Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
the task of theory …to construct a project whose transformative potential depends on its capacity to reflect upon its blind spot — on its conviction that to be socially and politically productive it has to include its own foundations in jouissance. … Is not the whole point of Lacan’s teaching that knowledge is rooted in jouissance, and that the moment we cut the umbilical cord between the two — or in Sohn-Rethel’s terms, between intellectual and manual labour — we are done for, condemned to be ruled by an invisible master and to perambulate in a paranoid universe? As with Lacan, Žižek’s epistemology hinges on the connection between thought and the “material weight” of the historical Real.
– this Real is not external to thought but its innermost symptom
– it is only insofar as it “enjoys the symptom” … that thought can lead to praxis — not the other way around (that is, not by keeping the symptom at a distance).
– The only way to understand the unity of theory and practice, … this generative force connecting theory and praxis can only be conceptualized in relation to the ability to disturb a symptom by definition in excess of a given theory and therefore rooted in the Real of jouissance. (146)