Slavoj Zizek Is a Blogger

His books are not books in the customary sense. Rather, he is blogging lucratively onto pulp posts that are published as books once they accumulate sufficient weight to tip the scales of gatekeepers in the midst of the distress of their terminal crisis. And the standards and assumptions of that chimeric rhetorical mode, not quite journaling not quite journalism not quite meditation should bear on our evaluations of Zizek's productions of the last ten years or so. This is not a condemnation of Zizek so far as that goes -- tho' there are plenty of things he's blogged over the years that I have disapproved of, who cares -- but a vindication as much as anything, really, something to account for his idiosyncratic practice (the seat-of-the-pants tempo and repetitiveness and kinda sorta editedness of the writing, the ripped from the headlines topicality and copious citations of online sources in footnotes just itching to be clicked, the vertiginous juxtapositions of high and low culture -- a distinction he actually depends on for his writerly special effects, not one he is effacing in his writing) as well as to account better for my own continued enjoyment of his blog-post anthologies all these years despite feeling more than a little appalled by him most of the time.