Anyone seeking to become acquainted with the work of Źiźek could do worse than settle down to the thirteen essays, published in October and affordably priced, in “Against progress”.
Sean Sheehan
Here are some of the topics covered and Źiźek’s take on them.
From the “Absolute invariants” essay
There are gaps in the order of being because reality lacks a coherent wholeness. The parallax effect – the difference in the position of an object caused by a change in the position of observation – goes all the way down.
This does not reduce Źiźek to the laughable level of the Jeff Bridges character in “The big Lebowski”: “Yeah, well, that’s just like your opinion man”. There is no smooth and uniform correspondence between matter and meaning but science still holds its own.
In Einstein’s special theory of relativity, if observers in different frames of reference pinpoint an event using the same mathematics, it will nevertheless be possible to determine an absolute invariant for the interval between two events. It is the same with class struggle: it invites different perspectives but its existence remains an ‘absolute invariant’.
From the “Authority” essay
The incomplete nature of reality includes us. The human subject – not the self-conscious, ‘autobiographical’ individual with a rich interiority but that part of us that yearns for completion – is aware of its loss. We question our identity through the desire of the Other – what is it in me that the Other desires – but we are not at home in language. ‘The “true” word is missing, and this word is missing because I – the speaking subject – don’t have a proper place within the symbolic, because I am a crack in its edifice’. The symbolic here refers to the multifaceted system of signs and structures, principally language, that we have no choice but to inhabit.
From the “Holographic history” essay
The idea of theoretical physicists that the universe is a hologram, is taken up with interest because of its implications for other areas of thought. A hologram as that which retains interference patterns of other possibilities before a quantum wave’s collapse, serves to illuminate the role of retroactivity. A narrative/meaning shapes the past, after events have taken place, and there can never be a straight line connecting moments and our comprehension of them. A hologram offers a vertiginous scenario of existence: “Is this the way we live now, in an unbearably prolonged burst of crackling static as different futures teeter on the brink of collapse and consolidation?’
From the “Against progress” essay
Buddhism holds fondly to the Goldilocks principle and a fairy-tale economy positing a ‘just-right’ amount of desire. But desire doesn’t work like that, there is always an excess. The circle cannot be squared and attempts to do so at a governmental level are seen to tend towards a form of soft fascism; even in Bhutan, Źiźek notes, where Buddhism is a way of life, ethnic cleansing took place in the 1990s.
“Against progress” by Slavoj Źiźek is published by Bloomsbury.
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