interview

Slavoj Žižek does not want to be called "professor." He jokes that when people use the honorific, he looks back over his shoulder to see where the professor is. Indeed, he has seldom taught at universities. It is through his immensely prolific output of books, essays, articles and columns that Žižek, 65, has become a globally influential intellectual. His lectures and appearances around the globe have made him one of the most famous contemporary thinkers and cultural theorists in the world.

Despite his influence, it's difficult to pinpoint just where he stands philosophically and politically. Born in the Slovenian capital city of Ljubljana, where he still lives today, he belonged to the Communist Party until he left it in 1988. He had a difficult relationship with official party channels because his ideas weren't considered to be sufficiently orthodox Marxist and he was never granted a professorship at the university in his hometown. He was, however, able to go to university in Paris between 1981 and 1985, where he studied the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Just prior to Yugoslavia's dissolution in 1990, he ran as the Slovenian Liberal Democrats' candidate for the presidency of Slovenia, despite his extremely critical position toward political liberalism, which he considered to be lacking in substance and power.

Žižek's thinking, which is oriented on German Idealism, on Hegel and Marx, focuses on the development of the autonomous subject and how it is imprisoned by ever-changing ideologies and identities. From Latin-America to Asia, he is valued for his critique of global capitalism and as an intellectual figurehead for the leftist protest movement. The shock over the terrorist attacks in Paris recently inspired him to write a polemical philosophical essay on Islam and modernism. In it, he addresses the rupture between tolerance in the Western world and the fundamental hatred of radical Islam against Western liberalism and makes a plea for the West to insist on the legacy of Enlightenment and its universal values. He argues that the true sovereignty of the people is only possible through a renewal of the Left.

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SPIEGEL: Mr. Žižek, the financial and economic crisis showed just how vulnerable the free market system can be. You have made it your task to examine the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Are you anticipating a new revolution?

Žižek: Unfortunately not.

SPIEGEL: But you would like to experience one? Are you still a communist?

Žižek: Many consider me to be a crazy Marxist who's waiting for the end of time. I may be a very eccentric, but I'm not a madman. I am a communist for lack of something better, out of despair over the situation in Europe. Six months ago, I was in South Korea to gave talks on the crisis in global capitalism, the usual you know, bla bla bla. Then the audience started to laugh and said: What are you talking about? Just look at us -- China, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam -- we're doing very well economically. So who is that has slipped into crisis? It's you in Western Europe -- or, more precisely, in parts of Western Europe.

SPIEGEL: Well, it's not quite as simple as that.

Žižek: Still, there's some truth to it. Why do we Europeans feel that our unfortunate situation is a full-fledged crisis? I think what we are feeling is not a question of yes or no to capitalism, but that of the future of our Western democracy. Something dark is forming on the horizon and the first wind storms have already reached us.

SPIEGEL: You're saying the economic crisis could lead to a political crisis?

Žižek: China, Singapore, India or -- closer to us -- recently Turkey don't augur well for the future. It's my belief that modern capitalism is developing in a direction in which it functions better without a fully developed democracy. The rise of the so-called capitalism with Asian values in the past 10 years at the very least raises doubts and questions: What if authoritarian capitalism on the Chinese model is an indication that liberal democracy as we understand it is no longer a condition for, and driving force of, economic development and instead stands in its way?

SPIEGEL: Democracy isn't there to pave the way for capitalism. It's there to counter the latent dangers of capitalism, which is what makes democracy all the more irreplaceable.

Žižek: But for that to be the case, there has to be more to it than just the principle of free elections. Freedom of choice can lead a society in every possible direction. In this sense, I am a Leninist. Lenin always asked ironically: Freedom -- yes, but for whom? To do what?

SPIEGEL: The freedom of self-determination. And, first and foremost, freedom of speech and opinion is also a part of it.

Žižek: Magnificent! I am not a Stalinist who mocks civil liberties and pronounces that the party line is the only true, real freedom. In personal and private areas, freedom of choice is increasing, even in China. I am referring to areas like sexual freedom, freedom of travel, freedom of trade and the freedom to become rich. But I wonder if that's enough and whether this kind of personal freedom of choice is actually perhaps a trap. The gains in personal freedom mask the loss of social freedom. The classic welfare state is being demolished. We are losing sight of where the societal process leads to and in what type of society we want to live in. The field of options within which we can live out our individual freedoms needs to be redefined.

SPIEGEL: In other words, you're missing a larger systemic debate. We saw one during the 1968 student revolts, but it didn't lead to any real results, with the exception of gains in liberal civic freedoms. In contrast to the desire for individual freedom, does the totalitarian temptation not lurk in the mobilization of the collective desire to overcome the existing system?

