Status Updates From The Plague of Fantasies

Holy fuck, Zizek claims Dune is """proto-Fascist""". What a useless book.

This might also be Zizek's filthiest book I've read.

We find some pretty weird proto-less-than-nothings in this volume; but Zizek never sticks to a single definition of the Real. "The precious agalma perceived .... as the unique ineffable kernel .... is precisely jouissance as that which always remains the same [as Real-impossible]." But he will also claim stuff like science being a manifestation of the Real, which is utterly un-Lacanian, as Laclau claims.

"Science belongs to the Real and, as a mode of the Real of jouissance, it is indifferent to the modalities of its symbolization." What an unacceptable thing to say. No wonder Laclau shits on Zizek about the Real.

It is interesting that Zizek undermines a lot of the postulates of his later oeuvre here, such as equating the hysteric and neurotic (oh my!), and now entertaining the radical ambiguity of jouissance, by a reversal of fantasy and its traversal. This undermines his later idea of subjective destitution as Night-of-the-World, thus traumatic; if the function is ambiguous, destitution can be accepted as possibly blissful.

It's absurd how vulgar Zizek is here, but also the amount of later stories that are already present in this volume (MASH, Smoke my prick, terrorist assertions).