How to break free of the tramlines of thought. The first step to a solution is to recognise that there is a problem. The tramlines exist.
Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian philosopher and terrible child, generates ideas that seem to have broken free of the tramlines of thought, time and time again. You would think it would work against him that he claims to be a follower of that great obfuscator and mountebank in the tradition of the French intelligentsia, Jacques Lacan. Surely, the principle of garbage in (Lacanian notions) garbage out should apply. How is it that he seems to oddly perceptive so much of the time?
Think about his leaning towards, perhaps almost his addiction, to paradox. To turning the received wisdom onto its head. In this he resembles no-one so much as Gilbert Keith Chesterton, inventor of the paradoxical priest, Father Brown.
How does Zizek break free of the tramlines of thought? Think about a man directing his first film, without experience or training. And the way he innovates, simply because he does not know, from experience and training, that things are not done that way.