Žižek: The 20th century is over. A totalitarian regime is incapable of surviving in the long run. If we want to maintain the image of ourselves we have in the West, then we have to revisit the immense questions relating to the expansion of democratic freedoms and to the process of self-emancipation. It is here where Europe is most threatened. I am a eurocentric leftist. It has become fashionable in leftist circles to criticize eurocentrism in the name of multiculturalism. But I am convinced that we need Europe more than ever. Just imagine a world without Europe. You would only have two poles left -- the USA, with its brutal neoliberalism, and so-called Asian capitalism, with its authoritarian political structures. Between them you would have Putin's Russia, with its expansionist aspirations. You would lose the most valuable part of the European legacy, where democracy and freedom entail a collective action without which equality and fairness would not be possible.

SPIEGEL: That's the legacy of Enlightenment -- the transition from self-inflicted immaturity to that of autonomous self-determination.

Žižek: Exactly! I am not one of Jürgen Habermas' best friends, but I agree with him entirely on this point. More than ever before, we should continue to stick firmly to this project of European enlightenment. It is the only thing that will allow us to change the contours of that which appears possible or doable.

SPIEGEL: Is this aim not expecting too much of a liberal democracy?

Žižek: Yes. We should go beyond liberal democracy. Ordinary democracy works as follows: The majority of voters seem satisified with the pretence of freedom of choice. but in reality they do as they are told. It is telling that Germans' favorite choice of government is a grand coalition (Eds note: a governing coalition that pairs the country's two largest parties, the center-left Social Democrats and the conservative Christian Democrats). Out of fear of having to make truly radical, pioneering decisions, people are acting as if decisions are made on their own, based on the circumstances, on practical constraints and on pre-determined conditions. But sometimes you also have to alter the field of meaning instead of just skillfully analyzing things and adapting to them. The development of a general will, Rousseaus' volonté générale, doesn't happen in this way. The development of will remains individualized and privatized and is ultimately apolitical. That's a great environment for capitalism because liberal democratic freedom and individualized hedonism mobilize people for its purposes by transforming them into workaholics.

SPIEGEL: What do you see as the alternative?

Žižek: There is no way back to communism. Stalinism was in a certain sense worse than fascism, especially considering that the communist ideal was for Enlightenment to ultimately result in the self-liberation of the people. But that's also the tragedy of the dialectic of Enlightenment. Stalinism still remains a puzzle to me. Fascism never had Enlightenment ambitions, it exclusively pursued conservative modernization using criminal means. To some extent, Hitler wasn't radical or violent enough.

SPIEGEL: What? You don't mean that seriously, do you?

Žižek: What I am trying to say is that fascism may have constituted a reaction to the banality and self-complacency of the bourgeois, but it also remained trapped within the horizon of bourgeois society and perpetuated precisely this self-complacency. I share Walter Benjamin's view that every rise of fascism is the product of a failed revolution. The success of fascism is the failure of the Left and it proves that there was a revolutionary potential but that the Left didn't know how to use it.

SPIEGEL: What is the current state of the basic values of liberalism: freedom, equality and fairness? Is liberal democracy strong enough to protect itself from illiberal attacks?

Žižek: I doubt that it is able to withstand the challenges. The global capitalist system is approaching a dangerous zero-point. Its four riders of the apocalypse are the climate catastrophe, the obvious consequences of biogenetic research, the lack of self-regulation on the financial markets and the growing number of people who are shut out. The more globalized markets become, the stronger the forces of social apartheid will become.

SPIEGEL: The dangers have been recognized and they have been broadly discussed. Still, do you think that we are powerlessly stumbling toward the abyss?

Žižek: The lack of a clear alternative cannot mean that we simply continue with the status quo. If the existing system continues to reproduce, then we are heading toward its implosion. The only thing that can save liberal democracy is a renewal of the Left. If Leftists miss this chance, the danger of fascism or at least a new authoritarianism will grow.

SPIEGEL: These trends can already be observed today -- in religious fundamentalism, in right-wing populism and in an aggressive nationalism.

Žižek: That's right, and the answer to that cannot be the usual Leftist reactions of tolerance and understanding. No! By doing so, liberalism would undermine itself little by little. We have a right to set limits. We feel too guilty in Europe -- our multicultural tolerance is the effluent of a bad conscience, of a guilt complex that could cause Europe to perish. The greatest threat to Europe is its inertia, its retreat into a culture of apathy and general relativism. I am dogmatic in that sense. Freedom cannot be sustained without a certain amount of dogmatism. I don't want to cast doubt on everything or question everything. Liberal dogmatism is based on what Hegel called moral substance. That's why I am also against every form of political correctness, which attempts to control something that should be a part of our moral substance with societal or legal bans.

