Zizek Masterclass

Reports on the Zizek masterclass so far:

Thursday, May 25th: K-Punk

Tuesday, May 30th Different Maps

Thursday, June 1st: Different Maps & Sit Down Man..

Tuesday, June 6th: Infinite Thought

I made it to the 25th May one. It’s pretty well covered in the link above. Some of it certainly seemed to bear out the suggestion that Zizek is moving closer to Deleuze. At one point he used the ‘Hegelian-Deleuzian’ hyphenation in speaking about concrete universals. He claimed that Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’ is very close to Deleuze’s ‘reinterpretation of the Idea’. What follows are my lecture notes on this section of the talk (slightly edited for the sake of clarity). The repetitions are in the original, btw

Deleuze’s reinterpretation of an Idea: An Idea is not the fully elaborated concept but the problem. All particular empirical solutions are attempts to 'solve' this problem. This can be seen, for instance, in the way nature experiments with organs - the eye as a response to a certain 'problem'. (problem of light). Thus, the ‘problem’ is inscribed in reality itself.

Only way to grasp the thing concretely is to see it not as a self-contained thing but as an answer to a problem - as a sign of that problem. The relation between particular and universal is the relation between problem and answer/ response.

This is what characterises the Hegelian-Deleuzian approach. Can see this using the example of modernity.

What defines modernity is a problem, an antagonism. Actually existing ‘modernities’ are answers to the general universal problem, attempts to resolve the tension inscribed in the universal. It is nto just that a plurality of modernities have sprung up here and there (so let us not impose one model etc)... concrete modernities not simply ‘examples’ of modernity, but particular solutions to a single deadlock.

The particular examples of modernity do not fight each other/ compete with each other/ exist in tension with each other; no, the site of tension is universality itself. The Universal not an empty container but an antagonism.

The particular is only an attempt to resolve the tension of universality > concrete universal eg concrete forms of the state are answers to the problem of the state.

The modernity example is in fact a paraphrased version of The Parallax View, pp. 34-5. Some of it is conveniently online here (scroll down to 'jameson').