INTRODUCTION TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL
Fri. April 16, 2004Categories: Abstract Dynamics
Zizek: ‘In some “radical” circles in the US, there came recently a proposal to “rethink” the rights of necrophiliacs (those who desire to have sex with dead bodies) why should they be deprived of it? So the idea was formulated that, in the same way people sign permission for their organs to be used for medical purposes in the case of their sudden death, one should also allow them to sign the permission for their bodies to be given to necrophiliacs to play with them.’
The thing about Zizek is that you have to love his writing, even if you disagree with it, even if, in fact, you find very little to agree with in it. He might just be the model academic in that he elucidates the otherwise impenetrable idiolect of abstruse theory by using the vernacular of Pop cult allusion, and he makes it seems as if the two were made for one another. The one thought that never occurs when you read Zizek is: what’s the point of Theory? Zizek shows that everything – from the smallest Popcult trifle to the gravest Geopolitical catastrophe – is saturated with Theory, can only be opened up by Theory.
Any way, you can read lots of Zizek at lacan dot com. I’d particularly recommend his two essays on Iraq (you can get to these straight off the front page) and some of his contributions to the online journal, Symptom, especially Passion in the Era of Decaffeinated Belief and Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
The best introduction to Zizek is Zizek’s own writing. But if you want something by someone else, try this.
i really really enjoyed his Iraqi essays, but talk about taking an intellectual to state the bloomin’ obvious, from the ‘McGuffin’ piece:
ordinary Iraqis will probably PROFIT from the defeat of the Saddam regime with regard to their standard of living and religious and other freedoms
it’s just possible, in the long run, eh.
Zizek catches up with Stewart Home’s Necrocards about 7 years after the event, but fails to see any of the humour in it? LMFAO!
I love Zizek, but his pop culture knowledge is actually very patchy and he can come up with some real clangers–eg he has cited Spielberg as the director of the Star Wars trilogy (incredible among other things that not a single editor at Verso picked this up!), and in the course of a discussion of slash fiction it became apparent that he didn’t realise fanfiction was a written genre, he thought the writers were actually making new episodes of the shows.
Lacan.com special prize for the first of the theory-blogger-massive to apply the conceptual schema of the ‘chocolate laxative’ rigorously and inventively in a new context.
Yeah, I reckon Zizek has been exposed to some of Stewpot’s Yank mates and has been conned into thinking it’s a serious proposition.
Which of course it is.
They’ll be worth a fortuhne in a few years, those necrocards.
Anyway, never trust a cultural theorist who can’t mix.
i used to be astructuralist but now i’m not saussure
Don’t talk about things you know Foucault about
Guattari will get you everywhere.
I love Zizek more than just about any other theorist but it’s true that he’s on firmer footing with old sayings and fairy tales (eg. emperor’s new clothes) than with actual honest to goodness pop culture.
He is great though, so unashamedly in love with being a smart alec *and* class clown – a lot of the time I mentally insert a little mark s style “DO YOU SEE?!?!?!” into his paragraphs.
Slavoj is great, but Alain Badiou is the (Lacanian)Real deal — he isn’t into pop culture tho, so he’ll never be a darling of the, um, “Essex theory”(ha ha) school
I disagree; I think his knowledge of pop culture is more than sufficient. So, he makes the odd howler, that endears him to me even more! Badiou, I haven’t really read, but what I have doesn’t open up Lacan in the way that Zizek does.
Badiou is hyperdub’s boy isn’t he?
Big on whippets.
What’s Essex theory then? Which part of the county’s it from? I’m guessing Chigwell cos of the gangster element, but it could be Becontree.
Lot of structuralists in Becontree. Not a lot of people know that.
[…] Like how k-punk talks about pleasure as an interruption of a plateau of intensity and desire, several of the books he wrote were culled from long-form blog posts to be edited down before receiving the prestige of becoming incarnated into The Book form. Ghosts of My Life and Capitalist Realism are the most obvious – abstractions/extractions from the plateau of intensity that is k-punk, books with An Author (‘by Mark Fisher’) instead of a collective intelligence unfolding itself on the one-off forum or endless e-mail chain. But even through 2012 (I think?) at the DIY conference, he attributed his writing and readership to what would become a decade-plus’ worth of blogging. Don’t get me wrong, I lug the KPCW vol around every now and then, but it’s an after-effect/artefact of something much stranger in format. I’m also still turned off by k-punk’s face lit up in stars in the night sky like Disney’s Hercules, a memorialization of k-punk as culture-hero that seems too cloyingly personal given his love of ego-death (cf., Spinoza’s intellectual love of God). At any rate, k-punk isn’t the name of a style (not even in the late-Deleuzian sense of a lone genius anti-stylist making language stutter) but of a desire to write with others from wherever we happen to begin. The desire called k-punk is a desire for the vulgarization of theory by deploying it only so far as our lives are already saturated – and, as any ideology critic will tell you, they already are – by Theory, capable of being ripped open by Theory (cf. k-punk on Zizek). […]