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Jewcy Book Club

This week:
Hyperchondriac
and
I Have Fun Everywhere I Go
Welcome Authors
Brian Frazer
 &
Mike Edison
who are posting all week.
Coming up:
  • 10/13:
    Rabbi Levi Brackman and Sam Jaffe
  • 10/20:
    Jonathan Garfinkel
  • 10/20:
    Rabbi Robert Levine
  • 10/27:
    Danit Brown
  • 10/27:
    Joshua Henkin
  • 11/03:
    Craig Glazer
  • 11/10:
    Max Gross
  • 11/17:
    Seth Greenland

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DAILY SHVITZ
Why Nothing Is Žižekproof
by Josh Strawn, May 30, 2007
6 comments

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek will hopefully always generate as much praise as criticism. Simon Jarvis writes of one of Žižek's recent works, The Parallax View:

Žižek himself describes this work as “his magnum opus”, but it is not really an opus at all. It is the valuable record of what an extremely intelligent Hegelian-Lacanian happens to think about whatever happens to have crossed his cerebral cortex at the time of writing.

Jarvis notes early on that Žižek has rendered classical German philosophy deconstruction-proof and recuperated universalism, then concludes by saying that the fellow "must try harder" if he is to put his talents to good use. Wait--how long has the liberal academy been stuck in its pathologically particularist, Derridean, Foucauldian loop again? Žižek is certainly not always on point, and he may pimp one soda, Hollywood film, or dead dictator too many to make his points, but it's precisely the resistance of his thought to orthodoxy that makes him essential. It'll actually be cause for concern when the shining reviews start pouring in.



Josh Strawn is the lead singer of Blacklist as well as a signatory and vocal advocate of the Euston Manifesto.


More...
6 comments | leave a comment

Anonymous

05/30/07 10:37 pm

Is this a joke?

I can't figure out what you're talking about or why this is relevent to anything on this site.



François Blumen...

05/30/07 11:10 pm
Comments: 220
Friends: 33

Hmmm, I don't know, Josh. Z

Hmmm, I don't know, Josh. Z is MEGA-popular amongst all the post-colonial-anti-war-tenured-radicals academics I've met.



portnoy

05/31/07 8:36 am
Comments: 33
Friends: 7

diacritics taste great

Actually, I believe Zizek's "magnum opus" is Zizek himself. That said, his work is more anarchistic than ever and often breaks the post-colonial-anti-war-tenured-radical-academic mold. But those in the mold will continue to laud him because they don't know what else to do.



Josh Strawn

05/31/07 4:55 pm
Comments: 128
Friends: 7

Why Not?

Jon: Given the amount of discussion on this site about politics and orthodoxy, I thought an article on a philosopher contributing some interesting thoughts to both subjects would make for a noteworthy blurb.  (I personally couldn't figure out why you associated Jabotinsky with being "Bad-Ass.")

Francois: I know he's popular, but the great thing is precisely that he speaks the language well enough to get himself into the conversation and then obliterates cherished platitudes.  

 

 

 



Monica Osborne

05/31/07 5:22 pm
Comments: 115
Friends: 26

Gotta side with Josh here .

Gotta side with Josh here . . . Zizek, though occasionally (often? always?) prone to pompous bouts of intellectual masturbation, is definitely "essential." I have long cherished my love-hate relationship with him -- his work on film has been particularly valuable to my own work . . .even if only to give me something to disagree with.



invisible_hand

10/07/07 6:27 pm

the ignorance here

wow... it's really great that all the informed commentators here have decided to frame nuanced philosophical debates in the terms of an "us vs. them" battle. yes, all academics are the same, they all want to kill america. they are eating the america from the inside out!
news flash, people. this seems like a weird angle for a jewish site to take, given than zizek has framed his fight for ideology in the sense of a battle against "jewish" deconstruction in favor of "christian" materialism.
which is just silly.
deconstruction as a "jewish" thing was passe even in the 80s when it was being bandied about by people like hartman who thought they knew midrash. start reading and stop reacting knee-jerkily to philosophy that scares you.