Syndicate: Zizek: a bearded Eastern European intellectual

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de> (by way of Andreas Broeckmann)]

The Independent (London)

June 21, 1998, Sunday

Interview: Terrible old Stalinist with the answer to life, the universe
and everything; Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek is a darling of the
intellectual left and a brilliant commentator on pop culture. But the
really important thing about him is that he is terrifyingly hip in the way
only a bearded Eastern European intellectual can be. Prepare to name drop

by Jenny Madden /Ben Seymour

"GOD IS THE ultimate tamagochi!" Gleeful but sexy-sounding obscurity is
part of the job description for philosophers, especially ones with beards
who lecture on cinema and contemporary culture, so this and similarly
provocative pronouncements can have come as no surprise to Slavoj Zizek's
audience at the National Film Theatre last week. And since Britain is a
bit short on fashionable intellectuals, the black polo-neck wearing classes
were there in force to drink in the bearded Balkan's genre-scrambling
discussions.

Not since post-modernism reached saturation point in the Eighties has
theory (as opposed to the practice of tunnel-digging and tree-house
building) been so fashionable. Youth and style magazines like Dazed and
Confused and The Idler are stuffed with lengthy interviews with
contemporary thinkers. But Zizek, recently voted "most entertaining
speaker" by London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, is a rather
different experience from the laid-back and frankly impenetrable
intellectual stars of the Seventies and Eighties like Jean Baudrillard and
Jacques Derrida.
His manic monologues, drawing on all aspects of culture from the operas
of Wagner to the films of Jim Carrey, leave his fans in a state of
excitement rarely associated with the world of philosophy. With his thick
Slovenian accent and wonderfully Freudian speech impediment he sounds like a
turbocharged Eastern European vacuum cleaner, sucking the debris of
modern life into his hyperactive brain.

Finding "Adorno" next to "Alvin Stardust" in the index of yet another
trendy treatise from post-modern academia has long provided students with
harmless pleasure. The difference with Zizek is that his cultural
ecleticism is bent to serious political purpose. Colin McCabe, head of
research at the British Film Institute in London and himself one of the
most influential writers on film and theory in this country, is
overflowing with enthusiasm for the radical Slovenian philosopher: "What
makes him so important is his ability to relate the most abstract
theoretical language to the most concrete political facts. He uses
contemporary films like
Breaking the Waves and Leaving Las Vegas as a way of meditating on
contemporary emotional and sexual relationships and manages to decode
Lacan in the process. With his specific East European perspective, and
unapologetic development of the ideas of Freud and Marx, Zizek is doing
what no one else has done. He makes theory interesting and important
again."

Born in 1949, Zizek studied philosophy at the University of Ljubljana
during the years of Communism and then immersed himself in the teachings
of the infamous and influential psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in Paris. Back
in Slovenia he was politically active in the alternative movement during the
Eighties, and later ran for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in
the country's first multi-party elections. His English language conquest
f the realms of film, politics and popular culture really began in the
early Nineties, when he edited the seminal Everything You Always Wanted to
Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Since then, he has
produced eight more books, dozens of articles and been translated into twelve
languages - all while holding down his day job as senior researcher at
the Institute of Social Studies in his home town. His next, The Ticklish
Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, will consolidate his
assault on the foundations of contemporary political thought.

Urgency, bordering on emergency, best describes Zizek's approach to
philosophising. After a three-hour phone interview he is willing to talk
in stream of consciousness mode for another two hours, "as long as I don't
collapse". It's no surprise to find the superheated Zizek has recently
been the victim of panic attacks. De Beauvoir to his Sartre, Zizek's wife
Renata Salecl (herself an impressively eclectic cultural theorist) recently
stood in for her beleaguered husband at a conference on feminism and
psychoanalysis. While they have collaborated on the cosy-sounding title
Gaze and Voice as Love Object, being married to Zizek could be a
full-time job in its own right.

