On Belief

Rating:
Summary: Not for the faint of heart...
Review: I agree with the review from the New York reader... Routledge says that the Thinking in Action series, "[...] is clearly and accessibly written. [...] Punchy, short, and stimulating..." On Belief fails on all accounts - it is pedantic, requires a near-encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy, and does not present (according to my own reading) any clearly defined argument. The author rambles, as the other reviewer correctly points out. In one paragraph the author will be talking about one thing, and in the next he will start talking about something else - with absolutely no transition.

I'm usually a fan of Routledge books, but this one was very disappointing. Buyer beware!

Rating:
Summary: just don't expect rigour
Review: I confess from the off that I have only read the first chapter of this book. And yet, even this brief encounter was enlightening - because it confirmed what many have always thought. Zizek is a great thinker - a great associator of ideas; but he doesn't know what he's talking about. I illustrate with a single example.

Hubert L. Dreyfus has spent his career arguing that the mind cannot be reductively explained in any terms that would make it analogous to a computer program. This is because understanding is skillful, not rationalistic, and because the mind is essentially embodied. In the first chapter of this book, Zizek contemplates the possibility of our minds becoming virtual - that is, disembodied, computer programs existing only online. He discusses Dreyfus' work - and yet he fails completely to acknowledge the challenge it presents to the claims that he is considering, eventually concluding that the mind is just "software", apt to be uploaded just as soon as technology advances. Since Dreyfus' arguments against this idea could not be more explicit, this is bizarre.

Why would Zizek gloss this issue? Perhaps he doesn't understand the problem (his reading of Dreyfus is scarcely recognisable, after all). Alternatively, he might have felt Dreyfus' work insufficinetly glamorous to be worthy of development. But this is more strange still, since Zizek is primarily a Lacanian theorist and Lacan's Nom du Pere would seem to present its own challenge to the possibility of a disembodied mind.

I suggest another reading: Zizek simply doesn't pay attention to what he's reading and talking about. Anyone who has seen him lecture will have witnessed this for themselves. His work is charismatic and exciting, for sure - but far from rigorous.

Perhaps a reading of the the rest of the book would answer my questions; and I concede that such a review of an incomplete reading is impertinent, to say the least. But by the end of the first chapter (and despite having made it through several of his other books), I had run out of patience with Zizek's undisciplined stream of consciousness.

Rating:
Summary: Never for any *Feint* of the Heart
Review: I disagree with the reader from Montreal: Belief itself may fail on all accounts, but nevertheless persists and insists. If anything this book enacts -- in Zizek's Helegian fashion -- the very concept under discussion. For that reason Zizek's dialectic is joyous, tumultuous and, yes, RAMBLING. But the subtle reader will notice that the transition from one random topic to the next is always tied together later, when ex nihilo a Master-Signifier emerges to order the text in a consistant fashion.

Furthermore I reccomend any of Zizek's rambling, ill defined arguements or pedantry. Buyer beware, but not of this book!

Rating:
Summary: bizarre: one of the best as well as the worst
Review: I have recently began reading Zizek after picking up this short essay that he wrote for Routledge's Thinking in Action Series. His idiosyncratic writing style has its quirks which I could imagine some people despising, but I enjoyed it myself. He has an incredible talent for looking abstruse concepts and philosophical debates in a fresh perspective that definitely could be described as 'thinking outside of the box'. He writes with a ad hoc mixture of pop culture, hitchcock, philosophy, theology, doxology, and Lacanian psychology. And his message is a powerful one--reaffirming the human and the real against what he terms 'the digital heresy'. By the end of his essay, he has you wanting to believe once again--or maybe just to admit to yourself that you've believed all along.

Rating:
Summary: a small treasure
Review: I have recently began reading Zizek after picking up this short essay that he wrote for Routledge's Thinking in Action Series. His idiosyncratic writing style has its quirks which I could imagine some people despising, but I enjoyed it myself. He has an incredible talent for looking abstruse concepts and philosophical debates in a fresh perspective that definitely could be described as 'thinking outside of the box'. He writes with a ad hoc mixture of pop culture, hitchcock, philosophy, theology, doxology, and Lacanian psychology. And his message is a powerful one--reaffirming the human and the real against what he terms 'the digital heresy'. By the end of his essay, he has you wanting to believe once again--or maybe just to admit to yourself that you've believed all along.

Rating:
Summary: not that easy
Review: This is a review from someone without a background in philosophy - and that may be where part of the problem lies....

I have been reading books from the "Thinking in Action" series, and consequently moved on to this one by Zizek. I found it very difficult to follow the lines of discussion. This was for two reasons: (i) the author assumes a lot of background knowledge on the part of the reader, making a lot of (unexplained) references, (ii) the author has an incredibly rambling style.

If you are in the field of philosophy, perhaps this book will have more meaning for you. If you are a beginner, you may want to steer clear.

Rating:
Summary: bizarre: one of the best as well as the worst
Review: Zizek argues in this book along with Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling) that there should be a "teleological suspension of the ethical category" in favor of the religious. In Kierkegaard's book he says that Abraham is asked by God to suspend the ethical in order to kill his son Isaac. Of course God stops the killing before it takes place, but first he wants to test whether Abraham is willing to suspend the ethical in order to give primacy of place to the religious. Zizek uses this paradigm to argue that Leninists had the right to suspend the ethical in order to put their religious fervor to the test by slaughtering liberal Mensheviks, and millions of others, after the October revolution. This is a strange book played out with fantastic verve and bizarre humor. One isn't sure how seriously Zizek takes his "belief" in Leninism. This is one of the worst books on an ethical basis I've ever read, but aesthetically it's one of the best efforts in contemporary theory -- fun to read, whacky "beyond belief," and filled with a real fun for sentence making. The sentencing of the Marxists, both their own in terms of Solzhenitsyn and others, as well as the sentence that the liberal west has laid on them in order to lay them down to rest, is replayed as if it was a trauma that needs to be relived. The result is a species of madness: a great book with a seemingly bizarre ethical message: kill all liberals to prove your religious fervor for a secular religion that is widely discredited for asking for such mass murder. God never asks Abraham to go through on his killing of his son. Zizek appears to condone the killing of millions by communists in the twentieth century through using Kierkegaard's paradigm for understanding Abraham and Isaac. Zizek has a lot of fun with this comparison. I suffered, and I think most Christians would suffer because the comparison seems so grotesque and so completely out of control, but Marxists will delight in this religious rationale for their peculiarly bloody heritage.