[lbo-talk] Zizek channels Carrol

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Sun Aug 24 18:06:23 PDT 2008


I went to the bookstore with the intention of finding a trashy novel to read on my first vacation in 4 years! I was weak, and ended up getting Zizek's _In Defense of Lost Causes_.

"There are still only two theories which imply and practice such an engaged notion of truth: Marxism and psychoanalysis. They are both struggling theories, not only theories about struggles, but theories which are themselves engaged in a struggle: their histories do not consist in accumulation of neutral knowledge, for they are marked by schisms, heresies, expulsions. This is why, in both of them, the relationship between theory and practice is properly dialectical, in other words, that of an irreducible tension: theory is not just the conceptual grounding of practice, it simultaneously accounts for why practice is ultimately doomed to failure -- or, as Frued put it concisely, psychoanalysis would only be fully possible in a society that would no longer need it. At its most radical, theory is the theory of a failed practice: "This is why things went wrong..." One usually forgets that Freud's five great clinical reports are basically reports on a partial success and ultimate failure; in the same way, the greatest Maxist historical accounts of revolutionary events are the accounts of great failures .... Such an examination of failures confronts us with the problem of fidelity: how to redeem the emancipatory potential of these failures through avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic attachment to the past and of all-too-slick accomodation to "new circumstances."

(p. 3 in the Introduction to _In Defense of Lost Causes_, Slavoj Zizek

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