Reading DISPARITIES (8)
“Zizek agrees with Althusser’s thesis that philosophy is class struggle in the field of theory, and specifies that here it is a question of a “struggle against the different forms of obfuscating disparity”. He favours division and struggle rather than dialogue and consensus. He wishes to draw a line of demarcation between the deployment of disparity (or “ontological difference”) and its obfuscation.”
“Another way of formulating this struggle would be the attempt to formulate a view of the universe as open (and recall that Zizek has said that for the true materialist the universe is open all the way down) without falling into postmodern relativism. We need both disparity and realism.”
“The book has a triadic structure. It is composed of an introduction, three parts (each of which contains three chapters) and a conclusion. The three parts repeat the classic triad of the True, the Beautiful and the Good, in that order, or epistemology/ontology (“ontological difference in the age of science”), aesthetics (“the role of ugliness and disgust in modern subjectivity”), and political theology (“the ongoing theological-political mess”).”