another good two-pager by Žižek

I’m voluntarily stuck in the gate area of Frankfurt Airport for a few hours due to the coincidental chance to meet someone here, and am passing the time with the Gabriel/Žižek Mythology, Madness, and Laughter, a three-essay collection on German Idealism.

It reminds me that one of Žižek’s strongest genres is one that he utilizes mostly in passing– the mid-length, sidebar-type digression pasted into the middle of the text.

Žižek’s bread-and-butter method, of course, is to take some apparently simple phenomenon and subject it to a Hegelo-Lacanian spiral of increasingly complicated ironic and counter-intuitive reversals. This dazzles but sometimes tires me.

Yet the moments when I like him best are those apparently subordinate passages where he makes a more general point, sometimes in a spirit of humor and sometimes in a spirit of humane general life wisdom. These last anywhere from a long paragraph to a couple of pages, and though they usually end with some sort of plausible segue into what follows, there is a certain quality of self-containment about them, as if they could be extracted from the text and reprinted autonomously somewhere.

A good example of the humorous case would be his “the inherent stupidity of all proverbs” section from The Abyss of Freedom, which in my opinion may be the single most brilliant thing he’s ever written, though it looks like little more than a crowd-pleasing rant at first glance.

As a good example of the two-page “wise” sort of passage, I would recommend the one on pages 122-123 of the book co-authored with Gabriel and mentioned at the top of this post. His theme here is that, along with the usual “official” progression of a series of philosophers (e.g., Locke-Berkeley-Hume, or Descartes-Spinoza-Leibniz), we also ought to ask how the earlier figures would react in each case to their supposed supercession by the following figure.

And as Žižek reminds us, what makes German Idealism such a special case here is that each of the figures in question did actually respond to his supposedly more progressive next-comer. We have Kant’s public denunciation of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte’s bitter correspondence with Schelling, and Schelling’s reaction to the night-in-which-all-cows-are-black dig by Hegel.

Interesting in its own right, it’s the sort of passage that also opens up possible general methods for looking at the history of philosophy, and closes with an idea similar to one I’ve also toyed with occasionally: “True revolutionaries are always reflected conservatives.”

What does he mean by this idea? That the first appearance of a “new” idea is often a bit flat and naive and fails to fully grasp the established idea that it critiques. I made a similar point in my INTERVIEW BY TOM BECKETT last fall: though Spinoza looks more modern than Leibniz, in a sense it is Leibniz by retrieving what was most valuable in Scholasticism who became closer to the future and thus more “progressive,” even though Spinoza remains more popular because more openly radical on all fronts. And the same for Cézanne, who in his lingering fondness for three-dimensional bulks seems more conservative than the Impressionists, though it was Cézanne and not the mainstream Impressionists who paved the way for cubism.

Other examples? I can think of one that Žižek himself probably wouldn’t care for, which is that the apparent Aristotelian throwback Brentano and his heirs (including Husserl) were in fact more radical than German Idealism, even if to partisans of the latter the Brentano School could only look like a relapse.