The Albion Beatnik Bookstore website (or how to change a light bulb in a tight space on a ladder)

The web page of the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, based once in Oxford, then Sibiu, always neo-bankrupt, now closed for business: atavistic and very analogue, its musings and misspells on books and stuff.

Zizek & the Art of Powder Room Publicity

A special offer to flush away chic and incontinent communism: a free loo roll given away with every volume of Zizek bought in the Beatnik.

zizekZizek is unrivalled at self-promotion; to that aim he courts controversy. His melisma of high and low culture gives him a wider constituency than learned academic journals, yet, dubbed as the “Elvis of cultural theory,” he is prolific, profuse, prolix and randomly diffuse. He is the apogee of entropy, the nadir of consilience. He is a Marxist with, it seems, no belief in revolution and no sense of history; he misreads science and the history of philosophy, seduced by any wagging bobtail of an argument that adds credence to his inconclusive summaries. He holds to a form of atheist theology (otherwise known as theology without capital letters, and I never trust that lot) that veers from disbelief to disbelief like a punt on the Isis. He claims to having been “attacked for being anti-Semitic and for spreading Zionist lies, for being a covert Slovene nationalist and unpatriotic traitor to my nation, for being a crypto-Stalinist defending terror and for spreading bourgeois lies about Communism… so maybe, just maybe I am on right path, the path of fidelity to freedom:” yeh, sure.

His relentless self-plagiarism allows for several books to be published each year, although I have never found anybody who has finished reading any of his books. Five years ago he was top of the philosophical pops; these days he is for the sort of neo-middle aged, out of date, Oxford bloke who sports red corduroy trousers and a check shirt and has his car cleaned regularly at a service station, and if the book protrudes from his back pocket then at least it gets fashionably creased.

But peculiarly – and I have never resolved to discover why, although I have assumed incontinence – one of his billboard traits is to be photographed sitting on a lavatory. And if you needed any further proof that he is rather garbled of brain and a penny short of a threepenny bit, note that there is rarely any colour coordination, there is never a loo roll in sight (Mr Zizek has refused to endorse our promotion), and that he sits on the lavatory with his trousers still on.

Zizek discusses his anal fixation with toilets

 

 

2 comments on “Zizek & the Art of Powder Room Publicity

  1. Philip Pullman
    19th November 2015

    Few things denote insincerity of purpose so much as sitting on the lavatory with your trousers on.

  2. invisibules
    26th January 2016

    I’m amazed how much information you gleaned from reading just “£10.99”

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This entry was posted on 19th November 2015 by in philosophy, Slavoj Zizek, Uncategorized and tagged , .

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