Common Knowledge

Who could not love a book that opens with a careful distinction between an “idiot” and a “moron,” with “imbeciles” thrown into the mix? Moreover, the initial section of the book is titled “The Drink Before,” and the last section “The Cigarette After,” as though the reading process will be a sexual liaison. Some features of the text may strike readers as daring or playful; others may come across as noxious. The dedication, part of which reads “die Partei hat immer Recht” (an allusion to the anthem of the Communist Party of East Germany), is in Fraktur font; the language of the dedication and the font combined cannot help but evoke the National Socialist period, especially for readers unfamiliar with the East German background. The fracking begins early with Žižek—and, as with the toxic process used to extract natural gas, a result can be an earthquake. It does not seem a stretch to say that Žižek may view this book as the start of a philosophical earthquake, as the earth strains to support its size.

Readers need to turn off the mind-switch activated by language about jouis sance, “phallic signifiers,” and de Sade, lest all of Žižek’s references to “cuts,” “gaps,” and “lacks/holes” be taken as sexual euphemisms and invitations to laughter. Žižek sprinkles jokes throughout the text, but their upshot is no laughing matter. After writing, for example, that “the gap between my fascinating cyberspace persona and the miserable flesh which is ‘me’ off-screen translates into the immediate experience of the gap between the Real of the speculative circulation of capital and the drab reality of the impoverished masses,” he goes on to assert [End Page 581] that capitalism denies this gap and that the “virtualization of capitalism” is equivalent to an electron in particle physics: “The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron’s mass at rest is zero, its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance.” His demonstration that Hegel anticipated quantum physics can be found in chapter 14 (“The Ontology of Quantum Physics”), in which Žižek is deadly serious.

Overall, his view is that “things always go wrong” and “life itself . . . is permanent warfare.” Žižek seems to have failed, perhaps due to his conflicted relationship to Catholicism, to separate out the esoteric from the exoteric teachings of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the matter of polemos (page 899 is where things go terribly wrong with Žižek’s reading of Heidegger) and on the endless warfare presided over by philosophical masters, who, to use Geoff Waite’s words, are prepared for many of us to die while the “battle royal that is profound thinking” rages on. [End Page 582]