Disparities

by Slavoj Žižek

The concept of disparity has long been a topic of obsession and argument for philosophers but Slavoj Žižek would argue that what disparity and negativity could mean, might mean and should mean for us and our lives has never been more hotly debated.

Disparities explores contemporary 'negative' philosophies from Catherine Malabou's plasticity, Julia Kristeva's abjection and Robert Pippin's self-consciousness to the God of negative theology, new realisms and post-humanism and draws a radical line under them. Instead of establishing a dialogue with these other ideas of disparity, Slavoj Žižek wants to establish a definite departure, a totally different idea of disparity based on an imaginative dialectical materialism. This notion of rupturing what has gone before is based on a provocative reading of how philosophers can, if they're honest, engage with each other. Slavoj Žižek borrows Alain Badiou's notion that a true idea is the one that divides. Radically departing from previous formulations of negativity and disparity, Žižek employs a new kind of namely positing that when a philosopher deals with another philosopher, his or her stance is never one of dialogue, but one of division, of drawing a line that separates truth from falsity.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis

456 pages, Hardcover

Published October 20, 2016

About the author

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.

He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).

Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dark implicit lesson of Protestantism is: if you want god, you have to renounce (part of the divine) goodness.

The point of contact is Hegelian, though it becomes an umbrella or rather a conceptual penumbra. This is Slavoj at his best, often maddening in the depths of Lacan, but an astonishing thinker. Such is a fine auger for what might be an ugly year.

[Wedma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disparitäten von Slavoj Zizek ist ein solides, anspruchsvolles, spannendes philosophisches Werk, das auf viele aktuellen Themen der Gegenwart eingeht unter anderem: KI (Künstliche Intelligenz) und der Umgang damit, in diesem Zusammenhang die Frage, was es eigentlich bedeutet, ein Mensch zu sein, was ist sein Platz, seine Rolle, die Auswirkungen seines Einflusses auf die Natur und damit einhergehend die Frage der zukünftigen Rolle des Menschen und noch vieles, vieles mehr.

Zum Autor laut Umschlagtext: „Slavoj Zizek (geb. 1949) gehört zu den bekanntesten Philosophen und Kulturkritikern der Gegenwart. Er ist International Director am Birkbeck Institute for Humanities der University of London und Professor für Philosophie an der Universität seiner slowenischen Heimatstadt Ljubljana.“

Das Buch, rund 450 Seiten in eher kleiner Schrift, ist gut und leserfreundlich gegliedert. Es gibt drei Teile: „Disparität der Wahrheit“, „Disparität der Schönheit“, „Disparität des Guten“, die je aus drei größeren Kapitel bestehen. Diese sind weiter in kleinere Unterkapitel gesplittet, sodass man, je nach zur Verfügung stehenden Lesezeit, auch bei nur paar Seiten bleiben kann und trotzdem ein in sich abgeschlossenes Segment gelesen haben, oder, was viel öfter passiert, man liest einfach weiter, denn wenn man sich erst eingelesen hat, ist es schwer, sich da loszureißen.

Es ist spannend, den Gedanken des Autors zu folgen. Eine Überraschung hier und da ist gewiss. Auch eine Reihe von Zitaten kann man aus der Lektüre mitnehmen wie: „Die größte Macht unseres Geistes liegt nicht darin, mehr zu sehen, sondern auf richtige Weise weniger.“ S. 60. Ein Schlusswort mit dem Ausblick und dem vorletzten Satz: „Wir müssen der Vorstellung, dass sich mit extremen Erfahrungen etwas Emanzipatorisches verbindet, dass sie uns die Augen für die letzte Wahrheit einer Situation öffnen, eine Absage erteilen.“ S. 459, rundet das Ganze ab.

Es ist auch nicht (immer) einfach, Zizek zu lesen, u.a. dank der Sprunghaftigkeit seiner Gedankenführung. Scheinbar rein assoziativ, bloß der eigenen, nur ihm verständlichen Logik folgend, springt er von einem Punkt zum anderen, kommt dann aber doch zum eigentlichen Thema zurück und entwickelt seine Argumentation weiter. Im Endeffekt aber sind seine Ausführungen in sich stimmig und aufschlussreich. Man erfährt nicht nur allerhand Neues. Das bereits Bekannte erscheint in einem neuen Licht, von einer ungewöhnlichen Perspektive beleuchtet.