SPIEGEL: Doesn't every culture have a pain threshold for intolerance?

Žižek: There are things that are impossible to tolerate, "l'impossible-à-supporter," as Jacques Lacan put it. What would happen if some magazine openly made fun of the Holocaust? What about jokes that are felt to be sexist or racist? The left-liberal or libertarian position on general irony or grating humor tends to go in the opposite direction -- toward increased sensitivity for the defenselessness of others. You know, obscene jokes are a good test of the tolerance threshold between many cultural groups. I love them.

SPIEGEL: I'm tempted to ask, seriously?

Žižek: In earlier Yugoslavia, each constituent republic had a joke about the others. For example, Montenegrins were considered to be lazy. Montenegro has earthquakes. So why does a Montenegrin stick his penis in every hole or crevice? He's waiting for the next trembler because he's too lazy to masturbate. Or take the Jewish joke -- they can be wonderful in their self-derision. Do you know this one? A Jewish woman of Polish origin -- they're considered to be particularly serious in nature -- stoops as she cleans a tile floor. When her husband gets home and sees her stretched backside, he pulls up her skirt in excitement and takes her from behind. When he is finished, he asks his wife if she has also been brought to climax. No, she says, I still have three more tiles to go. Without obscene exchanges like that, we don't have any real contact with each other -- just a cold respect.

SPIEGEL: I wouldn't put too much faith in the strength of tests like that.

Žižek: There are limits, certainly. It becomes an explosive problem if two ethnic or religious groups live together in close vicinity who have irreconcilable ways of life and, as such, perceive criticism of their religion or way of life as being an attack on their very identity.

SPIEGEL: Is that not precisely the explosiveness packed in a statement that has recently become popular -- namely that Islam is also a part of Europe?

Žižek: Tolerance is not a solution there. What we need is what the Germans call a Leitkultur, a higher leading culture that regulates the way in which the subcultures interact. Multiculturalism, with its mutual respect for the sensitivities of the others, no longer works when it gets to this "impossible-à-supporter" stage. Devout Muslims find it impossible to tolerate our blasphemous images and our disrespectful humor, which constitute a part of our freedom. But the West, with its liberal practices, also finds forced marriages or the segregation of women, which are a part of Muslim life, to be intolerable. That's why I, as a Leftist, argue that we need to create our own leading culture.

SPIEGEL: What could that be? What might this leading culture look like? Even the universal application of human rights is sometimes questioned in the name of cultural differences.

Žižek: The European leading culture is the universality of Enlightenment within which individuals view themselves through this universality. That means you have to be capable of dispensing with your characteristics and to ignore your particular social, religious or ethnic positions. It's not sufficient to tolerate each other. We need to have the ability to experience our own cultural identity as something contingent, something coincidental, something that can be changed.

SPIEGEL: The universal individual is an abstraction. It doesn't exist in real life. In reality, everyone belongs to a group or a community.

Žižek: The universal individual is very much a reality in our life. Apart from apples, pears and grapes, there should be a place for fruits as such. I love the beauty of this platonic idea. People belong to a specific group, but at the same time they are part of a universal dimension. I don't remain the same throughout the course of my life, but I do remain me. A community is not closed either. A person can leave one and join another. Our identity is made up of several identities that can exist successively and in parallel.

SPIEGEL: "The days go by, not I," reads a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire.

Žižek: Spoken in Christian terms: The holy ghost is in us all -- we all share him, regardless if our identity is associated with a certain community. I'm an atheist, but I admire the emancipatory core of Christian teachings: Leave your father, your mother and follow me, Christ says. Leave your community behind in order to find your way to the universality of humanity!

SPIEGEL: Emancipation is an act of violence -- a parting and an uprooting. Islam doesn't permit people to leave the community of believers.

Žižek: There is no freedom, at least no universal freedom without a moment of violence. Parting with one's roots is quite a forceful process, but this force, which doesn't have to be physical, has something redemptive about it. Mind you, it is not about destroying that which makes us special. We are attached to our idiosyncrasies. But we have to recognize that the particular is based in a contingency, a happenstance that isn't substantial to the self. Universality is the opening to a radical contingency.

SPIEGEL: What does that mean for politics?

