Customer Reviews

The Parallax View (Short Circuits)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

(Again, I feel guilty for such a short review, but aside from lack of time, who am I to say "what the text is saying"?)

Zizek refers to this work as his magnum opus. This is a curious remark for a few reasons. For one, the book does not come across as "climactic"; neither does one envisage a future decline in either productivity or quality in Zizek's writings. Just based on memory, this book is Zizek's longest and most sustained single engagement, but that fact in itself is not particularly relevant. It is undeniably one of Zizek's better books, but not an absolutely singular occurrence in his oevure (such an occurrence would have to be phenomenal).

Needless to say, the reader needs to come to this work with a background in Hegel and Lacan (as well as others, but these are the central presupposed figures). Zizek has been criticized for merely "regurgitating" Lacan or "applying" Lacanian ideas to various topics. This criticism is a little unfair, but it's also true that in this particular work, Zizek tends to string together a series of readings of various texts (which of course includes films, books, thinkers, novels, poems, and even Schumann's Humoresque). Zizek is usually insightful in his readings, even if he occasionally takes tendentious liberties and occasionally falls into obscurity; he is always provocative, however, even if one disagrees with his readings. Some reviews have faulted Zizek for making "too many" references. Although Zizek occasionally cites an obscure author (better known to Europeans than Americans), most of Zizek's texts are familiar to anyone reasonably versed enough in academic and popular culture at least to be able to get the point of a reading even if one has never seen Chaplin's City Lights. Zizek never *simply* refers to something by saying something exasperating (like some other academics) like "Adorno makes the point more emphatically when he claims, with Ibsen, that forms of moral purity are often nourished by a 'hidden egoism.'" At least Zizek explains the comparison or point he is trying to get across. In any event, Zizek writes in a way that demands breadth of knowledge from his readers, but in a way that is not merely an exercise in virtuosity.

On the other hand, one problem with this text is that the argument tends to get lost by virtue of the fact that Zizek moves from the reading of one text to another text such that it feels like all he is doing is either giving examples or arguing by a series of analogies. While there is nothing inherently wrong with analogical thinking, the problem is that it can be easy to miss the point. Zizek is most certainly not just giving examples, but the narrative tends to get buried under the readings.

These readings, however, traverse the gambit from the usual Kant (including an ingenious reading of his ethics), Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Lacan to Heidegger, Kafka, Mozart, Kierkegaard (problematic but interesting), Bernard Williams, Henry James, Wordsworth, Damasio, and Badiou (his most recent interlocutor).

The central idea is, of course, that of parallax, but it is easy to miss the point here. Zizek is *not* primarily interested in the perspectival aspect of parallax. While this feature of parallax often emerges in this discussions throughout the book (for example, he speaks of the political parallax in this way: "all [that] is needed is a slight shift in our perspective, and all the activity of "resistance," of bombarding those in power with impossible "subversive" (ecological, feminist, antiracist, anti-globalist...) demands, looks like an internal process of feeding the machine of power, providing the material to keep it in motion"), the "shift in perspective" is not the main point.

The main point is that when we take this shift in perspective, what becomes evident is the *parallax gap*, which is irreducible to either one of the two perspectives in parallax or even to perspective itself. The gap is the mark of the *noncoincidence of the One itself*. Here Zizek enters into the ontological debate between Deleuze and Badiou by proclaiming that "the pure difference is itself an object. Another name for the parallax gap is therefore minimal difference, a "pure" difference which cannot be grounded in positive substantial properties". (And, of course, we must turn to Lacan for the full importance of this: 'L'objet petit a' is the pure parallax object.)

It is this absence in the center of parallax that is key to Zizek's so-called "rehabilitation of dialectical materialism". The parallax is the key to his "materialist theology" in chapter two, but the relationship of parallax to (Hegelian) dialectics is precise: the parallax does not allow for synthesis to occur. In fact, it seems like Zizek has either given up on the very idea of synthesis or is arguing that synthesis entirely misses the point.

The encounter with Hegel thus continues Zizek's prior work, and he (more or less) explicitly updates his arguments in The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Ticklist Subject. Continuities, however, are apparent from other works such as Tarrying With the Negative (which is among my own favorites of his works and probably his most "theoretical" work despite the claims of The Parallax Gap).

What I personally found the most interesting in this book is the idea of pure ontological difference in itself--i.e., the very idea of parallax which is rather underdeveloped in the work. (Perhaps Zizek is simply relying on Badiou's kind of ontology, but this itself is not unproblematic.) Zizek devotes only a few pages in the first chapter to it before mobilizing the concept of the parallax in his readings of ontology, epistemology, and politics. (Of the three, the second seemed the weakest and Zizek's argument about the irreducibility of brain processes and conscious experiences added little to current debates in the philosophy of mind, even if the text was illuminating in some parts. In this light, chapter three was more interesting than chapter four, even though it was the latter on which Zizek placed the most argumentative emphasis.) Hence my first reason for this rating: the most interesting idea of this book from a philosophical point of view was underdeveloped before it was deployed (even if the critical exercises were stimulating). (Or, another way of saying this is that Zizek is at work in this book as a critic and not a philosopher.)

