The video is from his July 1 talk, sponsored by Intelligence Squared. The beginning is a fairly clear explanation of the Zizek’s theory of ideology – “what you don’t get is part of what you do get” – and then the second half is just his generic ideology critique. The left needs to reconfigure the ideological coordinates of etc etc. There’s nothing new for anyone familiar with Zizek’s work, although it’s as recent an update as you’ll find of where he currently is.
There is a bit of theory around 13:00 that’s worth pointing out specifically. That’s where Zizek talks about fetishistic splits, in which subjects – especially late modern subjects – have specific knowledge but behave as if they don’t. This dynamic is one side of the “what counts as a belief” coin for Zizek, who would insist that beliefs that don’t affect action are in a sense not “genuine” beliefs. The other side of the coin is that suppressed beliefs which do affect action are real beliefs, even if they’re hard to fit into traditional epistemological frameworks because they’re inaccessible to the subject:
That Zizekean theory of belief seems like one of the easy places where Lacan can be usefully put into dialogue with Peirce (the other obvious place is in Zizek’s emphasis on the reality and persistence of social structures, which he inherits from Althusser). It’s not a clean mapping since Zizek lacks Peirce’s falsifiability criteria and Peirce precludes the possibility that lack can intrude on semiosis. But Peirce leaned heavily on the definition of belief where a genuine belief is “that upon which a man is prepared to act,” so much so that he insisted that pragmatism followed trivially from that definition. The resonances seem straightforward, and it would be interesting to untangle whether there’s anything more going on beyond two realist theorists asserting a naive realist theory of behavior.
If Peirce’s theory of belief is tied into his philosophy of mind – for instance – it would suggest another place where his robust semiotics might fill out psychoanalysis, or vice versa. It would take quite a bit of work to unpack though, given how deep “belief” is buried in the Peircean architectonic.
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* Rhetoric and Philosophy »
* Slavoj Zizek
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