To Že or not to Že: that is the question

A collection of phenomenal posts, first paraphrasing and then transcribing a series of public interrogations of Žižek in London. Props a-plenty to 'daniel' of 'Different Maps.' In chronological order from the beginning: Mr. Žižek comes to London "You win and you win nothing..." The Hegelian Death-Drive "Butcher those who insult the Buddha" The man on Thursday "God is like this stupid dog" The Horror Stalinism with a Latino Twist The Last Temptation of Slavoj Žižek Pere Jouissance has Left the Building

"If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic." -Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin

"Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied." -Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia So begins Introduction: Rhizome, the first 'plateau' in what is undoubtedly one of the most alien and beautiful books I am always still reading. An experiment in declaration of a radical alternative to the things they critiqued in Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus diverges from its prequel Anti-Oedipus by actually putting forth a positive vision of what can replace 'State-happy' Marxism and traditional, family-bound psychoanalysis. Hardly confined by its own medium, the text crescendos and lulls like a musical piece, and is just as seamless - one can start or finish anywhere, and are encouraged to do so by the authors themselves. Never has theory been so incomprehensibly poetic and meticulous, and yet you know while reading that rather than being 'nonsensical' in a dismissive sense, they speak nonsense because their heads are alight with the Holy Spirit; they speak in divine tongues. This is the rhetorical lesson to be learned from critics who would pick apart Capitalism and Schizophrenia as they would a textbook: truly emancipatory politics must always seem as foreign, precisely because how should one inside the existing social order imagine a future of difference? What choice do leftists have except to parse new meanings out of banal existing categories? Lenin's slogans, Chomsky's polysemies, Bakhtin's poetics, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis - schizophrenia as a creative process that engages the world in unimagined ways.

Desire sandwich, or, why does objet petit a taste so good?