FULLY CONSTITUTED METAL JACKET

Slavoj Zizek’s  ‘Military Subject’  +  Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket

Rupert Nuttle

http://critpaper.com/2013/01/18/fully-constituted-metal-jacket-slavoj-zizeks-military-subject-stanley-kubricks-full-metal-jacket/

In his 1997 Plague of Fantasies Slavoj Zizek upends the popular perception of Robert Altman’s MASH as a true satire of military ideology, calling it “a perfectly conformist film”, and demonstrating that the characters’ apparent rebellion (their “mockery of authority”) in fact confirms their complete ideological identification (Zizek 1997 20). His reason is straightforward: “the members of the MASH crew perform their job exemplarily, and thus present absolutely no threat to the smooth running of the military machine” – their irreverence bears no consequence and causes no impediment (Zizek 1997 20). Zizek also cites An Officer and a Gentleman, in which the same ‘perfectly functioning military subject’ is realized through the “awareness that behind the cruel drill-sergeant there is a ‘warm human person’, a helping father-substitute” (Zizek 1997 20). Here the protagonist’s sincere (angsty, not comedic) rebellion against the ideological machine, paired with his longing for paternal acceptance (repressed respect for authority), prompt the drill-sergeant to grant him the allowance – the ‘second chance’ – that the protagonist so craves.

Both these films operate through phantasmic depictions of a military structure that is apparently subverted, but left essentially unchanged. Both disavow their underlying fantasy, allowing the viewer to engage cathartically in the narrative, to project themselves onto those roles that resist ideological identification. The viewer thereby senses himself or herself a relieving (but temporary) disassociation from the symbolic order in which they actually exist – that order which provided the movie theater, the military, and the war.

Zizek contrasts these ‘conformist’ films with Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, from 1987. Full Metal Jacket introduces several more complex facets of the military ideological machine, and “successfully resists [the] … temptation to ‘humanize’” (either through patriarchal acceptance or prankster slapstick) (Zizek 1997 20). Kubrick achieves a critical distance in the film by establishing the weapon (the rifle) as the central fetish object of Marine Corps ideology. In the first part of the film, the recruits’ rifles serve as the medium by which they are indoctrinated. They chant prayer-like tributes to their rifles, sleep with their rifles, and are judged strictly on the proper handling of their rifles. In the second part, the rifle (and weapon machinery more generally) serves to evidence the moral degradation and complete absence of vision in the Vietnam War. The troops destroy impulsively and on a massive scale (i.e. the annihilation of entire cities – vast expanses of collapsed concrete structures on fire), but do so only as a method of compensation, to fill some ever-gaping psychological ‘void’, and out of utter terror. The results, consistent with Kubrick’s playful sense of irony and Douglas Milsome’s poignantly drab cinematography, are often deeply satirical. The humor in Full Metal Jacket is underlying and dark, produced by the characters’ own pathological deficiencies. It is the polar opposite of MASH, in which a superimposed secular humor dominates over the military machine, making it livable. In spite of its humor, Kubrick’s is not a livable depiction.

Marine recruit training in Full Metal Jacket begins with subject negation. Where there was a civilian, a person, now there is nothing, only the potential to become a killer. New recruits are defined by their lack; they are essentially ‘castrated’:

“If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training … you will be a weapon, you will be a minister of death, praying for war. But until that day you are pukes! You’re the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings! You are nothing but unorganized grabasstic pieces of amphibian shit!” (Kubrick 1987 0:01:30)

Not only are the recruits reduced to microbes by the drill-sergeant: the unspoken ideological Law of the military is coded subliminally in such violent corporeal rhetoric; “it is precisely [the] non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority” (Zizek 1989 43). Such threats as “You had best unfuck yourself, or I’ll unscrew your head and shit down your neck!” provoke a self-doubting (self-effacing) fear, as the subject balances the evident hyperbole against the unacknowledged (and therefore vast) realm of plausibly administrable threats.

In A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft cites Ernest Jones, writing in 1916: ‘true’ symbolization “arises as the result of intrapsychic conflict between the repressing tendencies and the repressed … only what is repressed is symbolized … only what is repressed needs to be symbolized …” (Rycroft 162). Making the transition of self-identity from human to ‘puke’ requires a forced repression of the subject’s ego. This repression becomes symbolically manifested in the recruit’s rifle, the only provided signifier, which he uses to externalize his sense of the threat of castration. Freud says: “the horror of castration sets up a sort of permanent memorial to itself by creating this substitute” (Freud 216).

