By Paul Taylor<\/p>\n
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. (Hannah Arendt \u2013 The Crisis in Culture)<\/p>\n
As likely to talk about Homer\u2019s Springfield as Ithaca, \u017di\u017eek offers a fascinating new take on Arendt\u2019s open question. Embodying \u201cthe Heineken effect\u201d, he refreshes the parts other thinkers cannot reach at a time when increasingly anaemic universities have begun to act as uncritical subsidiaries of their governmental and corporate sponsors.<\/p>\n
The motivation to write \u017di\u017eek and the Media came from a desire to express exactly why he stands out so forcefully from the conventional commentariat as well as wanting to tackle head-on two frequently voiced objections to his work \u2013 the obscene humour and his refusal to provide ready-made solutions for the problems he so readily identifies.<\/p>\n
Both po-faced distaste and an instrumentally-minded yearning for immediate answers miss two fundamental points \u2013 his jokes are philosophically important and, despite the \u00fcber-pragmatic nature of our times (or perhaps more so now than ever before), the over-riding purpose of philosophy remains the asking of questions rather than the providing of answers \u2013 as Heidegger put it: \u201cquestioning is the piety of thought\u201d.<\/p>\n
In ancient Greece, the philosopher Diogenes (aka \u2018the dog\u2019) shocked the Athenian agora with public acts of defecation and masturbation. Although (so far) \u017di\u017eek has limited himself to only talking about such acts, he can be viewed as a Diogenes for our online times. The following joke is not one that \u017di\u017eek has used, but it nevertheless vividly encapsulates the paradoxically serious end of his frequently comic means.<\/p>\n
In the middle of a vibrant middle-class dinner party, the host\u2019s old flatulent dog staggers into the dining room, flops down, and promptly begins to enthusiastically and noisily lick its scrotum in full view of the now suddenly quiet guests. To ease the unbearable sense of embarrassment that descends upon the party, a male guest says, \u2018I wish I could do that.\u2019 This produces a round of cathartic tittering \u2026 that becomes heavy laughter when the hostess adds tartly, \u2018If you give him a biscuit, you can.\u2019 …more<\/a><\/p>\n