21st-century philosophers - Ingo Zechner,John Zerzan,Yujian Zheng,Dean Zimmerman,Slavoj Žižek

Ingo Zechner (born December 24, 1972 in Klagenfurt, Austria) is a philosopher and historian, since 2009 Business Manager of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI).


John Zerzan (born 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of prehistoric humans as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Some of his criticism has extended as far as challenging domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time.
His five major books are Elements of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994), Running on Emptiness (2002), Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections (2005) and Twilight of the Machines (2008). A collection of his most fundamental texts on the roots of civilization, "Origins" (2010), is currently being published by Black and Green Press and FC Press.

Yujian Zheng (Y.J. Zheng, 郑宇健) is a philosopher studying ethics and comparative Chinese and Western philosophy, with interests in rationality and rational choice theory, philosophy of mind, moral epistemology and psychology, social science and political philosophy.He is an associate professor at Lingnan University (Hong Kong) and writes in both English and Chinese. He also served as a hostel warden in Lingnan University (2007-2008).

Dean Zimmerman is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University.He specializes in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Brown University, and has taught at the University of Notre Dame and Syracuse University.He is a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers.He is the author and editor of many books, including Metaphysics: The Big Questions (1998), The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (2003), Persons: Human and Divine (2007), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics (2008), and the Oxford Studies in Metaphysics series.
Zimmerman is one of the leading and most influential figures in contemporary metaphysics.

Slavoj Žižek (pronounced [ˈslavoj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian continental philosopher and critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis.
Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School.He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium, Princeton, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.
Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist economic criticism to interpret and speak extensively on immediately current social phenomena, including the current ongoing global financial crisis. In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on the New York City radio show Democracy Now! he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense," and in another appearance on the show in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist".Žižek is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of the radical left.
It was not until the 1989 publication of his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, that Žižek achieved international recognition as a social theorist. Since then, he has continued to develop his status as a confrontational intellectual.
He writes on many topics including subjectivity, ideology, capitalism, fundamentalism, racism, tolerance, multiculturalism, human rights, ecology, globalization, the Iraq War, revolution, utopianism, totalitarianism, postmodernism, pop culture, opera, cinema, political theology, and religion.

Hegel and the chicken suit
29 May 2008
John Lippitt on a Lacanian analysis of comedy that trips up on a few Real and Symbolic banana skins

This book, by one of the three Slovenian philosophers central to the Lacan-inspired Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, appears in a series called "Short Circuits". The other two - Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar - are liberally cited, and the former contributes a foreword to the series in which he explains its name. A short circuit "occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network - faulty ... from the standpoint of the network's smooth functioning". This makes short-circuiting "one of the best metaphors for a critical reading".

By approaching various areas of inquiry from a Lacanian standpoint, we are told, we make them readable in a "totally new" and "disturbing" way. But the other, unmentioned, possibility is that a short circuit might plunge the reader into darkness, making it difficult to find one's way around. Such is the case, I fear, in several parts of this book. The reader relatively unfamiliar with concepts such as the Real and the Symbolic in their Lacanian-Zizekian modes isn't given much of a torch.

In line with the Ljubljana school's aim of synthesising Lacanian psychoanalysis and German idealism, the main inspiration for the book other than Lacan seems to be Hegel. Alenka Zupancic initially shows the deadpan stand-up's knack - Steven Wright and Michael Redmond spring to mind - of delivering an extraordinary one-liner with a straight face, such as the claim that of all "classical" philosophers Hegel was "the one who valued comedy and the comic spirit most highly".

But once the initial surprise has worn off one realises that there is at least something in this, given Hegel's discussion of epic, tragedy and comedy in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the significance of comedy in his story of Spirit's progress through various manifestations of religion. This is where Zupancic starts, and the only chapter I've ever read that discusses both Hegel and chicken costumes ends with a very Hegelian question: "What is the singular Moment of the Spirit that is at work in comedy?"

But why the non-believer in the Hegelian project should consider this the most productive question to ask is left unanswered. This is symptomatic of what strikes me as the main problem with the book: many of the explanations do not seem to require the particular theoretical perspective that Zupancic brings to bear, so one never quite loses the whiff of arbitrariness.

In the second part, where we move from Hegel to psychoanalysis, some genuinely worthwhile insights slip on the banana skin of this theoretical apparatus. I found the book most interesting when Zupancic switches from the abstract to the specific, and there are some insightful analyses of a variety of individual examples of comedy, from Shakespeare to Borat and Moliere to mobile phone ads. (The range of reference is wide: the name "Marx" is as likely to refer to Groucho or Chico as to Karl.)

In the third part, a valuable chapter on Bergson and a discussion of the contrast between tragedy and comedy sits alongside the most obscure chapter, a rather baffling discussion of repetition as a theme in (Karl) Marx, Kierkegaard, Deleuze and Lacan that is connected back to comedy only with a bit of force. (This is where the torch is most needed.)

Nevertheless, there is value to be found here even to the reader sceptical of Zupancic's project. For instance, the "(Essential) Appendix" - a discussion of the (Lacanian) phallus and castration - does not emasculate an interesting discussion of Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium. And early on there is an interesting criticism of the view that comedy is necessarily about accepting our finitude. But having effectively disposed of one great overgeneralisation, Zupancic does not escape replacing it with another, such as the assertion that comedy is exempted from "all forms of spiritualism" and is "counter-religious".

While the book was worth reading for a number of insights, I was ultimately unclear who its primary audience might be and remain unconvinced that Zupancic's privileged figures give us a greater insight into comedy than many other thinkers with whom the book does not engage.