Symbolically read, the rifle would therefore index the development of a specifically military libido, which replaces ‘normal’ or civilian libido. The military subject, deprived of his sex life and his social life, must be trained to express his drive through his weapon, the handling and operation of which come to stand for sexual – or social – performance. The helicopter door-gunner who, for sport, mows down ‘gook’ farmers from the air (shouting, “Get some … get some … get some… yeah … yeah … get some!”) exemplifies this mentality perfectly. Joker asks him, “How can you shoot women and children?” “Easy.” he replies, “You just don’t lead’em so much.” By identifying his carnal urges with his rifle’s function the subject transforms into a pathologically crazed fighting machine – killing (using his gun) becomes the total expression and fulfillment of his phantasmic desires.

Zizek writes of the phallic signifier: “In its very positivity it is the signifier of ‘castration’ – that is of its own lack” (Zizek 1989 157). Not only do the soldiers’ weapons embody the act of compensation, but the symbol utilized (the fetish itself), by its very form and physical manifestation, directly signifies the very lack which is being symbolically compensated for. The subject is left helpless, but for his gun. His sublimation into the ‘phantasmic superego machine’ is complete.

This reading runs directly parallel to Freud’s conception of the sexual fetish. Zizek notes, “in Freud a fetish conceals the lack (‘castration’) around which the symbolic network is articulated” (Zizek 1989, 49). This is true of the direct symbolic reading above, but Freud’s theory also possesses a more complex maternal dimension:

When I now disclose that the fetish is a penis-substitute … I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but was afterwards lost. That is to say: it should normally have been given up, but the purpose of the fetish precisely is to preserve it from being lost. To put it plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego – we know why. (Freud 214-215).

Here the ‘particular quite special penis’ is most intriguing. Using it, Freud makes the crucial distinction between the subject’s phallus and the (phantasmic) ‘mother’s phallus’ – the acknowledged absence of which poses the perpetual threat of castration. By substituting the fetish for the ‘mother’s phallus’, the mother’s lack is accounted for and the subject’s (inhibitive) fear of castration is alleviated.

Understanding the full-on identification with ideological machinery through Freudian fetishism is integral to understanding Full Metal Jacket (particularly as concerns Pvt. Pyle’s psychological breakdown in the film’s first half), but for the most part the actual relationships forged between the soldiers and their rifles are of a more nuanced fetishism. Alphonso Lingis offers a useful splicing between fetishism and animism – more delicate than Freud’s definition of the former, and well suited to Zizek’s notion of operative ideology:

Animism recognizes a spirit in material things. The voice that we hear in things is not their voice, the voice of matter; material things are animated by a spirit or by spirits…

Fetishism recognizes a spirit of material things. Things emit signals and issue directives on their own. The voice is the voice of their material bodies. (Lingus 111)

Senior drill instructor Hartman employs a mixed rhetoric when speaking about the private’s rifles – he is both animist and fetishist in his message:

“Tonight, you pukes will sleep with your rifles. You will give your rifles a girl’s name … because this is the only pussy you people are going to get. Your days of finger-banging old Mary-Jane Rottencrotch through her purdy pink panties are over! You’re married to this piece, this weapon of iron and wood, and you will be faithful!” (Kubrick 1987 10:05)

(In this scene the platoon proceeds to lie down on their bunks (“Mount!”), where they clutch their rifles to their chests. Hartman shouts “Pray!” and the recruits recite in unison:)

This is my rifle.
There are many like it but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me my rifle is useless. Without my rifle I am useless.
I must fire my rifle true.
I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me.
I must shoot him before he shoots me.
I will.
Before God I swear this creed.
My rifle and myself are defenders of my country.
We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
So be it! Until there is no enemy but peace!
Amen.
(Kubrick 1987 10:39-11:58)
The first excerpt is essentially fetishistic in its reference to castration and its material (external) directives (“You’re married to … this weapon of iron and wood, and you will be faithful!”), and the second is animistic: the directives (“I must master [my rifle] as I must master my life.”) encircle the object – do not issue from it.

