The last third of Zizek's exercise in thought is full of examples and jokes. These little anecdotes explain his thoughts will and are followed by a close analysis that illuminates their deeper meaning. However, we don't have a basis for the analysis as we did not read Lacan, who I take to be some sort of psychoanalyst in the vein of Freud. The anecdotes, therefore, seem to be touching upon something profound, but I only understood the surface value of these lessons. I actually enjoyed reading the anecdotes as they were a happy reprieve from the Lacan vector field/graph creation of Zizek.

Zizek's critique of the Althusserian concept of ideology in light of the rise of cynicism was interesting to me. It is a pretty intense wrinkle in the seemingly never ending quest to unravel the question of if and how the means of production in our society reproduces itself. He discusses how cynicism looks like a "kind of perverted negation of the negation" (30), in which even though people are able to see the inconsistencies in problematic ideas, they somehow still refrain from acting.

http://www.mediafire.com/?12zzntoc1hw

Why someone would scan all of the book and post it is beyond me. It's also not a very good scan. However, I was so startled to see this that I thought I'd share. I guess it's always nice to have a searchable copy (providing you could OCR this).

Thinking about my last post, I realized how ridiculous a laugh track is. Zizek glosses over it with that quote I provided last time; the laugh track basically serves as way for us to realize something is funny and react to it without actually having to react. That is the ridiculous part; the ridiculous part of the laugh track is how far out of touch from reality it is. TV shows are there to mimic reality to the point where we can identify with the characters to the point where we escape reality for 22 minutes. However, there is no laugh track in reality.

Well, Zizek has managed to fry my brain in ways that only G&D, and possibly Huyssen, have fried it. I like to think of myself as the everyman, capable of understand pretty much everything that is thrown my way. However, I feel lost, dazed, and confused by these past couple of readings. The lack of a coherent point or flow has driven me mad. One page will talk about capitalism, then skip to phalluses and anal, and then decide to jump to anti-Semitism and ideologies.