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Underground > Head Shop >

Lacan for self-important nutters

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09:58 / 18.08.01

Welcome to the wacky world of a high profile academic theorist. Despite the fawning interviewer, Zizek comes across as an unbelievably annoying idiot whose theoretical skills mask a complete lack of social awareness. Funny, but.

At the first meeting of each course, he announces that all students will get an A and should write a final paper only if they want to. "I terrorize them by creating a situation where they have no excuse for giving me a paper unless they think it is really good. This scares them so much, that out of forty students, I will get only a few papers," he says.

09:58 / 18.08.01

Link isn't working for me.

09:58 / 18.08.01

Zizek's written some really good stuff though. I mean, he's a bit flighty - but I've got a couple of his books.

12:52 / 19.08.01

The link should work now, I think.

And I haven't read any of his work. Could you recommend something? (Off topic - I'm in the middle of Virilio's Speed and Politics. Highly recommend it, even though I'm finding it 90% incomprehensible.)

15:28 / 20.08.01

quote:"We must have the most fanatically precise English tea," Zizek insists, gesticulating dramatically in the style of a European dictator. "Everything must be exactly the way the English do it: clotted cream, cucumber sandwiches, scones. It must be the most radically English experience possible!"

I am now convinced he is entirely fictional; possibly the construct of a Yugoslavian situationist cabal.

16:30 / 22.05.02

This last comment of Zizek's reminds me completely of a piece of writing in the book A rebours or "Against Nature" by Huysmanns, in which the hero wants to go to England, travels by train to the dock, and while waiting to cross the channel, experiences the English accents, the tea of the local tea shop and the atmosphere of the port, decides he has had the perfect English experience and hence does no longer actually have to go to England. This kind of disposition is described as 'decadent'. Is there a connection between Zizek's postmodern / deconstructive Lacanian analyses and the aesthetics of the decadents?

10:49 / 23.05.02

I can't get the link to work.

I have read some Zizek's articles and remember thinking:
1. He needed an emergency vocabulary amputation
2. He *really* needed to get out more - lots of clever ideas but all largely leading up his own arse

Tom> excellent question! I have no idea. Maybe a possible answer might examine the 'decadent' obsession with textuality and circularity (Huysmanns hero fulfils his own expectation of an English experience) - and link it to Derridean notions of differance and the Lacanian imaginary. And possibly a dislike of linking the textual to the messiness and intractability of lived experience as a part of that.

anyway from the quote - "radically English" - what does that mean? I can only assume this is Zizi's idea of a joke.

unheimlich manoeuvre

15:08 / 28.08.03

the initial link to the Chronicle of Higher Education doesn't seem to lead the relevant article.
(assuming it is the same article) it can be read here.

Zizek, like Lacan, does seem to enjoy playing with his audience.
I read Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? a few months back. It was intriguing and engrossing, multidisciplinary research. How he combines strands of psychology, philosophy and cultural theory is excellent. A living example of the short-comings of current intensive specialisation in academia.

Tryphena Absent

15:39 / 28.08.03

I hate people attacking Zizek in this way. He's a theorist, he claims to be nothing but a theorist and he has a fantastic brain. No other philosopher or cultural theorist gets consistently shot down because their ideas don't apply to the 'real world' or because they're an intensive academic but people seem to really dislike him. I happen to think his writing is pretty good, only as indecipherable as the contradictory Derrida and his points are quite clear. I heard him absolutely destroy Pilger and Fukuyama on Radio 4 a while back because he was far more logical than either of them and damn the man's got a sharp sense of humour. He's impassioned, bright and interesting, let's treat him according to the merits of his work and remember that his first language is not English.

22:03 / 28.08.03

Zizek spits copiously into his beard, it's quite impossible to watch him speak.

