Holy Cow! There’s still an MLA…

And this year’s center of ironic detachment turned out to be (long drumroll while all the underpaid, underfunded, disengaged folks in their birkenstocks and corduroy jackets get on the greyhound bus for the return trip to the University of Cornstarch)… the center for all that persuasively po-pomo detachment???

Zizek!

What would I do without the s lot?

Here’s one blogger’s reflection:

My thesis is that Zizek should be read as thinking in the
conjuncture. And, more specifically, this means that his theoretical
work needs to be read in terms of this process of emptying. In his (and
Hegel’s) language, it means that we take seriously the work of the
negative.

Such a thesis allows us to understand his key themes in terms of
this emptying out in order to produce a political space that can be
filled. Thus, the decline of symbolic efficiency or fact that the big
Other doesn’t exist reminds us that anything is possible. Similarly,
Zizek’s emphasis on subjective destitution, correlative to the
non-existence of the big Other, eliminates any stake and/or stain that
might attach a subject to existing relations or to a future already
filled. At the same time, Zizek’s emphasis on responsibility, on a
willingness to go to the limit, indicates the political element of the
action of taking a stand in an empty place, a radical and risky move
insofar as it is not guaranteed in advance.

The careful reader will discern the similarities between this epistemological and political turn with the lost wax casting process.