http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/24/MNGDTCEA9D1.DTL
Slovenian intellectual with rock-star status brings out adoring fans
Philosophy's his game, but so is provoking academics and the masses
- Reyhan Harmanci, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Slavoj Zizek -- philosopher, author, former presidential candidate of
Slovenia, cult hero -- sat on a chair in front of a packed house at the
Roxie Cinema looking oddly small.
The intellectual giant came to San Francisco last week for the world
premiere of a documentary -- "Zizek!" -- that fervently bears his name and a
post-screening where his fans were eager to hear the views of this
improbable hero.
Without any paid publicity, the filmmakers relied on word-of-mouth to fill
the theater. It was a safe bet. The last time Zizek was in the Bay Area in
2003, he sold out appearances in Berkeley and San Francisco. "We counted on
getting a good crowd in San Francisco," said director Astra Taylor,
explaining that Zizek's left-wing politics and social activism mirror the
ideals of many in the Bay Area. "It was the perfect place to show the film
for the first time publicly."
Zizek is a rare creature, a cultural theorist who, according to one fan at
the screening, "makes Hegel and Kant comprehensible." He has published more
than 50 books -- most of them combining the psychoanalytic techniques of the
notoriously unintelligible French theorist Jacques Lacan with Marxist social
and political thinking.
He examines a breathtaking array of subjects: Hitchcock films, Christianity,
cognitive functions and, perhaps most famously, the events of Sept. 11 and
the war in Iraq. All in service to raising -- without answering -- big
philosophical questions about the nature of humanity.
Not exactly rock star material.
And as the diminutive version of the giant bear-faced man, with scraggly
beard and sunken eyes, sat below the spot where moments before a giant
cinematic version of himself had loomed, Zizek looked positively average.
When he started speaking, his voice rose, and his hands flew up, and he
started spitting and sweating. As he applied his compulsive analysis to the
documentary, there was no doubting his gifts as a showman. The audience was
rapt as he insisted on his paltry role as a "philosopher, with, really,
modest aims."
The transformation -- from small to large, serious to silly, quiet to
loud -- reflected the contradiction that is Zizek -- the esoteric scholar
who became a public icon with a global following; the obtuse writer whom one
British critic called "the Elvis of cultural theory"; the serious ideologue
who wrote copy for the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog; the captivating speaker
whose voice and speech patterns, according to a New Yorker profile, most
closely resemble the late Andy Kaufman's Latka character in the television
show "Taxi."
While holding the admittedly meaningless title of senior researcher at the
University of Ljubljana in his native Slovenia, Zizek has reached the
broadest audience in the United States with his most recent books "Welcome
to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates"
(2002) -- whose title is lifted from the film "The Matrix" -- and "Iraq: The
Borrowed Kettle" (2004).
His next book, to be published in 2006 by MIT Press, is called "The Parallax
View." "It's a big book," he says, "over 600 pages." He plans to bring
together threads of cognitive science, biogenetics, politics, the problem of
freedom and an analysis of Kierkegaard, ostensibly, for the first time ever.
His genius, according to the filmmaker, is finding often absurd connections
between popular culture and obscure academic texts, thus encouraging people
outside academia to find scholarship relevant. One of Taylor's larger goals
with this film is to show the effect Zizek has on his fans -- "to make
intellectualism exciting and fun and vital in a climate of
anti-intellectualism."
No one, even his detractors, denies that he is brilliant.
"He's a one-man jet set," says Professor Khachig Tololyan, chair of Wesleyan
University's English department. "Not every academic gets to fly around,
delivering lectures to adoring crowds. Some people may resent him, but it
would be a mistake to dismiss him."
An employee of City Lights Bookstore, Karl Bauer, 26, recalls the reading
Zizek gave in September 2003 as a mob scene. "We had to turn people away,
the lines were so long." Bauer says that the last time he heard Zizek speak
in New York, the police cane to deal with unruly fans who didn't make it
inside.
Zizek's attitude toward his fame, like his attitude about any subject, is
relentlessly articulated and exceedingly contradictory. In one memorable
scene in the documentary, he's in a park in Buenos Aires when a woman
approaches him with a book to sign. He acquiesces, but a few minutes later,
grinning, he claims to hate the attention.
Taylor, the director, can be heard saying, "Really? You don't enjoy that
even a little?" "No," he grouses, backing away, "she should bother me at the
lecture."
