I recently read Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique, which, for those that don’t know, is an analysis of Marxian political economy from the transcendental perspective of Kantian ethics, and Adrian Johnston’s Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, which I thought was tremendously well written considering the breadth of abstruse theory dealt with. Not to say that Karatani’s wasn’t, in fact Karatani’s was probably just as equally well written, although it was translated, so maybe I should just thank the translator.

Anyhow, I started reading Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes and, although it’s whimsically riveting, I can’t help but hope that Zizek’s next book will be a much more condensed attempt at touching upon the real core of his work (transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity, according to Johnston). Essentially, In Defense of Lost Causes seems to me to be applying this Kantian notion of “bracketing” by limiting intense theoretical discussion in favor of a Hegelo-Lacanian analysis of politics and popular culture (but I’m only fifty pages into it, so perhaps this isn’t the case, but the lack of citations and the title of the book is highly suggestive…). If In Defense of Lost Causes brackets “high” theory, then perhaps we may look forward to a text that brackets (“low”) popular culture and politics as sources of deviation from a more rigorous thesis. This, I think, would be interesting, as it would concretize the essentially theoretical notion of “parallax,” as developed by Karatani (vis-a-vis Kant) and later expanded on by Zizek in The Parallax View, by putting it into practice in regards to his publishing.

So, again, it would be really interesting, then, to have a very focused work (akin to Tarrying with the Negative or The Parallax View) deploying, in his own words, a more coherently formulated account of self-relating negativity (Hegel’s “night of the word,” Descartes’ cogito, etc.). Perhaps even more interesting would be a direct engagement with Johnston’s text and, perhaps, drawing concrete political conclusions from it, which Johnston’s text, for a variety of reasons I’m sure, usually abstains from (with a deliberate reference to Kantian bracketing, in his case). And I would say this would still abide by this bracketing principle since any political discussion would be held off until the very end of the dialectic.