Zizek E-Book

Kelsey Wood

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 668

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A comprehensive overview of Slavoj Zizek's thought, including all of his published works to date.

• Provides a solid basis in the work of an engaging thinker and teacher whose ideas will continue to inform philosophical, psychological, political, and cultural discourses well into the future
• Identifies the major currents in Zizek's thought, discussing all of his works and providing a background in continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory necessary to its understanding
• Explores Zizek's growing popularity through his engagement in current events, politics, and cultural studies
• Pertains to a variety of fields, including contemporary philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, esthetics, literary theory, film theory, and theology

Leseprobe

Contents

Epigraphs

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

Who is Slavoj Žižek?

What Does Žižek Mean by “Dialectic”?

Žižek’s Philosophical Re-inscription of Lacanian Theory

Žižek’s Major Contribution (According to Žižek)

What is Žižek’s Primary Aim?

2 The Sublime Object of Ideology

3 For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor

4 Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture

5 Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out

Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?

Why is Woman a Symptom of Man?

Why is Every Act a Repetition?

Why Does the Phallus Appear?

Why Are There Always Two Fathers?

Conclusion: Why is Reality Always Multiple?

6 Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

“I or He or It (the Thing) Which Thinks”

Cogito and the Sexual Difference

On Radical Evil and Related Matters

Hegel’s “Logic of Essence” as a Theory of Ideology

Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself !

7 The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality

8 The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

9 The Plague of Fantasies

10 The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

11 The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway

12 The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?

13 On Belief

14 The Fright of Real Tears: KrzysztofKieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory

15 Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion

16 Welcome to the Desert of the Real

17 The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

18 Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences

19 Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

20 How to Read Lacan

21 The Parallax View

22 In Defense of Lost Causes

23 Violence

24 First as Tragedy, then as Farce

25 Living in the End Times

Introduction

Chapter 1: Denial

Chapter 2: Anger

Chapter 3: Bargaining

Chapter 4: Depression

Chapter 5: Acceptance

26 Conclusion

Don’t Just Do Something; Think!

Democracy as Fetishist Disavowal

An Ethics of the Real

The Paradox of Singular Universality

There is No Blueprint for the Future

Further Reading

Index

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wood, Kelsey, 1960– Žižek : a reader’s guide / by Kelsey Wood. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-67475-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-470-67476-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Žižek, Slavoj. I. Title. B4870.Z594W66 2012 199′.4973–dc23

2011052162

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

for John Brennon Wood

Epigraphs

As a general rule, disciples have been won over for the wrong reasons, are faithful to a misinterpretation, overdogmatic in their exposition, and too liberal in debate. They almost always end up by betraying us.

—Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, p. 96

Lacan’s scandal, the dimension of his work which resists incorporation into the academic machinery, can be ultimately pinned down to the fact that he openly and shamelessly posited himself as an authority, i.e., that he repeated the Kierkegaardian gesture in relationship to his followers: what he demanded of them was not fidelity to some general theoretical propositions, but precisely fidelity to his person – which is why, in the circular letter announcing the foundation of La Cause freudienne, he addresses them as “those who love me.” This unbreakable link connecting the doctrine to the contingent person of the teacher, i.e., to the teacher qua material surplus that sticks out from the neutral edifice of knowledge, is the scandal everybody who considers himself Lacanian has to assume: Lacan was not a Socratic master obliterating himself in front of the attained knowledge, his theory sustains itself only through the transferential relationship to its founder.

—Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, p. 100

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to Slavoj Žižek and to Clayton Crockett. John Brennon Wood read every chapter, offered constructive criticism, and suggested many improvements to the text. Our frequent conversations were a source of inspiration, and his knowledge of computer media showed me that dialectical materialism is alive and well in unexpected places. We are grateful to Stan Wakefield, and to Jeff Dean, Executive Editor at Wiley-Blackwell. And to Jana Wood, Margaret, Jacqueline, Raymond, and Bruce: we are close to each other by way of being close to the third thing.

1

Introduction

Today, one often mentions how the reference to psychoanalysis in cultural studies and the psychoanalytic clinic supplement each other: cultural studies lack the real of clinical experience, while the clinic lacks the broader critico-historical perspective (say, of the historic specificity of the categories of psychoanalysis, Oedipal complex, castration, or paternal authority). The answer to this should be that each of the approaches should work on its limitation from within its horizon – not by relying on the other to fill up its lack. If cultural studies cannot account for the real of the clinical experience, this signals the insufficiency of its theoretical framework itself; if the clinic cannot reflect its historical presuppositions, it is a bad clinic.