Das Buch ist hochwertig, passend zum Inhalt gestaltet: Festeinband in Schwarz, das Umschlagblatt fest und glatt. Die Seiten sind aus gutem weißen Papier. Das Buch liegt gut in der Hand. Obwohl es knapp achthundert Gramm wiegt, ist es auch für stundenlanges Lesen kein Hindernis. Wichtig, wenn man gewohnt ist, das Buch während der Lektüre vor Augen zu halten.

Fazit: Wenn man eine anspruchsvolle, fordernde, aufschlussreiche Lektüre sucht, die trotzdem unterhaltsam bleibt, ist man hier richtig. Für Philosophiestudenten sowie für die Fans des Autors ist dieses Buch ein Muss. Man kann sich mit seinen Ausführungen, seinem Standpunkt insg. einverstanden erklären oder auch nicht, aber kennenlernens-/ lesenswert, da eine wahre Bereicherung, sind sie auf jeden Fall.

[Христо · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this might be my favourite Zizekian book so far. Might, because you definitely need some introductory literature before going into it; but it's his best attempt at elucidating his ontological framework, I think.

It has less movie references, and - as readers of Zizek know - the standard copy-paste repetitions from other books, but having come out after both Less than nothing and Absolute recoil, I feel as though it's further smoothing out the complex and thoroughly unintuitive tower of thought.

To me, the most complex part was the middle section on (un)aesthetics. While eye-opening, it's rather rough to comprehend unless you're familiar with the work of Schiller and modernist art.

A fellow reader once commented that this publication appears to be missing proofreading, and is littered with verbatim repetitions, and some typos. Now, I feel the repetitions simply serve to properly transfer the concepts and abstractions, but there are in fact typos. It's not too awful, especially if you force yourself to read the textual body itself as a disparity.

The references back to LtN and AR are invaluable if one should need further reading on the history of the theoretical aspects presented. All in all, I think this is an excellent tome.

[Knecht René · Rating 5 out of 5]

Žižek’s Disparities is not an easy read. It’s dense, elliptical, and, as alway, entangled in a matrix of philosophical references: Hegel, Lacan, Schelling, Heidegger, Pippin, Malabou, Althusser, Marx... the usual returning names. To be honest, I skipped quite a lot of pages when the text went too deep into detail. The text about Pippin is not entirely clear, but it contains some highlights that make it worth reading.

The first part is particularly interesting. Žižek dives into ontology and offers a sharp critique of leading figures in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), such as Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, and also Meillassoux, figures who still believe it is (or will be) possible to grasp the Real as an objective reality or object.

There is no place for the subject in OOO (p. 83).
⇒ Subjects, he argues, are a blind spot themselves. As in his other works, Žižek insists that the very distance which renders the thing inaccessible to us is inscribed into the thing itself. The very gap that separates us is not external to the object, but constitutive of it.
==> This, for Žižek, is the true insight of Schelling (the “indivisible remainder”), of Hegel (the Real as the appearance of appearance), and even of Žižek’s own materialistic theology: God is alienated from himself. This is where Žižek’s materialism radicalizes the entire framework and gives a deeper meaning to everything he touches.

▶ His main objection is that OOO ultimately still fails to grasp the object: because the subject is the constitutive blind spot. The subject inserts itself into reality as a kind of ontological stain or distortion. There is no Self that precedes alienation. The self only emerges through alienation. Alienation is its constitutive feature (or, in Lacanese: the subject is constitutively barred).

Page 35
"... it is not enough to insist on the non-transparency of objects, on how objects have a hidden core withdrawn from human reach: what is withdrawn is not just the hidden side of objects ... The true excess is not the excess of objectivity which eludes the subject's grasp but the excess of the subject itself, that is to say, what eludes the subject is the 'blind spot' (= the subject), the point at which it is in itself inscribed into reality."

Page 65
"... the blind spot is not simply the mark of inaccessibility of the transcendent In-Itself, but the inscription of the perceiving subject itself into reality, the hole in reality is not simply the excess of the In-Itself ..."

Page 68
"... the Lacanian Real is the 'impossible' point of coincidence of opposites: the Real is the In-itself external to (symbolized) reality, but it is simultaneously the obstacle that makes the In-itself inaccessible; it is the excess of content over the form (...) AND the excess of form over content (a pure form which cannot be actualised in any content)."

Žižek thus turns the tables: the real disparity is not between subject and object, but within the subject itself. The blind spot is us. This is where his readings of Heidegger and especially Schelling become crucial. On page 59, he refers to Schelling’s notion of the “impenetrable ground of God: that which in God is more than God. Žižek suggests that OOO stops short here: it fails to ask how Logos, or subjective mediation, emerges from this abyssal ground.

