The Ticklish Subject

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Watch out, here comes Zizek - Rated
This is one of Zizek's better books, but also one of the most fragmentary. It's supposed to be a case for the Cartesian subject, but it turns out to be a series of snippets in which Zizek mobilises Lacanian analysis across a broad range of subjects. Of course, the Lacanian subject - constitutively incomplete because haunted by a constitutive lack - is not the Cartesian subject - present to itself through the gesture of knowing - and this makes the entire premise for the book rather implausible. Perhaps Zizek has found yet another way to annoy his intellectual rivals; among the trendy, Cartesianism is very passe, and Zizek is always one for trying to make the unfashionable into the latest style.

Anyway, there's plenty here to get you thinking, if you can follow the often dense prose and if you "get" the reference-points scattered across pop culture and critical theory. Zizek is certainly smart, and often quite original, but ultimately there are huge problems with what he's trying to do. He wants to produce a critique of capitalism without abandoning the often speculative methodologies of cultural studies and psychoanalysis, and he wants to produce a theory of revolutionary change without renouncing the Lacanian idea that alienation is constitutive and should be accepted as such. The result - the concept of the "Act" - is less of a contribution to radical politics than a kind of therapeutic gesture aimed at self-purging through self-flagellation. The resulting politics is rather nihilistic, and is almost empty at the level of form, a problem Zizek only papers over with attempts to articulate it to Marxism, Christianity and anything else he can find. The book is definitely worth reading, but more for its critiques than for the theories it offers.

This book might be a really big deal... - Rated
Slovenian author Slavoj Zizek has been rearing his head for awhile, but this might be his big break-through. In "The Ticklish Subject", he is actually outlining an argument for the return of the Cartesian subject, the universal subject, whose presence he claims is "a spectre haunting Western academia...". He argues that the rejection of this cogito is what unites an astounding array of intellectual thinking just before the milennium. The book consists mainly of three parts, which can be categorized broadly as engagements with German idealism and anti-idealism, then French post-...political thought, then with Anglo-American modes of "cultural studies" and multiculturalism. Specifically, in this last part, he engages with Judith Butler in the most respectable critique of her work I've ever read. In short, I think the publication of this book could mark the first major break with postmodernism in its myriad forms. This feels like an "insider" critique-- there are no kind of typical reactions against postmodern jargon, inaccessability, etc. Zizek comes from a hardcore Lacanian viewpoint, but his major task in this book is to put forth an essentially political standpoint in the era of global capitalism. As always, Zizek is funny and anecdotal, drawing from pop culture enough to incite me to say he's "keepin it real". Good book, likley to become very important.