Sgt. Hartman’s most animistic characterization of the military weapon offers the key to the viewer’s ideological entrance into Full Metal Jacket – the phantasmic space shared by both audience and fictional character discussed with MASH and An Officer and a Gentleman:

“Your rifle is only a tool. It is the hard heart that kills. If your killer instincts are not clean and strong you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill! … And then you will be in a world of shit!”
(Kubrick 1987 0:22:04)

The true fantasy that is sustained (and sustains the viewer) throughout Full Metal Jacket is that of the realist-humanist subject – Pvt. Joker. Ostensibly he is the author, providing the occasional voice-over commentary; Kubrick adapted the film from Gustav Hasford’s 1979 semi-autobiographical The Short-Timers (with Hasford’s help). In the film’s second half Joker wears a peace symbol pinned on his vest and, in seeming contradiction, the words ‘BORN TO KILL’ written on his helmet. When a Colonel unknown to him inquires, “What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?” Joker replies,

“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.”
“The what?”
“The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.”
“Whose side are you on, son?”
“Our side, sir.”
“Don’t you love your country?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then how about getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?”
“Yes, sir!” (Kubrick 1987 1:05:05)

We see here a distinct alignment with the power relations present in MASH, that is, the authority figure’s ignorance revealed through the hero’s cleverness, but with crucial differences. Instead of the protagonist using silliness to mock dry military language, as in MASH, Joker introduces dry ‘extra-ideological’ (in this case psychoanalytic) non-military language to reveal the Colonel’s inherent silliness – his inane perception of war as sport. The humor is distinct in being utterly humorless, but distinctly unsettling as well. Nonetheless, the joke is undoubtedly on the Colonel (the authoritarian ideological perpetuator) and shared privately between Joker and the viewer, again allowing the viewer to project as ‘subversive’ within the film. The issue of the pin and the helmet is excused by default.

It must be noted that Joker does make the final concession in this interaction (“Yes, sir!”), just as on his first day of training he responded “Sir, to kill, sir!” when asked “Private Joker, why did you join my beloved Corps?” (Kubrick 1987 0:04:15). He does want to “jump on the team and come on in for the big win”, but, presumably, he also wants peace as the end goal, and the freedom to express what is apparently an ideological contradiction. Joker, like Zack Mayo in An Officer and a Gentleman, challenges the moral integrity of military ideology while engaged in its praxis. The peace symbol/BORN TO KILL pairing becomes a symbol of Pvt. Joker’s own dual nature. Embodied by his character is precisely that ‘Jungian thing’ to which he offhandedly refers.

In Joker’s synthesis of dual signifiers we discover the Zizekian ‘trans-ideological kernel’, which in fact confirms the subject’s complete identification with military ideology:

An ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: ‘not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person’ is the very form of ideology, of its ‘practical efficiency’. (Zizek 1997 21)

He further qualifies:

It is only the reference to such a trans-ideological kernel which makes an ideology ‘workable’
(Zizek 1997 21, his italics).

Joker’s interactions with higher-ranking officers are assertions that he is ‘not fully identical’ to military ideology, yet, at the film’s climax, when a wounded Viet-cong sniper-girl is begging to be shot, and the other troops hesitate, it is Joker’s ability to bridge the ‘duality of man’ in action as well as thought – to bring together his humanism and his ‘killer instinct’ – that reveals him to be “the fully constituted military subject” (Zizek 1997 21).

Works Cited

MASH. Dir. Altman, Robert. Prod. Preminger Ingo. 20th Century Fox, 1970. DVD.
Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism (1927).”
Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Macmillan, 1963. 214-219. Print.
An Officer and a Gentleman. Dir. Hackford, Taylor. Prod. Elfand Martin. Paramount Pictures, 1982. DVD.
Full Metal Jacket. Dir. Kubrick, Stanley. Prod. Kubrick Stanley. Warner Bros., 1987. color film. Lingis, Alphonso.
Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisims in Culture. New York, London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Rycroft, Charles.
A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972. Print. Zizek, Slavoj.
The Plague of Fantasies. London, New York: Verso, 1997. Print.
The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, New York: Verso, 1989. Print.

