[lbo-talk] Time to Get Religion

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Tue Dec 5 17:15:48 PST 2006


I recently bought the _Zizek_-edited _Mapping_Ideology_ and determined that for about every 5 or 6 paragraphs Zizek writes, he really nails something in one paragraph, then continues on another fairly useless 5 or 6 paragraphs.

High signal-to-noise ratio (yes, like this thread itself, har har har), not aided by the fact he prefers to speak in the all-too-often-obfuscating language of PoMo to convey his ideas.

There are nuggets of wisdom here and there; you have to dig for them, though. (Like his observations that it's easier for people to imagine Armageddon than to imagine a modest change in the social mode of production -- something disturbingly true, esp. in the USA.) It'd be nice if the excavation process in Zizek was less dense. I feel the same way about Foucault, though. I love Foucault to death, but I have to read a LOT of him to glean just a very few *really* resounding insights that I find useful.

-B.

Bill Bartlett wrote:
> At 1:16 PM -0800 5/12/06, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
>> But the ten commandments aren't the fundamental
tenets of Christianity. It's about throwing off the old law. That's what Zizek means by the Christian legacy. This is him in a Bad Subjects interview from 2002 (with someone we all know and love asking the questions).
>
> I couldn't care less what this fellow Zizek thinks.
With someone who expresses himself in such a cryptic way, it is in any event impossible to fathom what he thinks and presumably not worth the effort.



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