How do the non-grad students know about Foucault? It is because he was translated by academics who know French. If those academics had not been interested in Foucault, or if Foucault's work had been written in a language not known by a sufficiently large number of academics, or not made indirectly accessible to them by a third party, the non-grad students would never have heard of him.
I really don't know what we're arguing about here. My point was that Zizek is well-known in the anglophone world because he writes about things that interest anglophones. If he wrote books about ancient Slovenian history or the impact of EU membership on the Slovene energy grid or 19th-century Slovene poetry, nobody outside of Slovenia except a very small handful of Slovenian-speaking specialists in Eastern Europe would have ever heard of him. That was my sole point. I edit articles by Eastern European academics for a living. There are many more writers of books about ancient Slovenian history or the impact of EU membership on the Slovene energy grid or 19th-century Slovene poetry than there are Zizeks.
----- Original Message ---- From: Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>
Zizek, like Foucault and many others, is read and discussed by an audience far broader than grad students.