"With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility." From the NYRB, in a masterful review by John Gray.
One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer. For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here . If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .
It seems like a bit of a (perhaps willful) misreading in some parts, IMO.
ReplyDeleteE.g. where Gray talks about Žižek’s reference to things like the Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge, I suspect the latter was, in his usual way, trying to be provocative while making a subtler point about being truly revolutionary in the sense of breaking with the symbolic coordinates of the status quo, rather than about the immediate physical violence of those events per se.
Could be, I'm in no position to judge.
ReplyDeleteSome may be interested in this response:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=2230%22