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Philosophical celebrity, while not necessarily an oxymoron, is nevertheless an ambiguous beast. In a post at Page Views, The New York Daily News’s books blog, Rebecca Rothfeld tries to account for the mass appeal of Slavoj Zizek by comparing him to such figures as the young writer and TV star Lena Dunham, and the rapper Lil B, both of whom thrive, Rothfeld claims, “in spite of their confused relationship to earnestness.” It is difficult to know just how serious one should take a Hegelian philosopher who also “authored the text of a 2003 Abercrombie & Fitch catalog,” but Rothfeld thinks that working in this “liminal space between the serious and the farcical” may be the key to Zizek’s allure. In any event, his example, Rothfeld concludes, provides philosophy “a much-needed breath of self-deprecation.”

Standing just slightly out of Zizek’s spotlight is Peter Sloterdijk. In a post at 3quarksdaily, Jalees Rehman looks into why the German philosopher “is not quite so well-known in the English-speaking world.” Like Zizek, “his fans adore him; his critics are maddened by him;” like Zizek, Sloterdijk is utterly at home working in electronic mass media; and like Zizek, Sloterdijk makes one wonder whether there “isn’t much of a difference between a true comedian and a true philosopher.” But as a “professional digressor,” Sloterdijk is, for Rehman, “the prototypical anti-TEDtalker,” and probably unsuited to an age accustomed to receving “excessive positivity” in slickly-produced 15-minute packages. On the other hand, Rehman thinks “Philosophical Temperaments,” Sloterdijk’s collection of short essays on philosophers which “reveal more about the painter than the subject,” could teach the TED-talkers a thing or two.

The philosophical North Star of the previous generation, Jacques Derrida, is the subject of a post by Emily Eakin at The New York Review of Books, which uses Benoît Peeters’ recent biography to explore the idea that Derrida’s celebrity waxed in almost inverse proportion to his feelings of isolation. Derrida’s method, deconstruction, taught that “every structure…is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion,” in the words of Mark C. Taylor, and Eakin concludes that “acts of exclusion, it turns out, were central to Derrida’s perception of himself.”

Notable Entries: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has fortified its coverage of “continental” thinkers with two recent entries. A quite readable essay on Zizek’s notoriously opaque mentor, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, includes a detailed historical and biographical sketch of the “French Freud,” and discusses canonical Lacanian concepts like, “matheme,” “sexuation,” and “jouissance.” An updated entry on “continental feminism” emphasizes work by Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz and others as it engages, challenges, and transforms the traditions of “postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology” that preceded it.

Also:

At Vice magazine’s Motherboard blog, an interview with “immortality project” leader John Martin Fischer.

At History Today, an overview of Michael Oakeshott.

At The Guardian, Michael Krämer proposes ways philosophers and physicists might constructively confront the Higgs boson together, and a post at The Prosblogion wonders what the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics might tell us about the problem of evil.

At the Other Journal, a discussion of the metaphysics of race, and an examination of the connections between pragmatism, theology, and the Tea Party.

At New Scientist, the question of whether it’s possible to patent mathematics has opened up a philosophical debate in the business world.

At NPR, Tania Lombrozo considers “The Ironic Success of Experimental Philosophy.”

At Philosophy Today, Immanuel Kant walks into a bar…

At KPLU radio, inside the mind of a philosophical prodigy.