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

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.”