Žižek may be at risk of succeeding too well in his arguments for his own good. At one point, he says that ‘a precise definition of time’ would be the space of ‘the emergence of something radically new, outside the scope of the possibilities inscribed into any atemporal matrix’ (230). But, but, if this were true in anything like a ‘precise’ sense, there could be no question of any ‘emergence’ out of or into anything whatever; there could only ever be apparitions, out of nowhere. If the Absolute does not slowly and accretively emerge, but bursts at each point unannounced but fully-caparisoned on to the stage of history, it is hard to see what ‘history’, in the sense of something building or persisting through change, might mean at all. Each such moment would be a monad, providing itself with its own fixtures and fittings, and sealed off from all previous and subsequent moments, of the priority and posteriority of which it could by no imaginable means inkle. There could be no question of any communication between, let alone anything like a progression from, one such self-begetting epoch to another. Žižek seems nevertheless oddly determined to protect himself against ‘falling back into a relativist historicism’ (502) by willing himself into belief in what he boomingly calls ‘true historicity’ (218), but, given that he has deprived himself of any basis for such a logic of history, can do so only through a kind of chuffing I-think-I-can-I-know-I-can determination to succeed. Žižek’s desire to hang on to historicity amid the force-nine gale of his own arguments also means that, for all his espousal of the radically new, he is Gothically doomed to drag around dogmas of the most clanking antiquity, like the conviction that ‘modern bourgeois society could only have arisen through the mediation of Revolutionary Terror’ (524). He is aggressively certain that ‘there is no substantial historical Spirit weighing up in advance the costs and benefits’ (525), but nevertheless has no hesitation in valuing historical phenomena as progressive and reactionary, or in defining the ‘proper’ dialectical response in different circumstances (making one wonder what an improper negation might be exactly, and how you might know). stevenconnor/zizek/
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 09:42:24 +0000
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