things that kick my ass
Music: Brian Eno: Night on Earth (2006)
1. Crunches on the exercise ball. Yowee!
2. Chapter one of Zizek's The Parallax View.
Speaking of number two (pun intended, of course), the reading group met yesterday to finish up our discussion of Zizek's first chapter. Fortunately, some of us read up through the second chapter and discovered it's not as dense and difficult as the first. Nevertheless, chapter one lays out all the toys Slavoj is going to use for the rest of the study.
A lot of territory is covered in chapter one, and most of it to: (a) "rehabilitate" dialectical materialism; (b) square Hegel with Kant in a way that is not as oppositional as folks tend to assume; (c) introduce, elaborate, and critique the work of Kojin Karatani, a neo-Kantian from whom Zizek gets the notion of parallax; and (d) criticize the so-called "cultural turn" in post-Marxian theory as insufficiently dialectical.
Our discussion ended yesterday with some confusion over Zizek's stance on the real. He introduces the "parallax real" in distinction from Lacan's Real at one point, and then in a footnote has a curious statement: is the only response to "naïve realism" a thoroughly "methodological idealism?" The latter seems to indicate Zizek's disappointment with the party-line reading of Lacan's "real" as a kind of non-existent yet nevertheless necessary referent. The parallax real is not a "gap," but rather what we might call "the gapping" or the "gap-movement," the shifting of which either side gives an alternative viewing. Understanding the real as a kind of blind spotting (that is, the knowing of such a spotting after one moves from one view to another), as opposed to a thing, allows Zizek thus to call for a constant movement regarding "the real" in a way that the party-line reading of Lacan does not.
Of course, I'm not sure about that. We tried to parse this distinction for some time, and finally settled on the idea that the "parallax real" is indicative of the book as a whole: After Gender Trouble Judith Butler had to write Bodies that Matter in order to confront the "methodological idealism" through which her theory was read. Similarly, after The Ticklish Subject Zizek suggests it is necessary to move to the "object"---to stress the materialism behind his views, to acknowledge that, yes, bodies do matter.
Jillian helped us come to this reading after all my bitching and moaning about being sore. About doing too many crunches on the exercise ball. "Thanks for reminding me," she said, "what this business is about." Indeed: it's about sore-ness.