the gaping parallax

books:


	• The Parallax View (Short Circuits) Slavoj Zizek The MIT Press, 2006 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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the gaping parallax

"Noncoincidence of the One itself" represents more of the same from an academic who keeps refusing to acknowledge that he is getting ever fatter, older and more timid. The endless references to other artists & philosophers do not help the reader to access meaningful knowledge - they obfuscate it. In other words, Zizek's provocations are a mask, a simulacrum for courage with which one is to face the (a) real world.

This book may be a yet another cynical and perhaps nihilistic attempt at cheating Oneself through dazzling the Others. Its fundamental lack of cojones is... disappointing.

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little-a-ness

"The clue to this book is in the little-a-ness: the simulacrum of the [...] is PARALLAX , the vernacular translation of the text itself being DOUBLE VISION. Well, fair enough, after a whole magnum of opus anyone's focus would be a little ,er, shall we say inconsequential."

Nice Cover!

There are some other things I might say about this book but Zizek, along with Bartleby, would probably prefer not.

Instead let me use my amazon review as an open letter to the Man. Listen man, you inspired a lot of people, showed them how to delegitimate the text of the default culture, took the argument forward. But now what you doing? This aint dialectics man. Maybe you are on the wrong drug, try some mellow green. It's not all about twos and ones it's about ONE NO ( not a dithering decline) and MANY YESES ( affirming transcendent autopeoses).

Use your head not your eyes and your appetite, come back and join the human race in our struggle to save ourselves and our world. Another World is Possible!

One Earth One Love One Struggle

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Food for thought

Enjoyable as it is to read Zizek (the table of contents is itself a work of art), the inflation of 180 degree turns (" in fact, the EXACT OPPOSITE is the case / is the better interpretation) and the phrase "this is PRECISELY what Lacan meant with .....", makes it impossible to give more than 4 stars.

Though there is a certain emptiness / lack of practical implications in Zizek's writings (which he defends in terms of refusing to provide the Left with "the formula" they demand, instead using his fame to position himself as object a, frustrating our demands), it should be noted that he definitely penetrates deeply into the field of political thinking, too, and he has made me revise some of my opinions about Scandinavian social democracy.

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Very insightful

It's a synthesis in Zizek's trajectory, but also it opens his work toward new discussions

reviews: page 1, 2

The Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.

Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. In The Parallax View, Zizek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which "nobody is home" in the skull, just stacks of brain meat--a condition Zizek calls "the unbearable lightness of being no one"); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Zizek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics--including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism.

The Parallax View not only expands Zizek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.

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