Impatient of his own frailty, Zizek rages against the trend to medicalise
complex human emotions and is one of the few intellectuals prepared to
speak out against the reduction of the psychological to the biological.
On the delicate subject of the new impotence- curing wonder drug, Zizek (who
habitually speaks in lecture-room mode) declares: "Does not changing
erection into something that can be achieved through a direct medical
intervention deny the man knowledge of his true attitude? In what form
will his dissatisfaction find an outlet, when it is deprived of the simple
sign of impotence?"

In Zizek's view we short-circuit the emotional at our peril. Problems
arise not only when desires are denied expression, but, above all, when they
are too easily attained. Most of us fantasise about doing a job we enjoy for
a living instead of the daily drudge. But Zizek reminds us to be careful
what we wish for, because it just might come true: "If anyone embodies the
potential catch-22 in the future of work, it is the young hackers
employed by companies like Microsoft. It's like a distorted realisation of
Marx's dream of disalienation. Here one no longer faces the split between
one's
job and one's own private pleasures. The hired hacker is paid to indulge
his 'individuality'. The employer's demand is no longer 'Behave properly,
wear grey suits' etc - it's 'Be as idiosyncratic as you can, indulge in
your crazy ideas - you will lose your job if you don't.' You are paid not
to slave away at a job you hate but, on the contrary, to enjoy yourself.
Yet the pressure is much worse."

With a renaissance man's grasp of the world around him (as Slovenia
"ambassador of science" he has developed an in-depth knowledge of quantum
physics) and a journalist's eye for detail (he writes regularly in one of
the national papers) Zizek's often contentious observations are usually
rooted in hard evidence: "I spoke with a psychiatrist whose main
customers are Microsoft people and she told me that they can take it for a
couple of years then the job gets so suffocating they disappear. They move
a little
bit East, you know, towards those horrible states like Montana and Idaho
and then become - how do you call them? - survivalists, extreme
right-wing gangsters. They simply want to escape! They cannot stand it!"

Not content with comparing the almighty to a kind of technological
terrapin (sadly, the constraints of space prevent us from reproducing his
entirely cogent argument here), Zizek goes on to liken the rigours of
tamagochi
care to the ultimately false and sterile activity of contemporary politics.
His key philosophical concern is with the distinction between "Act" and
(mere) "activity"; "The most succinct definition of false activity is as
follows; when I am frenetically active not to achieve something, but in
order to prevent something from happening." For Zizek, identity politics,
superficially dedicated to promoting concrete, practical ends (for
example aving the rain forests or lowering the age of consent) nevertheless
unconsciously avoids confronting the root of social problems. "Like the
obsessional neurotic, the 'new political movements' are frantically
active precisel y in order to insure that something - that which really
matters, the smooth functioning of the market - will not be disturbed."

This last phrase is the giveaway. Whilst Marx has become rather chic of
late, with intellectuals falling over themselves to declare their debt to
an abridged version of his ideas, Zizek is unusual in holding on to the
most radical aspects of his legacy. This "terrible old Stalinist" (as he
self-mockingly puts it) challenges the notion that there can be no
alternative to the market. "Politics is a very recent thing, perhaps it
will have been only a brief episode in human history. Maybe the situation
is globally pessimistic, and political acts as such will soon no longer
be possible. Until that time, we must try to locate the universal demand in
any particular struggle and to repoliticise the economic."

So, when he's not contemplating the future prospects for human
emancipation, how does Zizek relax? Does this populist polymath ever
worry that, having made his cultural pleasures the stuff of his theoretical
labour, he will end up like one of those deracinated microserfs? "You
know the stereotype of the teenage boy who wraps up his copy of Playboy in
 The Principles of Mathematics or whatever? Well, for me the situation is
reversed. I pretend to be reading popular literature, but inside it's
some purely theoretical work by Hegel. That's what I really enjoy."

Slavoj Zizek is participating in 'Art and Psychoanalysis', a one-day
conference at the Tate Gallery on 26 June. His latest book, 'The Plague
of Fantasies', is published by Verso.

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