Žižek: Iranian Revolutionary Leader Khomeini once said: We Muslims aren't afraid of Western weapons or of economic imperialism. What we fear is the West's moral corruption. The extreme form of this resistance is Islamic State or, even more so, Boko Haram. What a strange phenomenon! A social and political movement whose main objective is to keep women uneducated and relegated to their place. The old motto from the 1960s, that everything was sexual is also political, is given unexpected new meaning here: The preservation of a strict sexual hierarchy becomes the most important political imperative. And did we not experience a weaker form of the same attitude in the Russian response to the Eurovision Song Contest because a bearded Conchita Wurst won? Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky said last May, "There are no more men or women in Europe, just it." Even our Catholic Church stirs up the same panic with its resistance to same-sex marriage.

SPIEGEL: Is unbridled individual hedonism the only thing we have with which to oppose this fundamentalism?

Žižek: No, for two reasons. The first is that our opponent isn't really religion. Zivko Kusti, a Croatian Catholic nationalist priest, declared Catholicism to be a symbol of the fact that people aren't prepared to renounce their national and cultural legacy -- "the whole Croatianness." This statement makes clear that it is no longer an issue of faith and its truth, but rather a political-cultural project. Religion here is just an instrument, an indicator of our collective identity. It's about how much public one's own side controls, the amount of hegemony "our" side exerts. That's why Kusti approvingly quotes an Italian communist who claims, "I am an atheist Catholic." That's also why Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who himself is not very religious, referenced the Christian legacy as a foundation of European identity. The second reason, which is even more decisive, is that the unbridled personal freedom of choice fits in excellently with today's capitalism in the sense that the global social and economic process is becoming more and more impenetrable. Individual hedonism and fundamentalism are mutually driving each other. You can only effectively combat fundamentalism with a new collective project of radical change. And there is nothing trivially hedonistic about that.

SPIEGEL: Who determines what is contingent and what is substantial? For an orthodox Muslim, the headscarf is not contingent, it is substantial.

Žižek: Therein lays the explosive problem. The girl, the woman must decide on that in a self-determined manner. In order for her to be able to do that, she must be freed of the pressure of the family and community. And this is where the emancipatory violence applies: The only possibility for autonomy is uprooting, tearing one's self out of the community's pressure to conform. That's why one of my heroes is Malcolm X. The "X" stands for uprooting. It didn't drive him to search for his African roots. On the contrary, he saw it as a chance to attain a new universal freedom.

SPIEGEL: You welcome this violence?

Žižek: I accept this violence because it's the price for true contingency and the liberation of the self. It's like a sadomasochistic sex game. Those involved can participate in all the perversions. At any time, though, everyone has the right to say, "Stop, that's it, I'm stopping and leaving." Progress in Western democracy consists of constantly expanding the scope of universality and, by doing so, also diversifying the freedom of choice between contingent decisions. But contingency does not mean triviality. Our most valuable collective achievements are contingent -- they come out of nowhere and break with our substantial identities.

SPIEGEL: Is the tireless work of expanding public free spaces the job of public intellectuals like you? That's more reminiscent of the open society of Karl Popper than of Marx's proletariat revolution.

Žižek: My god, anything but Popper! In this sense, I am still a Marxist, because what is important to me is the infrastructure of freedom inherent in institutions. Specialists -- idiots in the original sense of the word -- take care of finding solutions to specific problems. The intellectual is concerned with asking questions in a new way and reflecting about the societal conditions for exercising personal civil liberties. In his essay "What is Enlightenment" Kant differentiates between private and public uses of reason. This is more relevant today than ever before. To Kant, public use of reason meant free thinking apart from any political or religious pressures, whereas the use of reason in the service of the state is private. Our struggle today, and this includes WikiLeaks, is to keep the public space alive.

SPIEGEL: So how can we develop an emancipatory solidarity between groups that are culturally different?

Žižek: My answer is to struggle. Empty universality is clearly not enough. The clash of cultures should not be overcome through a feeling of global humanism, but rather through overall solidarity with those struggling within every culture. Our struggle for emancipation should be coupled with the battle against India's caste system and the workers' resistance in China. Everything is dependent on this: the battle for the Palestinians and against anti-Semitism, WikiLeaks and Pussy Riot -- all are part of the same struggle. If not, then we can all just kill ourselves.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Žižek, we thank you for this interview.

Madisen Ward and the Mama Bear - "Silent Movies" (Live at WFUV)

Bluegrass music against gentrification

random thoughts on the symptom

Here is some miscellaneous information about the symptom.

a basic, simple definition to start with:

symptom--something in mind or body which intrudes into your life to bring you misery. The symptom represents a portion of jouissance which has not been dislodged, and which has come back to disrupt your existence.

