/lit/ - Literature

1. Take Slavoj Žižek.
2. Remove the quirky mannerisms: the constant sniffling, the hands rubbing all over his face, the digits pressing on his nose, the tugging of his shirt, the generally intentionally untidy look, and the Slovenian accent that for some reason doesn't show up that much when he teaches German.
3. Remove the rhetorical strategies: the systematic, relentless series of interruptions of his unfortunate interlocutors (a habit of his he admits makes it impossible for him to be a successful clinical psychoanalyst), the "But I agree with you" followed by a deliberate, conscious misrepresentation of the differences of thought between him and the poor bastard on the receiving end of it, the omnipresent pop culture references, and the overused jokes too while we're at it.
4. Meditate on what exactly were his interdisciplinary studies like to find himself babbling in an academic setting about anything ranging from architecture to the environment to the economy to sociology to psychology to, well, pretty much anything, and which things would you like to have been taught to in order to feel prepared to undertake such a goal.
5. Meditate on what exactly would one expect would happen were there a generation of sufficiently numerous young men and women who can reliably tell you the differences between the first and second editions of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Cool scholarship, what then?
6. Meditate on why is it that he has not found a prescription, nor discovered a cure for any of the problems he diagnoses in the immense variety of fields he pontificates about, and whether there is a correlation between that and the self-plagiarism wherein he repeats the same things he says endlessly like some mantra, as if the greater the number of repetitions would mean a greater merit, efficacy or ability to see the workings of ideology in reality.
7. Remove the pictures of Stalin from his living space.
8. You may now begin to understand why the man is not taken seriously, and so on.