>With Irina, I did feel it was a bit sad, because I thought that she
>was merely keeping up with a recent fad in the West for Heidegger,
>which she was unlikely to be ahead of. Let's face it, by the time
>any of us mastered Nietzsche, or de Man, or Heidegger, or Carl
>Schmitt, the really out-there pomos had already found some new Nazi
>thinker to fawn over.
Speaking of modishness and Soviet philosophy, I've just read Kit Barton's review (in _Radial Philosophy_ 111, January/February 2002) of _Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? -- Four Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion_ by Slavoj Zizek (Verso, 2000). A modish criticism of modishness reviewed in a modish journal.... In the last theoretical season Zizek re-evaluated Lenin (cf. <http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm>); in _Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?_, Burton says, he re-evaluates Stalin. From the Verso website:
***** Totalitarianism, as an ideological notion, has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the obverse, the twin, of the Rightist Fascist dictatorships.
Instead of providing yet another systematic exposition of the history of this notion, Zizek's new book addresses totalitarianism in a Wittgensteinian way, as a cobweb of family resemblances. In so doing it reveals the prevalence of the consensus-view of totalitarianism, in which it is invariably defined by one of the following four things: the holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the Socialist revolutionary project; the recent wave of ethnic and religious fundamentalisms to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; or the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought, the denial of the irreducible gap in human existence.
Zizek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail of what constitutes totalitarianism but in what enables the very designation totalitarian, the liberal-democratic consensus itself....
<http://www.versobooks.com/books/tuvwxyz/zizek_totalitarianism.shtml> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>