Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, December 30, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, December 28, 2012
Welcome to the Slavoj Zizek Show
By Philipp Oehmke
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-most-dangerous-philosopher-in-the-west-welcome-to-the-slavoj-zizek-show-a-705164-2.html
[…]
Part 2: 'He'll Have to be Sent to the Gulag'
His repertoire is a mix of Lacanian psychoanalysis and
Hegel's idealist philosophy -- of film analysis, criticism of democracy,
capitalism and ideology, and an occasionally authoritarian Marxism paired with
everyday observations. He explains the ontological essence of the Germans,
French and Americans on the basis of their toilet habits and the resulting
relationship with their fecal matter, and he initially reacts to criticism with
a cheerful "Fuck you!" -- pronounced in hard Slavic consonants. He
tells colleagues he values but who advocate theories contrary to his own that
they should prepare to enter the gulag when he, Zizek, comes into power. He
relishes the shudder that the word gulag elicits.
"Take my friend Peter, for example, fucking Sloterdijk.
I like him a lot, but he'll obviously have to be sent to the gulag. He'll be in
a slightly better position there. Perhaps he could work as a cook."
One could say it's funny, especially the way Zizek delivers
it, in his exaggerated and emphatic way. But one could also think of the more
than 30 million people who fell victim to Soviet terror. Those who find Zizek's
remarks amusing could just as easily be telling jokes about concentration
camps.
"But you know?" Zizek says in response to such
criticism. "The best, most impressive films about the Holocaust are
comedies."
Two Posters of Stalin
Zizek loves to correct viewpoints when precisely the
opposite is considered correct. He calls this counterintuitive observation. His
favorite thought form is the paradox. Using his psychoanalytical skills, he
attempts to demonstrate how liberal democracy manipulates people. One of his
famous everyday observations on this subject relates to the buttons used to
close the door in elevators. He has discovered that they are placebos. The
doors don't close a second faster when one presses the button, but they don't
have to. It's sufficient that the person pressing the button has the illusion
that he is able to influence something. The political illusion machine that
calls itself Western democracy functions in exactly the same way, says Zizek.
His detractors accuse him of fighting liberal democracy and
of wanting to replace it with authoritarian Marxism, even Stalinism. They say
he is particularly dangerous because he cloaks his totalitarianism in pop
culture. The jacket of his book "In Defense of Lost Causes" depicts a
guillotine, the symbol of leftist terror decreed from above -- "good
terror," as Zizek has been known to say. The Suhrkamp publishing house
removed passages from the German edition of the book which reportedly toyed
with totalitarianism.
There are two posters of Josef Stalin on the wall in Zizek's
apartment in a new building in downtown Ljubljana.
"It doesn't mean anything! It's just a joke,"
Zizek is quick to point out.
He says that he'll be happy to remove the posters of Stalin
from the wall if they offend his visitors. And he says that he is tired of
being characterized as a Stalinist. He has been sharply criticized in recent
weeks in publications like the liberal, left-leaning US magazine The New
Republic, Germany's Merkur and the German weekly newspaper Die
Zeit. His critics write that Zizek's thoughts on communism ignore history and
are insufficiently serious, and that his theory of revolution is downright
fascist. And now he has even been accused, once again, of anti-Semitism. Even
Suhrkamp decided not to publish some of his writings, arguing that they could
-- maliciously -- be interpreted as anti-Semitic. These accusations are
opprobrious, but Zizek knows he isn't entirely innocent. His constant drilling,
poking and questioning is truly subversive, but sometimes it makes him
extremely vulnerable. He says that those who attack him in this way have rarely
comprehended his thoughts.
For Zizek, philosophy means thinking out of bounds -- far
removed from practical execution, as opposed to reality-based political
science, which must have its limits. When American leftist liberals accuse him
of making a case for a new leftist dictatorship, Zizek points out that it was
he, not they, who lived under (former Yugoslav dictator Josip) Tito and, as a
young professor, was barred from teaching.
The Itinerant Intellectual
Zizek's roughly 600-square-foot apartment looks as though
Tito were still in power. It consists of three rooms and is carelessly
furnished. A poster from a Mark Rothko exhibition hangs on the wall above the
sofa in Soviet-era colors; otherwise, the furnishings consist of a rack of
DVDs, bookshelves, mountains of "Star Wars" Legos and his laundry,
which he keeps in his kitchen cabinets. He serves iced tea in Disney cups.
He lives alone in the apartment, except when his son from
his second marriage stays with him. He also has a son from his first marriage.