Dolar, Žižek, and Zupančič at Villanova Philosophy Conference

http://plasticbodies.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/villanova-philosophy-conference-2013/villanova philosophy conference 2013

Posted on October 25, 2012

Call for Papers:

The 18th annual Villanova Philosophy Conference

Apocalyptic Politics: Framing the Present

Villanova University, Friday April 12-Saturday April 13, 2013
Confirmed Speakers: Mladen Dolar | Slavoj Žižek | Alenka Zupančič

The present is often characterized as a critical moment that totters between possibilities of irresolvable catastrophe and redemptive restoration. Such claims involve prophecies of an end. Whether consisting in theological predictions of a messianic end, political predictions of a revolutionary end, or historical predictions of an epochal end, claims on the future charge the present with immediate significance through the ethical and political demands they place on it. This is to say, an anticipated end, which in a way is not-yet, is also always enacted in the present. Apocalyptic futures clearly enter into the structure of contemporary subjects – of their desires and drives, on the planes of fantasy and of theory – but these relations call for clarification. The multiplicity of ways in which prophecy can be received, for instance – whether the foretold end is interpreted as already-accomplished, imminent, or in the indeterminate future, whether the end is met with a spirit of fear or hopeful anticipation, or whether it is understood as necessary and irrevocable or as contingent and preventable, etc. – invites fundamental inquiry into the conscious and unconscious relations of the subject to history and its ruptures.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following: the end/temporality of history (Hegel, Marx, Kojeve); political theology and the Messianic: the legacy of Paul in political theology, kariological temporality and klesis (Agamben, Derrida, Benjamin, Bloch); early modern political philosophy: the role of prophecy in shaping societal affects (Hobbes, Machiavelli, Spinoza); phenomenological relationality to the future; revolutionary politics; apocalyptic cinema, science fiction, and art.

[…]

“I must go on, I can’t go on, I will go on“.

wie geht kunst

http://www.wiegehtkunst.com/?p=599

[From a 2009 interview with Mladen Dolar]

WgK: Is there an artwork that had a lasting effect on you?

Dolar: The work of Samuel Beckett – if I have to single out just one. It is both the importance it had for me and for the particular historic moment of the end of the twentieth century. I think he is the one who went the furthest in a certain way. There are various reasons for this, and one of them has to do with an enormous will to reduction. What Beckett did was to create an infinitely shrinkable world. There is never little enough. You can always take away more.

Take the The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. In the Beginning there is some sort of plot and some sort of characters. Then in the second novel you have just Malone, who is dying alone in his room and who is inventing stories as he is waiting for death. The space has shrunk, there is no more travel. And then you have the third novel, where you don’t even have this. You don’t even have a space, you don’t even have a character, you just have a voice. A voice which just rambles on and continues, and it doesn’t matter what it says in the end. It’s just the sheer thrust of perseverance, of persistence, which carries the whole thing. So just persist. You have to go on. And you know how this ends, it ends in the most beautiful way: “I must go on, I can’t go on, I will go on“.

[…]

'Violence' talks at Google

Buzludzha, Bulgaria

http://humanplanet.com/timothyallen/2012/02/buzludzha-buzludja-bulgaria/

Salon interviews Žižek, DEC 29, 2012

BY KATIE ENGELHART,

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/29/slavoj_zizek_i_am_not_the_worlds_hippest_philosopher/

[…]

Salon caught up with Žižek, who still calls Ljubljana home, over Skype. On the agenda: the improbable celebrity of Slavoj Žižek.

You’ve given a number of interviews over the past few years. I was hoping that we could take this one up a few levels of abstraction and discuss the phenomenon that is Slavoj Žižek.

Ah, if you want to.

Most recently, Foreign Policy named you one of its Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2012.

Yes, but at the bottom of the top!

Right, you were No. 92. Do you deserve to be on the list?

No! You could not get that out of me if you tortured me! I know the polite thing is to say no.

Isn’t the first one on this list that Myanmar girl? I always forget her name. Who is that?

Do you mean Aung San Suu Kyi?

Yes! Nothing against her, but can you explain to me: In what sense she is a philosopher or intellectual?

Well first, to clarify, this is a list of “thinkers,” not “philosophers.”

Yes but in what sense is she a thinker? She just tries to bring democracy to Myanmar. OK, that’s a nice thing. But you can’t just accept an ideal as ideal. Oh, democracy! Everyone gets an orgasm so let’s bring it to as many people as possible.

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions. For example: What is really decided in a democratic process?

I recently had a look through The International Journal of Žižek Studies, and…

I never opened it! I promise! I never even opened that site.

