the revised details on Žižek’s Hegel book

“Hardcover: 1056 pages
Publisher: Verso; 1 edition (May 22, 2012)”

Just took this information from Amazon. So it will be two months later than expected (not rare for Amazon pre-announces) and will shed maybe 150 pages from the initial total (not a bad idea). I’m looking forward to this book a great deal.

Why looking forward to it, given the fact that I will surely disagree with almost every word of it? (I hold that more Hegel is the last thing we need.)

Because, thinking is not about attaining accurate or inaccurate propositional content (I believe in reality, but am a hardcore atheist about accurate content; truth is always translation). Instead, thinking is about avoiding the ready-made cookie cutters into which our surrounding societies always invite us (see the previous post).

That’s not as easy as it sounds. You can’t do it just by playing with surface formulae and generating pseudo-novel doctrines (that’s not what Meillassoux did with his virtual God; every step of his proof is something he obviously feels deep in his bones). You actually have to see the world with your own eyes, learning to do it slowly and consistently over the course of many years until it finally gels.

Žižek may have his moments of excess where you want to roll your eyes. Fair enough. But he also displays such marked force and originality of intellectual character that you know you’re in the presence of someone who’s really thinking, rather than someone who is just robotically trouncing on enemies by means of some oversimplified rule of thumb. If we had 10 more Žižeks it would be one of the most golden of golden ages.