Zizek: A Critical Introduction (Key Contemporary Thinkers)

The buzz of Slavoj Zizek is eminently important, fascinating and politcally useful within today's cultural force fields at work. Zizek has found a combustible energy between philosophy and the omnipresence(largely Hegel) and psychoanalysis(Jacques Lacan forever)."We love you Jacques. . . " So whether he speaks/writes about "The Matrix"(Loaded or Not-Loaded), or Kieslowski's "Decalogue",Hitchcock, Lenin, Christianity, cyberspace, junkspace or other competitors,(quite recently) as the late Deleuze of currently Alain Badiou, Zizek locates his triggering points in how objects are pitted against the real and can delude us and seem important, like a prostitute's gaze/or flick of the eye toward her prospective john. So fantasy becomes one place for focus and popular culture abounds in the fetish of the Cult,what is marketable(another pathway into Marx),and one of Zizek's most fertile breeding grounds where his work has spawned and is chocked filled with objects to discuss as they are hardened against the death-drive, the end of time as we know it, the Buzz turned Off. So we,(our culture,our objects) become in a state of "acceleration" as Virilio(within another context) has referred to as the "dromos",the "running or race". The Real, The Imaginary, and the Symbolic are three cyclical/ellipitical Lacanian icons of discourse that forever revolves within Zizek's thought,be it politics of culture,or cyberspace and consequently ours. For the Real, is Real(real) wherever it may interface with the human object. This is an utterly useful book, a virtuosity of intellectual thought/,creating a capsule like profile of such a formidible thinker, explaining his vast philosophic Helegelian energies expanding over 20 years of Zizek's work. Kay knows how to break apart/and impeccibly analyze Zizek's vast edifice.She touches on all his primary texts,most of which are far from breeze-easy reading.In that there is always a synthesis, a coagulative process at work finding Hegel in cyberspace or Lacan in Hitchcock, or truth in Lenin. But she defends this endeavor as well worth a flatter, the exepnditure of time. Zizek is a livily impassioned speaker,often throwing wonderful jokes, quips,shibboleths, incidentals, and dirty humour into the texture of his thought written or spoken.Kay's remarkable job here is locating points of developmental alchemy and longevity within Zizek. Zizek having experienced first-hand the break-up of the Soviet empire/ satellites, Zizek has been an important instigator/speaker toward committment into the ethics and the political, Desiring(as I understand here) a Marxism without Marx, and a Lenin without anyone. Lenin? Ethics? Now, What For? The fascination here is magnetized toward points of hardened committment,vision,cohesion,agenda something quite rare within After-postmodernity hopscoth ontology. In that we(our cognitive faculties,our cultural products)seem to move/mulitply/accrete (and die) at such great speeds. Lenin(in Zizek's eyes) had vision for success, The Revolution. This is given meaning further with his recent fascination with Paulist Christianity,Belief and the work of Alain Badiou, a philosopher who has been reconstructing the philosophic edifice,perceptive pieces from the French deconstructive,(In that Derrida can only summon the complaisance of Marxian "ghosts" as explaining reality Now)and virtuosic post- structuralists(Baudrillard,Lyotard)both representing a kind of escapism of the past three decades.Badiou has been useful for Zizek in the search for the truth "event", that truth never finds itself impacted within a system, but truth always is determined by its past, a point Zizek finds worth developing. Kay quite clearly brings a forward looking narrative to this in Zizek's forever search at expansion from the kernel of Hegel/Lacan/Marx.There is also a useful Glossary of terms.

If you've never read Lacan, and you're reading Zizek for the first time, this introduction is for you. Kay's text is a great foray into Lacanian aspects of Zizek's thought, and, in fact, makes a decent introduction to Lacan himself (although it purports not to be such). Compared to Ian Parker's introduction, I prefer how Kay begins: with the problems of conceptualizing the Lacanian real. This forms her first two chapters, and the subsequent ones make individual passes at the real from the angles of sexual difference, ethics, and (finally) politics. Kay writes with progressively broader strokes and only concludes with the Lacan, Hegel, Marx triad. This progression is the easiest and best way to get a foothold on Zizek's thought (rather than begin with Marx, as Zizek himself frequently does in his writings). Highly recommended as a first introduction (though why not read Zizek himself?--The Sublime Object of Ideology and, especially, Looking Awry are good places to start).

Condensing Zizek's entire oeuvre into 176 pages is an admirable feat in and of itself, especially given the subject's notorious exuberance of style and disparity of subject matter. Professor Kay successfully reins his thought into six independent, well structured and bounded chapters. More than this, her comments on Zizek's style itself as an encounter with the Real were insightful and original. Her contention (in chapter 3) that the end of great art is to reveal the mechanism of sublimation without destroying the machine in the process is particularly useful to a writer. My caveat is that professor Kay is an academic and like most in her profession, could profit greatly from a course in plain english. Many of her sentence constructions were unecessarily abstruse, one felt for the sole purpose of imbuing the work with an intellectual veneer. I found myself rewriting many sentences in the margin, so many in fact that I now count myself as a co-author of my particular copy of the book. In many instances, professor Kay puts up a shield of latinate abstractions where simple saxon concrete nouns would have got the point across a lot more sharply. In other instances, she condenses a complex thought into a barely decipherable clause. As an example, she says of symbolic castration, "It is only once it has been cut from within by the limit of death that the organism undergoes the internal differentiation which makes symbolization possible." I took this to mean that as a pre-verbal infant we have no inkling that we are mortal; just like the amoeba-esque lamella that continuously divides and that Lacan therefore describes as immortal, the infant has no reason to believe that it will not persist for evermore in its current state. It is only with the advent of language that it comes to realize that its parents were once tiny too and that her fate is to grow big then old just like them and finally perish. Language therefore brings with it a sense of oneself as bounded in time, a being toward death as Heidegger termed it. And here I differ with professor Kay; surely this realization doesn't make symbolization possible. The inverse must be true; symbolization makes this realization possible. It may well be that I am misrepresenting professor Kay's line of thought in this instance; it is difficult to say since the original proposition was presented so obscurely. All in all the book was more of a slog than it needed to be. However, for those of us who slog through, the effort is, I am happy to report, worth it. You will come out of the experience with a greater appreciation of Zizek's overall philosophical scheme as well as deeper clarity on the individual topics that populate the Slovene's work. Phew!