*********CALL FOR PAPERS********* Chinese Perspectives on Zizek Special Issue of International Journal of Zizek Studies

 

The International Journal of Zizek Studies will publish a special issue on Chinese Perspective on Zizek at the beginning of 2009.

Why should we publish a special issue on Chinese perspective on Slavoj Zizek at this historical junction? Zizek combines Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist political theory, Hegelian dialectics, and Kantian ethics, with opera, literature, cinema, popular culture, and dirty jokes, to critique both “really existing socialism and really existing capitalism.” At the same time, contemporary China has realized socialist ideology in its Communist Revolution and recently integrated itself into the new world order through massive absorption of global capital in its post-Cultural Revolution economic reform. In this sense, we can say that certain analogy exists between Zizek’s theory and contemporary China. But a Zizekian reader can easily detect my misuse of his concept; at the very beginning of his Pallax View (2006) Zizek already pointed out the fallacy of such a “translation” between two unrelated realms. Nevertheless, the complex and often self-contradictory nature of contemporary Chinese society, which resists any conventional theoretical frameworks, be it liberal or socialist, calls for such a dialectical and open-ended approach. Zizekian theory provides us with a much-needed possibility of repolitization, while problematizing the Big Other as an empty signifier behind the curtain. At the same time, China’s radical materializations of both socialist and capitalist ideologies offer fertile ground for the possibility of a much-needed theoretical breakthrough. I hope that our special issue will serve as an excellent point of departure for such a productive theorization.

Those who are interested in contributing to this special issue should e-mail Tonglin Lu a one-page prospect either in Chinese or in English by June 1st 2008 a: tonglin.lu@umontreal.ca.