> A friend asked me to forward the following query to this list to see if
> anyone had thoughts about Zizek as "post-marxist."
>
> What I would like to know, is it fair to characterize Zizek as post-Marxist?
> He seems to be synthesizing Marx and Freud when he discusses fetishism.
Actually, Freud was one of the great materialists in human history, his original writings (as opposed to the chatter of orthodox followers) are marvels of scientific analysis, which drew howls of outrage from contemporaries. Marx usually gets tagged as an objective economist, even though he's talking about subjects, while Freudian gets tagged as a subjectivist, even though he's talking about objective wish-fulfillments; in many ways, Freud is the first great theoretician of mass culture, a.k.a. consumer culture, a.k.a. the political economy of the subject under consumer capitalism. Both strands of the dialectic sort of converge, if you want to put it that way, in the Frankfurt School/Walter Benjamin, so there's a sense in which Zizek is sort of on the same general track as Adorno (my own sneaking suspicion is that Lacan is sort of a Francophone code-word for Adorno).
-- Dennis