor man's Cioran, but with Stalinism filling in for Fascism. He overplays the Lacanian psychoanalysis schtick, too.

One would think that reading all Zizek's books in succession would only compound the problem: on the contrary, it simplifies it somewhat, as the larger concepts begin to emerge from the mist. Zizek usually proceeds by starting from broad intuitions offered as paradoxes or outright provocations: Kant "was not Kantian enough" and didn't draw all the consequences from the finitude of the transcendental subject; Heidegger's Nazi engagement was "a step in the right direction", but he mistook the pseudo-Event of the Nazi revolution for the Event of revolution itself; Habermas "throws the baby" of the political with the bathwater of totalitarianism; despite his anti-Christian stance, Badiou's notion of the Truth-Event finds its paradigm in Christ's arrival and death; for all their anticapitalist credentials, deconstructionists and other post-modern intellectuals serve the interests of global capitalism, which favors modes of subjectivity characterized by multiple shifting identifications; etc.

Zizek's tendency to repeatedly refer back to many of his favorite examples, quotes and references also means that many of his essays are fairly similar. Again, readers are comforted by this great deal of repetition. Lacanian verbose paradoxes acquire a meaning of their own when hammered down from every angle. Even pop-culturally illiterate people like me will see through his references to TV dramas, Hitchcock's flicks, and popular novels. Zizek confirms Bergson's insight that the comical emerges through repetition, as something mechanical encrusted on the living. Even his most tasteless jokes (and they are many) pass as Central European proclivities when engulfed into his overflowing logorrhea. Reading the 1184 pages of The Essential Zizek in a row provides a similar experience as sitting through a horror movie night at the local theater: scenes that could be traumatic when seen in isolation acquire a grand-guignolesque nature, and you emerge from this experience with a sense that it was all a big joke. But there are some provocations which are better left to the realm of nightmares and horror films.

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