Slavoj Žižek (Graeme Robertson/Eyevine)
The Times Literary Supplement called him an “intellectual rock star”. For the New York Times, he is the “Elvis of cultural theory”. And the New Yorker, wittily conflating his unfashionably intransigent left-wing politics with his taste for Hollywood classics, has dubbed him “The Marx Brother”.
Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and political theorist, happily colludes in these journalistic caricatures. His work routinely contains more jokes than is customary in academic political philosophy – his new book, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, an analysis of the current global crisis, is no exception – and he has been the star of two documentary films, Žižek! and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. In the former, he allowed himself to be filmed in bed, shirtless, expounding on the nature of philosophy. And in the latter, he navigates his way across California’s Bodega Bay in a motor launch, in homage to Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. (Hitchcock, along with Lenin and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is one of Žižek’s heroes, and a frequent subject of his crypto-Marxist cultural analyses.)
All of which makes him sound like a benignly eccentric, mittel-European buffoon. (One American magazine profile observed that he speaks English at “high speed”, in an accent rather like that of the character played by Andy Kaufman in the sitcom Taxi.) And yet, in the eyes of the critic Adam Kirsch, writing in the New Republic under the title “Deadly Jester”, Žižek is nothing less than the “most dangerous philosopher in the west”. Kirsch was indulging in hyperbole when he wrote that, but his description of Žižek does get at something important – that is, his contempt for mainstream political thought, an animus so complete as to lead him sometimes to appear to be “glorifying”, as Kirsch put it, “totalitarianism and political violence”.
Whether or not Kirsch’s now notorious criticisms of Žižek were justified, it certainly is the case that the Slovene’s avowedly “Leninist” provocations, and his hand-waving in the direction of the Jacobin Terror and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, are intended to unsettle and to question the sort of liberalism that dominates political theory in the west – especially in the English-speaking world. The recent fruits of his prodigious output, including a book on violence and a defence of “lost causes”, all tend in this direction.
When I spoke to Žižek on the telephone from New York, where he’d been giving a series of talks on the financial crisis and Barack Obama’s healthcare plan, I asked him what relation he thought his work has to the mainstream of normative, liberal political theory done in British and American universities. click to continue
Click here to read the full transcript of Jonathan Derbyshire’s interview with Slavoj Žižek
