Elsewhere, in my comment in response to Nagarjuna, I have mentioned about the need for a “attitudanal fix”. For instance, as you rightly say, it is not necessary for us to sieve through every possible post-modern thinker or some theory, that might get produced in the West and then qualify our acceptance/rejection of it, by confronting ourselves with its oveure and nuances of emergence.

We need to rather chart out an independent epistemological journey, as a society, culture and civilisation and reconfigure the cognate categories of recieved wisdom – including ones such as what is state, society, culture, modernity, secularism, rationalism, democracy, science, philosophy, logic, language, technology etc. In fact, Indian rennaisance/enlightenment, if ever there will be one, rests on this non-trivial challenge and impending process of intellectual discovery and dystopia.

To be able to appropriate this space, we may however need to perhaps shed our proclivities for political correctness and instead try to locate the coordinates for a fresh ‘return to the political” in as yet uncharted aqnd untested terrains. (hope we get there sooner before Ms. Chantal Mouffe makes a lecture tour !!! ) It is indeed, high time we turn the gaze from outside to inside and see what we really have and where we are headed.

Though having said that, I am still of the view we are here under no less perplexing/intimidating circumstances. I only take some satisfaction in the fact that intellectual and philosophical traditions in our society have so far demonstrated far greater resilience in comprehending/confronting any level or geneology of existential conflictuality and complexity. This probably we will owe to our inherently open-ended but intrinsically well-knit systemic philosophical schools of thought which unwittingly co-habit our everyday life.

This counter-factual reality is however, no more plainly self-evident, for it is taken-for granted and even appears tautological at times. It however, needs to be now recalled through critical discursive expeditions. The terms of this discourse mandate that we here not only tap into many social fissures and poitical sutures but also anchor ourselves in an embeded understanding of the cognitive and topological grids of our cumulative historical and cultural experience.

In the parlance of popular cultural discourse, we still have this legendary “Indian juggad” – with its widely divergent and often wildly contradictory attributes of being at once adaptive, accretive, assimilative, accumulative, adumbrative and lately even agile in a counter-hegemonic context of making room for its survival in a global and diasporic context. This ingenious ” juggad” from India veritably straddles many a time-zones of its medieval and modern and contemporary history; the tectonic plates of cultural memory and experience and extravaganzas of religious life. This juggad is, however not a sociological arche-type but is a universal genome that is pervasive.

The burden of my critical thinking is to only ask if we can be little disingenuous about this and attempt new trajectories of being. I see this impulse gaining some ground and girth, as we try to disentangle from Zizekian parallax errors.

While we are still on this point, I agree one could possibly approach Slavoj Zizek’s texts, without recourse to Jacques Lacan or his school of psycho-analysis. I would however, still see this as a sort of self-imposed limitation, rather than see it as an issue of “right to say” what one wants, under paradigmn of deconstruction. To the contrary, a deconstructivist approach would actually suggest, as I understand it, that one must comprehend the nuances of different constitutive/componential elements in the composition of a text, rather than rip them apart in isolation or to mutual exclusion.

Here I like to highlight two key points, I had tried to make:

Firstly, Jacques Lacan’s contribution, according to Zizek is not just some standard psychoanalytic theory to be practiced at the couch. Rather he clearly sees Lacan as having made a radical epistemological departure of a foundational nature and as having provided new anchor-points to envision philosophy. Lacan’s ideas are thus, contingent to a revolutionary reconstition of universal mediating categories and structures – of time and being; of knowledge and cognition; of language and images; of symbols, signs and meanings; of human volition and indeterminacy; of memory, dreams and desires and so on and forth. Succinctly put, Lacanian psychology is to Slavoj Zizek, what German idealism (Hegel) was to Karl Marx.

Secondly and more pertinently, my point was that Zizek may be actually putting himself in the role of a “analyst” who is simply treating his readers/audiences/critics/commentatorts as mere “analysands”, by only provocatively and perhaps articulately mirroring/shadowing lost hopes, unresolved political, social traumas, unrealised dreams, utopias, broken threads of historical reasoning and political legitamacy and therein reconstructing his discourses without himself committing/compromising to any definitive subject positions. To be fair, there are lately indications though, that Zizek is begining to identify key suture points for the shaping of new radical political subjectivity.

My problem with Zizek is however not about his quest for a universal discourse but his assertion that universal singularity that he talks about is the only possible one. There never was or there ever will be any singular previleged point for appropriating the claim to universal singularity You’ve asked, if Jacques Lacan would ever confessed to his ignorance, or otherwise, of Mimamsa, Vedantism, Buddhism or Islam? Perhaps, if he had practiced psychoanalysis in India, I am sure he would have done so. Post-coloniality has to confront the Western traditions to arrive at its own universalising moments.

But before we get there, are’nt we here also unwittingly getting pushed to a precipice, where we should now be confessing to rather our ignorance of the home-spun philosophical traditions and of attempts at their deconstruction by hundreds of new schools of thought.

Nagarjuna,this really beats me. To be fair, we cannot trivilise or be dismissively judgemental about the persona of Zizek’s ideas, much less ignore the subversive potential of his varied cogitations. Though I do in some sense marvel your gut-feel about how sanitising, it might be for Slavoj Zizek while he takes a dip in Kerala’s muddy back waters!!!

