Captivating Talk but Ultimately Leaves You Wishing for More

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	• The Reality of the Virtual Slavoj Zizek Olive Films, 2007 average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Interesting...

Very interesting ideas. Excellent for people who want to keep their brains fit. Zizek seems to be the new hit in philosophy.

Captivating Talk but Ultimately Leaves You Wishing for More

Many (almost all) of Zizek's discussions revolve around the Lacanian triad (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real) and many who have contemplated this triad still can't explain exactly what these terms mean exactly. If you are looking for clarity on Zizek's reading of Lacan, you won't find it here. Just when I think I have a handle on one or even two of these terms, the third (and the ultimate usefulness of the triad) inevitably escapes me. Personally, I find Zizek's over-reliance on these terms to be an obstacle, and an unnecessary one. And I suspect that I am not alone on this. I think he is at his best when he abandons these slippery terms and uses his own words to discuss how we structure the social field. When he does this he sounds less like a Lacanian or Deleuzian and more like a traditional utopian (or a traditional utopian with a difference). I say this because Zizek does not believe that we are doomed to try and recapture an originary wholeness or multitude, rather, Zizek believes that utopia is within our grasp and that we can in fact touch it in moments when we act on some kind of higher impulse that challenges what we have heretofore believed is possible. Acting on this impulse is what Zizek defines as "utopian".

What Zizek is not: Zizek is not a postmodern. Zizek does not believe that captialism is the end all be all of human existence. (He refutes Fukuyama on this point.) Nor is he the kind of postmodern that advocates tolerance and permissiveness and multiculturalism and the politics of identity as the end all be all of liberal humanism. Rather, Zizek still believes that we live in a world where universal truth exists. And the utopian impulse is the impulse to realize (or, in his words, to enact) that truth. The problem, according to Zizek, is not that universal truth does not exist (as postmoderns claim), but that no one can claim any direct access to it. In other words, for Zizek, truth is there, but each of us can only approach it from our uniquely situated vantage points. Individually, Zizek seems to have faith in our ability to glimpse parts of the truth. But as far as offering any kind of prescriptive methodology for how we are to engage & organize politically and collectively enact this utopia, Zizek has none.

Zizek, like many philosophers, is very good at elucidating problems. Solutions are another matter.

Zizek's cultural/political criticism is, at times, captivating, but there is some inconsistency even in this one hour program. This is especially apparent when he discusses how we know what the real is (or how we intuit it) and how we choose not to know what we know. Using The Sound of Music as an example, Zizek explains how on the surface the film appears to be about a small enclave of liberal democrats resisting a fascist regime, but that in actuality the film shows an enclave of provincial blondes resisting the urge to become cosmopolitan (and Zizek notes that all of the "cosmopolitans" depicted in the film look like "Jews", or Jewisn stereoptypes). In short, Zizek argues, the Von Trapps exemplify everything the Nazi regime celebrates. Clever as this reading of The Sound of Music is, Zizek seems to get lost in his own cleverness and does not seem to see that what he has just done is show that what people (that like the film) secretly want is a Nazi modernity. So, how are do we to differentiate between our fascist and our utopian impulses? I suspect Zizek has no answer.

Zizek makes his strongest points in his discussion of how tolerance and permissiveness do not bring about new freedoms but, paradoxically, lead to excessive social regulation. But, again, Zizek offers no alternative to the multiculturalism & identity politics that he so often vilifies. Tolerance, he argues, paradoxically makes us fearful of one another and makes us avoid one another whereas antagonism is more productive because it brings us into contact with one another. Zizek is a man that loves a paradox but the individual insights (clever and useful as they sometimes are)do not always add up to as much as one might wish.

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good intro to Zizek, satisfying for Zizek students

Sitting in some London Library (Marx?), Zizek talks for a while, giving some of his clearest available recorded discussion of the Lacanian triad of Real/Symbolic/Imaginary along with some fascinating examples of their usefulness. Much of what he says is contained in his books, but nevertheless, we enjoy hearing it again, eh? The director's attempt at visual scansion is irritating, but that is the point. Have I let the cat out of the bag?

Slavoj Zizek is a realist thinker. Zizek is always trying to think from the standpoint of the real and, at the same time, to think through the standpoint of the real. Going beyond the Lacanian Real what resists symbolization or marks the limit that is both obstacle and access to the real this is an examination of those real elements (which may or may not resist symbolization) that constitute the nodal points of our worldly existence, the points that undermine all systematic attempts to determine this existence in advance and by means of externally derived iron laws. It is unlikely that Zizek himself would put the matter in this fashion. This is because his strategy is precisely to flirt with iron principles (what he has most recently named lost causes) in order to expose how the political contingencies of our world are nowadays veiled by a palliative language that uses the alibi of contingency to defeat principles... .

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