A life in writing: Slavoj Žižek

[CHIMO]

"There is an anarchist leftist group here in London who hate me," says Slavoj Žižek with a giggle as we settle into a dilapidated leather sofa in the bar of his Bloomsbury hotel. He is wearing freebie airline socks, an Italian T-shirt someone gave him and jeans that could easily have been made decades earlier in an unsuccessful Soviet tractor factory. "But fuck it, let's speak frankly, no bullshit, most of the left hates me even though I am supposed to be one of the world's leading communist intellectuals."

Žižek summons the waiter and orders hot chocolate, Diet Coke and lots of sugar ("I am diabetic"). He is disappointed, he tells me parenthetically, that we didn't do the interview in the hotel's adjacent Virginia Woolf burger bar. "What would the Virginia Woolf burger be like?" he asks. "Dried out, topped with parsley, totally overrated. I always preferred Daphne du Maurier." He then launches into a denunciation of the pretensions of James Joyce, arguing that his literary career went downhill after Dubliners, and then into a eulogy to the radical minimalism of Beckett's Not I. Within minutes we're on to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's views on the Malaysian economic miracle, the prospects for Žižek's film theory course in Ramallah and Katarina Wagner's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, in which Hans Sachs is depicted as a Heil Hitler-ing Nazi. One's task as a reader or interviewer of Žižek is rapidly to build a network of mental pontoon bridges to unite his seemingly autonomous intellectual territories.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jul/15/slavoj-zizek-interview-life-writing

[tishaLA]

1. Zizek taught or cotaught a class I took...

While I was still doing coursework. Generally speaking, it was fun because the class was called Lacan and Politics, we got to read an unpublished seminar Lacan conducted, and students weren't only from English and Comp Lit--we had students from Art History, Ethnomusicology, Political Science, History, etc. And while there were more students than a typical grad seminar, there were still only about 25 students in the class.

Zizek is entertaining, exuberant, and sometimes ridiculous. When he spoke about Deleuze, which he did quite frequently, it was an entirely different Deleuze than the one I'd read (I later discovered he did this as an attempt to mimic what Deleuze did to so many philosophers in his history of philosophy books, but whereas Deleuze was subtle and made his points by explicating small moments to create a Kant or Nietzsche or Stoic philosopher who seemed unfamiliar to us, his sketches of Deleuzian philosophy were Ham fisted,pedantic, and silly). So it's not surprising he would judge Woolf or Joyce harshly; he once said that Henry James wrote novels in which "lives are won and lost over missed glances at a dinner table."

When he writes about film, he's often brilliant. When he writes about Lacan, Hegel, and Kant, he gives them new meaning. He's also quite often interesting when he talks about current events. But when he talks about aesthetics qua aesthetics? I cover my eyes.

[xchrom]

2. His life is a performance art piece.

I love him.