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Preface: Reinventing the Psychopathology of Everyday Life One of Slavoj Žižek’s favorite recent references is a short 1997 book on Gilles Deleuze by Alain Badiou (Deleuze: The Clamor of Being).1 In this text, Badiou contends that the typical first impressions arising from a reading of Deleuze’s works tend to reinforce a misinterpretation of him as philosophically celebrating the flourishing of heterogeneous multiplicities and the mad dance of “nomadic rhizomes” chaotically branching out in every possible direction, with no guiding trajectory either shaping this philosophical program or governing its objects of descriptive inquiry. Deleuze is all too often cast as a theoretical anarchist of desire, as a schizophrenic troublemaker disrupting the organized structures operative within both political and libidinal economies. In short, much of Deleuzean thought is exegetically filtered through the lens of his joint “anti-Oedipal” endeavor with Félix Guattari. Badiou maintains that a pronounced discrepancy exists in Deleuze’s oeuvre between, on the one hand, its superficial style, whose baroque, ornate intricacies encourage the view that this is a philosophy of explosive fragmentation, and, on the other hand, its basic, underlying content, its endlessly reiterated thesis. Beneath the scintillating stylistic façade of a “rhizomatic” prose, Deleuze tirelessly and monotonously underscores the same essential point again and again: Everything exists on one ontological level alone; everything is to be situated on a single “plane of immanence”: therefore, the temptation to posit split tiers of existence (such as Plato’s division between the visible and intelligible realms and Kant’s noumenal-phenomenal opposition ) must be resisted. The heterogeneity of appearances belies the homogeneity of being: “the moment we introduce ‘thriving multitude,’ what we effectively assert is the exact opposite: underlying all-pervasive Sameness” (Žižek 2002c, 73). Thus, according to Badiou, the frenzied multiplication of the “Many” in Deleuze’s philosophy ultimately serves better to reveal the all-inclusive “One” of an ontology of absolute immanence .2 A similar observation should be made regarding Žižek’s own work. His frenetic accumulation of an ever-growing number of cultural examples and his famed forays into the twisting nooks and crannies of the popular xiii imagination are liable to mislead readers into viewing him as an antisystematic thinker (a thinker who seeks to compromise the ostensible purity of philosophical thought by forcing it into being dialectically contaminated through a symbiotic fusion with the disorganized domain of contemporary quotidian culture). Faced with the “pyrotechnics” and “fireworks” of his extended, elaborate asides concerning art, literature, film, and daily life in late-capitalist societies, readers are susceptible to being dazzled to the point of giddy, overstimulated incomprehension, of being stunned like the proverbial deer caught in the glare of blinding headlights.3 Žižek’s rhetorical flair and various features of his methodology are in danger of creating the same unfortunate sort of audience as today’s mass media (with its reliance upon continual successions of rapid-fire, attention-grabbing sound bites), namely, consumers too easily driven to distraction. The extent of this risk can be mitigated if one keeps in mind that Badiou’s warning about Deleuze (i.e., don’t let the heterogeneous style distract from and thereby obscure the homogeneous content) is equally applicable to Žižek himself. When Žižek declares that he employs, for instance, popular culture as a subservient vehicle for the (re)deployment of late-modern philosophy—with the “Many” of Žižek’s examples ultimately serving the “One” of a project aiming at the “reactualization ” (as Žižek himself puts it) of Kantian and German idealist thought through the mediation of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology4 —he is quite serious. The chain Kant-Schelling-Hegel, knotted together vis-à-vis Lacan himself as this chain’s privileged point de capiton (quilting point), is the underlying skeletal structure holding together the entirety of the Žižekian theoretical edifice. Nonetheless, much like Deleuze (and Derrida too), Žižek, whether deliberately or otherwise, seems to extend an invitation to read his texts in at least two ways. On the one hand, he proclaims himself to be a critic of various postmodernist trends, calling for a psychoanalytically informed return to modern philosophy. On the other hand, his almost schizoid jumping from topic to topic, his dizzying rampage through any and every disciplinary area and level of conceptual analysis, comes across as an approach strikingly different from that of such careful systembuilders as Kant and Hegel. Perhaps the imagined, hypothetical figure of the cultural studies reader of Ži...

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