The Plague of Fantasies (The Essential Zizek)

Stephen Hawking, the late astrophysicist, once famously opined that “philosophy is dead.” What I think he meant by this is that physics revealed a far stranger world than traditional philosophy had ever fathomed. Particles and antiparticles appearing and disappearing from the void, subatomic entities that behave partly as waves and partly as particles…all of the traditional reflection based on common sense notions of reality seemed suddenly very passé beside the verifiable conclusions of modern physics.But philosophy is by no means ready for a postmortem. Even the Marxist/Critical school, which would seem even more passé given the fall of the Soviet Union, continues to produce critiques of Western society which are marked by a surprising vivacity.True, the focus is not so much on metaphysics or ontology, but reflections on art, history and ethics which have had large scale effects on human societies. If metaphysics is ever more the domain of modern physics, philosophy continues to be able to sway the world of the humanities.Witness the effects of the works of the critical school on the domains of gender and the family: according to leading thinkers like Judith Butler the normalization of homosexuality is only the first step in destroying the norm of the nuclear family and achieving a total revolution in society’s understanding of sexuality.Which brings me to Zizek, a colleague of Butler’s at European Graduate School, who mixes Freudian insights, Hegel and the Christian tradition to envision a post-capitalist liberation of man from the master/slave relation he sees embedded in selling one’s labor in the marketplace. In this work, he elaborates on the fantasies at work in the service of ideologies to blind their followers to the emptiness at their core—along with a more thorough examination of the role of fantasy in Naziism, the interplay of the sexes and popular cinema.Rather than try to summarize it, I’ll merely point to it as another way philosophy continues to exist, despite Hawking’s death sentence. A difficult work but one well worth reading if you want to know how philosophy continues to influence and inform modern life. Highly recommended.

Very good book. Zizek is such a good writer/thinker. This is like the 6th or 7th book ive read by him. I do not think this is his best work though. An amazing book on Zizek is "Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory" by Rex Butler. Butler's book is amazing and really teaches you a lot about Zizek... about what Zizek's system is, what he is trying to see (the unsayable). In Butler's book, he also mentions that Plague of Fantasies isn't Zizek's best book. Nevertheless, Zizek is an amazing writer, and even if this isn't his best book, it still gets 5 stars. I look forward to reading more Zizek.In this book (as always) Zizek offers amazing interpretations on the history of philosophy. Zizek really says some interesting stuff on Kant... it inspired me to get a better grasp on Kant (I'm currently reading Roger Scruton's "Kant", which is very good).The reader absolutely must have a good understanding of Lacan to read Zizek. If you don't have a decent grasp on Lacan, Zizek will just seem like mush. It would also be good to have a good background in philosophy to understand Zizek.

its cool

I like it!

There are two subjects people shouldn't mention in a social dinner conversation: religion and sex (some may also add politics). People should withhold their potentially controversial opinions for a more suitable venue. But it is perfectly alright to talk about oneself, and that's what most people usually do. Slavoj Zizek talks and writes a lot about sex, about religion and about politics. He seems to have a view on everything, and is ready to spill it all, without restraint or taboo. But there is one subject he doesn't mention very often: himself. Apart from the biographical sketch at the beginning of each book (and this reedition of The Essential Zizek gets a revamped notice, complete with his stint as a presidential candidate in 1990), we know surprisingly little about Zizek as an individual. He seems to be a larger-than-life character, but he doesn't disclose much about himself.The Plague of Fantasies nonetheless contains some biographical elements. Military service is mentioned twice, and from this fact alone we can deduce that it must have been a life-changing experience. The Yugoslav army was divided along ethnic lines, and as many militaries, it was strongly homophobic. Zizek relates some episodes of everyday life in the barracks: obscene pranks revealing the disavowed homosexual libidinal economy underlying the homophobic ideology, or the sexual insults exchanged as common greetings among comrades. There the signifier acquires a life of its own: a soldier who confesses he would like fried eggs for dinner is submitted to an obscene ritual that has to do with a Serbo-Croat pun on "eggs on the eye"; and references to one's mother's or sister's sexual life are exchanged as friendly greetings among individuals otherwise sensitive to the extreme about family honor.Going through military service exposed the aspiring intellectual to the shock of the Real; but it wasn't an altogether negative or traumatic experience. As Zizek notes, "every intellectual knows the redeeming value of being temporarily subjected to military drill, to the requirements of a 'primitive' physical job, or to some similar externally regulated labour - the very awareness that the Other regulates the process in which I participate, sets my mind free to roam since I know I am not involved."There are also several references to Yugoslavia under communism, to the war in Bosnia, and to people's prejudices towards the Balkans. Surprisingly, the worst distortions seem to come from people close to the scene. Emir Kusturica's film Underground is criticized not for its overt bias towards the Serbs, but because of its 'depoliticized' aestheticist attitude that, according to Zizek, comes close to a neo-Fascist perspective. Peter Handke, the Austrian novelist and playwright, turned against Slovenia when the country became independent and since then directs attacks against that nation that would be labelled as racist and xenophobic in any other context.According to Zizek, 'Balkanism' functions in a similar way to Edward Said's 'Orientalism': the Balkans are the timeless space on to which the West projects its phantasmatic content. But Zizek is no Slovenian nationalist nor a nostalgic of the former Yugoslavia. To those who want to separate the 'baby' of healthy nationalism from the 'bathwater' of ethnic fanaticism, he replies that "in the matter of national identity, one should also endeavor to throw out the baby (the spiritual purity of the national identity) in order to reveal the phantasmatic support which structures the jouissance in the national Thing."But perhaps it is misleading to look for biographical elements or contextual references in Zizek's texts. An intellectual reveals himself not by exposing his inner self or relating his life story, but by stating his tastes and distastes and by acknowledging his debt to a pantheon of authors. Here Zizek's personal landscape is much clearer, and he doesn't try to deceive, impress or avoid the public's gaze. What he writes is what you get. Zizek practices the art of the self-portrait through close reading of philosophical texts, references to novel plots or music compositions, and movie commentary.To his core theoretical apparatus of Lacan, Hegel, and Marx, he adds a vast array of cultural references, spanning from high brow to low pop. The philosophers he revisits in the course of this particular book are, in historical order, Malebranche, Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Adorno, Arendt, Althusser, Deleuze and Badiou. In movies, Alfred Hitchcock is his all-time favorite, but he also makes frequent references to Luis Bunuel, Sergei Eisenstein, Frank Capra, and more modern films like Robert Altman's MASH or David Lynch's Wild at Heart. Pop culture commentary includes the TV series Star Trek, Columbo and the X-files. In literature, references are made to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Kafka's Castle and James' Ambassadors. Astute critique of Robert Schumann's Humoresque and references to Mozart, Wagner, Bach, Beethoven and Berlioz also reveal the classical music lover. If a conversationalist's skills are judged based on the breadth of his culture and on the depth of his insights, then Zizek must be a much sought-after social guest - if only he could refrain from talking about sex, God, and politics.