I’ve been wanting to interview the famous Slovenian philosopher for the last seven years and now I finally have. I discovered Slavoj Žižek’s work quite by accident when, wanting to check out Loren Singer’s novel The Parallax View from my local library I put Žižek’s book with the same title on hold instead. Looking back on this incident now, after having finally gotten the Continue Reading …
Descartes’s Horror?
At Zero Books, we aim to be unconventional. We aim, as Tariq Goddard wrote in the founding manifesto, to be "intellectual without being academic," to be critically engaged and theoretical without being boring, and to resist the "blandly consensual culture in which we live," but it's always a challenge. At the beginning of the year, during my second month as publisher and Continue Reading …
Foucault’s Madman and His Reply to Derrida
This post was originally published on the Zero Books blog. It is the second of two posts; the first post in the series is here. To review quickly, Foucault charged Descartes with excluding madness from consideration in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The relevant passage from Foucault's Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique follows: In the economy Continue Reading …
Madness as Ontology: Catching Foucault’s Quote Mining
This is the first of a two-post series, the second can be found here. It's probable that one could not find a weaker defense attorney for the cogito, or for what's called the Cartesian subject, than Jacques Derrida. The author of Of Grammatology, Derrida is known as the founder of deconstruction, a mode of critical analysis or hermeneutics that problematizes and complicates Continue Reading …
More on Marx? (on Diet Soap and Elsewhere)
[Editor's Note: Thanks for Doug Lain of the Diet Soap Podcast for weighing in here with his extensive experience with Marxism.] Mark, Seth and Wes finally arrived at the philosopher who matters most over at the pinko podcast Diet Soap. While I plan on writing a response to their comments, and most especially to respond to the problem of this split between base and Continue Reading …
The Negation of the Negation or Detecting the Truth
[From Douglas Lain - see biographical note below for more details about Doug!] In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit there is a procedure to which Hegel subjects every positive proposition called dissolution. This process or procedure of dissolution doesn't belong to Hegel alone. In fact, the Phenomenology seems to be Hegel's attempt to demonstrate how all the philosophers Continue Reading …