On Thu, 10 Feb 2000 21:08:25 -0500 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> Peter Dews writes in _The Limits of Disenchantment_ (London: Verso, 1995):
>
> ***** ...Zizek is ultimately a 'Right Hegelian' masquerading -- albeit
> unwittingly -- as a 'Left Hegelian'. He views the modern individual as
> caught in the dichotomy between his or her universal status as a member of
> civil society, and the particularistic attachments of ethnicity, nation and
> tradition, and this duality is reflected in his own ambiguous political
> profile -- _marxisant_ cultural critic on the international stage, member
> of a neo-liberal and nationalistically inclined governing party back home.
> (252) *****
First, Dews is quite sloppy here, and a bit too high-handed for his own good. His critique (comment), that Zizek is a "right hegelian" in the guise of a "left hegelian" on the basis of Zizek's "neo-liberal and nationalistically inclined" governing party "back home" is annoying - especially since Dews doesn't himself acknowledge who he voted for "back home." So its a rather unfair comment to begin with.
Second, there is little *theoretical* difference between Dews and Zizek. The Limits of Disenchant is a book about the role of fantasy and imagination in politics ("ethics of sympathy" - he's "reviving" Adorno's notion of emphatic reason). The difference between Zizek and Dews rests almost completely on their different interpretations of Lacan. BTW - Dews is quite Lacanian himself at times. To this end, Dews and Zizek are almost identical in the political status of their theoretical critique.
Third, the chapter you are quoting from is a critique of Zizek's appropriate of Hegel through Lacan - not a condemnation of his theoretical or political interventions per ce. In other words, Dews is arguing that Hegel isn't quite as Lacanian as Zizek argues. And it pretty much ends there.
Finally, the difference between Zizek and Dews is theoretical hair splitting. Dews seems to be appealing to an underlying "good for all of us" in an emphatic sense. I think he draws this from Adorno. In short - the difference between Dews and Zizek is close to the difference between Althusser's Lacan and Adorno's Freud. And, if you look carefully, these two perspectives are probably more mutually illuminating that Dews makes them out to be. Simon Critchley might be a good mediator for this dispute...
Oh yeah, you might also want to consider the possibility that Dews is reading Hegel through Habermas. In his most recent anthology, he notes that Lacan and Habermas are quite similar (I would argue, with Zizek, that Dews interpretation of Lacan here is highly problematic, citing Joel Whitebook's critique of Habermas via Castoriadis - who is also indebted to Lacan - for the split difference).
ken