The English Miscellany

Slavoj Žižek The anxious researcher is unsure about placing the entry on philosophical humour between phallic ritual and physical comedy . Encyclopaedic collisions and incongruities abound. Is this a breach of academic decorum? Would it be safer simply to abandon the alphabetical approach to comedy and humour in this book on Aspects of Comedy ? Another anxiety: is this entry concerned with the philosophy of humour, or humour in philosophy? How much space should be allocated to Slavoj Žižek? (A philosopher, a public intellectual, and a comedian). In parenthesis --- ("there is a case to be made that Slavoj Žižek is really the Ken Dodd of post-Lacanian Hegelianism." --- Lindesay Irvine, Guardian , 6 January 2012, here ) --- And how funny is Žižek's The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology (Verso, 1999)? I have my doubts. I guess his work will always divide opinion. Take a look at his highly controversial review essay on Benig...

Is the obsession with logic and rationality a limitation imposed on the free flow of writing by the hegemony of patriarchal men? Is it possible to interrogate order and structure in writing has a masculinised project of control; to think of it as a phallocentric, a logocentric project? On first inspection, it is an odd notion that writing is a pre-determined product of the shape of our bodies. But the anatomical difference between the female and the male body has been considered a sufficient criterion throughout most of recorded time -   and across the majority of societies - to constitute a major difference between the sexes. It is a short step from the recognition of difference to the creation of a system of unequal treatment and discrimination. The idea that writing as a cultural production participates in this project, perhaps even perpetuates it, is clearly not far-fetched. This critical feminist approach claims that the body is written into our daily discourse...