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July 10, 2007
Zizek
I had never seen Zizek in my life until last sunday. He was giving a lecture at the Ethical Society as a sort of commemoration organized by the Freud Society on the centennial of the publishing of "The sexual enlightenment of children".
I'm glad he said it himself during the lecture because I'd be too polite to mention this. Or maybe not. He said someone asked him to be that person's analyst and his reply was "Look at me! I'm a nervous person! I'm crazy!" and the person agreed and gave up. He is insane. But, or precisely because of that, strangely stimulating. He was a nervous wreck all through the lecture, scratching his eyes, ears and nose compulsively and read from a typed sheet all the way through with the occasional stop to illustrate a point. He has a funny eastern european accent that, conjugated with the enthusiasm with which he delivers his speech and matching and vehement wave of the right hand, makes you think you're at a retro communist rally.
But he is fascinating in the way he shoots theories at you like a machine gun, drawing examples from the most sophisticated of philosophers to quirky pieces of news. I'm not completely sure everything makes sense, it was such an intense experience that I'm still digesting it.
In one hour he managed to talk about: Freud (obviously), the Masturbathon, the myth of Dapnhe and Chloe, Shakespeare's All's well that ends well, Lacan, Hegel, genetically modified beans that don't cause gas, Kant, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, The Da Vinci code, Chinese translations, the Bible and the Catholic Church, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the north-american tribe that thought all dreams had sexual meanings except the dreams about sex themselves, Antigone, advertisements for sun screens, the myth in communist countries that everyone believed the secret information officers were the inventors and propagators of jokes about the government and a lot more I can't recall right away. All this to arrive, through a very tortuous journey, to a thesis - there were some collateral ones along the way - in which he states adults need sexual education even more than children because they know the mechanics but lack the knowledge that each of us must have his/her own personal fantasy on which to focus on while having sex.
Best quote of the night, while answering a question: "I have written about this on one of my books, can't remember which, there's so many of them."
Posted by claudia