notebookeleven

(Updated today, 4thFeb 08, so links work) 

An email today brings news of a wealth of Zizek material on Lacan.com, all of which looks interesting.    Zizek was also on Radio4 yesterday – there is this humorous mention in the introduction the presenter gives to Zizek about how he is so ubiquitous within intellectual life that one academic has proposed starting an ‘anti-Zizek league’ (at the mention of which we hear Zizek, in the background, saying ‘give me his name…’ and the presenter deferring on doing so in public…).  My own reaction to Zizek is curious, since on the one hand I think that there is a tension between the Zizekian/Lacanian philosophical analyses and the Deleuzian/Guattarian analysis around the question of lack and the productive ontological forces, a tension in which I find myself trying to draw on D/G against Z/L, whilst at the same time I am encouraged by the simple fact that Zizek is capable in our contemporary de-politicised and in some respects de-racinated intellectual culture of standing explicitly as a Marxist and as oppositional to capitalism.  It reminds me of times during my active political life (by which I mean, when I was an active member of a revolutionary organisation) when there would be a kind of separation of discursive spaces, such that within a specific space a criticism (sometimes quite violent and extensive) might be raised against another political perspective which would, on no account, be expressed outside that particular space, in the ‘everyday’ world as it were.  To do so would be tantamount to a kind of betrayal and such activity is what is often called ’sectarianism’, a practice in which the criticism and combat against another group (sect) would become more important that any common goals.  This peculiar practice is still one I find myself engaged in at various points, though I increasingly wonder about its efficacy.  More on that another time perhaps…for now, have a listen to the Slovenian and perhaps spend a little time perusing some of the fascinating resources listed below…

 

 Zizek on Radio4's 'Thinking Aloud', January 9th 2008: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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I’ve been watching some of the YouTube videos posted by the TED group, including one presentation by Murray Gell-Man (he of The quark and the jaguar).  Most of the presentations at TED seem short and sweet, not a lot of technical detail but a good – if broad – explanation of an interesting concept enabling people to gain something like a ‘lay of the land’ within intellectual life.

One of the things Gell-Man was saying in his presentation which really struck home, however, was the role of accidents.  “The history of the universe is … co-determined by the basic law and an unimaginably long sequence of accidents (outcomes of chance events)” (Time: 4.59).  He re-emphasises this point at various places during the presentation, that accidents are crucial co-determinants of reality together with any basic law that exists.

For a long time I’ve been fascinated by a short and simple point made by Deleuze.  “It will be said that the essence is by nature the most important thing. This however, is precisely what is at issue: whether the notions of importance and non-importance are not precisely notions which concern events or accidents, and are much more ‘important’ within accidents than the crude opposition between essence and accident itself.” (DR, P189, Athlone edition)

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A former undergrad student of mine, now busy in his postgraduate studies, requested a copy of an article I wrote a while ago with a mate and so I’ve scanned this in because it wasn’t previously available in an electronic form. The files are rather large, I’m afraid – I could do with getting a proper copy of Acrobat working on my laptop but in the meantime this is a kind of workaround. The article developed from some discussion I had with Ben regarding deafness, partially resulting from the way in which the ‘worlding’ of Heidegger – and phenomenology generally – takes the sound as something given within an interpretative stance, a position I always found rather difficult to accept, even though the arguments in favour quite often seem strong. My resistance would be framed in a rather different way now, probably by using something like the clear-confused notion of Deleuze, the infinitesimal perceptions of Leibniz and the like, and I think the problem I have with the over-arching interpretative priority that seems central to phenomenology arises from a resistance to idealism. Anyhow, the 2 PDF files are here and here, both of them quite large I’m afraid.