🙂 Rothenberg on Žižek’s insistence that the truth is a thoroughly partisan process. Yet Žižek refuses relativism, so how can he argue truth is partisan but not relativistic. Rothenberg cites a lengthy passage from Žižek [which I’ve broken up below for purposes of emphasis]:
Form is not the neutral frame of particular contents, but the very principle of concretion, that is, the “strange attractor” which distorts, biases, confers a specific colour on every element of the totality … [W]e should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can coexist peacefully — in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and opportunity to tell their story … The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibility of this liberal notion of Form:
Form has nothing to do with “formalism”, with the idea of a neutral Form independent of its contingent, particular content; it stands, rather, for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism which “colours” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, so that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it.
(Rothenberg 161, citing guess who from Revolution at the Gates, 190, original emphasis)