The symptom is what we (we 'normal' neurotics) complain about. But the symptom can also function as a 'knot' to bind together the three registers of imaginary, symbolic, and Real. So, even though we complain about it, we don't really want to lose it, since it organizes our existence. I had a good friend (who recently died of pancreatic cancer). He used to complain all of the time to me about his wife. According to what he said, he might have been happy, except he was stuck with her. She was (allegedly) the source of all the misery in his life. I told him over and over to leave her. I told him life was too short to be miserable, etc., etc. But nothing I said ever did any good. He just came up with all kinds of elaborate excuses for why he needed to stay with her. I finally realized that he needed her somehow. It was easier for him to keep his symptom than to encounter the Real and be cured.

I think it is significant that many men say this about women: "You can't live with them, and you can't live without them."

This is interesting because, according to Lacanian theory, men would not even BE men without women. This means that when they say this, men are complaining about the very thing that makes them to be what they are.

Here is a Žižek quote: 

"the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts..."

Below is some relevant info I found online at http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol2-1998/n28speck.

It is a summary of some ideas from Žižek's first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology:

In the first two chapters Žižek explains the psychoanalytical definition of ideology and its connection with Marxism: ideology 'is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as 'ideological'' (21) It is crucial to understand the futility of a critical or even cynical standpoint *vis a vis* an ideological problem, say, the condition of our society. The fetishist's 'I know, but nevertheless' is exactly the key to understanding this problem: 'The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence.' (28). We know that the use value of Beanie Babies is next to zero, nevertheless we exchange them for hundreds of dollars. If the object itself (a kitschy bag full of pellets) were the fetish (or the ideology), it could be easily destroyed. We are indeed not fetishizing commodities or money, but actually the fantasy itself.

Lacan's formula for the relation of Subject and Object, equally the formula for the phantasma, is '$ <> a' (see: Lacan, Seminar XI). The Subject, split and 'barred' by language, is directing his desire onto the object a, to retrieve the 'lost', imaginary unity with the mother, situated 'before' the entry into the symbolic order. It is crucial to stress the difference between the fantasy as scenario, inscenating/illustrating the desire of the subject and the impossible gaze onto the 'objet petit a'. The sign '<>' must be read as screen: '[T]he 'object' of fantasy is not the fantasy scene itself, its content (the parental coitus, for example), but the impossible gaze witnessing it'. [1]

The sense of wholeness that ideology extends to one is an imaginary function, connected to the ideal ego. Thus fetish and symptom cannot be destroyed simply by explanation, they have to be analyzed (see here Žižek’s example of the ideological figure of the Jew, starting page 97, especially 125-28). To further illustrate his argument about the quasi-external nature of the symptom Žižek chooses the 'canned laughter' of sitcom: Somebody else (the laughing track) is having a good time for me (35). Though we know about the idiocy and irrelevancy of Seinfeld, we enjoy the show. This jouissance (enjoyment, enjoy-meant) is not a side effect, it is the only driving force, aiming at the fulfillment of an ultimately unsatisfiable desire, like the surplus value that drives capitalism.

As with every act of fetishisation, the mechanisms of metaphoric disavowal and metonymic replacements are covering a lack (the absence of the phallus, the void of the real, the desire of the Other/the death drive) and becoming a quasi-entity, that is more in the subject, than the subject itself. In Freudian terminology this paradoxical construction is the 'Vorstellungsrepraesentanz' (see 160-61). In the case of collecting Beanie Babies this might be considered a mere and harmless perversion of taste; the collecting of territory for the grandeur of the (German/Serbian/whatever) nation is something different. Nevertheless both of these symptomatic constructions, as unrelated as they might seem, follow a similar psychic construction, insofar as they 'quilt' our ideological field and in the same instant bind our surplus-enjoyment in this object-cause of desire. This paradoxical 'point de capiton', 'a signifier without the signified' (97) is the tautological, empty signifier, giving consistency to the ideological field: 'I collect Beanie Babies because they are rare. Why are they rare? Because they are collectibles.' Or in the worst case: 'What makes you special? I am a German! What does that mean? I have Aryan blood! Why do you have Aryan blood? Because I am a German!' And so on . . .

