parallactic stew
Music: Chemlab: Rock Whore vs. Dance Floor (2006)
Yesterday was the first meeting of my summer reading group, and we have decided to slog through Zizek's latest self-described "masterpiece," The Parallax View. As the (obscene) counterpart to The Ticklish Subject, Zizek's latest situates the "parallax object"---a rereading of the objet a---as constitutive of the subject, and in so doing, attempts to rehabilitate dialectical materialism, or at least wrestle it from the clutches of those who have wrongly conflated "new age polarity" (e.g., yin/yang) and contradiction as such. Again, we have Zizek's peculiar reading of Hegel, this time amplified (or should I say, chopped and screwed) to a level that really tries ones patience because the jokes are less frequent and the tone is serious. But something strange has happened, too: for the first time that I've ever encountered, at least, Zizek opposes a Lacanian concept with something new and improved: forget the Lacanian Real, 'cause we have a better dasDing-a-ling to tarry with . . . the parallax real!
We're not quite done with the first chapter. I read for many hours for three days, but I didn't manage to get beyond page 41! As I read, I kept having flashbacks of Will Forte doing a Bush impression on Saturday Night Live: ". . . being president is hard y'all. It's so haaaarrrrrdddd." Well, The Parallax View is a slog; I've got a freakin' degree in philosophy and I have much trouble following the complicated discussions of "the concrete universal" and "minimal difference in Hegel" vis-à-vis Kant, the true understanding of the noumenal and the antimony of freewill and nature, and so forth. My hope is that the first few chapters flog the reader and then implications follow in the easier to read chapters. Unquestionably this book is going to keep folks busy for a few years (so please, Slavoj, stop writing so that we can catch up).
Although I won't outline the first chapter, it is fascinating reading because of the figures that lurk between the sentences. Laclau is evoked and dismissed, and Derrida gets a shout-out---but Deleuze and Badiou are right there, ready to pop out . . . it's almost like a sort of tease. Unquestionably Hardt and Negri are implicated too (looks like he addresses their latest tomes later in the book). By far, however, what interests me most in chapter one is the way Zizek attempts to deal with the tension between transcendence and immanence. After a quick tour of Laclau on difference and equivalence, Zizek explains that "'transcendence' is a kind of perspective illusion, the way we (mis)perceive the gap/discord that inheres to immanence itself . . . ."
With that gesture obviously this book is responding, not simply to Zizek's critics, but to the Next French Philosopher. And in this respect, here's the real fire-poker statement that had us hooting:
If anything . . . this reappraisal [of Derrida's notion of difference] is intended to draw an even stronger line of demarcation from the usual gang of democracy-to-come-deconstructionist-postsecular-Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects. So . . . as usual, I would like to point out that, as usual (and as usual, several sensitive people I like will look huffy), the democracy-to-come delegation has not been invited. If, however, a resolute democrat-to-come manages to slip in, he or she would be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set here and there throughout the book.
Well, I happen to love a good number of that delegation, so much so Levinas is in the summer pile, and obviously this is a bit of calculated over-protesting. I mean, with a jab like that in the introduction, who doesn't want to keep reading? Nevertheless, while the damn book is proving as challenging as The Sublime Object of Ideology---and worse, its like 400 pages longer---I think the payoff will be much more than Jameson seemed to suggest in his first-out-of-the-gate review.