Old roommate defends Critchley's honor [see below, late Nov. early Dec.] I met Zizek at a millionaire's dinner party but it's not as if I haven't done the same with D. It's almost worth the flight to London just to blackmail them into having a sitdown. The arguments—as manifest in print—are all bullshit anyway. The differences of opinion are real enough, but brass tacks are few and far between. --- update: just sent off a note to Slavoj the Bear suggesting the above. See what happens. --- and again: From David's letter

[Critchley's] book does not simply propound a Levinasian ethics, understood as an infinite responsibility to the other, but is itself an attempt to practise one. Zizek appears to object to this project on principle.

Cultural acts, directed from within culture, engaging their embeddedness, address the other by definition. "Craft" is always addressed from and to the community. Speech as craft engages both reception and the gap between speaker/author/maker and receiver. Can the vanguard as vanguard ever engage the other? Has it ever engaged craft as communication? If it breaks the bonds of language how can it reach back to the community it left behind? When has a vanguard ever made a new community? The best it's been able to do is teach by failure. All political thinkers should read Eisenstein. The last 20 years of my thinking ended up in that paragraph.