The other main reason for my rating is the surprising number of typographical errors throughout the book. These include misspellings, missing words (such as the one I added in brackets in the quotation above), some formatting errors, and so on. Some sources are also cited as "unpublished" or "forthcoming" which are indeed published (one such work, for example, was published in 2005, which should have been enough time for the printing of The Parallax View).

I used the word "provocative" several times in this review, and I did so consciously: it seems the best adjective to describe this work as a whole. The work "calls forth" insights in the reader in just about every page, even if they are not the insights Zizek is communicating. There are moments when obscurity muffles this call, but on the whole it is not a waste of time for anyone who thinks Zizek is on to something (on the other hand, if you don't think that, this work will not convince you otherwise).

Any supposed shortcomings or uneven passages in this brilliant book are more than made up for by the sustained, detailed analyses of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and recent developments in brain and cognitive science. What do these things have to do with the phenomenon of parallax? Everything.

In other respects, this book covers familiar pop-cultural ground --- Lynch, cartoons, star wars episodes 1-3, etc --- but it does so with renewed vigor and further insights. I'm thinking particularly of the chapter entitled "a boy meets a lady." This chapter contains probably the most perverse --- and therefore most accurate --- interpretation of Hegel's "absolute knowledge" I have ever heard. Please read, you like.

As to the skepticism my fellow reviewers express over Zizek's appropriation of Bartleby, all I can say is "not the letter but the spirit." He is clearly NOT suggesting that you never leave your workplace and try to subsist only on pine nuts until the authorities cart you away. He's interested in the negativity of Bartleby's gesture/motto as a double retort to both the frenetic activity that the capitalist epoch compells in its subjects and to the obsessive half-measures of the "resistance" movements that are the inherent supplement of global capital.

What is to be done in 2k6? The answer is seinfeldian: "everybody's doing something; we'll do nothing." What does this mean in real terms? Take voting in America for instance, as Zizek pointed out years ago, the choice for us is between coke and diet coke. Sure diet coke won't start a war in Iraq; it's healthier than that. It'll will wage an economic one instead, i.e. nafta, ftaa, etc. As Kerry seemed to always be implying in his election bid: I can make this a even BETTER empire. SO what is the way out of this forced/false choice? DON'T VOTE. Take America's already existing, statistical apathy (50% voter turn out) and turn it into a statistical boycott (somewhere near the mid-30s in percentile). This would make our elections invalid according to international election authorities insofar as the result cannot be construed as the will of the majority of the people. Does that bear legally on our government? Of course not, but it would be a hell of a lot more interesting than voting democrat and republican for another 150 years.

So remember, tell the green party it needs to commit suicide by advocating that no one vote. It's time to subtract logical positivism from out poltical thinking. And it's time to have Zizek as a guest on The Daily Show.

Slavoj Zizek's dense tome is a wandering and unfocused investigation of what he refers to as a 'parallax,' "the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight." Zizek examines numerous instances of the 'parallax gap' in multiple spheres of social life, from the political to the pop. There are brilliant explanations of Hegelian dialectics here, but Zizek's Lacanian lens is both interesting and restricting. He is ultimately unable to free himself from the baroque terminology of the late analyst and as a result his interpretation suffers from verbose terminology and awkward shifts of perspective. This is a rich book with plenty of insightful ideas, but it fails from sloppiness and lack of discipline.

In the documentary Zizek!, the man claims that his three best and most theoretically significant books are (assuming, in true Hegelian fashion, that you can also count three as four): The Sublime Object of Ideology: (Second Edition) (The Essential Zizek), Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Post-Contemporary Interventions), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Second Edition) (The Essential Zizek), and The Parallax View (Short Circuits). This then allows us to delineate the conceptual trajectory of Zizek's career so far: from the Object, through Negativity, to the Subject, and finally, Parallax. What justifies Zizek in claiming (on the dust jacket) that this is his "magnum opus"? If anything can legitimate this claim, it is that in this work Zizek finally lays claim to his distinctive ontology (although Zizek would not claim its distinctiveness, he would claim that it is Hegel's ontology, albeit Hegel read in a Lacanian vein)--the ontology of the barred S, the split-subject, the self-different One. This ontology gathers together all the concepts of his intellectual trajectory: both subject and object are nothing more than pure self-relating negativity, and it is only through the shifts of parallax that allow us to discern the difference (which is minimal). This ontology has guided Zizek in an implicit fashion from the beginning, but it is only recently that Zizek has had to develop it in an explicit fashion, to differentiate his position from that of his contemporaries'--most notably from Alain Badiou's mathematical ontology of pure multiplicity woven from the Void.