The disconnect between what he's saying and his look of abashed joy is
deeply funny; the audience at the screening howled. At other times, though,
his discomfort with being a public figure seems genuine.
It's all part of the same contradiction inherent in Zizek: balancing the
role of populist entertainer with serious scholar whose insights matter.
In his brief talk after the movie, Zizek repeated the point that he saw
himself as a philosopher with somewhat narrow aims. "It's strange," he said,
his hands taking flight again, "even people who don't agree with me seem to
expect that I'll have the big answers."
"You know, when the pope died, and they got a new pope, all these European
journals asked me to write this or that, to comment on the new pope," Zizek
said as the audience chuckled, anticipating the punch line. "What do I know
about the pope? Same thing with the tsunami! What do I know!"
For fans like Bauer, Zizek's ability to write and speak in terms familiar to
the general population, not just Lacanians, are what make his work so
powerful. "I was in New York on Sept. 11, and I felt like I was watching a
movie, an action movie, it was what Zizek was talking about -- more 'real'
than real," Bauer says.
Zizek's popularity raises a question: Does writing for a broader audience
necessitate losing academic rigor? Has he really, as he claims in the
documentary, lost influence in the American university system?
No, says Jane Gallop, a noted English professor at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who has written extensively about French psychoanalyst
Jacque Lacan and feminism. Many academics over the past decade have
attempted to broaden their relevance.
While Gallop says that she isn't personally as successful in the endeavor,
people such as Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks and Judith Butler have been.
While she hasn't read Zizek much herself, she believes he is "very
influential in the academy."
For some scholars, though, his import has diminished as he's traded
sustained academic work for cultural commentary.
Tololyan says that Zizek is not taught very often at Wesleyan, even in his
Reading Theories class. "Personally, although I have a tremendous amount of
respect for him and think he is a very, very smart man, I don't feel like I
have to read him right now," he says. "I'm a scholar, that's my vocation,
and he hasn't produced a sustained work of scholarship for quite some time."
Tololyan says he is making a distinction between intellectuals and scholars.
"Intellectuals are not necessarily scholars; they don't have professional
qualifications in many cases," he says. Similarly, most scholars are
professional academics, and while their work has intellectual content, they
are not intellectuals who use their knowledge base to generate engaged
commentary around the world.
"Zizek is both a scholar and an intellectual who has turned into a cultural
columnist," he says. "The problem is that much of his current intellectual
and cultural commentary is not underpinned or authorized by a deep knowledge
of what he writes about. But he's so smart and engaging, and also so much a
myth that he gets by."
UC Berkeley German lecturer Christina Gerhardt also acknowledges that she
doesn't often hear substantive discussions of Zizek's work in academic
circles. "He's talked about more in terms of being a phenomenon or a
personal," she says.
Zizek himself sees no contradiction in his ability to meld the popular with
the esoteric. He has accepted the post of international director of a
recently created center for public intellectuals at the University of
London's Birkbeck College.
"One of my main aims in my work has been to bring philosophical thinking to
the general public -- this intellectual tradition still exists in
Continental Europe," he says. "My writing appears in daily and weekly
newspapers and journals. But not here."
Immediately, though, he can't resist contradicting himself. "But that might
be changing!" he says. "I mean, even my friend Judith Butler (a UC Berkeley
professor of rhetoric), in her last few books, has been changing her
approach. And look at Noam Chomsky -- all but ignored by big media, he is
still a huge figure in this country."
For bookstore worker Bauer, the criticism heaped on Zizek from inside
academia misses the point. "Who has the time or inclination to read a
400-page academic work?" Bauer asks. "The academy isn't where anyone is
paying attention -- he manages to transcend the academy without losing his
integrity."
Zizek's analysis of himself is perhaps the greatest expression of his
contrarian nature.
At one point in the film, he expresses contempt for intellectuals "who
pretend they're just like other people, you know, false modesty."
A day later during a phone interview, he insists that his role in the
greater scheme is minimal. And when it was pointed out that he has a
remarkably simple e-mail address, Zizek is downright gleeful.
"I know, I tell you, I'm just a philosopher!" he says. "A peasant! A mere
peasant! Nothing more!" Just like that, in a flurry of exclamations, Zizek
gets off the phone.
Slavoj Zizek will address the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies at
8 p.m. Tuesday. Go to www.lacan.org for ticket information.
E-mail Reyhan Harmanci at [log in to unmask]
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