In the second part of the book, Žižek traces this paradoxical point-without-location through several fields. My above-mentioned example, fascist ideology, can be explained with the self-referential emptiness of the Fuehrer's claim, that he is the embodiment of the people's will. The fascist 'Leader's point of reference, the instance to which he is referring to legitimize his rule (the People, the Class, the Nation) does not exist -- or, more precisely, exists only through and in its fetishistic representative, the Party and its Leader.' (146) Another example is the post-structuralist dogma 'There is no metalanguage!' The only point of reference for such a statement is indeed the impossible position outside of discourse (see 154-55). Or, in Žižek's words: 'The phallic signifier is, so to speak, an index of its own impossibility.' (157)

 [vanishingmediator’s comment: cf. Jacques Derrida: “By a strange paradox, meaning would isolate the concentrated purity of its ex-pressiveness just at that moment when the relation to a certain outside is suspended.” (Derrida, La Voix et le Phénomène)]

Finally, Zizek outlines Lacan's different approach to the problem of the Real -- is it the 'really real', an untouchable thing-as-such/'Thing-in-itself', is it something resisting symbolization, or is it the subject supposed to know, a cause, that doesn't exist, something like Hitchcock's MacGuffin (see 162-164)? Zizek quickly dismisses the first oversimplifying definition and argues along the lines of his ideas about the founding paradox: the Real 'is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness in a symbolic structure marking some central impossibility' (173). And this, according to Zizek, is the difference between the so-called 'post-structuralist' position and Lacan's position: The former describes the subject as being the result of a subjectivating processes ('assujetissement'), while the latter conceives of the subject as an 'answer of the Real' -- because the signified can never find a signifier that would fully represent it, this void we call a subject is created (174-75). In the last chapter, Zizek gives another example of these 'impossible' founding things, the Sublime: 'The Sublime is . . . the paradox of an object which, in the very field of representation, provides a view, in a negative way, of the dimension of what is unrepresentable.' (202) Especially the last point, the Sublime, is a good example for how this book (and most of Zizek's work for that matter) can be used for film theory and analysis. The sublime beauty of Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Tippy Hedren in Marnie is not a separate 'entity' (e.g. 'a beautiful actress is portraying this and this character'), it is the impossible object of the male gaze. Both women appear in a similar movement from below the picture frame, throwing their hair back. The whole following story now centers around a man, trying to pin down, to frame their essence. The quintessential stripping away of this futile enterprise is Gilda's famous striptease. Johnny, a 'god of prosthesis' (Freud, Civilisation and its Discontent) in his bureau, equipped with surveillance microphones, can not prevent Gilda from performing her self-referential striptease. While taking the blame for everything, even for natural disasters, she performs the ultimate act of fetishization before the eyes of the nightclub guests (i.e. the big Other). This sequence starts significantly with a prophesy of the police officer that Johnny will fall apart (i.e. become a hysteric), and Johnny's point-of-view shot through the jalousie (sic!) on to the vulgar performance of the woman he is obsessed with. Gilda's subversive act destroys in one movement the illusion that there is 'something to see' and that there is something essential about woman. Her exposition thus exposes the fetish of the sexual arousing 'whore' and the sublime essence of the 'mother' as covering the lack in the Big Other. Or, as Lacan puts it (over and over): woman is the symptom of man.

Chronology

http://www.lacan.com/zizekchro1.htm

He was born the only child of middle-class bureaucrats (who hoped he would become an economist) on 21 March 1949 in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia and, at that time, part of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was, then, under the rule of Marshal Tito (1892-1980), one of the more 'liberal' communist countries in the Eastern Bloc, although, as Žižek points out, the freedoms the regime granted its subjects were rather ambivalent, inducing in the population a form of pernicious self-regulation. One aspect of state control that did have a positive effect on Žižek, however, was the law which required film companies to submit to local university archives a copy of every film they wished to distribute. Žižek was, therefore, able to watch every American and European release and establish a firm grasp of the traditions of Hollywood which have served him so well since.

Žižek's interest in the films of Hollywood was matched only by a dislike for the films and, particularly, the literature of his own country. Much of Slovenian art was, for him, contaminated by either the ideology of the Communist Party or by a right-wing nationalism. Slovenian poetry specifically is still, according to Žižek, falsely venerated as "the fundamental cornerstone of Slovene society". Consequently, from his teenage years onwards, Žižek devoted himself to reading only literature written in English, particularly detective fiction. Pursuing his own cultural interests, Žižek developed an early taste for philosophy and knew by the age of 17 that he wanted to be a philosopher. Studying at the University of Ljubljana, Žižek published his first book when he was 20 and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts (philosophy and sociology) in 1971, and then went on to complete a Master of Arts (philosophy) in 1975. The 400-page thesis for the latter degree was entitled "The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of French Structuralism", a work which analysed the growing influence of the French thinkers Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gilles Deleuze. Unfortunately, although Žižek had been promised a job at the university, his thesis was deemed by the officiating panel to be politically suspicious and he therefore lost the job to another candidate who was closer to the party line. According to his fellow Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar (b. 1951), the authorities were concerned that the charismatic teaching of Žižek might improperly influence students with his dissident thinking.