In this book Zizek develops a new conceptual operator, that of the Parallax Gap, which takes its place alongside Zizek's other theoretical conceptual operators--the Vanishing Mediator, the Indivisible Remainder, the Minimal Difference, etc. Zizek employs a curious (and to some, frustrating) methodology in elaborating his theoretical concepts; rather than articulating them in a concise theortical description, he merely puts them to work in example after example in different contexts. In this book Zizek runs through the usual gamut of intellectual domains in elaborating the notion of parallax gap: from german idealism to Christian theology, cognitive brain sciences to contemprorary politico-economic ideology. (The chapters on cognitive science--a field only recently taken up by Zizek--are particularly impressive.) This methodology demands a peculiar sort of engagement from the reader, in that in order to really discern the theoretical stakes of Zizek's arguments, one has to read carefully and not get distracted by the innumerable references to popular culture, literature and cinema. One must discern, under the continually variegated examples adduced to illustrate his claims, the theoretical tools at work. Anyone willing to give this book the exertion and discipline required, however will be amply rewarded.

This book certainly rates as one of Zizek's best, and is crucial for understanding Zizek's most recent conceptual innovations and his grasp on the ideological coordinates of a post-9/11 world. Although his other books contain specific engagements on various topics of cultural relevance, to understand the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of his engagement, this book is a must read.

It is good to read Zizek writing in a more serious, scholarly mode (not that this book doesn't also contain much of his famous humor). Philosophically, he makes a compelling case as to why the various postmodernist philosophers and theorists have done very little to advance philosophical discourse meaningfully beyond Kant and Hegel. In particular, he argues for a Parallax View of Hegel (and post-Hegelian philosophy): dialectical oppositions are never totally reconciled, there remains a gap, the negativity of thinking apart from being, yet this does not mean we regress backward to Kantian skepticism, nor or we stuck in the 'bad infinity' of postmodernist 'deference' or pious reverence for a mysterious Other. Rather, clarification about this gap, the negativity which causes the parallax of view, is shown by Zizek to be what is required of us (scientists and postmodernists alike) if we are at all interested in reason and enlightenment.

I read the Sublime Object of Ideology and shook with excitement. After eagerly reading his next books, including Parallax View, I am still awaiting an answer to the question: Okay I can now understand how Lacan can illustrate isssues in politics and philosophy, but to what end?

Once you get over the initial novelty of his use of Lacan, you begin to wonder whether Zizek just assumes there is something inherently and self-evidently valuable about Lacan. He certainly never articulates what this value is, and after reading his works one wonders if there actually is something important beyond the once novel but now fading insights he generates by the new territory which he traverses with the same tools.

The other thought that occurs while reading his "View" is that after reading the first fifty pages, the rest of the book seems to repeat the same basic procedures over and over without developing towards any specific objective. I can already hear Zizek's defense to this remark: "Hey this repetition is part of my post-modern strategy and it is entirely consistent with my Lacanian (or Lack-Canian) (non) position!" And he would be right about the latter, the psychoanalytic process is interminable. While that might be true in the large sense, and explains why his books have about four interesting concepts that reprise themselves in various contexts in all the rest of his works, this only begs the question: why and for what is the psychoanalytic process good? It is certainly good for Zizek boredom, but I am not o sure about mine.

Contrary to the common closed-mindedness of our day, I happen to find Zizek incredibly illuminating - and of all things, extremely easy to read. He develops concepts in a way that prompts haste out of the reader jumping from Lacanese to Marxist Theory etc, with a relatively contemporary kind of swiftness.

The key challenge for us readers is to really engage with this text, and question our common, rather dumbfounded, docility. To Zizek, the fool is the modern day "democratic" civilian who says: "Well, something is contaminating my funds - I should probably do something about it," while the parallax shift is something that occurs in a kind of transference, a heightened understanding, of not, "me, me, me - what's goin' on?" but of, more or less, "Time to take the radical step and do something about it for crying out loud - not for me, but for the common good and alleviation of all contemporary human suffering."

It would be mighty impressive if I could find just one person in my life who could grasp Zizek, and not just read him out of the coldness of liberal academic "interest." The beauty of the parallax view is that it is, potentially, helpful to us; and to, at least, shift our perspective just a bit.

The one thing that is annoying for me personally about Zizek is that he is almost always telling the reader how one should probably think about other people's ideas. But, for the most part, his critique is essential for the coming times. So, give it whirl, even if you're an idiot!

