From the little I’ve read of him I’ve always found Jameson a bit dull but I’ll look at the interview soon.

I’ve yet to see any political use of psychoanalysis that struck me as compelling, so I’m skeptical. I’ve also never felt a need for a theory of psychology in any of my political work, so this just doesn’t scratch an itch that I have.

I don’t know how to say this without sounding hostile, not my intent, but -
what’s the difference between a “non-sovereign and disunified theory of subjectivity” and a theory that self-contradiction is acceptable? That’s not a rhetorical question, I can’t tell the difference but that may be because I understand the terms differently/misunderstand the terms.

cheers,
Nate

this is kind of belated but what the hell. I personally thought that the first chapter of Sublime Object of Ideology was a very interesting reading of commodity fetishism. Don’t really care about the film criticism and other aspects of his work that make him popular among the literature students. But I was just glancing at this review by Jameson of one of Zizek’s books:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n17/fredric-jameson/first-impressions

and I think you might find it interesting for evaluating whether or not there is any good theoretical reason to consort with Zizek. I guess these are fairly trivial things to point out, but Jameson reads him as having a particular reading of the dialectic and also as trying to figure out some of the political consequences of a lacanian theory of (inevitably) split subjectivity. I actually think personally that having a better theory of psychology is an important left theoretical project, both to counter the tedious claims that “human nature is incompatible with communism” and perhaps to better understand some of the problems of human interaction that plague radical utopian experiments (radical pedagogy for instance is always shot through with contradictions, residual forms of authority, newly emergent forms of unhappiness, and so on).

Anyway, about Zizek, it seems only in keeping with someone who advocates non-sovereign and disunified theory of subjectivity to add that perhaps it’s not necessary to have a monolithic opinion of Zizek the Individual; I for one feel comfortable liking certain moments in certain of his texts, disliking others, and not really having the time to read more.

take care, eli

The main question for me is how much contact their was between these strikes, ranging from relatively passive awareness (reading newspaper articles) to active attempts to create awareness (leafletting, say) to direct contact between participants.

‘Oblique gaze’ or ‘unforeseeable point of view’. Experimentation with unusual and unexpected looks. A gaze that sometimes widens out vertiginously to span the non-human as an integral part of the narrative. Underlying these experiments, according to Wu Ming 1, is an ethical and political motivation.