Disappointed by this rejection of his talents, Žižek spent the next couple of years in the professional wilderness, undertaking his National Service in the Yugoslav army, and supporting his wife and son as best he could by occasionally translating German philosophy. However, in 1977 several of his influential connections secured him a post at the Central Committee of the League of Slovene Communists where, despite his supposedly dissident politics, he occasionally wrote speeches for leading communists and, during the rest of the time, studied philosophy. In these years, Žižek became part of a significant group of Slovenian scholars working on the theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and with whom he went on to found the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana. This group, among whose best-known members are Dolar and Žižek's second wife Renata Salecl (b. 1962), established editorial control over a journal called Problem! (in which Žižek was not afraid to author bad reviews of his own books, or even to write reviews of books that did not exist), and began to publish a book series called Analecta. Žižek himself is unsure as to why so many Lacanians should have gathered in Ljubljana, but he does point out that, in contrast to the other countries in the former Yugoslavia, there was no established psychoanalytic community to hamper or mitigate their interest in the usually controversial work of the Frenchman.

Although still disbarred from a traditional university position, in 1979 Žižek's friends procured him a better job as Researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Institute for Sociology. At the time, Žižek thought that this was an intellectual cul-de-sac in which the communist regime placed those who were inconvenient to them. As it transpired, however, this job, which would be the envy of most academics, meant Žižek was able to pursue his research interests free from the pressures of teaching and bureaucracy. It was there that, in 1981, he earned his first Doctor of Arts degree in philosophy. It was also in 1981 that Žižek travelled to Paris for the first time to meet some of the thinkers he had been writing about for so long and writing to - (he has several books by Jacques Derrida, for example, dedicated to him). Although Lacan was chief among these thinkers, he died in 1981 and it was actually Lacan's son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, who was to prove more decisive in Žižek's development.

Miller conducted open discussions about Lacan in Paris (and he still does), but he also conducted a more exclusive thirty-student seminar at the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne in which he examined the works of Lacan on a page by page basis. As the only representatives of Eastern Europe, both Žižek and Dolar were invited to join this seminar and it is there that Žižek developed his understanding of the later works of Lacan which still informs his thinking today. Miller also procured a teaching fellowship for Žižek and became his analyst. It was during these analytical sessions with Miller, which often only lasted ten minutes, that Žižek learned the truth of his oft-reported assertion that educated patients report symptoms and dreams appropriate to the type of psychoanalysis they are receiving. The result of Žižek's fabrication was that the sessions with Miller often ended up as a game of intellectual cat-and-mouse.

This game ended in something of an impasse when Žižek completed his second Doctor of Arts (this time in psychoanalysis) at the Universite Paris-VIII in 1985. Miller, with whom Žižek had successfully defended his thesis, was the head of a publishing house but he delayed publishing Žižek's dissertation and so Žižek had to resort to a publisher outside the inner circle of Lacanians. This second major disappointment of his professional career threw Žižek back on his own resources. These resources were already being put to more obvious political ends back in Slovenia where Žižek became a regular columnist in a paper called Mladina. Mladina was a platform for the growing democratic opposition to the communist regime, a regime whose power was gradually diminishing throughout the second half of the 1980s in the face of growing political pluralism in both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In 1990, the first democratic elections were held in Slovenia and Žižek stood for a place on the four-man Presidency - he came a narrow fifth. Although he stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate, this position was more strategic than a matter of conviction as he was attempting to defeat the conservative alliance between the nationalists and the ex-communists. Žižek does not, as he has often said, mind getting his political hands dirty. Nor did he mind becoming the Ambassador of Science for the Republic of Slovenia in 1991.

Although Žižek continues to provide informal advice to the Slovenian government, his energies over the past decade have been firmly geared towards his research. Indeed, since 1989 and the publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek has launched over 15 monographs, and a number of edited works written in English, on an eager public. He has also written books in German, French and Slovene, as well as having his work translated into Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian and Swedish. The prolific intensity of Žižek's written output has been matched by his international success as a lecturer where he has faithfully transcribed the molten energy of the word on the page to the word on the stage across four different continents. Apart from his post at what is now the Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Žižek has also held positions at SUNY Buffalo; the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; the Tulane University, New Orleans; the Cardozo Law School, New York; Columbia University, New York; Princeton University; the New School for Social Research, New York; and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor since 1991. He also maintains his editorial role for the Analecta series in Slovenia, as well as helping establish Wo es war (a series based on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism) and SIC (a series devoted to Lacanian analyses of culture and politics) in German and English.

