Part of what has been most helpful with the present Long Sunday discussion on democracy is that it has touched upon themes that will animate my dissertation – the proposal for which I began drafting earlier this week. No doubt I’ll elaborate on that at length at some point in the future. Jodi’s post to the discussion, “Possible? Maybe. Necessary? No.” points to a comment of Zizek’s: “… the universal notion of democracy is a ‘necessary fiction.’” While I was planning on eventually returning (as though it is a return – I never really went there in the first place) to Zizek, especially the debate between him, Judith Butler, and Laclau & Mouffe, I wasn’t planning on doing it at this stage. Looks like I’ll be quickly plowing through, at the very least, For They Know Not What They Do, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and The Parallax View (if not also the book on totalitarianism and his commentary on Lenin). Of course, the problem here for me is what Nate has recently called “the structurally absent third” – that is, texts that operate as the key to understanding another text. In the case of Zizek, the obvious references are Hegel and Lacan. Like any other more or less Marxist sort, I’m comfortable with Hegel, if not a specialist or Hegel scholar. Lacan, however, is not someone I’m familiar with. Can Zizek be read as Zizek? This is likely why I didn’t make it very far into Zizek the first times around.
(The question is becoming an increasingly growing concern as I will be teaching a course called “Law and Regulation” in the winter, and I’ve decided that they will spend two or three weeks on each of Durkheim, Foucault and Agamben – while they logically build on one another, there are, nonetheless, third party references that the students will never have heard of, let alone read. Tarde, Spencer, Bataille, Benjamin and Schmitt for instance.)
Zizek’s political (economic?) theological interpretation of money in the first chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology was quite interesting.
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zizek doesn’t exist. well, sorta. you’ve seen the inside jacket photo of the man, he exists in “reflection”(or is it refraction) of the mirror. how appropriate for a man who uses lacan to a point of utter exhaustion to allude to the mirror-stage, lacan’s famous re-reading of the freudian developmental stages in children’s sexuality. is zizek, then saying, he is just a kid, a baby?
lacan, for zizek, is his intellectual mentor in absentia. zizek did not study with the master himself, but with his son-in-law jacques alain miller, who actually studied with lacan. but zizek has spearheaded a lacanian resurgence in theory beyond that of the feminist film criticism and the misreadings of althusserians who didn’t quite get lacan because they thought they knew everything about lacan after the ideological state apparatuses essay. and i would argue that zizek is greater proponent of lacanianism than kristeva, who did indeed study with JL.
so the paradox: zizek, the master theorist who calls lacanian psychoanalysis home, waves the flag of the clan with a deferred relationship with the Name of the Father or perhaps it is something we can call, using lacan’s term, a structured “lack.”
hi Craig,
I’m going to bite the bullet and dig into some Zizek too one of these days. I’ve been reading Badiou and I hope to tuck into Z’s stuff on him soon-ish. When the time comes I hope to mine your notes for gems. :)
Re: the structurally absent third, I do of course agree there are books important for understanding other books (with the caveat that understanding is always relative to some framework). Those are necessary thirds, so to speak, which can be but don’t have to be absent – one could if so inclined go and read, say, Cantor in order to sort out what Badiou’s on about, or Proudhon or Stirner in order to get some Marx’s polemical remarks. The structurally absent third though is a continually replayed locking or closing function – it’s asserted that text Z can’t be understood without text Y which then turns out can’t be understood without text X which can’t … etc ad infinitum. I think it’s important to recognize that one’s understanding is never exhaustive (qua absolute or infinite) but that this doesn’t mean that one has no understanding at all, that is, to not turn simply absent thirds into structurally absent thirds, such that any understanding at all is unattainable. (No one actually poses this stuff this way, of course. I take all of this to be reductio ad absurdum argument against attempts to operate the rhetorical technique of a structurally absent third.)
take care,
Nate
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