i havent actually listened to this talk yet. i purchased the cd after missing the lecture on saturday night. i have heard that, despite my recent endearment to him, zizek has gone and made me have to re-re-reconsider why i continually listen to him, by making - and subsequently defending - a joke about rape during this talk. apparently someone makes an intervention during the question period but zizek's response is - again, this is liminal-space gossip - somewhat lacking.
i think it is important for sympathetic feminists to be at zizek and other machomachine rockstar talks to offer some interventions when all the rallying boys are about to cream in their pants over whoever is orchestrating the international that day. i am also not about to totally write him off...i like a lot of his work and disagree with other parts...i just wish that in some of our discussions about 'communist culture' and 'socialism for the 21st century,' that we could have some hard discussions about the failings of past movements in a gesture towards a better future marxist project.
i used to think that picking the right academics was part of an overall academic aesthetic - me, get caught at a zizek - or worse yet, david harvey - talk?! of course, swimming in the red sea does require a lot of critical interventions to unsettle the unspoken white straight male subject and its dichotomistic trappings (when the subject is troubled it is always through essentialist feminism), but i appreciate the disagreements so much more now. just like i can finally admit to myself that i disagree with some of my old and new feminist icons...and it feels so much smarter and politically relevant to disagree. of course, i recognize that some disagreements are welcomed and even fostered in feminist spaces while beefs about transphobia or secular imperialism at marxist events are often not...and that my white, gendered-bodied privilege is maintained and fostered as some critical discussions - esp. on race and trans issues - are sidelined.
for me, the most productive and rewarding parts of a lecture are the interventions, the disagreements, and the contestations - without which, the substance of the material sits comfortably in a monologic cavity. this is not to privilege the reductionistic conception of 'dialogue' which i think is ultimately a false sense of mutual engagement that fails to consider hierarchical social, political and economic conditions between conversants. further, the notion of 'dialogue' falsely reduces the conception of a conversation as ultimately between two parties, actively erasing the presence of multiple other actors (especially non-human) from the social sphere. nor do i promote the act of disruption for disruption sake. i definitely do not mean to contribute to the ever-growing anti-intellectual demonization of academic talks that - drawing on dangerous structuralist readings - over-emphasize the supposed 'violence' of the unidirectionality of conventional lectures. these requiems for the 'lost experience' of dialogic encounters include a strong aura of structuralist sentimentality that exhault an essential experience of listening, hearing, and engaging.
what i do mean to say, however, is that it can be useful to guard against the pressure of agreeing for the sake of aesthetics. for me, it has lead to an increase in intellectual stimulation and creative academic pastiche. besides an aesthetics of disagreement is so much hotter.
alas, without much further ado about nothing...
