''The Parallax View'' (2006) is a book by Slovenian philosopher
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek (, ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New Y ...
. Like many of Žižek's books, it covers a wide range of topics, including philosophy, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, politics, literature, and film. Some of the authors discussed in detail include
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and pu ...
,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends ...
,
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
,
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
,
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...
,
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou (; ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucau ...
,
Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book ''Empire'', which was co-written with Antonio Negri.
Hardt and Negri suggest that several forces which they see as dominat ...
and
Antonio Negri
Antonio "Toni" Negri (born 1 August 1933) is an Italian Spinozistic- Marxist sociologist and political philosopher, best known for his co-authorship of ''Empire'' and secondarily for his work on Spinoza.
Born in Padua, he became a political ...
,
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relat ...
,
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio ( pt, António Damásio) is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, ...
,
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It ...
, and
Henry James
Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...
.
The book was described by Žižek as his ''magnum opus'', and it is considered notable because Žižek attempts therein to outline his system of thought. According to Žižek's introduction to the book, it is divided into three main sections (philosophical, scientific, and political) in order to introduce "a minimum of conceptual order." Although the book was largely well-received, some questioned whether it truly had a systematic approach.
The most enduring concept developed throughout the book is the
parallax
Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines. Due to foreshortening, nearby objects ...
, which refers to the different apparent position of an object when it is seen from different perspectives. Žižek uses this idea, which comes from
Kojin Karatani
is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic.
Biography
Karatani entered the University of Tokyo in 1960, where he joined the radical Marxist Communist League, better known as "The Bund," and participated in the massive 1960 Anpo protests aga ...
's ''Transcritique'', to rework the
Hegelian dialectic
Dialectic ( grc-gre, διαλεκτική, ''dialektikḗ''; related to dialogue; german: Dialektik), also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing ...
from a
materialist
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialis ...
perspective.
Interpretation
Parallax
A parallax shift refers to the apparent motion of an object when it is seen from different perspectives. Using this notion, Žižek claims that both positions viewing the object are Kantian antinomies, meaning that they are completely incompatible and irreducible ways of seeing something.
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. James ...
argues that Žižek is after the "absolute incommensurability of the resultant descriptions or theories" of whatever object is discussed. Traditionally, this would be seen as a problem for the Hegelian dialectic, in which thesis and antithesis come together in a synthesis, rather than remaining entirely opposed. Žižek argues, however, that this is an incorrect view of the dialectic. Instead, Žižek writes, Hegel does not overcome the Kantian division, but rather asserts it as such. The Hegelian synthesis, in other words, is the recognition of the insurmountable gap between two positions. This synthesis can only be achieved through a parallax shift.
Ontology
Adrian Johnston maintains that Žižek is an "emergent dual-aspect monist." This refers to the belief that, although there is ultimately one substance that makes up the world, it appears divided and refracted into "distinct, disparate attributes." Žižek promotes a substance that is constantly "fracturing itself from within so as to produce parallax splits between irreconcilable layers and tiers of existence." In other words, the multiple appears because of a split in the Real. This could be contrasted to the work of
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...
and
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari ( , ; 30 April 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, ...
, who maintain that multiplicity is the "primary ontological fact."
Neuroscience
In neuroscience, Žižek confronts contemporary theorists like
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relat ...
and
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio ( pt, António Damásio) is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, ...
in terms of materialism and idealism. According to Johnston, Žižek asserts that although the mental arises from material neuronal processes, it nonetheless "breaks away" from being determined by those processes. In Johnston's words, "the mental phenomena of thought achieve a relatively separate existence apart from the material corporeality serving as the thus-exceeded ontological underbelly of these same phenomena."
Politics
![Brodskiy_Isaac-Vladimir_Lenin_in_Smolny](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Brodskiy_Isaac-Vladimir_Lenin_in_Smolny.jpg)
Žižek makes two major political points. The first involves a split between the economy and politics. He insists that although the economy is the real area where struggle occurs and that politics is simply a shadow of that, the battle must still be fought in politics. Additionally as the book concludes, he describes
Herman Melville
Herman Melville (Name change, born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American people, American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance (literature), American Renaissance period. Among his bes ...
