From the rear panel of my hard cover edition I read: “Zizek offers readers the distilled essence of a new dialectical materialism… nothing short a new definition of dialectical materialism.” Really? I was not aware that we were in search of new insights from this 19th century paradigm. And distilled essence (ousia) is that not the naïve realism that Zizek often confronts, and attempts to sublimate. Or was this book in fact ahead of its time (a return to the future, in the form of the “new and improved”)? Perhaps… but only because the book is copyrighted 2020 and I am reading it in the fall of 2019: A rift in space-time that separates the reading from its (legal) trace. Zizek begins by positioning his project against the “fine art of non-thinking,” which offers “wisdom in the guise of one-liners intended to fascinate us with their fake ‘depth’… They [non-thinking one-liners] no longer function as articulated propositions but more like images providing instant spiritual satisfaction…. The task of thinking is not to fill in this symbolic hole, but to keep it open and render it operative in all its unsettling force” [Introduction 13-14]. It is this hole (which is to remain open) that will become the point de capiton for his new materialism, whether expressed in the form of cross-caps, fissures, rips, tears, or other one-liners.
While historically (i.e., in past publications) Zizek’s entwinement of culture theory, ethnic jokes, philosophemes, political editorializations, and miscellaneous citations were once structured dialectically, while nevertheless aspiring to an aufhebung, here and now they operate on the surface structure of the Moebius where reality and phantasy (in the Greek sense φᾰ́ντᾰσμᾰ, not the Lacanian sense fantasme) merge and morph together un-orient-ably. Perhaps that is the final word in the argument (not mine, but his) that under postmodern conditions, I mean… framed in “Assemblage Theory” [351], the collage/pastiche of dynamis/energeia operates on the filmic structure of presentation; and this IS the new-materialism (also promised on the inner fold of the book). For in this way, we are told, we can “easily move from imagination to reality here” [355] or from superstructure to infrastructure, or from ideal to real, or from potential to actual, or from subject to object (or any other structural dichotomy imagined, e.g., Theorem II [107]) along the straight edge of the Moebius. Although if I recall my math, a single revolution of the Moebius (2π) will result in an inverted image (a mirror phase?). In this revolution (2π) of the surface structure of <insert your Western antinomy>, we only obtain the inverted image or a-bject (the semiorrhagy of object/subject), which allows us to proceed from reality to imagination (let us call this the filmology of the dualism) in order to return to the Same. There is no epistemological vantage point (film, jokes, syllogisms, citations, editorials) that will help us to return (transcendentally) to the One (master signifier), even if these (tropes) are all one (i.e., equivalent epistemologically). That is the failure in the Absolute that Zizek is attempting to recover in Lacan’s (and Hegel’s) Name.
So here I am at page 458 expecting closure in my quest for fundamental ontology and its potential alignment with quantum mechanics but I am left to wade thru Prokofiev’s travel (Scholium 4.2) and Beckett’s abstractions (Scholium 4.3). Was it not enough that I had to endure a tongue lashing (Scholium 4.1) which reduced linguistics to pre-Saussurian valorization of homophonies and onomatopoeia. Not to mention my patience with the political platitudes (Trump as the outside-the-box thinker) and random essays at film criticism (many of which unashamedly admit I have never seen). So, I have reached the end (of my patience and the book) and cannot accept that a few mathematical formulae, tantalizing allusions to physics, geometrical figures that blow the mind (Escher, Klein), filmic imagery that are perhaps more real that real, gratuitous references to friends and family, and an unwavering drive (Eros or Thanatos) to re-inscribe potential insights (sparks) into Hegelacanese, are in fact a (re)constitution of a new-and-improved Materialism which I was promised.
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