His last wife was an Argentine lingerie model, 30 years his junior, the
daughter of a student of Lacan who, ironically enough, is named Analia.
Zizek wears jeans and a T-shirt, blue sandals from the Adlon
Hotel in Berlin and socks from Lufthansa's Business Class. "I haven't
bought any socks in years," he says. He stays in the best hotels, and he
has just returned from a trip to China and Los Angeles. He spoke about Mao in
China and Richard Wagner in Los Angeles. The Chinese had invited him because of
his status as a communist thought leader, but he doesn't believe that they
understand his theories.
"They translated 10 of my books, the idiots," says
Zizek. The Chinese translated the books as poetry and not as philosophical and
political works. The translators had supposedly never heard of Hegel and had no
idea what they were actually translating. To make up for these deficiencies,
they tried to make his words sound appealing.
The experience of meeting Zizek is initially fascinating for
everyone (for the first hour), then frustrating (it's impossible to get a word
in edgewise) and, finally, cathartic (the conversation does, eventually, come
to an end). Zizek begins to talk within the first few seconds, and in his case
talking means screaming, gesticulating, spitting and sweating. He has a speech
defect known as sigmatism, and when he pronounces the letter "s" it
sounds like a bicycle pump. He usually begins his discourse with the words
"Did you know…," and then he jumps from topic to topic, like a
thinking machine that's been stuffed with coins and from then on doesn't stop
spitting out words.
Empty Battery
Zizek has created an artificial character. His appearances
are performances, something between art and comedy. He says that he wants to
get away from these standup comedy appearances, and that he wants to give a
serious lecture in Berlin, mostly about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the
subject of his new book. He says that he has already written 700 pages. It
would take a normal person 10 years to write 700 pages about the man who may
have been the most difficult thinker in the history of philosophy. Zizek wrote
his 700 pages on airplanes in the last few months.
A comforting thing happens after exactly three hours in
Zizek time. Suddenly his battery seems to have run empty, and the machine
stops. Zizek has diabetes. His blood sugar is much too high, he says, or maybe
it's much too low. The symptoms seem to be particularly severe at the moment.
But Slavoj Zizek would not be Slavoj Zizek if he were to describe such a thing
in such banal terms. Instead, he says: "You know, my diabetes has now
become a self-perpetuating system, completely independent of external
influences! It does what it pleases. And now I have to go to sleep."
On the way to Berlin, Zizek has not managed to put together
his talk on the plane, as he had expected. While the speaker preceding him at
the Volksbühne, a short man from Turkey with long hair and a long beard,
is still speaking, Zizek is shifting papers from one stack to the next,
searching, writing things down and furiously reading his notes. Strands of hair
are pasted to his forehead. Zizek doesn't just sweat while speaking, but also
while thinking.
It is now the second day of the conference, and so far Zizek
has had to content himself by merely asking the speakers questions. Now, he
immediately attacks Negri who, on the previous day, had accused him and Badiou
of neglecting the class struggle. Negri's theory of the "multitude,"
that is, his concept of a revolutionary subject that sees commonality in the
differences among individuals, assumes that late capitalism eliminated itself,
and that this alone is the source of a revolutionary situation. This is far too
concrete and pragmatic for Zizek and Badiou. Zizek arms himself with Hegel's
concept of totality, with Plato's concept of truth and Heidegger's concept of
the event. He argues that to one has to be outside the state to abolish it, but
that Negri remains within the system, which is why his "multitude"
can never start a revolution.
'Think I'm an Idiot'
Negri, furrowing his leathery brow, reacts testily. Zizek,
he says, has lost the revolutionary subject, but without a revolutionary
subject there can be no resistance. Badiou observes the argument with the face
of an old turtle, as if he were wondering which of the two he would like to
send to a labor camp first. The moderator asks Badiou whether he would like to
comment. Badiou waves aside the question, flashes a wolfish grin, and says that
he intends to comment on Negri, and perhaps on Zizek, as well, the next day. It
sounds like a threat.
At the end of Zizek's lecture, an audience member asks a
complicated and unintelligible question. "You made a good point,"
says Zizek, and continues to talk about Hegel. His response has nothing to do
with the question, which in turn has nothing to do with the lecture. The game
could continue endlessly in the same vein. Suddenly Zizek pushes aside the
cardboard screen and interrupts his Hegel lecture. "Okay! It doesn't
matter. As I said already, you made quite a good point. And the truth is that I
have no response. In fact, my long-winded talk was also just an attempt to
cover up that fact!" The audience seems grateful, now that Zizek has said
that it's okay to say that you don't understand something and don't have a clue
as to what something is talking about. Even Zizek does it.