's Bartleby as a new key figure in politics; Bartleby's consistently repeated phrase, "I would prefer not to," marks a purely formal refusal that must be adopted politically. According to Dean, Žižek advocates for a "withdrawal from resistance and from charity... a withdrawal from the whole variety of micropolitical practices..." He offers, ultimately, a political figure of "unbearable, inert, insistent, immobile violence."
Psychoanalysis
There are a number of
Lacanian
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and pu ...
and psychoanalytic concepts that are reworked throughout the course of the book. The parallax concept, for example, has important implications for Lacan's concept of
the Real
In continental philosophy, the Real refers to the remainder of reality that cannot be expressed, and which surpasses reasoning. In Lacanianism, it is an "impossible" category because of its opposition to expression and inconceivability.
In ...
. Whereas the Real for Lacan meant a hard kernel that resisted symbolization, for Žižek the term refers to the "gap in perspectives." Another concept that Žižek redefines is the
superego
The id, ego, and super-ego are a set of three concepts in psychoanalytic theory describing distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus (defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche). The three agents are theoretical const ...
. According to Jameson, Žižek's revision looks beyond the superego as the "instance of repression and judgment, of taboo and guilt" toward a new definition that states that the superego today has become "something obscene, whose perpetual injunction is: 'Enjoy!'" Whereas the superego was once thought by Freud to prohibit certain activities, today, Žižek argues, it commands people toward the pursuit of pleasure. Jameson claims that the "death drive" is another one of Žižek's persistent fundamental themes. In his revision of the Freudian Thanatos, Žižek suggest that the death drive's true horror is that it lives through us, embodied in life itself. The concept of ''
jouissance
''Jouissance'' is a French term meaning "enjoyment", which in Lacanianism is taken in terms both of rights and property, and of sexual orgasm. The latter has a meaning partially lacking in the English word "enjoyment". The term denotes a transgre ...
'' also receives a revision; according to Žižek, the envy of the Other's ''jouissance'' accounts for "collective violence, racism, nationalism and the like, as much as for the singularities of individual investments, choices and obsessions..." One final and crucial concept in the book involves the Lacanian "gap." According to Jameson, this refers to the doctrine that "the human subjectivity is permanently split and bears a gap within itself, a wound, an inner distance that can never be overcome."
Reception
Marxist political theorist Jodi Dean wrote that, although the book may not necessarily be a magnum opus, as Žižek suggested, it is certainly his best book since ''The Ticklish Subject'', which was published in 1999. Fredric Jameson assessed the book positively, writing that the chapter on cognitive science is a "superb achievement," and that the political lesson of the book is "as indispensable as it is energizing"; he considered these sections to stand as "major statements." He expressed some reservation, however, about the book's style; he claimed that the book functioned as a "theoretical variety show," and that the drawback of such a style is that, at the end, the reader is "perplexed as to the ideas that have been presented, or at least to the major ones to be retained." In a similar vein, Alexei Bogdanov described the book as a "vast battlefield of opinions, where the author's own position is often hard to pinpoint." Adrian Johnston also noted this aspect of the book, observing that although the book purports to be systematizing, "certain readers might experience a feeling of frustration in their attempts to discern the systematic unity supposedly underlying and tying together the wide-ranging discussions of the vast amount of diverse content contained in this text." Ultimately, Johnston asserts that there is an "integrated logic/pattern" to the book. Jameson discussed a similar problem and noted that, in theorizing the parallax explicitly, Žižek may have produced a new concept and system, despite the inherently "anti-philosophical" position of the concept.
[Jameson 8]
References
Works cited
*Bogdanov, Alexei. "The Parallax View by Slavoj Žižek." ''The Slavic and East European Journal'', Vol. 51, No. 4, Special Forum Issue: At the Edge of Heaven: Russian Poetry Since 1970 (Winter 2007), pp. 812–814
*Dean, Jodi. "The Object Next Door." ''Political Theory'', Vol. 35, No. 3 (June 2007), pp. 371–378.
*Jameson, Fredric
"First Impressions" ''London Review of Books'', Vol. 28, No. 17, 7 September 2006, pp. 7–8
*Johnston, Adrian. "Slavoj Žižek's Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing to ''The Parallax View''." ''Diacritics'', Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 2–20
* Žižek, Slavoj. ''The Parallax View''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Parallax View
2006 non-fiction books
Books by Slavoj Žižek
MIT Press books