Who is this Žižek fellow anyhow?

So I took a few weeks off from William Writes. I'm sorry about not being here, but I suppose it's just the curse of the undergraduate blogger: no posts until exams wind down.

But so much has happened! So much to talk about! I've got a whole list of articles marked for reading and reflecting.

First up: British literary critic Terry Eagleton explains a little bit about what's behind this name “Žižek” that's been popping up on all the theology blogs. (It reminds me of 2004, when everyone was talking about the Arcade Fire, but it took me about a year to get around to listening to them, so I just had no idea what was going on.) What's the big deal? Eagleton probes beneath the funny stories:

“There are two jokes in particular that are, so to speak, on the Žižekian reader. The first I have just touched on: Žižek looks like a fun read, and in many respects is so; but he is also an exceptionally strenuous thinker reared in the high traditions of European philosophy. The second is that Žižek is not a postmodernist at all. In fact, he is virulently hostile to that whole current of thought, as this latest book illustrates. If he steals some of the postmodernists’ clothes, he has little but contempt for their multiculturalism, anti-universalism, theoretical dandyism and modish obsession with culture. In Defense of Lost Causes is out to challenge the conventional wisdom that ideologies are at an end; that grand narratives have slithered to a halt; that the era of big explanations is over, and that the idea of global emancipation is as dead in the water as the former proprietor of the Daily Mirror.”

Sounds like the sort of thing I'll have to get to in five or ten years. Maybe these guys will have finally killed post-modernism by then.