livestream.com
(Full disclosure: about a year ago, I came to the conclusion that Zizek was full of shit, and that his main real skills were sounding profound, avoiding testable claims of any consequence, and getting other people to venerate him. I can't remember the specifics, though, so take this with the usual salt grain.)
If you thought he was bad, you should listen to someone like Derrida (he's dead btw).
Not that Derrida is necessarily a mystic, but I think when talking about the limits and inherent biases of language, straight, rational writing gets stuck in the same traps the writer is seeking to extricate himself from, both the post-modernists and mystical writers throughout history have dealt with this.
The bit of Derrida I read had a structural element to it, that added to the content.
Many of his articles are collected here: http://www.lacan.com/frameziz.htm
Read up on the Sokal hoax if you want to learn more about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair .
Reading about the hoax, however, is a good way to introduce people to what PoMo theory is, and the problems with it, as it introduces some important people and perhaps the biggest criticism of lit-crit (that being the emperor has no clothes).
I read quite a bit of PoMo stuff in college, kept waiting for a point for it all to make sense. Ultimately, I realized it was just a giant community of fakes and charlatans with little of value to say.
The problem with arguing with lit-crit types is you cannot argue on their terms. Their game is a game of empty words, built upon the ramblings of countless self-indulgent writers and pseudo-philosophers before them.
There's nothing in the way of reality to anchor anything they say, so anything can be said, and points are scored for the most convoluted explanations of.... well... nothing. It's downright embarrassing.
But don't believe me, go read some for yourself and decide.
Oh, and Estragon, there was actually nothing in the way of 'reasoning' in my original comment. I simply gave a quick opinion and a single link that those interested in it might find interesting. I'm not sure why you construed it as such.
Highly recommend it. In it, Zizek's arguments look pitiful and irrelevant next to BHL's, and I am in no way an admirer of BHL.
I say that only as someone who spent a lot of time reading many of his books, and discussing his work only in a rather informal, amateurish context, so perhaps I am pretty unqualified.
But my warning to HN readers about Žižek is that while his columns and short commentary can be very clever, his real theoretical work all starts with a foundation built on top of Marxism and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Granted, Žižek reinterprets both of those disciplines in clever, Hegelian ways that might make them unrecognizable at first glance to the modern reader, but if you're of the opinion that those two disciplines have little to offer intellectually (and I suspect most HN readers are in this boat), you'll ultimately look at the time you spent puzzling out Žižek and want those hours of your life back.
Since when is this some kind of feature for quality or authority?
How would that be related in any way?
in many cases it's the exact opposite.