In order to familiarize yourself with the thoughts and strategies of any critic or philosopher without being exposed to the sufferings sustained in the painful job of reading extremely complex texts, you should always focus on the interviews made with the critic or the philosopher. You will get a much better grasp of highly complicated ideas suggested by philosophers such as Sartre, Foucault, and Said by reading through their published interviews. I mention those three authors for it has been claimed by some reviewers that they have turned the activity of giving an interview into an artform. Daly's interviews with Zizek does not spare us from Zizek's playful, and at times elusive, style when he goes down on Kinder chocolate, virtual reality, globalization, Hitchcock, Fight Club, etc... Zizek is as quick and as versatile as you may have imagined him to be from his previous books or lectures. Daly seems to know to press the right buttons in order to get Zizek off the ground. The chemistry in this book makes even Deleuze sound as a wild and attractive philosopher. However, you should beware Zizek's Lacan is quite different from the clinical readings of Lacan. It became quite clear already in 1989 in "the Sublime Object of Ideology" that Zizek preferred to focus on the underestimated Real in the Lacanian cognitive edifice. Daly explains in a very lucid way the importance of the Real to Zizek's Lacan, and he helps the reader to enter Zizek's streams of thought. This book helps any reader to understand Zizek's highly complex ideas in a very simple way. I would place this book among the other books of interviews made with the authors mentioned above, Sartre, Foucault, and Said. Daly and Zizek are preserving the artform.

Conversations with Zizek (Conversations) PDF

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