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Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for
Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School EGS who uses
popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory
of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born
in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia where he lives to this day but he has
lectured at universities around the world. He was analysed by Jacques
Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan's son in law, and is probably the most
successful and prolific post-Lacanian having published over fifty books
including translations into a dozen languages. He is a leftist and,
aside from Lacan he was strongly influenced by Marx, Hegel and
Schelling. In temperament, he resembles a revolutionist more than a
theoretician. He was politically active in Slovenia during the 80s, a
candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in 1990; most
of his works are moral and political rather than purely theoretical. He
has considerable energy and charisma and is a spellbinding lecturer in
the tradition of Lacan and Kojeve.
Zizek has cast a very long shadow in what can only be termed "cultural
studies" (though he would despise the characterization). He is an
effective purveyor of Lacanian mischief, and, as a follower of the
French "liberator" of Freud, Zizek's Lacan is almost exclusively
transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables.
That he has an encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical,
literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop cultural currents — and that he
has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his
imagination — is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and
confounded his critics for over ten years.
Primarily the goal appears to be to demolish the coordinates of the
liberal hegemony that permit excess and aberration insofar as it does
not threaten the true coordinates. He suggests as well that the true
coordinates are much better hidden than we realize. The production of
cultural difference is to Zizek the production of the inoperative dream
— a dream that recalls perhaps Orwell's 1984 or even Terry Gilliam's
Brazil where a kind of generic pastoralism or a sexualized nature
substitutes for authentic freedom — the flip side of this is film noir.
Zizek has determined that late-modern capitalism has engendered a whole
range of alternative seductions to keep the eye and brain off of the
Real. The Real only exists as a fragment, fast receding on the horizon
as fantasy and often phantasm intercede. These dreams and nightmares
are systemic, structural neuroses, and they are part of the coordinates
of the hegemonic. The hegemony — the prevailing set of coordinates —
always seeks to "take over" the Real, and, therefore, this contaminated
Real must be periodically purged.
In his essay "Repeating Lenin" (1997) — ever the trickster, he convened
a symposium on Lenin in Germany in part to see what the reaction would
be — Zizek sets up a deconstruction of the idea of form to effectively
liberate the idea of radical form:
"One should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with
the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of
the multitude of 'narratives' -not only literature, but also politics,
religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are
telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is
to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives
can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual
minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The
properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibilty
of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with
'formalism,' with the idea of a neutral Form. Independent of its
contingent particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic
kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which 'colors' the entire field
in question.Ö"
He is interested in discerning the Lacanian Real amid the propaganda of
systems. In appropriating "Lenin" he is also looking for the moment
when Lenin realized that politics could one day be dissolved for a
technocratic and agronomic utopia, "the [pure] management of things".
That Lenin failed is immaterial, since Zizek is extracting the
signifier "Lenin" from the historical continuum, which includes that
failure — or the onslaught of Stalinism. The version of Lenin that
Zizek often chooses to re-enscribe into radical political discourse is
ostensibly (by his own admission) the Lenin of the October Revolution,
or the Lenin that had the epiphany that in order to have a revolution
"you have to have a revolution."
In his critique of contemporary capitalism Zizek finds not simply the
conditions that Marx anathematized but those same conditions reified
and made nearly intangible:
"A certain excess which was as it were kept under check in previous
history, perceived as a localizable perversion, as an excess, a
deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social
life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a
system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own
conditions, that is to say, in which the thing can only survive as its
own excess, constantly exceeding its own 'normal' constraints […] Marx
located the elementary capitalist antagonism in the opposition between
use- and exchange-value: in capitalism, the potentials of this
opposition are fully realized, the domain of exchange-values acquires
autonomy, is transformed into the specter of self-propelling
speculative capital which needs the productive capacities and needs of
actual people only as its dispensable temporal embodiment."
In the era of globalization, then, the main question is: "Does today's
virtual capitalist not function in a homologous way — his 'net value'
is zero, he directly operates just with the surplus, borrowing from the
future?"
"In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither
simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise
which justified present violence -it is rather as if, in a unique
suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and
the future, we are — as if by Grace — for a brief time allowed to act
AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand,
just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present
hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future
generations, but as the present hardship over which this future
happiness and freedom already cast their shadow — in it, we already are
free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting
for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is
not a Merleau-Pontian wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur,
to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the
present acts; it is as it were its own ontological proof, an immediate
index of its own truth."
Zizek's agenda is to foster and engender a withering critique of the
structural chains that enslave late-modern man. His nostalgia is for
very large gestures: the meta-Real, the Universal, and the Formal.
"This resistance is the answer to the question 'Why Lenin?': it is the
signifier 'Lenin' which formalizes this content found elsewhere,
transforming a series of common notions into a truly subversive
theoretical formation."
Zizek was a visiting professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis,
Universite Paris-VIII in 1982-3 and 1985-6, at the Centre for the Study
of Psychoanalysis and Art, SUNY Buffalo, 1991-2, at the Department of
Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1992, at
the Tulane University, New Orleans, 1993, at the Cardozo Law School,
New York, 1994, at the Columbia University, New York, 1995, at the
Princeton University (1996), at the New School for Social Research, New
York, 1997, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998, and at the
Georgetown University, Washington, 1999. He is a returning faculty
member of the European Graduate School. In the last 20 years Zizek has
participated in over 350 international philosophical, psychoanalytical
and cultural-criticism symposiums in USA, France, United Kingdom,
Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Netherland, Island, Austria, Australia,
Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Brasil, Mexico,
Israel, Romania, Hungary and Japan. He is the founder and president of
the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.
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