Zizek on Paul Theroux & 'Small Details' (was Re: Zizek on Havel)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Zizek wrote in his criticism of Havel:
*****  In 1974, Paul Theroux visited Vietnam, after the peace agreement and
the withdrawal of the US Army, but before the Communist takeover. He writes
about it in The Great Railway Bazaar. A couple of hundred US soldiers were
still there - deserters, officially and legally non-existent, living in
slum shacks with their Vietnamese wives, earning a living by smuggling or
other crimes. In Theroux's hands, these individuals become representative
of Vietnam's place in global power politics. From them, we gradually
unravel the complex totality of Vietnamese society.  When Keane is at his
best, he displays the same ability to extract from small details the global
context of what was going on in Czechoslovakia.
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n21/zize2121.htm>   *****

Whoa, Zizek likes Paul Theroux?  That's a bad taste!  In my view, Theroux's
racism & arrogance are equal to V. S. Naipaul's, and it is difficult to
match Naipaul on this score!  The 'small details' of poor countries that
Theroux finds 'revealing' tend to be exactly those that make imperial
travellers say, after visiting their former colonies, "Good riddance!"

Even aside from Theroux's condescension, do 'small details' really tell us
much about global contexts?  Isn't there a Hegelian relation of parts and
the whole lurking in this mode of reading 'small details' synecdochecally?

Yoshie