Thomas Moller-Nielsen: What is Zizek for?
Consider the following
passage:
What would be my - how
should I call it - spontaneous attitude towards the universe? It’s a very dark
one. The first one - the first thesis would have been - a kind of total vanity.
There is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally. Like,
ultimately - ultimately - there are just some fragments, some vanishing things, if
you look at the universe it’s one big void. But then, how do things emerge?
Here, I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where, you
know, the idea there is that the universe is a void, but a kind of a positively
charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is
disturbed. And I like this idea spontaneously very much, the fact that it’s not
just nothing, things are out there. It means something went terribly wrong,
that what we call creation is a kind of a cosmic imbalance, a cosmic
catastrophe, that things exist by mistake. And I’m even ready to go to the end
and claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake and go
to the end. And we have a name for this, it’s called “love.” Isn’t love
precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this
notion of “I love the world, universal love.” I don’t like the world. I’m
basically someone in between I hate the world or I’m indifferent towards it.
But the of whole of reality, it’s just it, it’s stupid. It is out there. I
don’t care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not “I
love you all.” Love means, I pick out something, and you know, again it’s this
structure of imbalance, even if this something is just a small detail, a
fragile individual person, I say “I love you more than anything else.” In this
quite formal sense love is evil.
Having conducted an
informal poll among friends and family members, my strong suspicion is that
your reaction to this passage - which, as you can see, ranges over such seemingly
disparate topics as the meaning of the universe, quantum physics and the
emergence of matter, and the nature of love - will fall into one of three
categories: (i) You believe that it expresses something profoundly insightful;
(ii) You believe that it expresses insane gibberish; (iii) You are utterly
unsure what to make of it: perhaps it is saying something insightful
about the universe, creation, emergence, quantum physics or love; or maybe, in
fact, it’s just unbridled lunacy posing as philosophical profundity.
If you fall into the first category, you most likely are - or would be - a Slavoj Žižek fan: the above passage is a verbatim transcript of the start of the popular 2005 documentary film about the 70-year-old Slovenian philosopher, entitled (somewhat unimaginatively)
Žižek! And
you’re in good company. Described on his book covers and lecture tours as a
“Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and political activist”, Žižek - a
self-described “radical
leftist” - is one of the only intellectuals alive today who has an entire journal exclusively
dedicated to discussing his ideas.
Prestigious newspapers and magazines have
labelled Žižek a “celebrity
philosopher” with “rockstar
popularity” who has a “fanatical
global following,” the “Elvis
of cultural theory,”and, perhaps most (in)famously, as the “most
dangerous philosopher in the West.”
... read more: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/what-is-zizek-for
... read more: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/what-is-zizek-for
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