Two NYPL Discussions

The meeting of two very trendy "thinkers" of our time Slavoj Zizek and Bernhard-Henri Levy was highly publicized by the new york public library but the discussion proved to be rather disappointing. No fistfights, just a series of "I Agree But...". The audio recording of the whole session is available here.

More interesting is this video interview of Zizek in which he explains the difference between "subjective" violence, that is the violence that is perpetrated by a subject (a specific agent) which destroys the normal order of things and "objective" violence by which he means the invisible, systemic violence inherent in the system itself which helps maintain the normal order of things. As an example he says that violence in a communist society is easy to identify (even though it often leads to games about the origins of violence, "From Plato to Nato" as he says) but the violence that keeps the capitalist society going is harder to identify. He later says a few interesting things about "divine" and "mythic" violence. The interview is in five parts all of which are available on youtube.

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Next day's discussion was between James Wood and Daniel Mendelsohn about the current state of the literary culture and health of mainstream criticism. Everybody seemed upbeat. At the end Mendelsohn makes some contentious points, at one place expressing his bemusement at the thought of how a million people with laptops all telling us their opinions on Moby Dick! He then mentioned a few words like authority and expertise and compared a normal person publishing a literary blog to him writing a blog about brain surgery! I will desist from expressing my outrage here. The discussion overall could have been better moderated. There was also a strange audience question asking if David Foster Wallace's suicide could be seen as a "literary gesture"!