Article on Movies: http://www.arthist.lu.se/discontinuities/texts/zizek.htm

23:19 / 28.08.03

Come on Anna, only one person's criticised Zizek in this thread, Gibreel. A bunch of people have endorsed his work. And the idea nobody complains about other theorists being detached from the real world is just wrong - it's the most consistent complaint you hear in the humanities, about everyone and anyone from Marx or Hegel to Derrida or Agamben. Would also like to repeat my request for recommendations as to good starting points in his work...

10:18 / 29.08.03

Well, now we know the source of his "eccentric" office hours--straight out of Lacan's variable-length sessions. If spitting in his beard, which seems an obvious obsessive-compulsive habit, at least he didn't strangle his wife, like Althusser did. And, speaking of cult-stud behavior, Michel Foucault did not knowingly infect other gays with AIDS. Hey, didn't Lacan kill his wife and disappear 35 years ago? This is probably the only board where that weak gag would mean anything...

I'm pretty suspicious of injecting transcendental values into politics--the French Revolutionary Terror is as much a product of the Enlightenment as was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen--but what comes out of the article is intriguing. The idea that Anglo-American capitalist-democracy-whatever is as good at keeping citizens passive as Yugoslavian "say-nothing" communism was rings true. So does the conflict of desires for anarchistic excitement and institutional stability (so you can go start a family and tend a garden). The European squatter scene seems to combine both, trying to establish an alternative transnational economy and society.

I thought he was loosely connected in the early '80s with IRWIN/NSK, who did jokey Fascist-looking art and whose best-known members were Laibach, the old name for Ljubljana. The above suggests he was.

Anyway, he's right about the need for an ideology to counter global corporate feudalism that's solidifying now. We sure as hell don't have money or organization on our side.

10:55 / 29.08.03

I think I've seen the idea of the disappearance of real politics in technocracies elsewhere, like in Manuel Castell's The Networked Society. In the US, the Democrats and Republicans left the economy alone and only made minor changes according to respective ideologies--the environment, the Bible, etc. Until early 2001, that is. Politics have returned with a vengeance.

I had a girlfriend who majored in Cultural Studies at Carnegie-Mellon University, in the early '90s. The scene there mirrored that of the Yale semiotics (sub)department in the late '80s, as an acquaintance described it. Both had a stink of desperation as the respective departments were shrunk due to budget cuts and a general turn to the right. There was a lot of obscurantism on the part of authors, professors and students, to show off and to shut out the less skilled. At CMU the competition for professorships was intense, which was ironic in a discipline half founded on Marx. I thought all this bullshit was a shame, because I was starting to make sense of the theories and a lot of it seemed (and seems) really useful.

10:57 / 29.08.03

Fukuyama is a whore. If his paymasters had a better grip on genetic manipulation, he'd be more sanguine about it too.

Tryphena Absent

12:12 / 29.08.03

Yeah, yeah I know, I'm just launching a pre-emptive strike. Actually I kind of read the thread halfway through writing my reply and decided to post it anyway because I was on a mad, bad roll and I was like, well this Head Shop thread isn't going anywhere atm and I'm in sledgehammer mode. Let's be devilish and controversial!

As to this- it's the most consistent complaint you hear in the humanities

Yes, it is a consistent complaint but people seem to have more difficulty dismissing such claims wrt Zizek than they do with other cultural theorists and philosophers. Derrida would never be bitched about and whined about in the way that the poor little Russian is- of course that might be because it rolls off his back like water off a ducky.

Bjacques- damn right. He is a whore and clearly reads waaayyyy too much Donna Haraway.

unheimlich manoeuvre

13:40 / 29.08.03

yeah Anna de Lo you're in explosive mood. i didn't immediately connect Haraway with Fukuyama. are you talking about the "Posthuman Condition"?
Within the transhumanism movement there views are considered dissimilar.
Personally i dislike Francis for the "End of History", him and Karl Popper are both patronising capitalist apologists!

(erh... by the way Zizek was born and breed in Slovenia, the former Yugoslavian republic.)

bjacques wrote- The idea that Anglo-American capitalist-democracy-whatever is as good at keeping citizens passive as Yugoslavian "say-nothing" communism was rings true.

so true. there were two million people on the streets of London against the war...

