watcha readin, crispy? well i'm working on the nature of human freedom, if any, and i keep coming back to friedrich schelling. he's a wildly problematic figure, and in many ways, starting from idealist assumptions, he refutes idealism. if schelling's philosophy stood in the pantheon where his college friend/fierce rival hegel's stands, we would have had a better last couple of centuries in philosophy, in my opinion. on the other hand, i don't think his work could quite bear that kind of weight. he's very mercurial. and whereas hegel's prose is often just sludgy and unbelievably pretentious, schelling's at times just seems contradictory or even meaningless.
now, i'm reading zizek's book on schelling, the indivisible remainder. this zizek person, at his best, is really really good, and i think schelling has not, in at least a century, had so intent and creative an interpreter. now were it me, i would not throw in lacan (indeed, i would construct the world's largest catapult in order to launch lacan into deep space; who's with me?), but it's a more natural pairing than some, and characteristically, zizek gets into some good nooks.
maybe i've done this before. i greatly admire zizek, even though i think his politics is unbelievably wrong. he's always flirting back and forth with totalitarianism, if you ask me, though he says not, and such a thing is always inspiring to the academic left. but what an incredibly smart nut. he has the gift for provocation that seems to elude me no matter how hard i try. and that begins to register the fact that i also envy zizek his success; he's the taylor swift of philosophy, our pop princess. where do i get a little slice of that attantion? but the fact that you resent someone's success, unfortunately, doesn't mean he doesn't deserve it.
