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KELSEY WOOD KELSEY a READER’S GUIDE WOOD “Wood Provides an Excellent Guidebook Through Žižek’S Thought 152mm 15.8mm 152mm KELSEY WOOD KELSEY A READER’S GUIDE WOOD “Wood provides an excellent guidebook through Žižek’s thought. This book is a tremendously clear, thorough and valuable resource for anyone interested in the most influential philosopher of our time.” Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas “Kelsey Wood has done something simple and invaluable: a comprehensive account of all Žižek’s books in English. Apart from providing an indispensable tool and a reference book for the future, he has done a lot more than that, for on each page his account is engaged, passionate, well informed and insightful, displaying a deep understanding of Žižek’s thought and its development.” WOOD Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana and Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht Slavoj Žižek is widely regarded as the most significant and provocative thinker of our age. He integrates concepts from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan with Hegel’s dialectical 229mm method in philosophy, for a radically new vision of human nature and human society. Žižek has written – with humor, lucidity, and extraordinary erudition – on the philosophical problem of identity, ontology, globalization, postmodernism, political philosophy, literature, film, ecology, religion, the French Revolution, Lenin, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. Žižek: A Reader’s Guide situates Žižek’s wide-ranging work in the broader context of continental philosophy, engages its precedents, and provides an overview of its main preoccupations, providing a backstory for both the philosopher and the general reader. A READER’S GUIDE Moving deftly through the works of G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Alain Badiou, in addition to Lacan, this reader’s guide offers a comprehensive overview of Slavoj Žižek’s thoughts. Kelsey Wood has taught philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, at Boston University, and at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Troubling Play: Meaning and Entity in Plato’s Parmenides (2005). Cover image: Slavoj Žižek. Photographed in Paris, 2011. © Eric Fougere / VIP Images / Corbis A READER’S GUIDE Cover design by Cyan Design ISBN 978-0-470-67476-5 9 0 0 0 0 9 7 8 0 4 7 0 6 7 4 7 6 5 WWood_ffirs.inddood_ffirs.indd iiii 22/10/2012/10/2012 11:03:45:03:45 PPMM Žižek WWood_ffirs.inddood_ffirs.indd i 22/10/2012/10/2012 11:03:45:03:45 PPMM WWood_ffirs.inddood_ffirs.indd iiii 22/10/2012/10/2012 11:03:45:03:45 PPMM Žižek A Reader’s Guide Kelsey Wood A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication WWood_ffirs.inddood_ffirs.indd iiiiii 22/10/2012/10/2012 11:03:45:03:45 PPMM This edition first published 2012 © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Kelsey Wood to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wood, Kelsey, 1960– Žižek : a reader’s guide / by Kelsey Wood. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-470-67475-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-470-67476-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Žižek, Slavoj. I. Title. B4870.Z594W66 2012 199′.4973–dc23 2011052162 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12.5pt Plantin by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India 1 2012 WWood_ffirs.inddood_ffirs.indd iivv 22/10/2012/10/2012 11:03:45:03:45 PPMM for John Brennon Wood WWood_ffirs.inddood_ffirs.indd v 22/10/2012/10/2012 11:03:45:03:45 PPMM WWood_ffirs.inddood_ffirs.indd vvii 22/10/2012/10/2012 11:03:45:03:45 PPMM Contents Epigraphs ix Acknowledgments x 1 Introduction 1 2 The Sublime Object of Ideology 46 3 For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor 55 4 Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture 66 5 Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out 75 6 Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology 94 7 The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality 108 8 The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters 115 9 The Plague of Fantasies 125 10 The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology 136 11 The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway 146 12 The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? 155 13 On Belief 163 WWood_ftoc.inddood_ftoc.indd vviiii 22/10/2012/10/2012 33:34:25:34:25 PPMM Contents 14 The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kies´lowski between Theory and Post-Theory 171 15 Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion 180 16 Welcome to the Desert of the Real 193 17 The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity 201 18 Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences 212 19 Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle 220 20 How to Read Lacan 227 21 The Parallax View 237 22 In Defense of Lost Causes 249 23 Violence 257 24 First as Tragedy, then as Farce 267 25 Living in the End Times 278 26 Conclusion 295 Further Reading 315 Index 322 viii WWood_ftoc.inddood_ftoc.indd vviiiiii 22/10/2012/10/2012 33:34:26:34:26 PPMM Epigraphs As a general rule, disciples have been won over for the wrong reasons, are faithful to a misinterpretation, overdogmatic in their exposition, and too liberal in debate. They almost always end up by betraying us. —Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, p. 96 Lacan’s scandal, the dimension of his work which resists incorporation into the academic machinery, can be ultimately pinned down to the fact that he openly and shamelessly posited himself as an authority, i.e., that he repeated the Kierkegaardian gesture in relationship to his followers: what he demanded of them was not fidelity to some general theoretical propositions, but precisely fidelity to his person – which is why, in the circular letter announcing the foundation of La Cause freudienne, he addresses them as “those who love me.” This unbreakable link connecting the doctrine to the contingent person of the teacher, i.e., to the teacher qua material surplus that sticks out from the neutral edifice of knowledge, is the scandal everybody who considers himself Lacanian has to assume: Lacan was not a Socratic master obliterating himself in front of the attained knowledge, his theory sustains itself only through the transferen- tial relationship to its founder. —Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, p. 100 WWood_flast.inddood_flast.indd iixx 22/10/2012/10/2012 11:03:38:03:38 PPMM Acknowledgments Thanks go to Slavoj Žižek and to Clayton Crockett. John Brennon Wood read every chapter, offered constructive criticism, and suggested many improvements to the text. Our frequent conversations were a source of inspiration, and his knowledge of computer media showed me that dialec- tical materialism is alive and well in unexpected places. We are grateful to Stan Wakefield, and to Jeff Dean, Executive Editor at Wiley-Blackwell. And to Jana Wood, Margaret, Jacqueline, Raymond, and Bruce: we are close to each other by way of being close to the third thing. WWood_flast.inddood_flast.indd x 22/10/2012/10/2012 11:03:39:03:39 PPMM 1 Introduction Today, one often mentions how the reference to psychoanalysis in cultural studies and the psychoanalytic clinic supplement each other: cultural studies lack the real of clinical experience, while the clinic lacks the broader critico-historical perspective (say, of the historic specificity of the categories of psychoanalysis, Oedipal complex, castration, or paternal authority). The answer to this should be that each of the approaches should work on its limitation from within its horizon – not by relying on the other to fill up its lack. If cultural studies cannot account for the real of the clinical experience, this signals the insufficiency of its theoretical framework itself; if the clinic cannot reflect its historical presuppositions, it is a bad clinic.
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