Tryphena Absent

14:17 / 29.08.03

Oh sorry, I'm sure there's a Russian connection there somewhere, his name isn't Slovenian and that's probably why I thought he was Russian. Slovenian's tend to have szil's and stickier sounds on their names than zek's. Or perhaps I thought he was Russian because he writes about the country so much... most likely both to be honest with you.

Within the transhumanism movement there views are considered dissimilar

Yes but when reading them from the outside you can see the posthuman influence of Haraway on Fukuyama. It's clear that she is, to an extent, the point where he started to consider these things. Mind you I'm totally on a Fukuyama hate trip and I think Haraway talks utter bollocks (love reading her because of it though) so I'd probably find any way of linking them together.

As for The End of History it's trash but it's his later work that really gets me... and what a pain in the arse I've forgotten its title again.

12:18 / 30.08.03

Teleologists make my skin crawl. Fukuyama's disciples (Wolfowitz, Perle, etc.) have decided the end of history justifies the means.

Thread rot alert!

Anna-Lo, what's a good first Zizek book to get? He's an occasional poster to www.nettime.org, a net-theory mailinglist that has more net.critics and .artists than you can haptically shake a stick at, so I'm vaguely familiar with his work. What I've seen (ok, skimmed) seems to hang together. Because of the heavy Former Yugoslav presence on the list, he gets rubbished for sounding totalitarian.

Amsterdam saw 75,000 turn out against the war, about 0.5% of the population, but the government joined the war and occupation anyway. Belgium, however, stayed out.

22:31 / 03.09.03

I think the reason it's easier to complain Zizek's work is all airy-fairy than, say, Derrida's, is because Zizek's is engaged with big-P Politics in a much more straightforward way - I mean, he's edited a collection of Lenin's writings. Derrida's just writing about textual shit, Zizek talks about Margaret Thatcher and that. It raises the level of expectation.

Anyway, I think for the last say 15-20 years in the humanities every major theorist being canonised in anglo-american academies has gone through this phase of reception. Foucault is the paradigmatic case: early interest, intensive phase of critiques which say his work has no politics, and especially, that they leave no basis for resistance, more nuanced readings set against that view, eventual incorporation. You can see the same with Derrida, with Deleuze and Guattari to some extent, and figures like Agamben and Zizek are in the dismissive phase now.

Is anybody ever gonna respond to the 'what's a good Zizek book to read' question, or is the repeated silence a good indicator?

07:24 / 04.09.03

The only Zizek I've read is his essay Repeating Lenin. I loved it, despite the parts that seemed to not make any sense.

unheimlich manoeuvre

16:44 / 08.09.03

Is anybody ever gonna respond to the 'what's a good Zizek book to read' question, or is the repeated silence a good indicator?

hmmm... i'd recommend starting with Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?:
Four Interventions in the Misuse of a Notion. it is a humourous defence of anti-capitalism and relatively accessible. i've partially read "Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture" and "Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel And The Critique Of Ideology". as a philosophical layman i found them verbose and pretty indecipherable.

01:10 / 19.09.03

I just read the totalitarianism book, and on the back there's this quote that he's such a great stylist he could be fascinating if he talked about mixing cement. That might be true, but it's still impossible to sound interesting talking about Lacan, and all of his arguments have the form 'Lacan said'. (For variation he sometimes tries 'like in that movie where, as Lacan said'.) I look forward to his concrete book, but in the meantime, yawn.

21:14 / 19.09.03

I read most of a book he wrote on films, which wasn't as useful as I'd hoped it would be (much preferred Christian Metz' Psychoanalysis and Cinema), but I found Zizek a much more palatable read than Lacan generally. He seemed to be a friend to the non-theorist weirdly though - someone that read relatively easily and made great connections, rather than someone who wrote in a style that could be recognised as 'rigorous', if that term makes any sense at all.

