Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
> Here, here, Woj!
>
> Except for your mode of expression (which I call "my style problem with Woj" - he is sort of the neo-con Spartacist League of this list) I agree with you completely. Unless you want to work through an obsession with Lacan, Hegel, Lenin, and the Roman Catholic church, Zizek is close to unreadable. But as far as I can see is Lakoff is not much different. All of thes guys make a critical fetish of language, essentially reducing an analysis of politics to an analysis of ideology, and an analysis of ideology to their own peculiar misconception of human language.
Have you read this particular article? Neither the RC nor Lenin figures in it, the Lacan is strictly decorative, the use of Hegel is decorous, and the language is straightforward for the most part amd quite readable. Most of the usual Zizek tics are absent. W may claim he's responding to style but I suspect it's another instance of W's being unable to acknowledge (or even imagine) that honest disagreement with him could possibly exist. (Actually, I haven't read W's post -- but I've never seen one of his polemics that didn't fit this description, so I'm fairly confident that I wouldn't need to rephrase had I read him.)
I'm not exactly obsessed with Lenin, though I've always found his works quite useful.
Carrol