Alain Badiou writes that Slavoj Žižek’s work ‘is the first time that anyone has proposed to psychoanalyze our whole world.’ This chapter takes Žižek seriously as a reader, even as a reading machine who consumes everything. Of course, Žižek is constantly accused of being a bad reader: sloppy, inaccurate, too rapid, dependent on secondary sources, and otherwise unreliable. Without simply exonerating Žižek from these charges, the chapter considers this ‘bad reading’, which violates the protocols of academia and philosophy, as a method. Whereas Žižek seeks his own philosophical credentials as a ‘dialectical materialist philosopher’ in his ontology of incompletion—of the ‘non-all’—the chapter argues that the true domain of his ‘philosophy’ is a practice of interpretation and reading. It argues his method is the end of knowledge, but also the birth of truth. This truth is the displacement and reworking of philosophy coincident with the world.
Advertisement