—Slavoj Žižek, “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses”

Who is Slavoj Žižek?

Slavoj Žižek is widely regarded as the most significant and provocative thinker of our age. As the above quotation indicates, Žižek deploys concepts from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan in order to reactualize a dialectical method in philosophy.1 The result is a radically new vision of human nature and human society. In addition to Jacques Lacan, Žižek has been strongly influenced by the work of G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Alain Badiou. In his public lectures, Žižek has concisely introduced his own thinking as Hegelian in philosophy, Lacanian in psychology, “Christian-materialist” in religion, and communist in politics.2

1 Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) is the most important psychoanalytic theorist after Freud, and his ideas transformed psychoanalysis; however, his theories are notoriously difficult. Because Žižek’s remarks are often addressed to an audience that is already familiar with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the reader new to Lacanian theory may need to consult an introductory text as well. One of the best short introductions to Lacan is Sean Homer’s Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 2005). A more in-depth (but still non-philosophical) introduction to Lacan is The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance by Bruce Fink (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). The best essays on Lacan and philosophy are Alenka Zupancic’s Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000), and Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). For additional essays on Lacan and philosophy, see the website The International Journal of Žižek Studies, at http://www.zizekstudies.org/. Readers should regularly explore the wealth of resources available from the website lacan.com, run in New York by Josefina Ayerza. Newcomers to Lacanian theory might want to consult Dylan Evans’ An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996).

But why has Slavoj Žižek become so well known in the two decades since his first publications in English? What is so captivating and so revolutionary about his fusion of philosophy and psychoanalysis? Why is Professor Žižek widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers in the world today? A preliminary answer to these questions is that he is a charismatic speaker with an extraordinary ability to engage his audience. Žižek regularly draws large crowds and packs auditoriums across whatever continent he visits, and consistently fills lecture halls beyond their normal capacity. But anyone who has also sat in his classroom will be impressed by Žižek’s ability to make difficult ideas comprehensible; he is an extremely effective teacher. Moreover, a look into any of his books reveals immediately that Žižek is an enormously accomplished scholar. He is the sole author of more than 20 books in English (and counting), and these innovative and theoretically substantial works have established him as one of today’s preeminent thinkers.

Žižek has written – with humor, lucidity, and extraordinary erudition – on the philosophical problem of identity, ontology, globalization, postmodernism, political philosophy, literature, film, ecology, religion, the French Revolution, Lenin, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and numerous other topics. Without question the work of Slavoj Žižek will continue to inform philosophical, psychological, political, and cultural discourses well into the future. In an effort to explain the Žižek phenomenon, Ian Parker writes:

2 For an online biography of Žižek, see the faculty page of the website for the European Graduate School at http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/biography/. Another online biography is available at http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Sp-Z/Zizek-Slavoj.html.

Žižek burst onto the world academic stage with commentaries and interventions in politics and psychoanalysis, with powerful examples of the way an understanding of these two domains could be dialectically intertwined and powered through a close reading of German philosophy. Žižek’s academic performance has also drawn attention from a wider intellectual audience, and this has given him the opportunity to elaborate some complex conceptual machinery that can be applied to music, theology, virtual reality, and, it would seem, virtually any other cultural phenomenon. His writing appeared at an opportune moment, offering a new vocabulary for thinking through how ideology grips its subjects.3

But Ian Parker’s remarks do not indicate the fundamental reasons why Žižek’s work has become so prominent (and so controversial) since the publication in 1989 of The Sublime Object of Ideology. Žižek is not only a charismatic speaker and a brilliant cultural theorist who, at an opportune moment, captivated the public with elaborate and innovative theories. Significantly, Parker (who is a practicing psychoanalyst) neglects the implications of Žižek’s work. According to Marek Wieczorek, “The originality of Žižek’s contribution to Western intellectual history lies in his extraordinary fusion of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy (in particular his anti-essentialist readings of Hegel), and Marxist political theory.” Žižek utilizes Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts ; he puts Lacanian theory to work in order to reactualize German Idealism for the twenty-first century.