John Gray on Slavoj Žižek

Gray reviews Less Than Nothing and Living in the End Times

Žižek at his apartment in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2010. Photo: Reiner Riedler/Anzenberger/Redux

In The New York Review of Books, John Gray has published a damning and thought-provoking review of Slavoj Žižek's new book, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, and 2010's Living in the End Times:

In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism. Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic—amounts in the end to less than nothing. [Read More]

[Update: 12.08.12] You can read Žižek's response at lacan.com.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek
• Slavoj Žižek on life, happiness and Hegel