One distinguishing question centers on why this process has not already commenced in earnest. Chomsky is a true believer in the clear fact. In his accounting, for various reasons (most significantly the complicit self-disciplining of the media), it’s because people lack adequate knowledge of the horrors being perpetrated hourly by their governments. He has implacably devoted decades to bringing these crimes to common knowledge. Zizek is not hostile to facts. Still, he concerns himself with the human capacity to proceed as if they didn’t exist or were exactly reversed, even when we “know” them perfectly well. He locates the blockage in a mercurial flux of desire and ideology, in the elaborate and contradictory attachments of human psyches to powers that will destroy them. No amount of Chomskyan recitation can provide illumination: the self-protective structure of the psyche, always divided against itself, is what wants breaking open. ... Zizek is accused of dressing up the simple-minded thoughts of a 12-year-old in mystifying jargon. In response we hear that Chomsky, for all his posturing, offers no empirical facts in his critique and, by the way, was an apologist for the Khmer Rouge. Or he wasn’t; this “fact” turns out to be ambiguous. Each dismisses the other’s claims out of hand before proceeding to tendentious counterpointing. It all escalates: Zizek is a fantasist; Chomsky is finally accused of having himself the comprehension levels of the original preteen. ... The limits of Chomsky and Zizek are certainly not their intellects, nor their probity or sincerity. They are simply out of time, staggering through afterlives. thenation/article/175740/atlantic-rim-chomsky-v-zizek#axzz2bjW8Owe4
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 04:41:22 +0000
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