MLRy 99.4, 2004 1019 mother non-mother of mine. Another question concerns the literary and psychological implications in writing by women representing the relationship between a mother and a son who embodies, in spite of his gender, female values and traits. See, for example, Morante's Aracoeli or Ortese's already mentioned 'L'indifferenza della madre'. Future attempts to answer these and other questions, whether leading to confirmation or negation, will benefit from the method and approach deployed in this ambitious and pioneering work. Jesus College, Oxford Vilma De Gasperin Conversations with Zizek. By Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2003. 171pp. ?50; $54-95 (pbk ?16.99; $19.95). ISBN 0-7456-2664-5 (pbk 0-7456-2665-3). Slavoj Zizek, who, thanks to what he describes here as his 'permanent sabbatical', regularly publishes over 100,000 words a year, including usually at least one major monograph, 'hates writing'. Some critics in the past have complained that he is very repetitive. Here, he acknowledges this, claiming it as a mark of the true philosopher. In each book he writes, he discovers a failing or shortcoming or inadequacy that has to be addressed by the next book. This, essentially a structure of excess, is in fact central to his thinking as well as to his practice, as these conversations make clear. As a philosopher, his work is shaped by the demand to explore 'how the world is disclosed to us', a post-Kantian exploration of the conditions under which an engagement with the Real might be possible; and that Real, forZizek, is the Lacanian Real. The Real is difficult to grasp; but here, in the mode of conversation, Zizek brilliantly describes it in a typically 'vulgar' example, a lover's obsession with a beloved's vagina, of which the lover can't get enough. In this state ofaffairs,the vagina becomes at once both fullyitselfand also something else. 'So in a way you do encounter the impossible', such that 'privileged objects' of a drive are 'somehow a double in themselves'. When he then relates this directly to Lacan's grounding observation that the Real is 'thyneighbour', and that Zizek himself is entirely caught up in the problem of loving 'thy neighbour', the massive and percussive effect of his work starts to become evident. The meditationon the Real/neighbour?and, incidentally, a superbly provocative passing encounter with Kierkegaard?leads to Zizek's sustained criticism (and this is the most important aspect of this book, as of his work) of the vacuous pieties associated with multiculturalism, tolerance, anti-harassment protocols, the death penalty, smoking, the PC in general, our 'virtual' reality conditioned by caffeine -free coffee, alcohol-free beer, and, eventually God-free religion. In bringing ostensibly abstruse theory into the domain of live conversation, the book makes difficult thought available for readers at many levels in a very engaging fashion. It reveals a personality?a voice, indeed?of a very funny man, tasteless and vulgar by his own admission, but able thereby to show that his philosophy has a purchase on the quotidian. Zizek is expert at concretizing what is the centre of his work?which he describes as 'this mutual reading of the Freudian notion of death drive with what in German idealism is rendered thematic as self-relating negativity'? in serious if often jocular commentary on the everyday. One splendid example is an extended discussion of the Kinder chocolate egg: a hollow chocolate egg, wrapped in attractively seductive coloured paper, containing a toy: Is this toy not I'objet petit a at its purest?the small object filling in the central gap, the hidden treasure, agalma, in the centre? A child who buys this chocolate egg often 1020 Reviews nervously unwraps it and just breaks the chocolate, not bothering to eat it, worrying only about the toy in the centre?is such a chocolate-lover not a perfect case of Lacan's motto 'I love you, but inexplicably I love something in you more than yourself, and, therefore,I destroy you'? Glyn Daly's expert introduction and his own conversational gambits both serve to bring Zizek out in very informative fashion, as a man whose biography...
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Jan 24, 2023
Frank Houghton 