What do you think of the idea?

I have good relations with Paul Taylor, who edits it. We are friends. Ironically, he thought that this would help him in his academic career, but it only brings him trouble.

As you can see now — or in any of the shitty movies that I make — I’m a nervous guy. I find it absolutely unbearable to see myself on a screen. And when people write about me, I never read it — unless there is a brutal attack and my friends think I should answer it.

I have a sense of shame here. I am afraid of seeing myself.

You’ve said this before. And you have noted the tendency for journalists to portray you as clownish or buffoonish. But I have to wonder: To what extent are you flirting with that?

You know why I do it? Because I’m terribly afraid that if people were to see me, to put it naively, how I really am, they would be terribly bored.

You know, in my private life I am an extremely depressed guy. Look where I am now! Look around. I’m in Paris.

[Žižek lifts his laptop, turning it to reveal his surroundings: a sparse hotel room, with simple bedding and a single window.]

You see? I’m in a small hotel room. I escaped my home for a week; I needed it. Here, I go out just once or twice a day to eat. Except for you, and another friend with whom I Skype, I haven’t spoken to a living person for a week. And I like it so much!

My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.

This is why, incidentally, I claim that reality TV is so boring: because people are not themselves. They are acting a certain image of themselves, which is extremely boring and stupid and so forth. I cannot see why people are attracted by reality TV. I think it should be prohibited. And I think Facebook and Twitter should be prohibited. Don’t you think?

You know, the only photos I have of myself are on official documents, like my passport.

But wait! This doesn’t mean that I massively despise myself. No, I like my printed work. I live for that — for theory, really. And shamelessly. I hate this leftist humanitarian attitude: People are starving! Children in Africa! Who needs theory? No! We need useless theory more than ever today, I claim.

You say you haven’t watched the 2005 documentary “Zizek!,“ which you star in. I watched it recently. There was a scene in it that struck me. It’s when you bring the director, Astra Taylor, into your kitchen — to show her that you store your socks there.

Yes, to shock her! It was a very naive thing that happened. I had mentioned that my socks were in my kitchen. She didn’t believe me. She thought: “Oh this is one of his postmodern extravaganzas.” I wanted to say: “No, fuck you; they’re really there!”

Some idiots made a lot of another clip from the film… Remember, when I’m lying in bed naked (from the waist up only, of course) giving an interview? Some idiots asked afterwards: Oh, what was the message in that?

It was so vulgar. [The director] was screwing me all day — screwing in the sense of annoying me —  I was tired as a dog. She wanted to ask a few more questions. I said: “Listen, I will go to bed and you can shoot me for five more minutes.” That’s the origin of it.

Now, people look at it and say, “Oh what is the message that he’s half naked?” There’s no message. The message is that I was fucking tired.

But isn’t that what you do in much of your writing? Take the half-naked man on-screen and attribute meaning to his half-nakedness?

That’s true!

Let’s go back to the socks in the kitchen. Surely you understood that showing this to the director would contribute to her portrayal of you as a befuddled philosophe who can’t quite function in normal life?

No, no. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a well-organized person. I’m extremely organized. Up to the minute, everything is planned. This is how I achieve so much. Quantitatively. I’m not talking about quality.

I am very well-trained. I can work everywhere. And I learned that in the army.

I may look half abandoned, it’s true. Because I find it extremely obscene to buy things for myself: like trousers, jackets and so on. All my T-shirts are presents from different colloquia. All my socks are from business-class flights. Here I totally neglect myself.

But my apartment has to be clean; I am a control freak. That is why I was disappointed when I did my military service. It wasn’t that I was a confused philosopher and I couldn’t handle the discipline. My shock was that the old Yugoslav army was, beneath the surface of order and discipline, a chaotic society where nothing functioned. I was deeply, deeply disappointed with the army for being too chaotic.

My ideal would be to live in a monastery.

Let’s run with that. You have said before: “I am a philosopher, not a prophet.” And yet, your followers are remarkably pious; many worship you as a prophet. Why?

Well, I’m ambiguous on this. On the one hand, I return to a more classical Marxism. Like: ‘It cannot last! This is all crazy! The hour of reckoning will come, blah blah blah.’

