>>The reason why Ken & other followers of Lacan & Zizek don't want to
>>renounce the recourse to the use of the word "psychotic" must be that while
>>they want a word that damns their objects of criticism, they can't bring
>>themselves to using such words like "bad," "wrong," "untrue," "incorrect,"
>>"ideological," etc. It would be very un-postmodern to suggest that there
>>are such things as the distinction between "good" and "bad," that "true" is
>>preferable to "false," and so on; it's also supremely un-postmodern to
>>argue explicitly that the theory one is advancing is superior to & closer
>>to truth than competing theories.
>
>Is Zizek a postmodernist? I'm taxonomically challenged, so I need
>some help on this.
Peter Dews says Zizek is a Right-Hegelian (in _The Limits of Disenchantment_). Does that sound better? I could call him Late Modernist, in that what is called postmodernism is just a version of modernist aesthetics (check out Tyrus Miller's _Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars_ if you have time). An anti-PC Eurocentrist? An unwitting empiricist (Roy Bhaskar thinks that's postmodernists' implicit ontology)? A post-Existentialist defender of moral choice and personal responsibility? Honoring his latest work (_The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For_), I can say he's a Christian socialist, too. How about a post-secular philosopher (have you read _Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology_, ed. Phillip Blond)?
Ken writes:
>So there was an ethical decision: a necessary but impossible
>choice. My point in all of this is a relatively simple one,
>and perhaps somewhat trivial (although I don't think so). Ethics isn't about
>"doing the right thing." It's about *failure* to do the right thing, because
>the right thing in the wrong world is impossible.
Given the above, we can call a Lacanian-Zizekian position an impossible philosophy or a philosophy of the impossible. As I said before, one might as well read Hume, Kant, Hayek, etc.
Anyhow, what unites postmodern philosophers, besides an epistemic fallacy, may be that while they are at bottom liberal politically, they are fond of illiberal, often reactionary, modernist critics of modernity (e.g., Nietzsche, Heidegger, Paul De Man, Paul Feyerabend, etc.). Perhaps this explains Angela's Francophilia and dislike of American postmodernists (though many of the French guys she's fond of are all fascinated by American mass culture); the latter often openly admit to being liberal pragmatists (e.g., Rorty, Fish, etc.). _No fun_ (besides not much sex in Rorty, Fish, etc.).
Andrew Ross, anyone?
Yoshie