Have any of you read the works of Slovenian post-Marxist sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek? Perhaps a more important question is, did you understand him? I myself have tried to do both resulting in success, but only after having to reread him about three times. The reason? To put it simply, the work of Mr. Žižek is about as clear as mud.
Over the last few years I had heard much of the work of Slavoj Žižek, him being touted as some sort of god-king of academic revolutionaries. Peaking my interest I decided to go out and pick up a few of his works so that I may be taken up by his elucidation of important emancipatory ideas.
The first two I read, or rather attempted to read, were two of his contributions to Verso Books' series Revolutions. Specifically, I picked Slavoj Žižek presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction and Slavoj Žižek presents Robespierre: Virtue and Terror. While I was at it I also picked up Terry Eagleton presents Jesus Christ: The Gospels, Michael Hardt presents Thomas Jefferson: The Declaration of Independence and Walden Bello presents Ho Chi Minh: Down with Colonialism. I enjoyed the actual writings presented in the books, and found the introductions given by Eagleton, Bello and Hardt quite interesting, and in the case of Hardt his thesis has managed to work itself into my wider revolutionary thought. However, when it came to Žižek's contributions I have to admit that at first I got about ten pages into the Mao one and just skipped the rest and just skipped it entirely in the Robespierre volume. It came down to one thing, Bello, Hardt and Eagleton wrought in a clear and concise manner, easy to read and easy to grasp. In other words, they wrought in ways accessible to the average lay person. Žižek on the other hand wrought in the most incredibly indecipherable dialect of academic shit-talk. To quote two authors critical of Žižek's work, Harpham (2003) and O'Neill (2001), Žižek's style is a "stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention" (Harpham) and "a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance (O'Neill)."
Rather than write in ways that the average person, who does not have a masters or doctoral degree in philosophy from an Ivy League university, can understand, Žižek chooses to use as many large words as possible and more analogies than you could shake a fist at. On top of that, his writings are incredibly dense, trying to pack as many ideas as possible into a single paragraph. I literally found myself rereading what I had just read every couple of paragraphs, sometimes as much as three times. Stylisticly he is also a terrible writer, his work simple does not flow well, which makes the already dense writing packed with academic terminology and analogies even harder to read.
The truth is that 99.99% of the population will have absolutely no clue what the fuck he is saying, so while he may truly have some great emancipatory ideas buried under all that crap, most of us will never know because we do not speak Academic Jargonese. He should be an example of how NOT to write revolutionary, progressive or radical literature, because the goal of any such writing should be to clearly communicate ideas of liberation to the masses, and as the masses generally are not big-time university profressors like Žižek. We should not write like we do not want them to understand us, but Žižek takes this mistake and runs with it, and as such I would suggest people avoid his works like they have the plauge.
Over the last few years I had heard much of the work of Slavoj Žižek, him being touted as some sort of god-king of academic revolutionaries. Peaking my interest I decided to go out and pick up a few of his works so that I may be taken up by his elucidation of important emancipatory ideas.
The first two I read, or rather attempted to read, were two of his contributions to Verso Books' series Revolutions. Specifically, I picked Slavoj Žižek presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction and Slavoj Žižek presents Robespierre: Virtue and Terror. While I was at it I also picked up Terry Eagleton presents Jesus Christ: The Gospels, Michael Hardt presents Thomas Jefferson: The Declaration of Independence and Walden Bello presents Ho Chi Minh: Down with Colonialism. I enjoyed the actual writings presented in the books, and found the introductions given by Eagleton, Bello and Hardt quite interesting, and in the case of Hardt his thesis has managed to work itself into my wider revolutionary thought. However, when it came to Žižek's contributions I have to admit that at first I got about ten pages into the Mao one and just skipped the rest and just skipped it entirely in the Robespierre volume. It came down to one thing, Bello, Hardt and Eagleton wrought in a clear and concise manner, easy to read and easy to grasp. In other words, they wrought in ways accessible to the average lay person. Žižek on the other hand wrought in the most incredibly indecipherable dialect of academic shit-talk. To quote two authors critical of Žižek's work, Harpham (2003) and O'Neill (2001), Žižek's style is a "stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention" (Harpham) and "a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance (O'Neill)."
Rather than write in ways that the average person, who does not have a masters or doctoral degree in philosophy from an Ivy League university, can understand, Žižek chooses to use as many large words as possible and more analogies than you could shake a fist at. On top of that, his writings are incredibly dense, trying to pack as many ideas as possible into a single paragraph. I literally found myself rereading what I had just read every couple of paragraphs, sometimes as much as three times. Stylisticly he is also a terrible writer, his work simple does not flow well, which makes the already dense writing packed with academic terminology and analogies even harder to read.
The truth is that 99.99% of the population will have absolutely no clue what the fuck he is saying, so while he may truly have some great emancipatory ideas buried under all that crap, most of us will never know because we do not speak Academic Jargonese. He should be an example of how NOT to write revolutionary, progressive or radical literature, because the goal of any such writing should be to clearly communicate ideas of liberation to the masses, and as the masses generally are not big-time university profressors like Žižek. We should not write like we do not want them to understand us, but Žižek takes this mistake and runs with it, and as such I would suggest people avoid his works like they have the plauge.
0 comments:
Post a Comment