Philosophers

What are your views on Slavoj Zizek's work? Too many fallacies of equivocation? Or is he successful in what he claims to accomplish; that is, rehabilitate Hegel. I have talked to many who greatly disliked him and pointed out Slavoj's supposed 'play of words' that is aimed to confuse rather than clarify. According to them, Zizek ends up sounding profound precisely because of this equivocating word play. It'd be interesting to see what philosophers think of the matter.

Comments

I myself find Zizek to be very interesting, although I am not familiar enough with his work as a whole to assess it. One problem I find Zizek's work to pose is that he is operating outside the standard categories used by most analytic philosophers, especially because his work is so thoroughly soaked in a particular understanding of Freud deriving in large part from Lacan's rereading of Freud. However, in an article in the July 12, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books, "The Violent Visions of Slavoj Zizek," John Gray argues Zizek's work, "achieving a deceptive substance by endless reiterating an essentially empty vision...amounts in the end to less than nothing." I recommend this article to you, but I also recommend that you keep reading Zizek's work in order to assess Gray's criticisms for yourself.

Read another response by Sean Greenberg

Read another response about Philosophers