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Title: Conversations with Zizek (Conversations)
ISBN: 0745628974
Author:
Slavoj Zizek
Glyn Daly
Publicate Date: 2004-01-07
Publish: 2004-01-07
List Price: $22.95
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $17.77
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $18.32
Amazon Merchant Price: $20.65
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| Customer Review: |
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1: The Easy Way
In order to familiarize yourself with the thoughts and strategies of any critic or philosopher without being exposed to the sufferings sustained in the painful job of reading extremely complex texts, you should always focus on the interviews made with the critic or the philosopher. You will get a much better grasp of highly complicated ideas suggested by philosophers such as Sartre, Foucault, and Said by reading through their published interviews. I mention those three authors for it has been claimed by some reviewers that they have turned the activity of giving an interview into an artform. Daly's interviews with Zizek does not spare us from Zizek's playful, and at times elusive, style when he goes down on Kinder chocolate, virtual reality, globalization, Hitchcock, Fight Club, etc... Zizek is as quick and as versatile as you may have imagined him to be from his previous books or lectures. Daly seems to know to press the right buttons in order to get Zizek off the ground. The chemistry in this book makes even Deleuze sound as a wild and attractive philosopher. However, you should beware Zizek's Lacan is quite different from the clinical readings of Lacan. It became quite clear already in 1989 in "the Sublime Object of Ideology" that Zizek preferred to focus on the underestimated Real in the Lacanian cognitive edifice. Daly explains in a very lucid way the importance of the Real to Zizek's Lacan, and he helps the reader to enter Zizek's streams of thought. This book helps any reader to understand Zizek's highly complex ideas in a very simple way. I would place this book among the other books of interviews made with the authors mentioned above, Sartre, Foucault, and Said. Daly and Zizek are preserving the artform.
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2: Most coherent text on Lacan and/or Zizek ever
Previous to reading this book I had read quite a few of Zizek's books, as well as some other secondary material on Lacan, and always seemed to miss the mark on some key conceptual understandings. They were always too technical, above my head, or hard to understand. In this book, by contrast, and probably in part because it's in an interview format, Zizek does an incredible job of succinctly explaining difficult Lacanian concepts in easy to understand terms. He also outlines his vision of politics and ethics, although if you want to see him defending his politics at his best, I reccomend Revolution at the Gates. The first part of the book also has the added bonus of giving alot of biographical information about Zizek, which, quite frankly, I couldn't care less about, but theory-heads might enjoy the story of his life. Daly also does a pretty good job explaining Zizek's interpretation of Lacan in the introduction - at least far better than most secondary material on Zizek. A great read if you want to get to understand Zizek and Lacan better but have had difficulty understanding his other books.
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3: a great introduction
Anyone interested in learning about Zizek should read this book. It is lively and accessible, a perfect way to get acquainted with a daunting thinker who writes faster than most of us read.
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