Zizek's best and worst

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Zizek's best and worst

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1lukeasrodgers
Mai 21, 2007, 10:00 am

What are your favourite/least favourite works by Slavoj Zizek?

From what I've read, I'd say he's at his best in The Ticklish Subject, and at his least coherent and most rambly in The Fragile Absolute, Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (which could have been a great book but just didn't deliver).

Anyone read The Parallax View yet?

2Jesse_wiedinmyer
Juin 27, 2007, 3:01 am

I've not read anything by him, but his is a name that seems to be popping up at me repeatedly. Where would one start?

3kimhnguyen Premier message
Sep 4, 2007, 4:59 pm

Though I haven't read the growing corpus, my favorite is Sublime Object of Ideology.

4finnian Premier message
Oct 19, 2007, 1:26 pm

Zizek needs to be read as fun, a sort of maverick comic at the edge of philosophy. For example, see his excellent "Organs without Bodies" where he turns Deleuze into Hegel. You have to laugh.

5nawfal Premier message
Oct 23, 2007, 5:09 pm

Parallax view is my fav. Dense and long, but really great. I agree with you re: Fragile Absolute.

6Briphelia Premier message
Oct 30, 2007, 2:12 am

I really liked Looking Awry and I've started reading Enjoy Your Symptom! recently. The Pervert's Guide to Cinema is a great film, as well.

7noomanic Premier message
Modifié : Nov 30, 2007, 7:20 am

There is a podcast (2 hr 12 minutes) of a talk, "Between Fear and Trembling: On Why Only Atheists Can Believe", by Zizek at the following: http://uc.princeton.edu/main/index.php?searchword=zizek&option=com_search&am...

(more directly, http://www.vanderbilt.edu/news/lectures/2006/11/8/lecture-theorist-and-philosoph...

8jot
Août 10, 2008, 3:13 am

Z is certainly a writer with 'ups and downs'. In paradox mode, he reminds me weirdly of G. K. Chesterton: sometimes the reversals pay off, sometimes they can get mechanical. For a very entertaining anti-Z polemic, arising from a controversy in film studies but going beyond that, check out David ('Film Art') Bordwell's blog (google for it). Latest London Review of Books (14/08/08) has a brief Z note on Radovan Karadzic in which he gives a translation of one of K's poems, usefully; you'll be relieved to hear that Z's love of paradox does not extend to a defence of K, far from it.

9Fullmoonblue
Oct 23, 2008, 9:52 pm

One of my favorite things about Zizek is how accessible his talks are via online audio and podcasts... His accent just plain makes me smile, even when I can't figure out what the heck he's driving at or disagree.

For his take on topics ranging from Kung-Fu Panda to the recent US 700 billion dollar 'bail-out':

http://www.radioopensource.org/slavoj-zizek-what-is-the-question/#comments

There's also a nice assortment of his lectures here:
http://www.discoursenotebook.com/

10theorchidsong
Oct 23, 2008, 10:55 pm

I would start with The Fragile Absolute... Short, easy, broad.

11Jesse_wiedinmyer
Nov 2, 2008, 5:10 am

So I just finished How to Read Lacan, and now that I know how, I'm not sure I want to follow through and actually do it. Is this representative of Zizek's work?

12Mr.Durick
Modifié : Nov 3, 2008, 7:14 pm

I didn't get an answer at the Opera group. Can anybody here tell me whether Opera's Second Death is worth attention?

Robert

13Mr.Durick
Nov 3, 2008, 7:13 pm

I didn't get an answer at the Opera group. Can anybody here tell me whether Opera's Second Death is worth attention?

Robert

15tomcatMurr
Déc 2, 2008, 11:40 pm

"Although, in terms of their positive content, the Communist regimes were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery," he explains, "at the same time they opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations." He adds elsewhere: "In spite of (or, rather, because of) all its horrors, the Cultural Revolution undoubtedly did contain elements of an enacted utopia." The crimes denoted not the failure of the utopian experiments, but their success. This utopian dimension is so precious that it is worth any number of human lives. To the tens of millions already lost in Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, Zizek is prepared to add however many more are required.

This is vomit on the face of humanity.

16theoria
Modifié : Déc 3, 2008, 12:35 am

14>
Oh yes, he's a horrible fraud. (wringing hands)

His recent piece on Obama's victory isn't bad. http://www.lrb.co.uk/webonly/14/11/2008/zize01_.html

In the increasingly arid conference world of agonistic theorizing that is opposed by baroque fugues on the theme of discourse ethics (H-A-B-E-R-M-A-S in twelve tone notation), Zizek's public appearances and occasional pieces bring critical theory into contact with American Idolish production values. His books look good on coffee tables (next to others by Chomsky and Virilio). Here and there, a word or phrase sticks in the brain; his clever references to throw-away pop culture recall the best features of Adorno's ideology critique of astrology columns (isn't Keanu really Sisyphus?). Please, let's enjoy Zizek, le Pere-jouissance of transcontinental theory, and avoid the hyperpseudoseriousness of small minds (e.g., Adam Cherry). Like the toy in the infantile Fort-Da game, we'll always reel Zizek back in.

17lukeasrodgers
Déc 6, 2008, 8:30 pm

Zizek is many things, but he is not a fraud. True, he occasionally says unconscionable things, but I'm not sure what it is about his extreme political views that make him 'fraudulent'. Zizek often writes from an attitude similar to that of Nietzsche, when the latter wrote "I am not a man, I am dynamite"; that is to say, he writes from a very reflexive position, never losing sight of the range of potential reactions he is trying to (with significant and predictable success) provoke.

Arguments over whether and when Zizek should be taken seriously are, I think, futile.

19Beatlesdom
Jan 14, 2009, 9:04 am

Best
The Sublime Object of Ideology

Worst (Weakest)
Violence (i don't dislike it; just feel he's recycled alot of his ideas for this text)

20Antoyne
Avr 22, 2009, 8:04 pm

I have just read "Welcome to the Desert of the Real", reflections on "911" and "The Parallax View". I have also seen some of his videos.
I find his method of drawing novel connections between things and concepts that are never usually associated to be very stimulating.
I appreciate your recommendations of other works, and intend to follow up on them.
While much of his "crap detection" is not original, he does hit a few that woke me up .
I am also finding leads to other authors that seem interesting, especially Kojin Karatani. Check out the site with the text of his essay on the New Association Movement. I have also ordered the Transcritique on interlibrary loan.

21MellowOwl
Juil 27, 2009, 2:03 pm

I actually liked "Violence" more than most Zizek texts because it was fairly concise and doesn't lapse into obscure cultural references like "The Parallax View" often does. I agree that "Violence" doesn't add anything new to Zizek's corpus, however I think it presents some of his ideas about structural violence much more clearly than in his earlier, more dense volumes.

22lizlo
Sep 11, 2010, 1:09 am

I agree with kimhnguyen...Sublime Object of Ideology

23Hamletmachin
Déc 4, 2011, 1:29 pm

Metaseses of Enjoyment is among his worst. After Sublime Object, he started plagiarizingfrim hisown work. Routledge forced an ediotr on him for ticklish SUbject. He even thanks her. That is why that book is good. Zizek is pretty much a two trick pony. He either equates things (Lacan's concept of X is illustrated by scene Hitchcock's z film) or inverts them (300 is a truly democratic film, but a fascist film). He can be very funny, and his writing can be very stimulating. But because he needs to be au courant with no matter what is trendy and because he has become so predictable, I stopped reading him many years ago.