At all stages in Žižek's life, then, we can detect the insistence of a theme. When he was growing up he preferred the films of Hollywood to the dominant culture of poetry in his own country. As a student he developed an interest in, and wrote about, French philosophy rather than the official communist paradigms of thought. When he began his professional career he preferred to read Lacan in terms of other philosophers rather than adhering to the orthodox Lacanian line. And, as we have seen, as a philosopher himself, he constantly refers to popular culture rather than those topics customarily studied by the subject. In each case, therefore, Žižek's intellectual development has been marked by a distance or heterogeneity to the official culture within which he works. He has always been a stain or point of opacity within the ruling orthodoxy and is never fully integrated by the social or philosophical conventions against which he operates.

The point is that although Žižek 's unauthorized approach has cost him the chance to become part of the established institutions on at least two occasions (once with his Master's thesis and once with his second Doctorate), he has defined his position only in his resistance to those institutions. This is not necessarily a question of Žižek initiating some kind of academic rebellion, nor even of proving how in the long run his talents have surpassed the obstacles erected against them, but rather of claiming that the character or identity of Žižek's philosophy is predicated upon the failure of the institutions to accomodate his thought. The eventual success of Žižekian theory proceeds partly from its clearly failure, from the fact that Žižek was able to perceive himself as alien to the system in which he worked. It was this alienation, this difference to the discourse of philosophy of which it was and is a part, which forged the identity of Žižek's own thought. Because Žižekian theory was no part of the objective system, it was in itself subjective. The reason that this is so pertinent is that Žižek describes the formation of what is known as the "subject" in a similar way. Indeed, one of Žižek's main contributions to critical theory is his detailed elaboration of the subject.

Did he or did he not give Germany the finger?

Greek finance minister's gesture was taken out of context but the finger was pointed in the right direction.

18 Mar 2015

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/03/give-germany-finger-150318054035307.html

As the two among the organisers and participants of the Subversive Festival in Zagreb in May 2013, we were happy to invite Yanis Varoufakis - now Greece's finance minister - to give a public lecture at the Festival and to present his book "The Global Minotaur".

In answering a question from the public, Varoufakis did not point the middle finger at Germany or the Germans but was talking about a hypothetical situation referring to January 2010 when Greece owed not one Euro to German taxpayers. His idea was that Greece should have defaulted to its private creditors rather than take on a huge loan from its European partners (including of course Germany).

The recent outcry, Varoufakis's gesture (or a figure of speech) and its meaning were thus torn out of the context by German media and manipulated in the most brutal propaganda manner: his figure of speech from two years ago was related to a totally different situation.

Low level of attacks

So why bring out that forgotten detail from a conference in Zagreb? The answer is easy to guess: it is part of a very dubious strategy to discredit the Syriza government.

What should worry us all is the low personal level of the attacks on the key persons of the Syriza government. First, Alexis Tsipras was attacked for living in the same modest apartment as before the elections, and now Varoufakis is attacked for living in a comfortable apartment.

All the racist cliches about the lazy Greeks who want to live at the expense of hard-working Europeans are shamelessly mobilised. What reality does such an approach obfuscate?

In negotiations with the EU as well as in his public statements, Varoufakis consistently displayed a modest approach of finding a rational way out of the deadlock, expressing readiness for compromises which even triggered the first demonstrations against Syriza in Greece. What he and Greece are getting in response is a repeated humiliating refusal to engage in serious negotiations.

Rational debate

Clearly avoiding rational debate, German media are now more and more descending to the level of yellow press, presenting Varoufakis and Tsipras as eccentrics who just perform circus-like tricks and offer irresponsible demagogic proposals.

The sad message of all this is clear: to add insult to injury, Greece has to be not only kept in financial chains but also humiliated. And the ultimate victim of it will be all of us, in short: Europe.

Insofar as "sticking the finger to Germany", "Germany" clearly didn't refer to the state or people but to the German government which was at the time (and is today) the main representative of the disastrous austerity policies in the EU.

In this respect, it was the finger pointed in the right direction. That message was clearly understood by anyone present at the Subversive Festival in May 2013 as it should be today, especially in Germany.

Thus the real scandal is not the use of the good old Greek tradition of the middle finger (who hasn't shown the middle finger at least once in his life?), but what Germany (or the German government to be more precise) is doing to Greece and the rest of Europe.

So in the midst of this debate about fingers, let's not forget the big fat finger Berlin and Brussels are raising at Greece.

Srecko Horvat is a philosopher from Croatia. His latest books include "After the End of History. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement" and "What Does Europe Want?", co-authored with Slavoj Zizek. 

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural critic. He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.