Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Zizek

Russell Sbriglia’s introduction to Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek offers a great explanation of Zizek’s work meanwhile discussing Lacan’s boss threesie: Symbolic, Real, Imaginary. I found it very elucidating!

Russell’s chapter, Symptoms of Idealogy Critique offers up a voracious philosophical investigation into interpretive paradigms on symptomatic readings (cynicism vs. fetishistic) of early modern literature –  through Emerson from Freud to Zizek. And in the spirit of Zizek (plus-de-jouir) discusses “the embodiment of the lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth.”

Book’s last chapter is from Zizek – deliciously entitled Subjective Destruction in Shakespeare and Beckett. Section 1, to put very casually, how in Shakespeare “melancholia precedes prohibition,” filling a void “primordially not its own.” Section 2, takes us from Joyce’s illicit pleasure in language (Here Comes Everybody) to Sam Beckett’s self-emptying subjectivity (Here Comes the Not I) and “whose dead puppet, the ‘real’ person is” anyway. Fabulous, as always. Wee bit excerpted here.