The standard format of argumentation is so deeply ingrained in academic culture that it generally goes unremarked. An argument begins with a hypothesis, a testable characterization of the data in a limited field. It proceeds by such means as adducing evidence, drawing inferences, proposing counterarguments, probing provisional conclusions in a spirit of skeptical inquiry, and eliminating contradictions, all of which lead towards a conclusion, a summative statement whose various elements have passed through the fires of rigorous and disinterested testing. This process functions as the form of fairness, an agreement to display the means by which a conclusion is achieved in order to prevent the mere reiteration of prejudice or the interference of desire. While this process cannot, of course, altogether eliminate flaws of observation, description, or reasoning, it does at least invite the scholarly conversation to continue, because conclusions arrived at in this way can either be challenged on the grounds of procedural flaws or can serve as the starting point for further investigation.

Zizek's work, by contrast, seems to be formed almost entirely of endgames in which the sense of conclusion, with its payoffs and rewards, is always present. A sharply diminished experience of orderly progress is compensated for by the continual feeling of arrival and by the constant surprises afforded by an exceptionally rich and quirky use of examples, which I discuss in more detail below. The effect is that of a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention. Zizek does not seem to believe that books should be about something; he reproduces his central themes compulsively regardless of the ostensible subject. He seems to write for the browser; even the earnest reader who begins at page one has the constant impression of having opened to a page somewhere in the middle. This sense of an endless middle is achieved by reducing the conventional middle to almost zero. The typical Zizekian unit of discourse--a wittily-titled passage of between five and fifteen pages--begins abruptly with the kind of confident assertion commonly associated with the conclusion; there is no phase of doubt, no pretense of unprejudiced inquiry, only a series of demonstrations, exemplifications, and restatements. Informed throughout by the spirit of conclusion, these units do not, in themselves, conclude, but simply gutter out at the end, like a sparkler; no sense of fairness attends the terminus and no invitation to further work by others is implied.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham is president and director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. His most recent books are Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (1999) and Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity (2002).

 

 

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