You can't always tell what's an aside, but that's to be expected in a book whose subtitle is "Six sideways reflections," concerned to challenge a culture which focuses on spectacles of individual violence as a way of ignoring (and in consequence of) systemic and structural violence. Here are an aside, and an aside to it, which really charmed me.In Europe, the ground floor in a building is counted as 0, so that the floor above it is the first floor, while in the U. S., the first floor is at street level. In short, Americans start to count with 1, while Europeans know that 1 is already a stand-in for 0. Or to put it in more historical terms, Europeans are aware that prior to beginning a count, there has to be a “ground” of traditions, a ground which is always already given and, as such, cannot be counted, while the U. S., and with no premodern historical tradition proper, lacks such a ground. Things begin there directly with self-legislated freedom. The past is erased or transposed onto Europe. This lack of ground thus has to be supplemented with excessive speech… (164)
The aside to this is a note to the penultimate sentence:
Perhaps this feature accounts for another weird phenomenon: in (almost) all American hotels housed in buildings of more than twelve floors, there is no 13th floor (to avoid bad luck, of course), i.e., one jumps directly from the 12th floor to the 14th. For a European, such a procedure is meaningless: who are we trying to fool? As if God doesn’t know that what we designated as the 14th
floor is really the 13th floor? Americans can play this game precisely because their God is just a prolongation of our individual egos, not perceived as a true ground of being. (230n10)You'll have to read more to see that these are both witty apperçus and emblems of a theory about the importance of acknowledging absence as the condition of a liberating universalism (I think!). Even without knowing the rest, though, there is so much packed in here, you could spend an entire evening unpacking it. And then unpacking your unpackings, backpeddling from the bits you're at first inclined to shout from the rooftops, then ceding on some you dismissed out of hand... Part of the pleasure is imagining that there actually is such a thing as a single "America" to analyze, not to mention a single "Europe." In fact, as Zizek notes in a lecture the European Graduate School has put online to which one of my firstyears referred me last semester, in Poland the floors go directly from 0 to 2...
I'm far from agreeing with everything I've read, heard and seen of Zizek (he's the subject also a documentary called "Zizek!"), but there is an intoxicating urgency to his ideas - not just to the way he presents them. Ideas matter, culture matters, everything demands thought: philosophy!
