Zizek Says Something Smart

Once in a while it’s good for the soul to acknowledge that someone you regard as stupid said something smart. Here’s Slavoj Žižek on the wisdom – that is, stupidity – of proverbs:

“Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and its Beyond. If one says “Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it’s the only life you’ve got!” it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite (“Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air–think about eternity!”), it also sounds deep. If one combines the two sides (“Bring eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!”), we get another profound thought. Needless to say, the same goes for its inversion: “Do not try in vain to bring together eternity and your terrestrial life, accept humbly that you are forever split between Heaven and Earth!” If, finally, one simply gets perplexed by all these reversals and claims: “Life is an enigma, do not try to penetrate its secrets, accept the beauty of its unfathomable mystery!” the result is no less profound than its reversal: “Do not allow yourself to be distracted by false mysteries that just dissimulate the fact that, ultimately, life is very simple – it is what it is, it is simply here without reason and rhyme!” Needless to add that, by uniting mystery and simplicity, one again obtains a wisdom: “The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life.”

I’m quoting this from Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy [amazon], which I am finding better than I expected. (I didn’t expect it to be bad, I just didn’t have high hopes. Heidegger stuff: usually not for me.)

The annoying thing about the Žižek is that I’ve made this very point myself before! – just not as amusingly. And now there’s no point in me trying to make it, amusingly. I have no sensible choice but to quote Žižek, which is an obnoxious thing to have to do. It’s like Žižek showing up at your front door, although admittedly not as bad. There, I admitted my feelings.

Harman’s point, in quoting Žižek, is kind of fun as well. He calls it: the stupidity of content. He starts off by defending Lovecraft against Edmund Wilson, who made fun of his ‘whistling octopus’.

[“At the Mountains of Madness” concerns] semi-invisible polypous monsters that uttered a shrill whistling sound and blasted their enemies with terrific winds. Such creatures would look very well on the covers of the pulp magazines, but they do not make good adult reading.

And so forth.

Harman imagines content-condensed analogues:

The hero of the book is a bipolar one-legged skipper who cruises the world from Nantucket with a team of multi-ethnic harpooners. The climax comes when a scary, evil white whale (the object of their hunt) swims around the ship so fast that everyone is sucked into a whirlpool – everyone except the narrator, that is, who somehow survives to tell the tale. When reflecting on such inanity, I marvel once more at the puerile enthusiasm of Melville’s admirers.

Or:

The plot of the work is visibly cracked. An Italian poet, age thirty-five, is lost in a forest. He is sad and confused and pursued by several ravenous African animals. At this point he happens to run into the ghost of Virgil, in whose company he enters a cave issuing into Hell. There, they meet scores of demons and observe a drooling Satan chewing the heads of three historic villains. They then descend Satan’s body and climb a giant mountain in the Pacific Ocean where people are forced to push boulders as punishment for minor sins. Virgil is then suddenly replaced by the dead sweetheart of the Italian poet’s childhood years. The Italian and his late muse (we are not told whether she carries a lollipop or a teddy bear) magically fly past all the planets and finally see Jesus and God. And appropriately so, I might add: for if this is the future of poetry, then only these Divine Persons can save us.

One might object that the point is really about tempo. That is, anything sounds stupid if it’s sped up. Like playing “Yakety Sax” in the background. (The exception is Žižek’s Tarrying With The Negative, which goes better with “Yakety Sax” than with nothing, if you get my meaning.)

As I was saying: Harman’s not the highest heights of comedy here, but better than the last work of Heideggerian philosophy I read in the yuks department. (I won’t name names. It was ok. But I didn’t lol.)

He makes some interesting points about what makes ideas appear smart rather than stupid – besides being, you know, smart or stupid. “For example, to argue between “the ultimate reality is flux” and “the ultimate reality is the stasis beneath the apparent flux” risks stumbling into Žižek’s bottomless duel of opposing proverbs. It is true that in different historical periods one of these philosophical alternatives is generally the cutting edge while the other is the epitome of academic tedium, just as three-dimensional illusionistic painting was fresh as the dawn in Renaissance Italy but crushingly banal in Cubist Paris.”

The intellectual fashion system is an interesting thing.

But I’m not sure I quite follow Harman to his conclusion. But that’s enough for a post anyway.

Oh, and a kind CT reader points me to this. Which he reminds me is taken from this. Very funny!

I like that there was a Lee/Kirby monster comic containing a story called “Taboo” and another in the same issue called “The Return of the Totem”. What are the odds that they were making a Freud joke? About zero, I think. But then?