"Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist" - Slavoj Žižek

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This is what comes from listening too much to Marginal Revolution:

"I am very much enjoying his new book Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist. Slavoj is one of the very few CWT guests (can you guess the others?) who can handle pretty much any question about any area, and have something fresh to say in response."

So I bought it, I'm in the process of reading it, and I thought of Iain Banks's response in an interview with Jude Roberts:

JR: Have you read any work by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or Emanuel Levinas (or any other continental philosophers)? If you have, what did you think?

IB: The little I've read I mostly didn't understand, and the little I understood of the little I've read seemed to consist either of rather banal points made difficult to understand by deliberately opaque and obstructive language (this might have been the translation, though I doubt it), or just plain nonsense. Or it could be I'm just not up to the mark intellectually, of course.

Slavoj Žižek as a writer reminds me of the output of a current LLM. The text flows felicitously enough but one senses deeper understanding is not there. He unwisely has a chapter on quantum theory, and despite it being checked over by a math professor, it's plain he's operating at the level of a reader of popularisations: those little errors keep creeping in.

Through the forest of abstractions, the endless references to Lacan and Hegel, sometimes an interesting insight emerges but mostly it's - in the space of ungrounded abstractions - just a rearrangement of the scenery.

It turns out that Roger Scruton was well ahead of me...

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Here's an example of the kind of mistake.

“A minimum of time always elapses between a quantum event and its registration, and this minimal delay opens up the space for a kind of ontological cheating with virtual particles (an electron can create a proton and thereby violate the principle of constant energy, on condition that it reabsorbs it quickly enough, i.e., before its environs “take note” of the discrepancy). THIS is how God himself – the ultimate figure of the big Other – can be deceived; by a swarm of “ones” which escape its grasp…” (p. 112).

So much for charge conservation.