Slavoj Zizek in person

  On 11/15/2013 at 5:38 PM, LimpyLoo said:

 

 

  On 11/15/2013 at 4:52 PM, poblequadrat said:

 

  On 11/14/2013 at 11:49 PM, eugene said:

 

  On 11/14/2013 at 11:36 PM, poblequadrat said:

Yeah, I sort of agree with SR4. I think Zizek is worthwhile, because nobody else is trying to do what he does

what's so unique about what he does ?

 

 

I've already said it two or three times before, but saving structural Marxism by turning away from Spinoza and towards Hegel is an original move. In a sense he's much closer to the original Lacanian Marxism than Badiou, Rancière, Balibar and so on are nowadays. I really think you need a notion of what Althusser's disciples where up to just before 68 to get what Zizek is attempting to do - and after that, yeah, he's not too consistent and gets lost, and I get endlessly frustrated at him because of this.

 

 

 

You have to think Marxism didn't have a theory of the subject for the longest time. There was Lukacs, and there were the Manuscripts, which were published really late. So Althusser's students tried to supplement this by using Lacan, and in the end it didn't work out because of various things, while Althusser himself turned to an antidialectical atomism ("aleatoric materialism") of which Negri (and Deleuzian Marxism) is the most direct, but strange, heir. Badiou came up with another theory of the subject by giving Lacan up, which left a void where everyday life and ideological artifacts somehow fall out of the scope of his philosophy because for him they don't really matter. On the other hand Zizek has kept all the Lacanian machinery, and I think it's easier to get a cohesive picture of where he stands if you see him, or at least part of what he does, as changing the basis of a preexisting project. He does drop the more scientific side of structural Marxism, though, but that probably has to do with the times (I still think that the question of the human sciences has to be taken up again sometime, though).