Slavoj Žižek's new book, Less Than Nothing, is reviewed in the New York Review of Books by John Gray. I haven't read the book, though I might buy it and make an attempt to read it if I came across it – it's about topics that interest me, including Hegel and the dialectic. But Gray's review is withering. Having previously explained Žižek's concept called "paraconsistent logic," he deploys it in his conclusion:
"Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic—amounts in the end to less than nothing."
Bam. Takedown. Or is it?
I'm not anti-Žižek, but I get that he seems, well… like a self-parody. And Gray's point about his obsession with violence is valid. He's not a comfortable philosopher, but I'm utterly confident that his incoherence is deliberate. Whether it's deliberate because he's pulling it off as a sort of intellectual deception (a la Sokal affair), or because he's using it as a sort of dialectical "tool-of-instruction" (a la the Socratic Method), I'm not sure.
Again, although I haven't read the book, it seems to me that Gray didn't get what Žižek was doing. It's supposed to be less than nothing. The title says so.
Last night I dreamed I returned to Yeonggwang, but that Yeonggwang resembled Humboldt County, as Humboldt County would be if it were occupied by Koreans. Interesting.