Define Infinity wroteHey trapt, do you think Žižek's ideas are worthwhile? I personally think it's rather easy and unoriginal to make "cogito" as the symbolic that exists outside of itself. The fundamental grasp of him thinking to interpret German Idealism, that the thing-in-itself, is rather outside of itself rather than within it and the thought that the nature of an object is an inter-connection and in relevance with the "other" or the reflection of the thing-in-itself is rather ambiguous to me.
Holy shit, when you put it that was it does seem rather ambiguous. The notion that the cogito rests on the symbolic Other is straight up Kantian apperception as the logical correlate to the transcendental object. Kantian subjectivity rests on objectivity. That's actually what my paper is about, i.e., a summation/re-exegesizing of Kant in order to present Adorno's reading of Kant.
Don't quote me on this but his thought on the thing in itself has to do with Freudian fetishism and the commodity, possibly? The thing in itself is a fetishization of Kantian resignation, a rejection of immediacy in the world, Marxian situatedness or Heideggerian being in the world. The commodity presents itself as the fetishistic object which is imbued with sacred powers for all of the Marxian reasons but also for the anti-Freudian psychoanalytic reading in that it embodies a contradiction in social meaning, the injustices which Marx pointed to. This Othering, in my understanding of Zizek's argument there, I would read more as Marxist/Hegelian alienation than psychoanalytic othering. Although that more reflects my theoretical leanings than perhaps Zizek's argument. To be wholly honest, I haven't delved into much of the early Zizek but I think this is what he is arguing. My knowledge of psychoanalysis is rather new, having read Freud, and Kant for that matter, after I read Zizek so I could be just way off base.
However, my conclusion on Zizek's relevance rests on his later works since after Welcome to the Desert of the Real up till now where he engages heavily in contemporary politics on the communism wave which Badiou and him started. I love his political writings and need to get into his metaphysical/ontological early works. Maybe start Sublime Object of Ideology over break. I think he's an awesome theorist who weaves together a lot, from philosophy to pop culture and presents it in a fun, informative, thought-provoking manner. Is he a great philosopher? I don't have the knowledge to say. Is he like everybody else in philosophy since for fucking ever? Yes. Hannah Arendt rehashed Kant. Hard. Kant rehashed a scholastic whose name I forget in writing the antinomies. Foucault rehashed Nietzsche, making him contemporaneous and arguing within the confines of a critique of capitalism, i.e., discipline creates and regiments bodies for capitalist labor. Read Zizek for fun. Be skeptical of his work but I think in the future, he will be looked back as an important figure as THE Marxist who made Marxism valid after its being cast aside. The problem will be if he does that through spouting off tons of nonsense, but hey that's what Derrida did.
At this point, I'm just writing to avoid writing my Kant paper.