Slavoj Žižek and the unbearable heaviness of the 2010's.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of time"
(Charles Dickens' quote on the podium of the 2012 London Olympics' closing ceremony)
"The most dangerous philosopher in the West” and also “the Elvis Presley of cultural theory” was born on the first day of spring 1949: a Slovenian, the “Giant of Ljubljana”.
Slavoj Žižek is known for having mixed two difficult authors like Hegel and Lacan and is hated by many for having constructed a public persona sui generis as a philosopher who also takes inspiration from the mechanisms of celebrity.
For example, it is known that his ideal home is made up only of secondary spaces: bathrooms, corridors, kitchens, closets: hence, in his kitchen in Ljubljana, the cupboard is full of underwear and socks.
Slavoj also loves rubbing his nose every now and then, speaking with an accentuated lisp that makes him hiss the words, with crumpled T-shirts which - as a habit - slightly tears in fits and starts. And a minimal look, with steely eyes. His ex-wife, an Argentine model named Analia, could have been his niece; his current wife, thirty years younger than him, is an attractive Slovenian journalist.
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THE PARALLAX VIEW
Kojin Karatani is responsible for the formulation of the so-called “parallax view” applied to Kant. Karatani states that - faced with antinomy in the Kantian sense of the term - we should (to quote Žižek who speaks of it in "Interrogating the Real" and in "The Parallax View")
“resist the temptation to reduce one aspect to the other (or, in the same way, carry out a sort of ‘dialectical synthesis’ of opposites). One should instead reaffirm the antinomy as irreducible and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain position opposed to another position, but as the irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them.”
From those books (in fact SZ's publications sometimes repeat themselves, more or less with the same words) Žižek deepens the scope of the concept of
Parallax, to the point of making it a tool that recurs in many of his books, such as the massive - and sometimes sublime - "Living in the End of Times" (which you can find like many of his books as
free pdf or in paperback or paperback on Amazon: the choice is yours.)
What is REALLY interesting is the irreducible space of that discontinuity, the Parallactic Gap.
Parallax can - in short - present itself simply as the change of an object by virtue of a shift in the point of view; this is readily observed in the spatial dynamics of objects; such as the architectures of Gehry and Liebeskind, forms that tend to accentuate irreconcilable points of view, that cling inconceivable prostheses to pre-existing neo-classical buildings, as in the case of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto: disturbing architecture for disturbing times. Even the variation of perspectives along a temporal axis can give rise to a parallactic gap, as suggested by some time-lapse images of "Koyaanisqatsi."
If we want to follow Zizek's didactics, parallaxes can be of many different kinds: pictorial (the Mona Lisa: "this irreducible gap between the 'subject' and its background"), political, musical, architectural, the one intrinsic to quantum theory, to neurobiology, to Lacan's Real (which "does not have a positive-substantial consistency, it is only the gap between the multitude of perspectives on it") let alone the parallactic status of philosophy per se.
A unique Žižekian twist is to associate the parallax gap with Lacan’s “little object a”, or the “object-cause of desire”, which allows me to transform an ordinary object into what “is the focus of my libidinal investment”. That “je-ne-sais-pas-quoi in the object that cannot be reduced to any of its particular properties” which – banally – makes an old guy like me loose his mind for a young Sri Lankan woman.
But how to associate "small object a" to parallax? Well, here’s how SZ explains it:
“The object a is close to the Kantian definition of transcendent object, in that it represents the unknown x, the noumenal heart of the object beyond appearances”.
The “objet petit a” can thus be defined as a purely parallactic object:
"not only do its contours change with the movement of the subject; it only exists – its presence can be felt – when the environment is looked at only from a certain perspective”.
Indeed, for Žižek that "small object a" (“that unknowable X which forever eludes the grasp of the symbolic and thus causes the multiplicity of symbolic perspectives”) is the underlying CAUSE of the parallactic gap that arises “when a pure difference emerges – a difference that is no longer a difference between two positively existing objects, but a minimal difference that divides that one and only object from itself”.
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Published on BlowUp Magazine, Jul/Aug 2016