Slavoj Zizek contre Noam Chomsky(Memo)

Peter Thompson “The Slavoj Žižek v Noam Chomsky spat is worth a ringside seat” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/19/noam-chomsky-slavoj-zizek-ding-dong


スラヴォイ・ジジェク*1とノーム・チョムスキー*2の論争を巡って。
所謂モダン/ポストモダン英米哲学/(ヨーロッパ)大陸哲学というお馴染みの対立の反復ではあるようだ。曰く、


Noam Chomsky, the professional contrarian, has accused Slavoj Žižek, the professional heretic, of posturing in the place of theory. This is an accusation often levelled at Žižek from within the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition. Even those like Chomsky who are on the proto-anarchist left of this tradition like to maintain that their theories are empirically verifiable and rooted in reality.

Žižek has countered with the side-swipe that nobody had been so empirically wrong throughout his life as Chomsky. He brought up Chomsky's supposed support for the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and Chomsky's later self-justification that there hadn't been empirical evidence at the time of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. It has all got rather heated and intemperate, but then, debates on the left are like that. More time is spent ripping flesh out of each other than it is trying to find a common cause against an apparently invisible and impregnable enemy. But terms have to be defined, ground has to be laid out.

1971年のチョムスキーフーコーとの「遭遇」が言及され、ラカン派の「現実界」概念*3の話へ;

Žižek stands in this same continental tradition (as well as against it, but, hey, that's his job) of asking ontological questions – that is, questions about being as an abstraction – rather than trying to find out through supposedly scientific methods what human nature actually is. There is an old joke that goes "the Anglo-Saxon philosopher will accuse the continental of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosopher accuses the Anglo-Saxon of being insufficiently." For Žižek there is no finished human nature, but rather simply a process of working out how human beings are in the world. At the core of this argument is a question of whether the word "real" is spelled with a capital letter or not.

For the empiricists the word "real" refers to something, well, real; something pre-existing which has to be uncovered. For the Žižek/Lacan tradition, the word is spelled "Real" and refers to something which isn't real, is inaccessible, and which can never be defined as it is still, with Hegel, "im werden" (or, in becoming). This "Big Other", as Lacan termed it, is the hole occupied by the absent father or God, so that the Real is only present through its absence. This sort of stuff is dismissed as charlatanry by those who want something concrete to hold on to, whereas for the continentals the hole was always part of the whole. Our being is conditioned by absence, by the something that is missing and by the desire to fill that gap.

*1:See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060413/1144934308 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080628/1214639902 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060429/1146270669 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070313/1173812138 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070607/1181239590 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070630/1183176001 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080121/1200845306 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080218/1203332323 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080221/1203560169 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080308/1204949369 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080915/1221504559 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110122/1295716186 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20130222/1361470475

*2:See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060105/1136425125 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060719/1153330094 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20061114/1163521045 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070306/1173149832 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080129/1201566623 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080331/1206966495 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20081222/1229964094 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100110/1263125320 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110911/1315709969 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20130426/1366972468

*3:拙blogにおける「現実界」への言及は1回のみ。 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110530/1306785462 松浦寿輝『あやめ 鰈 ひかがみ』「あとがき」を引く。

あやめ 鰈 ひかがみ (講談社文庫)

あやめ 鰈 ひかがみ (講談社文庫)