not

(‘neutralny’ opis spolocnosti je falosny)
Zizek sees that the description
of the society that purported to be “neutral” would not
be objective, but would formally be “false” because it would
involve accepting the existing order. In a manner that is
reminiscent of Max Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional
and Critical Theory,” Zizek reads Lukács as maintaining
that a critical theory must recognize its own situatedness
and its own commitments to political action and social
transformation. Zizek wants to follow Lukács by showing
that historicism is not sufficiently historicist because it does
not give an account of itself as a social phenomenon and is
thus incomplete. Zizek maintains that social theory cannot
be objective in the sense of being politically “neutral,” and it
is incomplete unless it takes its own social embeddedness
into account. An important aspect of what the critical social
theory would have to explain is a question that traditional
theory ignores: Why does it meet with resistance? In this
respect for Zizek critical social theory is similar to psychoanalytic
theory, which also has to explain why its explanations
are often resisted at first by patients.
+
Saying that a
theory is partial is not the same as saying that it is false insofar
as partial representation is not the same as misrepresentation
or distortion.
(==> lukacs kritizoval ze ciastocna teoria je falosna, ze vtedy ide ‘len’ o jednu z perspektiv,
ktora zahrna len ciastocny obraz socialnej reality, ktora teda nie je objektivna, treba celostnu,
resp vedomie “imputed” to the class—-[to som nepochopil dobre];
kym zizek tvrdi ze angazovana ciastocna je ok kym som si vedomy ze je ciastocna lebo je pravdiva,
kedze ciastocna reprezentacia nie je to iste ako misrepresentation or distortion.
cize je ok teoretizovat localised case studies, napriklad na zaklade honest autobiografie).
+
critique of ideology:
Marx @ Capital: “They do not know it, but they are doing it.”
Zizek via Sloterdijk about it: Marx is interpreted wrongly and should go
“They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.”
~ instead of “we misrecognize what is really going on”, it suggests
“we misrecognize that nothing is really going on”.
This thought that things seem to be one
way but really are another way implies that there is a level
of reality that could be grasped correctly. Zizek manages to
disrupt this traditional epistemological understanding of
the distinction between appearance and reality.
& false: “reality is just an illusion”.
“ideology has nothing to do with ‘illusion'”.
“social reality” is an “ethical construction”.
+
the totality is encountered in its purest form when it fails, and when one
tries to distance oneself from it in order to maintain one’s
own purity.
+
“purity is the most perfidious form of ‘cheating.’ ”
+
(pochopit to v celku – to nejde – ale nechcem si to priznat –
nechcem vidiet ze si to neviem priznat)
Reality is usually thought of in terms of everything
that is the case, and it is also assumed that everything
coheres with everything else to form a totality, whether one
can grasp this totality or not. Generally it is granted that the
human mind cannot grasp the totality. If that is so, it can reasonably
be asked whether this notion of the totality is not
simply a product of the imagination. Zizek’s statement that
the totality, which is impossible, tries to cover up its own
impossibility, is admittedly paradoxical. How could something
that did not exist cover up its own nonexistence? The
answer depends on a psychoanalytic premise that
the fantasy desires to hide from itself its own inability to face up
to the nonexistence and the impossibility of its fantasized object.
+
(?) instead of thinking of reality as a given that is
antecedent to experience, one must try to think of reality as a
failed effect
+
If consciousness is nothing but the consciousness of
something other than it, and if that which is other-than-it is
nothing in itself, then it is not surprising that consciousness
is inscrutable.
“Consciousness, in effect, equals anxiety.”
+
the anxious awareness of mortality is not simply one
among many aspects of conscious awareness, but its “very
zero-level.” ~ [anthropocentric humanism]
+
“very model of self-awareness”: “ ‘I
know very well that I am mortal, but nevertheless. . . . (I do
not accept it; I unconsciously believe in my immortality,
since I cannot envisage my own death).’ ”
+
For Zizek poststructuralism is a misunderstanding
of French philosophy by North Americans:
“In short, an entity like ‘poststructuralist deconstructionism’
(the term itself is not used in France) comes into existence
only for a gaze that is unaware of the details of the
philosophical scene in France: this gaze brings together
authors (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, . . . ) who are
simply not perceived as part of the same épistème in
France.”68 On his view, to consider poststructuralism as a
form of critical theory is “a classification which is unthinkable
in France.”

[14-17]