Slavoj Zizek ... 'The suggestion that capitalism is ready to collapse is perhaps, I admit it, wishful thinking.' Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian
"There is an anarchist leftist group here in London who hate me," says Slavoj i ek with a giggle as we settle into a dilapidated leather sofa in the bar of his Bloomsbury hotel. He is wearing freebie airline socks, an Italian T-shirt someone gave him and jeans that could easily have been made decades earlier in an unsuccessful Soviet tractor factory. "But fuck it, let's speak frankly, no bullshit, most of the left hates me even though I am supposed to be one of the world's leading communist intellectuals."
i ek summons the waiter and orders hot chocolate, Diet Coke and lots of sugar ("I am diabetic"). He is disappointed, he tells me parenthetically, that we didn't do the interview in the hotel's adjacent Virginia Woolf burger bar. "What would the Virginia Woolf burger be like?" he asks. "Dried out, topped with parsley, totally overrated. I always preferred Daphne du Maurier." He then launches into a denunciation of the pretensions of James Joyce, arguing that his literary career went downhill after Dubliners, and then into a eulogy to the radical minimalism of Beckett's Not I. Within minutes we're on to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's views on the Malaysian economic miracle, the prospects for i ek's film theory course in Ramallah and Katarina Wagner's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, in which Hans Sachs is depicted as a Heil Hitler-ing Nazi. One's task as a reader or interviewer of i ek is rapidly to build a network of mental pontoon bridges to unite his seemingly autonomous intellectual territories.
Back to those shadowy anarchists. It was they (his PR people suggest a student group armed with a fake Facebook account rather than fizzing bombs) who smeared him online, claiming he was having a "thing" with singer Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, aka Lady Gaga. It was, of course, a hoax, but sections of what Sarah Palin calls the lamestream media ran with it, including the New York Post and our own Daily Star, the latter reporting: "Pals fear the Lady Gaga's head is being filled with extremist ideas by Slovenia-born Slavoj i ek."
What irked the not-Lord Gaga wasn't so much the unwarranted Hegelian dialectical inversion (surely he might more plausibly have been corrupted by her extremist ideas?), but that the fake Facebook page claimed that Lady Gaga and i ek cemented their relationship by deconstructing patriarchal ideology, feminism and collective human responsibility. It was an intolerable slur: "I don't say those sort of things. Can you imagine a more boring evening?" How would you have spent an evening with Lady Gaga? He chuckles, but waves away the question ( i ek does many things in conversation but answering questions isn't one of them).
"My mistake was that I should not have categorically denied a relationship to the press. I should have said 'no comment', leaving a gap for the obscene possibility that I am her lover."
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