Zizek: A Critical Introduction (Key Contemporary Thinkers)

Rating:
Summary: utterly useful, well worth a flatter Mate!
Review: The buzz of Slavoj Zizek is eminently important, fascinating and politcally useful within today's cultural force fields at work. Zizek has found a combustible energy between philosophy and the omnipresence(largely Hegel) and psychoanalysis(Jacques Lacan forever)."We love you Jacques. . . " So whether he speaks/writes about "The Matrix"(Loaded or Not-Loaded), or Kieslowski's "Decalogue",Hitchcock, Lenin, Christianity, cyberspace, junkspace or other competitors,(quite recently) as the late Deleuze of currently Alain Badiou, Zizek locates his triggering points in how objects are pitted against the real and can delude us and seem important, like a prostitute's gaze/or flick of the eye toward her prospective john. So fantasy becomes one place for focus and popular culture abounds in the fetish of the Cult,what is marketable(another pathway into Marx),and one of Zizek's most fertile breeding grounds where his work has spawned and is chocked filled with objects to discuss as they are hardened against the death-drive, the end of time as we know it, the Buzz turned Off. So we,(our culture,our objects) become in a state of "acceleration" as Virilio(within another context) has referred to as the "dromos",the "running or race".

The Real, The Imaginary, and the Symbolic are three cyclical/ellipitical Lacanian icons of discourse that forever revolves within Zizek's thought,be it politics of culture,or cyberspace and consequently ours. For the Real, is Real(real) wherever it may interface with the human object.

This is an utterly useful book, a virtuosity of intellectual thought/,creating a capsule like profile of such a formidible thinker, explaining his vast philosophic Helegelian energies expanding over 20 years of Zizek's work. Kay knows how to break apart/and impeccibly analyze Zizek's vast edifice.She touches on all his primary texts,most of which are far from breeze-easy reading.In that there is always a synthesis, a coagulative process at work finding Hegel in cyberspace or Lacan in Hitchcock, or truth in Lenin. But she defends this endeavor as well worth a flatter, the exepnditure of time. Zizek is a livily impassioned speaker,often throwing wonderful jokes, quips,shibboleths, incidentals, and dirty humour into the texture of his thought written or spoken.Kay's remarkable job here is locating points of developmental alchemy and longevity within Zizek.

Zizek having experienced first-hand the break-up of the Soviet empire/ satellites, Zizek has been an important instigator/speaker toward committment into the ethics and the political, Desiring(as I understand here) a Marxism without Marx, and a Lenin without anyone. Lenin? Ethics? Now, What For? The fascination here is magnetized toward points of hardened committment,vision,cohesion,agenda something quite rare within After-postmodernity hopscoth ontology. In that we(our cognitive faculties,our cultural products)seem to move/mulitply/accrete (and die) at such great speeds. Lenin(in Zizek's eyes) had vision for success, The Revolution. This is given meaning further with his recent fascination with Paulist Christianity,Belief and the work of Alain Badiou, a philosopher who has been reconstructing the philosophic edifice,perceptive pieces from the French deconstructive,(In that Derrida can only summon the complaisance of Marxian "ghosts" as explaining reality Now)and virtuosic post- structuralists(Baudrillard,Lyotard)both representing a kind of escapism of the past three decades.Badiou has been useful for Zizek in the search for the truth "event", that truth never finds itself impacted within a system, but truth always is determined by its past, a point Zizek finds worth developing.

Kay quite clearly brings a forward looking narrative to this in Zizek's forever search at expansion from the kernel of Hegel/Lacan/Marx.There is also a useful Glossary of terms.