Slavoj Žižek is without doubt the most extravagant philosopher on the contemporary scene. Defined as “the Elvis of philosophical thought”, almost as if to belittle the intellectual scope of his reflections, he has managed to make his way, despite the niche character that philosophy assumes today, into all contemporary media, including the Internet, perhaps precisely because, as Marco Senaldi writes in the introduction to the book in question: “Žižek, rather than introducing ‘revolutionary’ content into the media, succeeds in ‘making evident’ the conditions within which media discourse takes place”.
The Sublime Trash is a small book made up of three essays, all written in the 2000s, referring to contemporary art and architecture, which, as in all his essays, are based on the reflections of three specific philosophical thoughts, Žižek’s compass in all his adventurous discourses: that of Lacan, that of Marx and above all that of Hegel. The trash sublime is the title of the first of these three essays, the most absolute and interesting, without in any way detracting from the reflections on the relationship between architecture and the social and anthropological state of the second (The architectural parallax) and those on the relationship between art and reality and art and truth of the third (The unbearable lightness of being nobody).
In this first essay, on the other hand, the Slovenian philosopher attempts to delineate the essence of the work of art, to find its contemporary meaning, a bit like O’Doherty with Inside the white cube or Danto with What is art?, but denying the artificial and absolute auraticity of the space dedicated to art, the ideal basis of the two thinkers’ reflections. According to Žižek, pre-modern art had a context, often a religious one, and therefore a symbolic function; contemporary art, on the other hand, is born when the symbolic disappears and its attempts, even the most shocking, are aimed at “provoking” a context, almost in the hope that the symbolic will re-emerge to ennoble it. The initiators of this tendency are those who ‘concretised’ the impasse of art, Duchamp and Malevič, those, that is, who showed the potential (in the negative) of the work of art, so that, today, as already several decades ago, in the absolute desert of contemporary ideologies, the radical incongruence of the trash work, the Artist’s Shit for example, with the place of art, what does it create, if not an awareness of the specificity of that place? An uroboros in which the work of art continually creates the place deputed to art and the place deputed to art creates the work of art: an untouchable system that in the trash tries to cling on in order not to succumb. A very interesting question that opens up an infinite number of related debates.
Slavoj Žižek, The Trash Sublime, Mimesis, 2013
