Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime

[jporter]

> From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>

> Subject: Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime
> 
> .... continuing on, from Marek Wieczorek, "The Ridiculous, Sublime Art of
> Slavoj Zizek," i.e., his Introduction to Slavoj Zizek's The Art of the
> Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway (Seattle: U of
> Washington P, 2000) ...
> 
> 
> Zizek also demonstrates the idea of the big Other through reference to
> Roberto Benigni's film Life is Beautiful.  Here a father attempts to
> shield his little son from the atrocities (the unbearable,
> unrepresentable Real) of a Nazi concentration camp through the
> competitive evocation of the Other's desire, as though they were simply
> playing a game of survival, a metaphor for the symbolic fiction that
> renders reality bearable.


                                         [snip]

> .... the big Other = They?  Big Other is watching you, at any rate.
> Anyway, much here perhaps applicable to those Pynchonian texts, I
> think.  Also reminds me, anybody see that film adaptation of  Time
> Regained, the last novel of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps
> perdu?  Saw it twice, myself (without having read past Swann's Way, mind
> you), think that, if anyone ever attempted Gravity's Rainbow: Now a
> Major Motion Picture, that might well be the way to go.  Though I also
> saw a stark and very poignant animated short a while back that also
> struck me as having Pynchonian potential, so ...
> 

Wouldn't it be nice if we could achieve a trans-personal reality without the
need for War, S&M, Religion, near death experiences, Orgies, Art, DMT, etc.,
etc....? I mean on the libidinal as well as the conceptual level... a
secular reality as a shared placenta with many umbilical straws? Doesn't the
reality of *individuality* beg the question? and wasn't *language* the
initial answer to that intial begging? Isn't "Vheissu" partly about the
origin of language and myth?

Or, our social behavior results in an emergent reality, which, inspite of
our best efforts, no one of us can ever totally comprehend or control, but
on whose good graces we all acknowledge our mutual co-dependence.

Oh well, there's always pynchon-l

jody