Philosophers Index: Zizek: 49 entries Habermas: 1761 entries
Considering that Zizek has written about 20 books, almost as many as Habermas, AND that he's writing most of them in English whereas Habermas is found only in translation... Zizek's impact on the "academy" is barely noticeable. Zizek's work isn't of interest to Kantians, Hegelians, or Schellingians. It certainly isn't of much interest to Marxists, let alone Leninists... the only people that might be interested in his work, other than a few film theorists looking for inspiration, are Lacanians - and most of them aren't wild about his work because he departs so far from the clinic. Certainly no self-respecting historian, political theorist, or sociologist would find anything of interest here since Zizek's work doesn't touch on historical-empirical analysis at all. So all this "this is why I don't like Zizek" ... guess what, YOU'RE THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY. "We don't like Zizek" is the ESTABLISHMENT. There is nothing radical or innovative about disliking the theory of a thinker who talks about fist fucking in the garden of Eden, about the madness of God, nor about someone who claims that you have to hold on to the Christian legacy in order to love and hate properly, and who bubbles endlessly on about symptoms, exceptions, signifiers, and jouissance... why would that be of interest to anyone but a dedicated psychoanalyst? He even identifies himself as a conservative who only flirts with radical ideas. If you're going to take shots at a theoretician at least go after the main tenets of their theoretical framework rather than the locale of where their name has been spray-painted. Is Marcuse wrong because someone once said, "Make love not war?" Take on his work as a body of literature rather than the most recent essay uploaded to the internet. If you're sick of Zizek take consolation in the fact that you're joined by 99.99% of those who read him... even those 0.01% who do take him seriously and bothered reading his work haven't understood most of it (insert me here). I think he's brilliant; I think the whole class of Lacanian theoreticians are brilliant, you have to be in order to understand the material and think that way. But let's not get carried away. Zizek's analysis RESTS on the validity of Lacan's clinical research. This is why he argues that in order to be a Lacanian you have to be an ORTHODOX Lacanian. His entire social theoretical framework is LIMITED to the initial findings of Lacan in the clinic. The modifications he has made to Lacan's work are minimal, he tries to be as orthodox as possible to Lacan's work of the 70s. If you want to undercut his theoretical position as a whole you have to start with Lacan and the relationship of the therapeutic to the social philosophical. If you want to criticise his work piecemeal you have to ACCEPT the main tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis... otherwise your critique will be gibberish (that's why he doesn't have to respond to so many of his critics... most of the criticism levelled against his work hasn't engaged with it even in the most elementary way).
So, with that, I can't wait for the chorus.
ken