Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2006

FILM REVIEW

Taking Slavoj Zizek Seriously

By Shai Ginsburg

"What would be my, how should I call it, spontaneous attitude towards the universe?" asks Slavoj Zizek at the opening of Astra Taylor's documentary Zizek. He continues:

It's a very dark one. The first one would have been a kind of total vanity: there is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally. Ultimately there are just some fragments, some vanishing things. If you look at the universe, it's just one big void. But then how do things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics where, you know, the idea ... is that the universe is a void, but a kind of a positively charged void. And then, particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. And I like this idea spontaneously very much: the fact that it's not just nothing—things are out there. It means that something went terribly wrong, that what we call creation is a kind of a cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe, that things exist by mistake. And I am even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract it is to assume the mistake and go to the end. And we have a name for this: it's called love. Isn't love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of "I love the world," "universal love." I don't like the world.... I am basically somewhere in-between "I hate the world" and "I am indifferent towards it".... Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not "I love you all." Love means: I pick out something; it's again the structure of imbalance. Even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person. I say, "I love you more than anything else": In this quite formal sense, love is evil.

Zizek—a professor at the Institute of Sociology, Ljubljana—is one of the most celebrated academic intellectuals in the world. His lectures attract scores, at times even thousands, of people. Astra Taylor's documentary follows the philosopher at public appearances in Buenos Aires, New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, and even primetime American television, as well as in the privacy of his hotel rooms and his apartment in Ljubljana. Whether addressing a packed lecture hall, strolling in the park, sitting on the sofa in his apartment watching videos, or even lying in his bed, Zizek's accented English speech never ceases, as he articulates a dazzling succession of ideas. For Zizek revels in the movement of one idea to the next—from philosophical questions to TV commercials, from the obscure language of Lacanian psychoanalysis to Alfred Hitchcock films and B movies, from the structure of modern capitalist-consumerist society to science fiction—in an attempt to elucidate complex philosophical problems while, simultaneously, shedding light on the moral and political problems of the present.

Commensurate with his theoretical engagement is Zizek's political engagement. Active in the alternative movement in Slovenia during the 1980s, in 1990 Zizek was a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in the first multi-party elections (the most intelligent candidate, as one of his right-wing rivals admitted during a televised round table). From his current podium as a public intellectual, however, Zizek reverses his earlier political position. Rather than offer his audience answers to the question "what is to be done?", Zizek argues that the desire to be provided with such answers only thwarts its fulfillment. Assuming the mantle of the psychoanalyst, Zizek redirects the question to a rapt audience in a perverse form: the question, he says, is not whether he will yield to the audience's desire for an answer, but whether their expectations are legitimate and what these expectations tell them about themselves.

In fact, Zizek's sheer enjoyment in shocking his interlocutors is patent, and so is his pleasure in performing the enfant terrible of both politics and philosophy. On the one hand, he directs his provocation at liberal, middle-class sensitivities, employing irreverent jokes to circumvent the trenches into which the Left digs itself by succumbing to simple, reductive oppositions such as "liberal" and "fascist." On the other hand, Zizek's provocations are also directed at the conceit of the philosophical and psychoanalytical establishments (as when, for instance, he wrote the catalogue of the clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch or when he refers to examples from popular culture in order to explain a complex notion of Lacan). By unsettling professional decorum—at least verbally—Zizek attempts to rephrase philosophical inquiry in such a way as to not only shed new light on it, but also to make it meaningful to everyday life.

One should, therefore, take Zizek's pranks and stories seriously, particularly when they seem fantastical, for our fantasies are the leading clue to ourselves, to our motivations, and to the world in which we live. This might explain the philosopher's fascination with cinema, including the kinds of lowbrow movies upon which serious film critics frown. It may also explain the following story Zizek once told a group of students: When in Paris studying psychoanalysis, he was analyzed by Jacques-Alain Miller (Jacques Lacan's son-in-law). Walking the streets of the city on his way to his daily session, Zizek would think about what would make an interesting dream and develop it, ultimately presenting it to Miller as his latest dream during the session. Never once, Zizek concluded, did he present a true dream during the analysis. Does this matter? Does the fact that a "fictitious," rather than a "real" dream was analyzed make a difference? Apparently not.

Yet this story reveals something that despite—or because of—Zizek's apparent candor, remains persistently concealed. In Zizek, he never drops the clown's mask that he assumes. True, in the best tradition of psychoanalysis, Zizek is the prime subject of his own analytical discourse. He willingly puts himself on the stage as he takes off his protective layers, literally showing us where he keeps his underwear—in a kitchen drawer with the rest of his household items. Yet we should not forget that this is a staged striptease: it reveals nothing beyond the public image Zizek nurtures. Rather, it discloses almost nothing, except to perhaps display Zizek's desire to direct his real-life performance to the last detail, suggesting his fascination with Hitchcock, who was known for the meticulous way in which he planned every scene in his movies. Zizek thus appropriately ends when, in a rendition of Hitchcock's Vertigo, the philosopher stages his own death.

For more information on Zizek, visit www.documentarycampaign.org.

Shai Ginsburg is the Jess Schwartz Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at Arizona State University.

Source Citation

Ginsberg, Shai. 2006. Taking Slavoj Zizek seriously. Tikkun 21(1):76.