Follow up to Zizek

I had previously dealt with the opinions (hallucinations?) of one Slavoj Zizek (*).

Allan Tuchin of New York had this letter published in the LRB:-

How noble of Slavoj Zizek to recommend that other people be self-sacrificing (Letters, 17 August). And how strange that he quotes the story of the two mothers from Brecht, rather than from the Bible.

Great!


And since I'm at its site, here are some one letters attacking the Left there:-

Too Fair to Hizbullah

From Eugene Goodheart

I do not support the terrible excesses of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, nor do I regard all criticism of Israel as an expression of anti-semitism, but Charles Glass’s defence of Hizbullah is beyond the pale (LRB, 17 August). Is Glass familiar with these statements, made by Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah? ‘If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide’ and ‘They [Jews] are a cancer which is liable to spread at any moment.’

The leader of the Party of God (a grotesque conception of a political party, although that doesn’t seem to bother Glass) is not simply a resistance fighter. He is an anti-semite with fantasies of genocide. Glass makes Hizbullah sound like a rational movement that does little harm, but on the contrary does a great deal of good and learns from its mistakes.

What lessons had it learned from the debacle of the 1980s when it provoked a war that has brought so much havoc to its own country, without even consulting the government in which it serves? Glass tells us that he was kidnapped by Hizbullah. Has he succumbed to Stockholm syndrome?

Eugene Goodheart
Waltham, Massachusetts

From Sam Hood

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent a great deal of time arguing that those who oppose the recent actions of Israel in Lebanon don’t necessarily also blindly condone the actions of Israel’s enemies. Charles Glass’s eulogy to Hizbullah, in which he praises that organisation’s clemency, ‘intelligent’ use of suicide bombers, and its defiantly disinterested support for Syrian interference in Lebanon, has made my position that much harder to defend.

Thanks for that.

Sam Hood
London SW2

==========================

(*)


Zizek, who?


As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Zizek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of Hitchcock films and other Hollywood products; references to current events; disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific ‘advances’. These are lined up in what Eisenstein liked to call ‘a montage of attractions’, a kind of theoretical variety show, in which a series of ‘numbers’ succeed each other and hold the audience in rapt fascination. It is a wonderful show;