Kvond: Very true. Actually, I read over at a Lacanian weblog that the article was “searing” or something like that. I was surprised to find how tame it was. I suspect that Zizek found it amusing, and perhaps wished it were a bit more vehement. He likely was happy to have found his place in such mainstream American political discourse, something that could be read on a Sunday morning with your Latte. Too bad he doesn’t write more interesting books. I think it was the weblogist k-punk who said that he is like a DJ who just mixes and remixes the same music. There is a bit of truth in this, once you get over the “shock” imagining the rationality of the “unthinkable”.

What is worse, Zizek is boring, or Zizek is dangerous.

In some ways, it seems like Zizek is asking for responses like Kirsch. If he didn’t get them, probably he’d think he wasn’t pushing hard enough.

Kvond:If you recall, I did mention that there was another fundamental objection/warning: that Zizek was not horrified by the proper things. This is a substantial objection, and in fact one might even say that societal classification of individuals (and their ideas/beliefs), is fundamentally organized around THIS kind of objection. Whether or not you have the right ideas is not often settled by Idea-to-Idea confrontation (as rational as we would like to be about it), but rather, How to you respond in your GUT to imbued phenomena. Are your horrified at the right things? Are you warmed and tingled at the right things? The truth of the matter is that we most likely would accept people with the WRONG ideas (which we disagree with), if they are horrified and warmed appropriately, rather than the reverse. There are very good reasons for this, for our affective memories and communications work to conserve our relations in significant ways.

Now Zizek wants to challenge this very organization, the easy way that we all can be horrified and warmed by the same things. Such things in a society work in a fairly sacrosanct way (again, for good reasons). Now, some would say that his is only playing to a shock value which cheaply serves him. Others would say that if he is not horrified by the right things, then his ideas could work to make truly horrifying things happen. (Being horrified at THE Holocaust, for instance, works to admit one into a possibility of a humane, European future, i.e. one without Holocausts.) But because Zizek is interested in challenging the very substantive affective organization of our sense-making, political capacities, he cannot help but challenge some very important societal structures (structures that do not seem to be very important until you imagine their violation…). There is an imp of perversity in Zizek, the gleeful joy of pricking with small fingers the immense inflation of European and American political sensibilities. Arguing eloquently for what previously was a bit unthinkable, not because it was logically impossible, but because it was obviously and affectively not SO, is a form of intellectual judo he is quite good at.

The big question is, are these ideas parlor-tricks played upon the intellectual mind, the mind that thinks that Ideas themselves are the important thing, and not our affective investments? Or are these reversals into horrification, imagining the unthinkable as rational and cogent — Stalinism wasn’t so bad after all compared to the ideologically hidden brutalities of the West (?!) — instructive on some level, some very important level. These are big questions.

In a certain regard, the reaction to Zizek’s flirtation with the horrific is well-deserved. He wants to touch the very fabric of our sense-making skins, even to go into the wound-places, and he does it as a kind of Trickster. The wisdom about Tricksters and wounds is a careful one. Wounds are often the last place you want a Trickster playing around.

I do think though we need to pay attention to our REACTIONS to those who are not horrified and warmed to the right things.

But I also wonder whether you’re being a bit unfair with Kirsch as well. He has substantive complaints with Zizek’s work that are worth hearing out and carefully evaluating. I don’t think the review can be reduced to celebrity envy. If Zizek is doing something dangerous, his celebrity only makes it more so.

Kvond: Hmmm. He cheaply earned celebrity. Isn’t hard-earned celebrity, (celebrity of the kind that he is accused of) an oxymoron? Isn’t the attack of “You are JUST a Celebrity!” an impunement of the process that lead to your fame?

Is there a thinker whose celebrity was earned? Rorty perhaps? Derrida? Now that they have passed, one might think that, but each of them struggled with the jealousy of what can only be called the phenomena of their ideas in society.

Secondly, your statement makes it sound like he was looking for celebrity from the beginning, and that he orchestrated it through “cheap” or “sensational” means. One might imagine this, but I am sure that Zizek never imagined what he has become.

Anytime an “expert” shows the ability to communicate to the “non-expert” serious things are afoot that need to be straightened out.

kvnod, the accusation on grounds of celebrity is an interesting one. Certainly something we’ve seen a lot lately—especially the strange equivocations between Paris Hilton and Barack Obama from the McCain camp. Celebrity tends toward a certain degree of inevitable self-defeat, and the benefits don’t always outweigh the costs. Zizek seems to think that he can insulate himself from that self-defeat by, while making a celebrity of himself, writing about celebrity.

It seems to me that both Zizek’s horror and his success depends on his mixing the very two things you mention. I would describe Kirsch’s accusation, in terms of your two complains this way: Zizek got the first cheaply by doing the second.

I am but it would certainly take a lot of my time and I really don’t care that much about disproving Kirsch – there’s a whole host of comments appearing with specific matters misrepresented by Kirsch, I’m sure you can read them – for example, comment to the article itself give a lot of information. Disproving Kirsch, however, is probably a thankless job, he’s already made up his mind long before any possible arguments – you’ve read the piece, didn’t you?