A Life in Writing

Please see the full interview at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jul/15/slavoj-zizek-interview-life-writing
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"We learned nothing new really from WikiLeaks," he tells me later. "Julian is like the boy who tells us the emperor is naked – until the boy says it everybody could pretend the emperor wasn't. Don't confuse this with the usual bourgeois heroism which says there is rottenness but the system is basically sound. It is like a man who finds his wife has been fucking around – until he can see in great detail what she has been doing, he can pretend to himself nothing is wrong. Julian strips away that pretence. All power is hypocritical like this. What power finds intolerable is when the hypocrisy is revealed."

Žižek sips hot chocolate and wipes his beard. "I should not, speaking frankly, be this man who talks about The Dark Knight and Hegel, about the value of WikiLeaks and Lady Gaga. I should be a mediocre philosophy professor in Ljubljana." He was born on 21 March 1949 in the Slovenian capital in what was then Yugoslavia to a father (Jože) who was an economist and mother (Vesna), an accountant. He had an unhappy childhood. "I read alone, a Freudian retreat that prepared me for the world in all its disgusting obscenity." He glances at me with a jaunty expression: "I trust that when you write this you will not be the usual shitty journalist who is true to the facts. I am expecting creative distortion of my biography. Truth is overrated: I have always been happiest alone. Why should that be interesting to read about?"

He underestimates his life. As a teenager Slavoj wanted to be a film director, but set that ambition aside after being seduced by Hegel. Like other budding Slovenian philosophers, he was influenced by Marxist philosopher Božidar Debenjak's Frankfurt School-inflected lectures of Marx's Das Kapital from the perspective of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind. "Hegel is everything to me. His collected works remain my most treasured possession," he says. But he was seduced later by French post-structuralists – Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and, above all, Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalytic theorist. He was fired as an assistant researcher at the University of Ljubljana when his PhD was initially rejected for being non-Marxist. He spent four years doing national service and then another four unemployed before getting a job as a recording clerk at the Slovenian Marxist Centre, where he became involved with scholars committed to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

He spent the early 1980s in Paris, studying psychoanalysis with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault, before returning to Slovenia where he joined dissident groups critical of Tito's regime. "I was a member of the Communist party until 1988 when it became disgusting to remain in a party that defended militarism." After Tito fell, Žižek – by then a celebrated figure in his homeland as columnist for alternative youth magazine Mladina, and as a leading member of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights – decided to run as a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in the first free elections, in 1990. He stood for the Liberal Democratic party and came fifth. "Politics," he reflects, "has always been shitty. It is something I am involved in often against my will. My first interest is theory. I am a Hegelian looking for facts to fit the theory."

During this period he developed his literary style in dissident magazines and journals, with Marxist, Hegelian and Lacanian thought juxtaposed with critical analyses of cinema and popular culture in a sometimes appealing sometimes exasperating written equivalent of jazz improvisation. His first book to appear in English, 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology, brought that style to a broader audience. It used examples from high and low culture in order to explain his understanding of Hegel's dialectic, the basic thesis that underpins all his analyses, and one which finds that contradiction is an internal condition of every identity. Contradiction was also the internal condition of Slavoj Žižek, bearing out Oscar Wilde's dictum: "The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves." "My thinking moves so quickly how could it not be full of contradictions?" he asks.

More books in English followed in rapid succession, including For They Know Not What They Do (1991, a book framing the re-emergence of militant nationalism and racism in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe as a Lacanian eruption of enjoyment), Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (1993), Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), The Parallax View (2006) and In Defence of Lost Causes (2008).

These books (and several others) earned Žižek much praise. Terry Eagleton called him "the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general to have emerged from Europe in some decades". Film-maker Sophie Fiennes, who directed him in The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, a 2005 Channel 4 TV documentary in which he presents marvellously Lacanian analyses of some of his favourite films, says: "He is very much a thinker for our turbulent, high speed, information-led lives precisely because he insists on the freedom to stop and think hard about who you are as an individual in this fragmented society." The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed him "the Elvis of cultural theory".

The blurb for his new books says he has made philosophy relevant for a whole generation of politically committed readers. Žižek demurs. "A lot of what I write is blah, blah, bullshit, a diversion from the 700-page book on Hegel I should be writing."

In 2009, responding to a call for a reconsideration of communism by his friend, Parisian philosopher Alain Badiou, Žižek took part in a London conference to test the notion that capitalism was on the point (yet again) of falling apart from its own contradictions and so theorising the emancipated future was imperative. He went on to co-edit The Idea of Communism, a book urging lapsed comrades to raise the red flag anew. "Don't be afraid, join us, come back!" Žižek wrote. "You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it – time to get serious once again!"

Are you or have you ever been a communist? "Not as you might imagine. Marx wrote about the commons – he meant land and property. I mean information. When we pay rent to Bill Gates that is a new kind of enclosure. WikiLeaks represents a threat to such control of information."

Do you really believe in such a society? "I am a philosopher not a prophet. I don't answer questions but ask them to critique our society. Benjamin said it is the task of the leftist thinker not to ride the train of history but to apply the brake. It is also important not to say what everybody else is saying. It is boring, for instance, to criticise the US eternally. Why not China instead? It is China, after all, where they have banned fictional works considering alternative worlds, because they are afraid of their citizens' imaginations. It is China that is colonising Africa."

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