Terry Eagleton in the London Reviews of books comments on Slavo Zizek's frame of mind.
... the flavour of his mind is thoroughly Hegelian, continually on the prowl for antitheses inverting themselves into identities, in a set of dialectical guerrilla raids on common sense.
Some random examples: it is not that order and disorder are opposites, but that the imposition of a (purely contingent) order on chaos is itself the highest mode of disorder.
The Lacanian Other – the Symbolic Order, or language as a whole – can have no Other to itself, which is to say that there can be no ultimate guarantee of the field of meaning.
Multiculturalism is just a kind of racism in reverse, respecting another’s culture from the distancing, unchallenged vantage-point of one’s own.
The law must be irrational, since if there were reasons for obeying it it would lose its absolute authority.
The unconscious is not the opposite of consciousness, but the founding act of repression by which consciousness is established in the first place.
As every English first-year student now knows, what makes a sign a sign is its difference from other signs; but this means that the difference which lends a sign its identity also makes it impossible for a sign to be complete in itself. Difference, as Jacques Derrida playfully puts it, both ‘broaches and breaches’ meaning. Or take the idea, much touted by Zizek, that blindness is the condition of insight,
Read Peter Cheevers' fiction published by Ether Books
http://catalog.etherbooks.com/Authors/1118
... the flavour of his mind is thoroughly Hegelian, continually on the prowl for antitheses inverting themselves into identities, in a set of dialectical guerrilla raids on common sense.
Some random examples: it is not that order and disorder are opposites, but that the imposition of a (purely contingent) order on chaos is itself the highest mode of disorder.
The Lacanian Other – the Symbolic Order, or language as a whole – can have no Other to itself, which is to say that there can be no ultimate guarantee of the field of meaning.
Multiculturalism is just a kind of racism in reverse, respecting another’s culture from the distancing, unchallenged vantage-point of one’s own.
The law must be irrational, since if there were reasons for obeying it it would lose its absolute authority.
The unconscious is not the opposite of consciousness, but the founding act of repression by which consciousness is established in the first place.
Truth looks like an end-product, but
turns out to encompass the whole process of trial and error which led
up to it
For Hegel, truth is not so much the opposite of error as the
result of it. As every English first-year student now knows, what makes a sign a sign is its difference from other signs; but this means that the difference which lends a sign its identity also makes it impossible for a sign to be complete in itself. Difference, as Jacques Derrida playfully puts it, both ‘broaches and breaches’ meaning. Or take the idea, much touted by Zizek, that blindness is the condition of insight,
Read Peter Cheevers' fiction published by Ether Books
http://catalog.etherbooks.com/Authors/1118
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