Sunday, July 25, 2010

Reading Slavoj Zizek

Spur of the moment purchase for me the other day was "Living in the End Times" by Slavoj Zizek. It has been a great relief! Having watched Slavoj on multiple Youtube videos I have grown used to his presentation style: very fast speech with a nice Slavic accent and frequent spastic movements that suggest a very active mind more than some sort of disorder. The relief in reading the book comes from the fact that while I can still hear his voice as I read his pace has slowed down considerably! In fact, he can even repeat himself when I want to hear something over again. But there has also been a terrible disappointment. Having never read one of his books before I wanted to review some of his research and started with the startling summary of Martin Luther's point of view regarding human beings as God's excrement. Did Luther say anything of the sort I wondered? A friend said yes. But using Google to check this have so far found multiple exact quotations of Zizek's point - made in multiple books - such as "The Parallax View" where virtually two pages from the new book are there complete. And still again in another web page. Typing ths before continuing my explore I wonder if anyone else has noticed a propensity for Zizek to repackage his books under new titles and reissue them? I can see using similar material to make similar points but would certainly not want to be paying the price for a new book that is mostly an old book.