-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Ted Winslow Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 1:56 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] RE: Why Zizek...
What's brilliant about the following?
[brilliant material is quoted by Ted Winslow but edited out for lack of space, etc etc etc...]
1. Consensus is not a criterion of truth. 2. Technical success is not a criterion of politics. 3. Normative consensus on any given issue does not guarantee social freedom. 4. The public, as much as the private, is the realm of pathology. 5. When we act, we act for the Other (an imaginary 'being' we assume is watching us). This is what "individuality" is, socialisation which means that the social is watching: father, mother, god, country, Hegel. 6. Fantasy is the support of our everyday reality. Without imagination, we'd see nothing but fog. 7. It is the striving for utopia that is utopian, not the achievement of utopia (which is catastrophic). 8. The hermeneutic assumption of meaning justifies violence and terror. 9. We interpret the past through our anticipation of the future. This make us terrible historians even on the best of days. Psychoanalysis should be historiographic, not Historical. 10. Enlightenment is not a bus stop. 11. Meaning is the realm of the imaginary. Friend and foe are not biologically different, the difference has to do with a conceptual schema. Within such schema we find enemies created by the structure of our thought. This doesn't mean that the accusations against such enemies is true or false. We have to be aware of our conceptual structures if we are going to avoid shooting our neighbours. 12. Consistency is totalising.
These statements aren't brilliant on their own... I've only summarised 'in other words' what Zizek wrote, avoiding some of the complex bits I didn't follow and all of the vibrant references. What makes this brilliant is that he provided a composite of these insights through Lacan, Greek tragedy, surrealism, existentialism, Christian apologetics, German historicism, Cartesian philosophy, fascist aesthetics and legal theory, anti-Semitism, critical theory, theory of ideology, post-structuralism, and German Idealism - without really watering down any of them. That's brilliant. Well, maybe it isn't brilliant - maybe it's just clever. But clever goes a long way in my books and I usually equate clever with brilliant at some point. Brilliant means shiny. I didn't say that shiny is good, it's just... shiny, well lit.
All of this is subject to revision by people more clever than myself.
less than polished, ken