A review by virtualmima
The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek
2.5
Freud, and by extension Lacan, Žižek, and everyone else who has been influenced by his ideas, are dealing with a form of obsessional neuroticism specific to patriarchal Western civilization, namely white Christian conservatives. If psychoanalysis had been popularized in an entirely different era or part of the world, everything about it would be entirely different. Even if we took it specifically as a way to analyze Western civilization, it's still wrong because it's not self-aware of the fact that it's dealing with a specifically Western phenomenon, so it treats itself as universal theory of human behavior. By now Freud should have been ditched by everyone, not just psychologists but philosophers too, in favor of a deeper analysis of human psychological development. Patterns between people do not reveal the underlying mechanisms of human psychology. The best way to analyze humans is by analyzing oneself phenomenologically and testing it on other people of various backgrounds, provided that the self-analysis is done by someone skeptical of all past and present theories, and who has familiarized themselves thoroughly with psychology, philosophy, and other relevant subject matter. It would be a lot more useful to deconstruct Western civilization using entirely new methodology than to use an outdated Western ideology that no one accepts anymore.
The fetishization of Freud, Lacan, and Hegel by contemporary philosophers demonstrates an unwillingness to progress that persists underneath their supposed deconstruction. The mistake here is in believing that the propositions by these people are logically sound, when it's clear that they willingly rejected logic whenever convenient. No matter how logical you are, building upon the sloppy incorrect ideas of other people will get you nowhere. If you remove Freud and Hegel from the consciousness of recent thinkers, there might occasionally be some sense. Butler and Žižek aren't entirely bad, they're just overly polluted by the backwards ideologies of Freud, Lacan, and Hegel, which they accept entirely without question. There's really no reason for philosophers to build upon each other's ideas, particularly when the previous thinkers were wrong. Composing a work out of other people's thoughts and modifying it to add your own is not as effective as composing something that is originally yours. This new tradition of referencing other people constantly prevents human thought from progress, because the new thinkers still remain stuck holding onto dead ideas from the past. Filling a work with neologisms is no solution either, because even though they come in handy sometimes, a lot of 20th century thinkers used them a little too excessively when they weren't really needed, and frequently without any sort of explanation to define their terms. Neologisms aren't a problem here, fortunately, but the reliance on other people's thoughts does prevent this from going much deeper than what had already been accomplished by earlier postmodernists.
The fetishization of Freud, Lacan, and Hegel by contemporary philosophers demonstrates an unwillingness to progress that persists underneath their supposed deconstruction. The mistake here is in believing that the propositions by these people are logically sound, when it's clear that they willingly rejected logic whenever convenient. No matter how logical you are, building upon the sloppy incorrect ideas of other people will get you nowhere. If you remove Freud and Hegel from the consciousness of recent thinkers, there might occasionally be some sense. Butler and Žižek aren't entirely bad, they're just overly polluted by the backwards ideologies of Freud, Lacan, and Hegel, which they accept entirely without question. There's really no reason for philosophers to build upon each other's ideas, particularly when the previous thinkers were wrong. Composing a work out of other people's thoughts and modifying it to add your own is not as effective as composing something that is originally yours. This new tradition of referencing other people constantly prevents human thought from progress, because the new thinkers still remain stuck holding onto dead ideas from the past. Filling a work with neologisms is no solution either, because even though they come in handy sometimes, a lot of 20th century thinkers used them a little too excessively when they weren't really needed, and frequently without any sort of explanation to define their terms. Neologisms aren't a problem here, fortunately, but the reliance on other people's thoughts does prevent this from going much deeper than what had already been accomplished by earlier postmodernists.