At the end of the day, I would still think we (here in India) might be needing some attitudanal fix because Zizek is certainly not talking some trivial stuff here. His politics may be a non-starter but the critical tenor and audacity of his philosophical argumentation is unquestionably unique and compelling.

The trouble often really is that we ( here, I mean people like you and me) might think we have done with exorcising the ghost of “communism”; just about the time when people like Zizek still wants us to return back and get re-started with greater zest and venegance. I am sure the intelligentia in India will have much to give back as well as borrow from Zizek.

I still have no clue what actually transpired at Kochi meet, where he was expected to deliver a lecture.

Any clue/links?

It is my view that many friends from India (especially those otherwise fairly well-versed in nuances of political theory, economics, history and literary theory) who have sought to look at Slavoj Zizek critically have not yet made a proper estimation of the methodological cues, Zizek draws from the largely unfamiliar (especially in India) domain of revisionist psychoanalytic practice of Jacques Lacan. This despite Slavoj Zizek’s candid admission in many of his written and spoken works that his ideas are very much based on the Lacanian psychoanalytic insights, that have indeed, substantially revised many of Sigmond Freud’s ideas.

These are essentially based on the Lacanian triad of consciousness into “REAL” “SYMBOLIC” and “FANTASY” and crucial to Ziziek’s own theoretical formulations, understanding and exposition of many of his ideas.

Zizek’s relationship to his reader/audience (left intellectuals, in particular) is primarily that of an analyst and analysand. This however, is a relationship of infinite regression (breaking up even Zizek’s own identity as a “Real Zizek” and “Other Zizek”) as much of infinite progression – where his rather queer espousal of “revolutionary terror”, ethical enigmas of defending Leninism and Joseph Stalin etc is naively fused with prospect of utopian communism, way beyond “actually existed socialism”, denounced as “one of 20th century’s worst totalitarian excesses”. (BBC Hard Talk Interview)

The mode of his analysis, his key arguments (as signifiers), the symbolism and imagery deployed (ranging from old world uncorrupted communism to perversity of Hollywood cinema) and his discourses on capitalism, global recession and “possible communism” no doubt draw on a rich repertoire of philosophical writings (Hegel, Neitzsche, Heidegger) political experiences, cultural and literary productions. They are however, firmly hinged on the application of core Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of “trauma”, “continuity”, “signifiers” “object”. “subject”,
“jouissance” “image”, “language” “dream” etc.

Zizek’s rather unorthodox understanding and use of the “mechanisms of transference” drawn from a wide array of cognitivist explanations and theories (Daniel Dennett, et al), philosophical anthropology (like juxtapositions of Kant), theology (St Paul) further result in a cathartic and engaging discourse positioned for either outright “rejection” or at best “constructivist accetance”.

He has quiet openly said that he is not bothered by those who consider him a “joker”, but his challenge to be rather at all accepted. There is here certain “messianic” tone to the boldness of his pronouncements and an implicit claim to “reveletary knowledge” that if it realised (by the analysand) could open new vistas for triggering global events of “epochal” significance.

Zizek would surely be not content with anything less.

go haath ko jumbish nahiiN aaNkhoN meiN to dam hai/
rahne do abhii saaGar-o-miinaa mire aage

[What if the hands have become lifeless, my eyes can still see
Let the wineglass and flagon remain before me]

My problem with Zizek is that his inclination is repeatedly towards an attempt to resolve the dilemma in favour of Faith (defense of all the old articles of faith that I have discussed above). But as Nivedita hints, whether he succeeds in thus resolving it, is of course another question. Maybe it is better to put it the way she has – there are indeed two Zizeks:)
That said, let me also say here that I find him quite charming and have really enjoyed listening to him speak and see him perform.

In this video Zizek explains how the traditional leftists turn blind eyes to real humans suffering and often boast of inflicting injuries to the ‘enemy’.
Zizek emphatically premises his Marxist- Lacanian ideas on many things- modernity, furtherance of the spirit of Italian-European renaissance, universalism and so on.

As long as Capitalism as a world order has emerged in theory and practice as euro centric and continues to be so, how can you defeat this otherwise?

Could Periyar, Ambedkar Phule, or even Gowtham Budhha have helped getting out of this ‘euro centrism’ as far as the sources of the trouble remain global hegemony of capitalism and the devastation & deprivations caused by it? As long as the economic and non-economic factors of coercion and violence remain overdetermined by huge conglomerates of capital and militaristic regimes presiding , how could a ‘politics of identity’ sans claims on ‘political correctness’ help but exasperating ?

Post modernists having rejected ‘mega narratives’ once and for all, seem rather less bothered to give up their freedom; ie, what they enjoy in the fields of identities, micro structures of power,so on and so forth.

I like to take along both.
The mega and the micro narratives about my predicament as a human being, I consider are equally relevant and indispensable!
I would like to keep the freedom with myself,to express as a Marxist, a feminist and an Ambedkarite and a Buddhist!
Zizek or no Zizek!