Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Johann Hari bashes Slavoj Žižek in a review of Zizek!:
The actual film being reviewed, Zizek!, has been available for a while, but I guess it is now getting released in the theaters in the UK, hence the New Statesman review. The latest one available on DVD is The Pervert's Guide to Cinema; which the picture with the New Statesman review is taken from. The earliest DVD is The Reality of the Virtual, a single lecture. You can view extracts from them on youtube. Žižek also appears on the recent Children of Men DVD--in a ten minute appreciation of the movie.
So what's with the intellectual suicide of this most video prolific philosopher, who apparently won't keep the hemlock down? Straight off the bat, Hari dislikes postmodernists, whatever those are, and he appears to carry the continental-aren't-proper-philosophers chip on his shoulder. I'm not a big fan of Lacan or Hegel, probably the two figures most cited by Žižek, but he does appear to know his stuff when he jaunts through the bits of philosophy I'm familiar with, and he does ask good questions that make you think. Hari accuses Žižek of being a communist because of his remarks, and although he's definately some variation of a socialist, Žižek explains--in the movie Hari reviews, when questioned about the portrait of Stalin on his wall--that he used to be a libertarian democrat when he was a dissident under a communist regime, but now that's all behind us, in our world of global capitalism, he will crack jokes about totalitarians in order to provoke a reaction. If he didn't do so, he'd be just another obscure academic philosopher, and Hari wouldn't be writing about his films. ¶ 2:10 PM
Pseud's corner"Latest film" is an interesting phrase to attach to a philosopher. There are three DVDs on Žižek out in the market. The only others philosophers who have had films made about themselves, that I'm aware of, are Derrida (1: self-titled, and which Zizek! clearly used as a model) and Heidegger (1: The Ister). So Žižek is something of an unusual philosopher. I can't help being bemused by Hari's criticism. How much of the criticism is sour grapes?
The star philosopher Slavoj Zizek commits intellectual suicide in his latest film.
The actual film being reviewed, Zizek!, has been available for a while, but I guess it is now getting released in the theaters in the UK, hence the New Statesman review. The latest one available on DVD is The Pervert's Guide to Cinema; which the picture with the New Statesman review is taken from. The earliest DVD is The Reality of the Virtual, a single lecture. You can view extracts from them on youtube. Žižek also appears on the recent Children of Men DVD--in a ten minute appreciation of the movie.
So what's with the intellectual suicide of this most video prolific philosopher, who apparently won't keep the hemlock down? Straight off the bat, Hari dislikes postmodernists, whatever those are, and he appears to carry the continental-aren't-proper-philosophers chip on his shoulder. I'm not a big fan of Lacan or Hegel, probably the two figures most cited by Žižek, but he does appear to know his stuff when he jaunts through the bits of philosophy I'm familiar with, and he does ask good questions that make you think. Hari accuses Žižek of being a communist because of his remarks, and although he's definately some variation of a socialist, Žižek explains--in the movie Hari reviews, when questioned about the portrait of Stalin on his wall--that he used to be a libertarian democrat when he was a dissident under a communist regime, but now that's all behind us, in our world of global capitalism, he will crack jokes about totalitarians in order to provoke a reaction. If he didn't do so, he'd be just another obscure academic philosopher, and Hari wouldn't be writing about his films. ¶ 2:10 PM