04:38 / 20.09.03

Yeah, his writing is engaging enough and not particularly difficult, but it seemed like whenver he was making any substantive point it was an argument from authority - no actual justification, just a Lacan citation. As I'm not sold on Lacan in general, this obviously didn't sit too well with me...

16:40 / 26.05.04

Zizek has written a piece about Abu Ghraib prison for In These Times.

It's much less opaque than I'd expect from a Lacanian.

The torture at Abu Ghraib was thus not simply a case of American arrogance toward a Third World people. In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture’s obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder, then, the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not an isolated case but part of a widespread practice. On May 6, Donald Rumsfeld had to admit that the photos rendered public are just the “tip of the iceberg,” and that there were much stronger things to come, including videos of rape and murder.

This is the reality of Rumsfeld’s dismissive statement, a couple of months ago, that the Geneva Convention rules are “out of date” in regard to today’s warfare.

Tryphena Absent

17:24 / 26.05.04

I totally missed the request for a Zizek starter text but I wouldn't actually advise that. I think that you should seek an opportunity to hear him speak in person before you read any of his work because he isn't at all opaque first hand. His speaking voice is actually very close to the article that grant links to above.

18:35 / 15.11.05

I came across this article about Zizek, and a documentary about the guy, and I thought I would share. Some choice quotes:

Making me popular is a resistance to taking me seriously

Thats quite funny, tbh. But I quite like,

The politics of multiple identity, each of us telling our story is precisely how global capitalism functions at the level of ideology. I totally disagree with everyone who says that global capitalism is culturally uniforming. No! Global capitalism is strictly, infinitely multicultural.

And one for the road,

I still believe in the big theories popular back in the '70s. This distrust in big universal theory is the most dangerous ideology today. Look at all totalitarians, the really bad guys, Hitler, Stalin. Sorry, but none of them believed in big theory.

Well, thats a theory anyway.

23:30 / 15.11.05

Now wear the T-shirt.

02:46 / 17.11.05

Agree with Nina: go see him speak. He is hilarious. And he freely admits to being a "disciple" (his word) of Lacan. He's Lacanian through and through. But what's not to love about Lacan?

(Ok, ok ok, give me the earful I probably deserve for that one.)

He's a great evangelist. I found his Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock) to be an excellent Lacan primer while studying for my comps, along with the aforementioned Looking Awry. There's a book of his interviews that might be a good starting place if you can't see hims speak (a good approach for many theorists, in my opinion, is to read interviews): Conversations with Zizek. The Amazon reviews of that book speak highly of its accessibility and clarity.

(Holy crap he writes a lot of books. This man is probably more prolific, in terms of book production, than is healthy for anyone, readers or writer. Still, I really just love him.)

16:54 / 16.03.06

For British 'lithers - Zizek is presenting part four of Channel 4's Artshock documentaries tonight (16 March) at 11.05:

A look at some of the more extreme examples of UK art. Acclaimed philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek delves into the hidden language of cinema, vividly uncovering what the movies can tell us about ourselves

22:44 / 16.03.06

In brief, going to the cinema is like gazing into a toilet bowel...

14:31 / 15.08.06

the docu that Lurid refers to above (i think) is available on bittorrent for those interested, a link to which you can find at the inimiatable Greylodge site here.

10:11 / 30.10.06

Just wanted to add that the documentaries are being screened in various cinemas at the moment. I'm definitely going - looks as though the presentation is cinematically lush. Apparently The film cuts its cloth from the very world of the movies it discusses; by shooting at original locations and on replica sets, it creates the uncanny illusion that Zizek is speaking from within the films themselves. - drool.

02:22 / 07.11.06

the Pervert's Guide to Cinema is amazing - though i advise against seeing all three episodes back-to-back in a cinema like i did. I went with my partner (who teaches film and tv) and we were just sitting there blown away, trying to make sense of what he said before he moved onto the next topic.

02:24 / 07.11.06

sorry, to clarify - there are two documentaries out. One is a three part series about cinema called The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, narrated by Zizek. The other is simply called Zizek! and is about Zizek himself.

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