Content area
Full text
Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism. By Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Zizek. London: Continuum, 2009. Pp. 202. Cloth $24.95. ISBN 978-1441191052.
The fetching title of this book is misleading. Those who are interested in learning about mythology, laughter, and madness as constitutive concepts defining German Idealism are in for a challenging surprise. This book, divided into three parts (part one by Markus Gabriel, parts two and three by Slavoj Zizek), with each part divided into essays of unequal length, is for specialists of German Idealism exclusively. Academics with background knowledge only will gain, perhaps, some small insights of value concerning the debate between the (post)modern ontological argument and the one supporting traditional epistemology. The main argument, however, gets lost through Gabriel and Zizek's conceptual virtuosity. Here is just one example: "The weird sounding syntagm 'coefficient of adversity' belongs to G. Bachelard who reproached Husserl's phenomenology with ignoring the inertia of objects resisting subjective appropriation...