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
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.