Saturday, August 27, 2005

A Moment of Zizek & Eagleton

The productive Zizek has slammed on the brakes of my runnaway poststructuralist pulman. Short of derailing this train of thought, his 'Ticklish Subject' (Verso 1999) fearlessly rechampions the site of the Cartesian subjectivity; and hence is troubling for radical poststructuralists and pomo philosophical dilettante apologists like me. Eagleton, on the other hand, has jumped on the roof - a la Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible - of my speeding train and, in a fit of over-acting, accosted the driver with some seductive reasoning: not least of which goes along the lines of "to be inside and outside a postion at the same time - to occupy a territory while loitering sceptically on the boundary - is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from. It is a resourceful place to be, if not a painless one." His 'After Theory' (Penguin 2003) is a passioned call for cultural theory to be the site of a renewed appraisal of theory in general; more precisely located possibly by Zizek's rechampioning of Cartesian subjectivity. Anyway; all aboard!