Žižek as Ur-Bloggist: Perfecting the Associative Theoretical Multimedium

The First Bloggist, Žižek as Father

Adam Kotsko has a wonderful line about Žižek, that his writing can only be understand as a theoretical-asethetic pre-posit of the Blog:

I think that Zizek has something about how Flaubert can only be understood retrospectively, because he was trying to do film by means of the novel — similarly, perhaps Zizek’s writing is anticipating not (as he has somewhere said) the CD-ROM, but rather the blog.

Aside from the fantastic inversion of Flaubert to cinema, and thus Žižek to populist journalism – talk about the return of the Bourgeoisie, first as parody, then as tragedy or at least made serious pop – this calls to mind Truman Capote’s line about Jack Kerouak, “That’s not writing, that’s typewriting.”

Žižek as the first, Primordial blogger, he who could not then blog because the techno-social space was yet invented. But how else could we have heard about the theories of someone from a country which no map knew, sporting unpronouncible consonants and knowing marks in his name, pealing off counter-intuitional brilliances on otherwise abandoned Hegel and Lacan, DJing in Hitchcock and the Terminator? Is not the Nom du Père of us bloggists…Žižek? The man who enjoys.

As proof of this, imagine how horrible it would be if Žižek actually blogged? It would be as if Flaubert made talkies. Does this mean that the blog world must track down and consume our father, ripping him into pieces like so many post-Oedipal and rabid daughters, maenads tearing at their Orpheus near a media river, or must it simply meet him at the crossroads and refuse to step aside?

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