Žižek goes even further, insisting that the Real is not some inaccessible core of objects (à la Harman’s “volcanic core”), but something produced through the distortion of our own access, , an embodiment of its own impossibility, a properly Lacanian insight.

Page 81
"... since subject is the self-appearing of nothing, its 'objective' correlate can only be a weird object whose nature is the embodiment of its own impossibility, the object called by Lacan object a ..., an object whose status is that of an anamorphosis:..."

Summarized: … not only is the picture in my eye, but I am also in the picture. The real is at the very heart of the subject = ex-timate center. We cannot gain full access to reality because we are part of it. Object a is the splinter in the eye which distorts our perception of reality … like the rainbow fully exists from our standpoint but it still a distortion, appearance, etc.
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The second part, on aesthetics, was for me a highlight. Žižek finally engages with Hegel’s aesthetics more explicitly, something I had found lacking in his other works. He traces the movement from the sublime to the monstrous, engaging Kristeva’s theory of the abject (Powers of Horror).
While for Kristeva the abject and the symbolic are two opposite poles, Žižek explains abjection as the primordial repression that makes the symbolic order possible: it both tears the order apart and founds it. It is not a prior purity, but already part of the symbolic as excrement, as leftover, a structure for repressing /protecting us from the Real. Through mimetic repetition (Kristeva's Hora), the abject is already inside the symbolic.

Short: Even horror is a veil over the Real, one we can only sustain if we fictionalize it.

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The final third part, which shifts toward political philosophy and ideology critique, brings us to Žižek’s more familiar territory: ideology, the death drive, divine madness, and an interesting chapter on Schiller, Stalin, ...

Again and again, Žižek returns to the same core point: the subject is the cut in the symbolic order, a point he explains more clearly than ever.

Perhaps because, as I’d put it:
Žižek is even more Lacanian than Lacan himself. He radicalizes the entire line of thought—and that, to me, is what makes him so compelling.

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Overall, Disparities is not a recommended entry point for newcomers to Žižek. Unless you're already somewhat familiar with thinkers like Schelling, Hegel, Lacan, and the OOO crowd, much of the text will likely feel opaque. I had to skip or reread several passages myself.

But the book is rich with what I can only call conceptual gems, those Žižekian moments where a difficult idea suddenly becomes crystal clear, refracted through a joke, a film reference, or a sharp theoretical twist.
For me, one of the better works in Žižek’s oeuvre.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have two enduring memories of this book: firstly, that I felt like it hadn't been proof read repeatedly throughout reading it. I felt like I was in possession of an accidentally released print-run that they had to recall because there were so many grammatical errors, typos and repetitions (word-for-word) of previous sections of the same book.

Secondly, it was the first book I'd read that kind of made me feel like I understood what Hegel and Lacan's ideas on the notion of the subject were. I always had a fuzzy idea, but for some reason in this book he put it across in such a way that I eventually said "Oh, I see now" (which is probably clear evidence that I don't see at all).

This is a mid-level Zizek read. It's not as light as his throwaway quick reads that he churns out every time there's a big event he needs to comment on (see his books on 9/11, the worldwide riots in 2011 and the refugee crisis). Nor is it as dense as something like Less Than Nothing or The Parallax View. This lies at the level where you need to know some Zizek to get the most out of it, but you can still get a great deal of food for thought even without any knowledge of his usual examples (he rarely even explains the overused "chocolate laxative" anymore, and just chucks it in. New readers must be perplexed by that). As such, it was a nice break from reading fiction but nothing that was going to tire me out and make me have to work too hard- which is what I needed.

The key to reading Zizek is to read as many of his works as possible, start to draw connections and fill in gaps, try not to bore of the repetition (see his explanation of an episode of a TV directed by Hitchcock involving a ventriloquists dummy twice in this book, as if we didn't read it the first time) and see it as an on-going process that you're watching unfold rather than ever being given the finished product. This books seems to be bridging a gap between Absolute Recoil (which I haven't read, but he keeps using the phrase) and whatever he comes up with next. There are some interesting threads, and while the notion of "disparities" is promised as a theme despite it not really being discussed much, it serves as a springboard for a collection of engaging essays and some bonkers analogies about a kraken (a much underutilised mythical creature in philosophy circles).

A good read. Not a great read. He's done better, but it's part of the journey if you've already joined him on it.

[Sena Yetim · Rating 4 out of 5]

One word hegel. Sniff Sniff..