PTSD

The Zizek post, or how to link Zizek with football

Since E is going to participate in a salon later today and will be exchanging intellectually-stimulating conversations with people of distinction (I'm told this is what happens in salons), I am giving this post the superior-sounding name of "meditations on inevitability". I'm sure if absinthe was involved in E's salon, people wouldn't be able to say "meditations on..." after a few sips. But, since it's a TUWSNBN thing, there's no absinthe on the menu (in fact, there's not even a menu). You, dear readers, might take absinthe-drinking and saying "meditatations on..." as a PTSD-encouraged experiment for the future.

In the meantime, E and I managed to tear ourselves away from a potentially-rivetting session of skating on ice and wander off to have a look at Zizek. This was after I'd spent the morning yelling at little people in TV for not being able to score goals and then waiting for the inevitable goal from the other side. Of course, since this is Liverpool we are talking about, that IS what happened: I yelled, the other side scored with less than a few minutes remaining, inevitability struck again. You know when SuperMach mentioned that stuff about Fortune and whonot inevitably coming about to make your life miserable? And, how "us" folk over in Asia supposedly talk about things like Karma? Well, that's being a Liverpool supporter for you. In the more than a decade I've dedicated to the cause (when you think about how many save-the-world type things I could have done in the time I've spent supporting Liverpool, I'm already depressed), inevitability has never given up on the team. Well, except once: May 2005.

What has this got to do with Zizek, you ask? Well, if Liverpool losing to the hated Man Utd lot hadn't pissed me off and made me unfit for proper Uni-type work, I'd not have called E and would probably have ignored Zizek. After all, what's a bearded philosopher when you're trying to write your PhD proposal, right? Actually, it'd probably help to write your proposal if you were a bearded P but since neither E nor I are one of those, it doesn't help us.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, Zizek. To cut what seems like an extremely long story short, we did make it to Zizek but got enthralled by Frames instead. E has said she's going to write about it (and she did spend over an hour writing notes on pieces of paper while I brooded upon being dragged away from watching Zizek before we actually GOT to that part with chest hair) so I won't give away any of the details. Suffice it to say that Zizek was what one would imagine him to be (from the 20 minutes we saw of the film)

We did end up with some important information/questions which I can now share with you in happy anticipation that this will make you go put Zizek on your Netflix list.

1. Zizek keeps his clothes very well organised. But, he keeps them in his kitchen. This leads to the v important question of (which E asked): where does he keep his kitchen gear?

2. Z is well-aware of his status as a celebrity and plays off it. This makes him much more fun on screen than on paper. If only he could find a way to transfer his screen selves onto paper, he'd be a lot more readable.

3. Autograph-hunters are Evil. Love is Evil too. Love is Evil because it has something to do with how the world is like quantum physics. I'll leave it to E who is more of an expert than me (in both love and quantum physics) to explain further, if any of yous are remotely interested.

4. Buenos Aires loves Z. New York loves Z. Z doesn't love Judith Butler. He does like Diet Ice Tea Snapple (I may have gotten the words mixed up in that last bit: Snapple Ice Tea Diet?). Z also loves blue shirts.

That's about as far as it got when we walked out. Both E and I thought watching all of Zizek would not fit in with the Frames motif. It was inevitable that, after discussing Z in this space and elsewhere, we would not watch all of him.

As usual, we are doing this upside down, inside out, back to front. It occurs to me that meditations on inevitability would have been more meditative (almost monk-like, in fact) if E had written on Frames first.

I shall leave yous with a teaser: It was the Tractatus that did it. That's when we got hooked. And to think this is a common endeavour though I am still having trouble imagining part of it as punk.

posted by Priya @ 11:59 PM