Blurb Writing

This evening Lori Emerson, ebr's current book reviews editor (a job I once held, which is a lot of work) e-mailed me to ask if I would write the blurbs for several pieces I've written that will be published soon. Lori suggested it would only take me ten minutes, as opposed to an hour for her. If only. I'm an obsessive reviser and find that the word constraints that blurb writing impose only intensify my impulse to repeatedly rewrite. After a couple hours, I came up with the following blurbs. We'll see if they appear this way on ebr.

1. “What Would Zizek Do?: Redeeming Christianity’s Perverse Core”: Jokes play a fundamental role in Slavoj Zizek’s philosophizing. Is Zizek joking when he extols the virtues of Christianity to the Left? Eric Dean Rasmussen analyzes Zizek’s pro-Christian proselytizing as attacks on modes of PC-ness – political correctness and perverse Christianity - that sustain an undesirable neoliberalism.

2. “Putting the Brakes on the Zizek Machine”: Eric Dean Rasmussen traces the contours of Hanjo Berressem’s rigorous, bi-tempo reading of Organs without Bodies, which finds Zizek’s philosophical buggering of Deleuze to be wanting.

3. “Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek”: A post-9/11 discussion between Zizek and Eric Dean Rasmussen concerning liberation as a an act and a state of awareness. Topics include: biopolitics and belief, ideology and infinitude, violence and vulgarity, and the parallax view required to perceive various posthistoricist paradoxes.