Zoolander replicant Andrew Keen strives to prolong his fifteen minutes. Eastern European sophistication is called upon...

Now the politics of the Great Seduction is truly out of the bag. In a provocative piece in In These Times, cultural iconoclast Slavoj Zizek gets to the political heart of the digital matter. Zizek explains why post French revolutionary political categories of left wing and right wing don’t work anymore. The reason, Zizek explains, is that the digital revolution has changed the moral and economic language of politics. The old left/right divide now is digital versus analog.

Yeah. Right. So who is this Zizek cobber, and why should we listen to him?

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School EGS who uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture...

He was analysed by Jacques Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan's son in law, and is probably the most successful and prolific post-Lacanian having published over fifty books including translations into a dozen languages.

He is a leftist and, aside from Lacan he was strongly influenced by Marx, Hegel and Schelling...

He is an effective purveyor of Lacanian mischief, and, as a follower of the French "liberator" of Freud, Zizek's Lacan is almost exclusively transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables.

That he has an encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop cultural currents — and that he has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his imagination — is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and confounded his critics for over ten years...

He is interested in discerning the Lacanian Real amid the propaganda of systems. In appropriating "Lenin" he is also looking for the moment when Lenin realized that politics could one day be dissolved for a technocratic and agronomic utopia, "the [pure] management of things". That Lenin failed is immaterial, since Zizek is extracting the signifier "Lenin" from the historical continuum...

Even when performed before a riotously approving audience, wanking remains wanking. Quotable quote, please?

In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence -it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are — as if by Grace — for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed.

My. That was all one sentence.

Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow — in it, we already are free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances.

I bet he's thigh deep in coed plenitude.

Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontian wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth."

Damn. They're like nested Russian dolls, each level more pretentiously vacuous than the last. This is considered impressive? Admirable? It's revolution without victory! Simply redefine your terms!

Such mesmerizing wordplay seems spot on perfect for a man like Andrew Keen, who could say the following line with no apparent trace of irony...

If people aren’t able to censor their worst instincts, then they need to be censored by others wiser and more disciplined than themselves.

If revolution can be an immediate index of its own truth, then much becomes clear. For instance, given the Bill of Rights, I have long been curious as to how exactly Mr. Keen proposes to accomplish his well intended censorship. What concrete steps does he advocate?

In brief, none. He's all hat and no cattle. For all his talk of a war on digital literacy, he comes to the battlefield unarmed.

Perhaps he intends to talk his way to victory? It would be in character. Perhaps he hopes to persuade us to censor ourselves? Well. You all know what that means.

His sole and greatest weapon is his tongue.

I just put an ugly picture in my head.