Zizek Watch Last in a series tracking a seemingly ubiquitous thinker.
By SCOTT McLEMEE After six months of tracking Slovenia's psychoanalytic sphinx, we here at Zizek Watch have entered a terminal crisis of moral and epistemic reflexivity. (And yes, that's just as painful as it sounds.) The question has become unavoidable: Why do we watch Slavoj Zizek?
Sure, it's fun to see him torment the Kantian neo-liberals. He knows a lot of dirty jokes. And he can analyze an Alfred Hitchcock film like nobody's business. But after a while, a reader begins to notice that Mr. Zizek repeats himself. A lot. He even recycles whole chunks of material from one work to the next. By the time Verso published his latest book, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, in June, devotees had encountered some paragraphs in three or four earlier incarnations.
The prospect of novelty, then, forms no part of his appeal. On the contrary, there is something about reading Mr. Zizek that calls to mind certain remarks by Andy Warhol on the reassuring consistency of Coke and Campbell's soup. No matter which can you open, it's going to be the same as the last one you tasted. But might there be more to it than that? In search of an answer, we turn to an interview with Mr. Zizek in the July issue of The Believer -- a literary magazine beloved by the twentysomething post-ironic hipster literati. (Readers who are older, more earnest, and/or less cool may also want to track down this interview. It offers perhaps the single best short introduction to Mr. Zizek's characteristic preoccupations.)
In a comment on the genre of reality TV, the theorist notes that "the charm of it is a certain hidden reflexivity. It is not that we are voyeurs looking at what people are already doing. The point is that we know that they know that they are being filmed." In other words, says Mr. Zizek, "we are seeing people acting themselves. In everyday life, we act already, in the sense that we have a certain ideal image of ourselves, and we act that persona."
So why is Slavoj Zizek so fascinating? Because no one else can do nearly so good a Zizek impersonation. It makes perfect sense if you think about it, and even more if you don't.
And on that note, we here at Zizek Watch feel it is time to enter Lacanian psychoanalysis.