"I know that people often think I'm an idiot," he
says that evening, "that nostalgic Leninist. But I'm not crazy. I'm much
more modest and much more pessimistic."
Why pessimistic? In fact, it isn't absurd at all to assume
that capitalism and democracy have reached a dead end. "That's true,"
says Zizek, "but I believe that the left is, tragically, bereft of any
vision to be taken seriously. We all wish for a real, authentic revolution! But
it has take place far away, preferably in Cuba, Vietnam, China or Nicaragua.
The advantage of that is that it allows us to continue with our careers
here." He ends the conversation by saying that it's time for him to return
to his hotel -- you know, the diabetes, he says.
'See You Tomorrow!'
Late Saturday evening, just as the US and Ghana World Cup
match is in overtime, Zizek calls again. He sounds excited. "Did you watch
my clash with Negri today? Unbelievable! What is he talking about! That late
capitalism is doing away with itself?"
Zizek says that the revolution can never function without an
authority, without control, and that this was already the case during the
French Revolution and with the Jacobins.
He pauses. Zizek rarely pauses when he speaks, because it
makes him feel self-conscious for an instant.
Finally he says: The thing about the state and revolution
reminds him of women. "It's impossible to live with them, but even more
impossible without them."
He seems about to talk himself into a rage again, but just
as the machine is revving up he suddenly interrupts himself.
"Oh, let's forget about it. I'll see you tomorrow, my
friend!"
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Žižek: A Brief bio
Personal Life
Žižek was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, the capital city of
Slovenia which was at the time a part of Yugoslavia. He spent a great part of
his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož. His parents moved back to the
Slovenian capital while he was a teenager and enrolled him to a prestigious
high school in Ljubljana. Žižek continued his education at the University of
Ljubljana where he studied philosophy and sociology. After receiving a Doctor’s
degree, he went to Paris where he studied psychoanalysis.
At the time Žižek began to study philosophy, the communist
Yugoslavia was entering a period of liberalisation. But he was studying French
structuralists even before he became a student of philosophy and sociology at
the University of Ljubljana. As a high school student, Žižek published the
first Slovene translation of Jacques Derrida.
Despite the fact that Žižek studied philosophy during the
era of liberalisation, he was influenced greatly by his teacher, Slovenian
Marxist philosopher Božidar Debenjak. The latter was a professor at the Faculty
of Arts in Ljubljana where he taught German idealism and Karl Marx’s Capital
from the Hegelian (philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) perspective.
In the early 1970s, Žižek became an assistant researcher at
the University of Ljubljana and was promised tenure. However, soon thereafter
the Communist regime removed liberal leaders throughout Yugoslavia including
what was then the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. As a result of toughening of
the regime and Žižek’s Master’s work being evaluated as anti-Marxist, he lost
his position at the University of Ljubljana.
In 1977, after being unemployed for four years, Žižek found
a job at the Slovenian Marxist Center where he worked as a recording clerk. At
that time he also came into contact with a group of scholars who introduced him
to the theories of Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who
had a major influence on his later work. In the late 1970s, Žižek returned to
the University of Ljubljana and was employed by the Institute of Sociology.
In the late 1980s, Žižek attracted a lot of attention both
at home and abroad. At home, he gained a lot of publicity as a columnist of the
alternative magazine called Mladina (“Youth”) which was critical towards the
Communist regime. Žižek who was a member of the Communist Party (like the
majority of scholars and intellectuals at that time) returned his membership
out of protest due to the so-called JBTZ trial. It was a trial held against two
Mladina journalists, the magazine’s editor and a sergeant at the Yugoslav
People’s Army for betrayal of military secrets in 1988. Žižek became active in
political and civil movements for democratisation and even ran for Presidency
of the Republic of Slovenia at the first free elections in 1990.
In the international scene, Žižek attracted attention in the
late 1980s with his book The Sublime Object of Ideology and established himself
as one of the most influential social theorist and contemporary philosopher.
Work
Despite the fact that Žižek was actively involved in the
democratisation process in Slovenia, he is committed to the communist idea and
describes himself as a “radical leftist” and “communist in a qualified sense”.
His political ideas and criticism of the existing political and economic
systems caused a great deal of controversy in the intellectual circles on the
one hand, and earned him the title of one of the foremost thinkers of modern
times and a near celebrity-status on the other.
[…]
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