Even the great Jameson conceded a decade ago that Slavoj Zizek is one of the great contemporary practitioners of dialectic. His was characteristic understatement. This scary word dialectic/s has a well-deserved reputation for its difficulty. Then, how lucky we are that the dialectician-in-chief of the world today is also the most accessible and persuasive explainer of the most complex and otherwise unclear things. Here is an example. (There is an endlessly repetitive flurry of ignorant portrayals of the philosopher, mostly by semi-academics and journalists who seem to read only the jokes, skipping the serious and important points Zizek uses them to demonstrate. One can be sure that many of these impatient souls do not even fully read the joke if it sounds like an old one, not knowing that the philosopher gives a joke a new twist whenever he repeats it. Some wise person recently compiled a book of all the jokes of Zizek - only jokes - to make matters simple and clear. Also there is this seemingly ineradicable prejudice that Zizeks work was obscure, which sometimes means for these critics nothing but bluff, a charge surprisingly never levelled against a Goedel or a Balibar (they seem to be lucky in being known mostly to the experts). Rarely you find in Zizek a technical or arcane concept without it being introduced at the very first instance. If anything he does it more than most leading thinkers of the world. Not all Zizeks detractors are idiots or the impatient, some of them are great and honest thinkers and writers such as Noam Chomsky and Mary Scully. Holding a cutting-edge continental philosopher to the unfair and unrealistic standard of an Orwell or an Arundhati Roy-like prose style is not the only problem here. An unshakable belief that whatever one cant immediately understand must be meaningless or fraudulent. I have read somewhere on facebook recently that an academic is usefully preparing a book appropriately titled: Zizek for Chomskys, so named after ... Dummies series.) via Sebastian Budgen
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 22:16:32 +0000
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