Sunday, February 22, 2009

Cheap Shots Against Žižek

Why American Corporate Academics (and Other Capitalist Flunkies) Accuse Žižek of Inconsistency:

"Two leitmotivs of your approach to Lacan are already discernible in what you have said. The first is that you do not conceal Lacan's inconsistencies: you seem always to be on the lookout for unexpected shifts in his position. Your Lacan is a theoretician engaged in continuous polemics against himself, his own previous statements....

True, the fundamental presupposition of my approach to Lacan is the utter incongruity of a 'synchronous' reading of his texts and seminars: the only way to comprehend Lacan is to approach his work as a work in progress, as a succession of attempts to seize the same persistent traumatic kernel. The shifts in Lacan's work become manifest the moment one concentrates on his great negative theses: 'There is no Other of the Other', 'The desire of the analyst is not a pure desire'....Upon encountering such a thesis, one must always ask the simple question: who is this idiot who is claiming that there is an Other of the Other, that the desire of the analyst is a pure desire, and so on? There is, of course, only one answer: Lacan himself a couple of years ago. The only way to approach Lacan, therefore, is to read 'Lacan contre Lacan' (the title of the 1993-4 Jacques-Alain Miller seminar)."

From Žižek's The Metastases of Enjoyment: on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), Appendix A, p. 173

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