To fully appreciate the value of this book, it seems that the reader has to have already read Zizek's earlier key books. What The Parallax View does is to proffer an invisible Hegelian thread to further systematize his philosophy, to pull it all together, to abridge its various components, and to bring in additional bricks (such as Thomas Metzinger's articulation of the ontological absence of the Ego). True, Zizek does put forward in this book his key concepts inherited (descent with modification, that is) from Lacan, Freud, and Marx, but the book is not self-contained in the sense that you would get from it alone a clear layout of Zizek's system. And I am not sure Zizek would admit to doing anything like system-building, but the book has left me with a strong suspicion that Zizek is, after all, a closet Hegelian above being anything else, including a Lacanian.

Overall, I believe the book does succeed in offering us a system, but not as a ready-made product but is instead a box of Legos you have to put together following the instructions (often vague) scattered all over the place. But that is what makes books like this fun. It seems that Zizek has so much to say that he does not think he has time or space to glue it all together let alone build inert transitions -- he trusts you to do that. And what is the system that I think he is building? If you have read his earlier books, you already know its core and will get from this book further fleshing-out and consolidation. If you have not, I would not rely on this book to express its core to you in a self-sufficient manner. You would still enjoy it though, and would feel interested enough to go to his earlier books.

Enjoyable as it is to read Zizek (the table of contents is itself a work of art), the inflation of 180 degree turns (" in fact, the EXACT OPPOSITE is the case / is the better interpretation) and the phrase "this is PRECISELY what Lacan meant with .....", makes it impossible to give more than 4 stars.

Though there is a certain emptiness / lack of practical implications in Zizek's writings (which he defends in terms of refusing to provide the Left with "the formula" they demand, instead using his fame to position himself as object a, frustrating our demands), it should be noted that he definitely penetrates deeply into the field of political thinking, too, and he has made me revise some of my opinions about Scandinavian social democracy.

_The Parallax View_, which the ever-prolific Slavoj Zizek has declared the "magnum opus" of his substantial _oeuvre_, is a generally rewarding, if uneven, work.

I took from it this: every posited antinomy, opposition or other binarism conceals in itself a more pluriform nature, the terms themselves irreducible to themselves (a challenge to Western thoughts principle of identity: an entity is identical to itself[?]), leaving an irreducible bare difference(the old Derridean stand-by) that remains largely unaccountable but ontologically substantial nonetheless -- a locus of "the Real." Ultimately uncognizable, this difference, which for Zizek is the Lacanian "_object petit a_," opens a parallax gap wherein this difference, though uncognizable, nevertheless serves as a common referent among the actors of any ideological disagreement.

I found this a compelling thesis, and Zizek, though often given to an over-reliance on rhetorical questions, ellipses, and anacoluthon (this latter tendency perhaps inspired by St. Paul, himself an inveterate employer of anacoluthon, whom Z. frequently discusses in the early portions of _TPV_), is in the main persuasive. (I have to balk, however, at Z.'s frequent recourse to pop-cultural examples -- are overwrought, pandering summer blockbusters like _The Matrix_ and _The Revenge of the Sith_ really so fraught with important theoretical implications?) The real shortcoming of _TPV_, as I see it, comes in the final pages, wherein Z., having explicated his theory, waxes prescriptive, encouraging his readers to embody the "Bartleby-parallax" in order to avoid being caught up in the Hegelian pseudo-negations of counterhegemonic practices. We must be as resistant to the latter in our "preferring-not-to's" as to the hegemonic ills the latter are intended to redress -- "I prefer not to eat factory-farmed, adulterated, GM food; I prefer not to purchase food from an organic farming co-op." Because not to do so and to remain, rather, in the old dialectic of resorting to alternatives to dismaying hegemony, is to remain ensnared in the Foucauldian circuits of power that result in the eternal recursion and reinscription of extant relations. The parallactic Bartleby disrupts the workings of ideological apparatuses by cultivating an inner disposition of refusal until, according to Z., there opens up possibilities that are not determined by the dialectic.

This is precisely where Z. lost me. I recall Bartleby's fate: blind, starving, homeless, jailed ... eventually dead. And, for all of Z.'s hostility to what he calls "postmodern techno-gnosticism," Bartleby seem an odd exemplar, given the fact that Herman Melville, Bartleby's creator, often mused upon the tenets of Gnosticism (He composed a poem on gnosticism, and _The Confidence Man_, his last published novel, arguably lends itself to a gnostic reading). Z.'s recommendation here seems too close to Baudrillard's injunction to "be silent" in the face of popular media -- essentially to choose a mode of resistance likely futile, all while consoling oneself that futility is inevitable, until from the murky parallax gap of the Real messianically springs, like Athena from the head of Zeus, the possibility of truly efficacious revolution.