Also, I really hate all of this politically correct, cultural studies bullshit. If you mention the phrase “postcolonialism,” I say, “Fuck it!” Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

So you offer respite to the 20-something who wants to escape the fruits of postmodernism: political correctness, gender studies, etc.? 

Yes, yes! That’s good!

But here I also have a bit of megalomania. I almost conceive of myself as a Christ figure. OK! Kill me! I’m ready to sacrifice myself. But the cause will remain! And so on…

But, paradoxically, I despise public appearances. This is why I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you … Office hours!

How very European. 

Yes, here I’m totally for Europe — and specifically for the German authoritarian tradition. England is already corrupted. In England, students think they can simply stop you and ask you a question. I find this repulsive.

That said, I quite admire the United States and Canada. In some ways, they are better than Europe now. France and Germany, for instance, are currently in a very low state intellectually — especially Germany. Nothing interesting is happening there. Yet it surprises me how intellectually alive The United States and Canada are. Let me give you an example: Hegelian studies. If Europeans want to understand Hegel, they go to Toronto or Chicago or Pittsburgh.

What would Hegel think of your popularity? 

He wouldn’t have any problems with it. He even wrote — I think at the end of “Phenomenology“ — that if, as a philosopher, you really articulate the spirit of the time, the result is popularity … even if people don’t really understand you. They somehow feel it. It’s a beautiful dialectical question: How do the people feel it?

You’re a devout Lacanian. Would it be awkward for you if [psychoanalyst and psychologist Jacques] Lacan were alive today? 

Definitely! Because he was such an opportunist. And he would not have liked my direction. Theoretically, he was completely anti-Hegelian. But I try to prove that, without being aware of it, he was actually a Hegelian.

When you write the popular books that you claim not to like, who do you imagine to be your reader? 

Prohibited! I never ask this question. I don’t care. Another prohibition is that I never analyze myself. The idea of doing psychoanalysis on myself is disgusting. Here, I’m sort of a conservative Catholic pessimist. I think that if we look deep into ourselves, we discover a lot of shit. It is best not to know.

In “Zizek!” I was very careful that all the clues about my personality are misleading.

Why bother? For fun? 

Because they are idiots! I hate journalists! Filmmakers! I think there is something obscene about it. Of course, now you catch me again: Because if I’m really indifferent, then why do I bother to lie? Yes, there is a problem there…

You know, when I got married in Argentina, I was very embarrassed. People thought I orchestrated the leak of my wedding photographs. It’s not true!

I’ve seen those photos. For someone who describes love as violent and unnecessary, you seem to have pulled off quite the affair. Your wife [Argentinian model Analia Hounie] wore a long white dress and held a bouquet. How traditional! 

Yes, but did you notice something? If you look at the photos, you can see that I am not happy. Even my eyes are closed. It’s a psychotic escape. This is not happening. I’m not really here.

I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the “portrait of Stalin.” And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

So you did it for your wife, this big wedding? 

Yes, she was dreaming about it.

You know what book I really didn’t like from this perspective? Laura Kipnis’ “Against Love.” Her idea is that the last defense of the bourgeois order is ‘No sex outside love!’ It’s the Judith Butler stuff: reconstruction, identity, blah, blah, blah.

I claim it’s just the opposite. Today, passionate engagement is considered almost pathological. I think there is something subversive in saying: This is the man or woman with whom I want to stake everything.

This is why I was never able to do so-called one-night stands. It has to at least have a perspective of eternity.

You seem to hold up [feminist philosopher] Judith Butler as a kind of antithesis. You’ve mentioned her several times already. She’s your straw woman!

Yes, but personally we have great relations! Judith once told me: “Slavoj, you must think I’m a mean woman.” I said: “No, when somebody likes Hegel like you, you cannot be a total idiot!”

Are there historical figures that you relate to?

Robespierre. Maybe a bit of Lenin.

Really? Not Trotsky?

In 1918-19, Trotsky was much harsher than Stalin. And I do like this in him. But I will never forgive him for how he screwed it up in the mid-’20s. He was so stupid and arrogant. You know what he would do? He would come to party meetings carrying French classics like Flaubert, Stendhal, to signal to others: “Fuck you, I am civilized!”

You write that we need to think more and act less. But in the end you identify with Lenin: a famed man of action.

Yes, but wait a minute! Lenin was the right guy. When everything went wrong in 1914, what did he do? He moved to Switzerland and started reading Hegel.