Waterstones Event
74 ratings
TO EXPLORE MORE
Price: £10.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Probably the most famous living philosopher, Slavoj Žižek explores the concept of 'event', in the second in this new series of easily digestible philosophy What is really happening when something happens? In the second in a new series of accessible, commute-length books of original thought, Slavoj Žižek, one of the world's greatest living philosophers, examines the new and highly-contested concept of Event. An Event can be an occurrence that shatters ordinary life, a radical political rupture, a transformation of reality, a religious belief, the rise of a new art form, or an intense experience such as falling in love. Taking us on a trip which stops at different definitions of Event, Žižek addresses fundamental questions such as: are all things connected? How much are we agents of our own fates? Which conditions must be met for us to perceive something as really existing? In a world that's constantly changing, is anything new really happening? Drawing on references from Plato to arthouse cinema, the Big Bang to Buddhism, Event is a journey into philosophy at its most exciting and elementary. Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Communist political activist. He is the author of numerous books on dialectical materialism, critique of ideology and art. His main work is Less Than Nothing, a study on the actuality of Hegelian dialectics.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781846146268
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781846146268
My website utilises affiliate links when you click my 'Get the best deal now' buttons. If you buy something through one of these links, I may earn a little commission, at no extra cost to you.
I have relationships with many of the top online retailers (purchasing, shipping and returns will be handled directly by them) which enables me to offer the best deal online for the Waterstones Event and many other similar products - which will appear below, to enhance your online shopping experience.
For even more great deals on Waterstones Books, click the link.
Author: Grinderman
Rating: 5
Review: Zizek ages well, like good leather. I do not yet have the groundings in Hegel and Lacan for the lengthier tomes. First encountered Zizek writings on a film MA course at Kent University. Subversive and illuminating thinker, cliches but both true.
Author: John Harmer
Rating: 1
Review: I should start by saying I did not buy this for myself, a fellow philosophy student bought it as a present. She said it would probably annoy me, and it did. I had never read Zizek. I studied philosophy in the anglo saxon tradition of empiricists, but we also covered Kant and Sartre, both of whom I enjoyed. I have only briefly studied Hegel, but I dislike him intensely, and Lacan seems to me a grandiose obscurantist. So that was where I was coming from to this book. I will refer to the penguin paperback edition page numbers throughout. Right from the start Zizek put me off with his opening sentences. He lists some big events, then says "All these statements refer to that which at least some of us would consider an event - an amphibious notion with even more than fifty shades of grey" Why does he use the word amphibious (he uses it again later in the book, also without a clear reason) and why the sideways reference to some softcore porn novel (which I haven't read). He then decides to try to define his term. And what does he choose as his exemplar, a fictional event, the murder on the 4:50 from Paddington. An "event" which happened inside the brain of Agatha Chritsie, and subsequently in the brains of millions of readers of her detective novels. He characterises one of the hallmarks of an "event" in his special sense "something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation". Well, within Christie's novel there is probably a cause, some jealousy or money situation would be behind the murder, and the spotting of it is a coincidence cuased by two trains being close on the tracks for a few moments. He really goes with the causeless idea, on page 3 he says "At first approach, an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes - and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes". I feel he introduces this causelessness characteristic without justification (it is a really radical idea, though I do not dismiss it out of hand), and appears to hope he will bludgeon the reader into accepting it by repeating it throughout the book. It gets worse. He then in subsequent chapters quotes from Hegel as if Hegel has some kind of authority (whereas I detest the thinking of Hegel), and also refers to nonsense ideas of Lacan such as the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary as if these were accepted ideas that can be trotted out in defense of his confused notions of the transcendent causeless event, which not only changes the present and future, it retroactively changes the past as well. On page 9 he sneeringly quotes Rumsfeld's famous (or infamous) description of known knows etc, but dismisses Rumsfeld as "not a true philosopher" because he missed out "unknown knowns" which of course are right up Zizek's obscurantist street. I also dislike Rumsfeld but for his foreign policy, the known knowns speech was his finest hour in my opinion. He warms to his topic, illustrating his ideas with some insightful critiques of recent cinema releases, I would say he is a much more competent film critic than he is a philosopher. But keeps peppering his arguments with references to absurd notions culled from Lacan and Deleuze such as "Master-Signifier" and "big Other" He has silly ideas about love, that make me doubt if he has ever had a real relationship, they remind me of ideas I had when I was a virgin teenager. On page 81 he says "Such a situation [love] is beyond Good and Evil. When we are in love we feel a weird indifference towards our moral obligations with regard to our parents, children, friends - even if we continue to meet them, we do it in a mechanical way, in a condition of "as if"; everything pales with regard to our passionate attachment." Here is an example of his prose style from page 114 "It is because of this temporal complication that, in Hegel, everything becomes evental: a thing is the result of the process (event) of its own becoming, and this processuality de-substantializes it" If you like that kind of thing you will enjoy this book, it is full of it. Near the end of the book, he introduces politics. I must say I wasn't that surprised to discover he is on the left. A final little and inconsequential observation, there is a thumbnail photo of Zizek on the back cover, where he looks about as untrustworthy a cove as you could ever hope to come across. But he can't help how he looks. He probably can't help how he thinks either, but I feel his thinking is open to criticism
