Whilst sorting through some old files, I came across a disk containing a 'critical dictionary' from last year. My intent had been to provide myself with a ready to hand gloss of some key theoretical terms, largely through direct quotation from people like Zizek and Deleuze - mostly Zizek as it turned out. This was to be of use both for my own writing and for teaching. Here are a couple of examples:
Notion, Self-movement of (Hegel)
"What is, effectively, the Hegelian “self-movement of the notion” about? Recall a boring academic textbook that, apropos of a philosophical problem or discipline, enumerates the series of predominant opinions or claims: “The philosopher A claimed that soul is immortal, while philosopher B claimed that there is no soul, and the philosopher C that soul is only the form of the body”. There is something blatantly ridiculous and inadequate in presenting such a panoply of ‘opinions of philosophers’ – why? We, the readers, somehow feel that this is not philosophy, that a true ‘philosophy’ must systematically account for this very multitude of ‘opinions’ (positions’), not just enumerate them. In short, what we expect is to get a report on how one opinion arises out of the inconsistencies or insufficiencies of another ‘opinion’ so that the chain of these opinions forms an organic whole – or, as Hegel would have put it, the history of philosophy is itself part of philosophy .. This organic interweaving of opinions is that Hegel calls the “self-movement of the notion”. (Zizek, OWB, 50)
Big Other
"'Rule Girls' are heterosexual women who follow precise rules as to how they let themselves be seduced (accept a date only if you are asked at least three days in advance etc). Although the rules correspond to customs which used to regulate the behaviour of old-fashioned women actively pursued by old-fashioned men, the Rule Girls phenomenon does not involve a return to conservative values: women now freely choose their own rules - an instance of the 'reflexivisation' of everyday customs in today's 'risk society'. According to the risk society theory of Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and others, we no longer live our lives in compliance with Nature or Tradition; there is no symbolic order or code of accepted fictions (what Lacan calls the 'Big Other') to guide us in our social behaviour."
(Zizek, 'You May')
Repetition
"Consequently, to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin - to repeat Lenin is to accept that "Lenin is dead," that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension, what was "in Lenin more than Lenin himself." To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities. Today, Lenin appears as a figure from a different time-zone: it's not that his notions of the centralized Party, etc., seem to pose a "totalitarian threat" - it's rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate. However, instead of reading this fact as the proof that Lenin is outdated, one should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture: what if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with OUR epoch? What if the fact that we experience Lenin as irrelevant, "out of sync" with our postmodern times, impart the much more unsettling message that our time itself is "out of sync," that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it."
Anyway, I thought that I might as well put this 'critical dictionary' (a phrase which I think is stolen from Bataille) online for my own use and for anyone else who's interested, here at a new site. At the moment the references are a little sketchy, but this will be rectified. I intend updating this 'dictionary' weekly. As I say, it's mostly quotation although there is occasional commentary from me.