Eliran Bar-El

A shooting star rose out of the eastern bloc - Slovenia of all places - to dominate and inspire the Left, while entertaining the masses all over the world. The unlikely story of Slavoj Žižek is told in terms of his intellectual pursuits in Slavoj Becomes Žižek by Eliran Bar-El.

What is most fascinating to me about Žižek is his cross-cultural penetration. He quickly mastered western culture, writing in both French and English. His book titles are clever plays that native speakers would be wise to examine. (See for example: Why Only An Atheist Can Believe; an entire book series called Sic; How Long Can We Think Globally And Act Locally?; The Year of Dreaming Dangerously; First As Tragedy, Then As Farce; Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Lacan But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock.) His western cultural references are impeccable.

Possibly his most famous work is a film called The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, starring himself commenting on the cultural significance of numerous films, directors, stories and stars. He goes as far as recreating a number of scenes, with him in them. What he did in the film was suggest there are other ways to look at everything, and thereby evaluate them differently, and thereby think about the significance of the final product differently. He also does this with politics, philosophy, psychology and current events. Slavoj Žižek has something to say to pretty much everyone.

Bar-El recognizes this, to the point of conducting surveys online to find out why people read or watch Žižek. He found just 10% were in it for the philosophy that Žižek is most famous for. Culture and art scored 64%, politics 62%, critiques of neoliberalism 58%, psychoanalysis 54%, communism and Marxism 51% and religion 28%.

Žižek’s timing has also been impeccable. As he was entering higher education, Slovenia was leaving Yugoslavia, years before it collapsed back into feuding microstates. He was able to travel and his writing in underground publications not only didn’t land him in prison for life, but flourished. His particular brand of left thinking became known as the Ljubljana School. His education was in psychotherapy, and his leftist coloration of it was (and is) dominated by Hegel and Lacan. To the point where Bar-El calls the way he talks and writes Hegelacanese.

His activism led him to politics, where he was at the center of making Slovenia into a multiparty democracy, forcing coalitions to form and reform, preventing the single-purpose state that has led to the massacres, discrimination and hatred seen elsewhere. Far from communism, he headed up the Liberal Democrats. Yet his image remains pure Left.

To say he is prolific is to say nothing. Besides the films and videos, Žižek has published over a hundred volumes in English alone, at the rate of two a year. There are articles and papers at the rate of one a month for the past 20 years, and his books appear in at least ten other languages. He plays off about 20 publishers anxious for more.

Critics, as usual, get bogged down in the fine print of philosophy, which if nothing else, is always arguable. Between Marx, Lenin, Freud, Lacan and Hegel, it is simply not possible to write something without someone finding fault with the accuracy, the logic, the history, the interpretations or the conclusions. So Žižek gets a lot of bad press. But as long as they talked about him at all, his star continued to rise, because he showed the noncritics how to look at the world differently. At some point, early on, everyone who encounters Žižek in print or on video says wow, I never thought of it that way. He’s right. I need to see more like this.

His view on ideologies is that they are “not just the explicit text, but all the series of obscene ritual and so on.” On film: “Cinema is still the easiest way, like for Freud [where] dreams were the royal way to the unconscious.” He criticized President Bush II’s reaction to the scandalous Abu Ghraib photos, saying “Bush was wrong: what we get when we see these photos … is precisely a direct insight into ‘American values’ in to the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the US way of life.”

He mixes philosophy with psychiatry, politics and culture. Especially culture – mass culture that everyone can relate to. Not only are his titles catchy, but his books and papers are full of jokes and what we now call Presidential Language (courtesy of Donald Trump). This differentiated Žižek from everyone else in academe. He has been called the Elvis of cultural theory, not the nicest compliment. But Bar-El says he turns “irony and cynicism into witticism and fidelity,” which is much kinder. Meanwhile Noam Chomsky called him “the jokester.” This one person affects people in a remarkable number of ways.

For Žižek himself, “I think it’s simply applying Lacan to politics and to popular culture.” For example, he says “I always felt a deep sympathy for Monty Python, whose excessive humor also signals an underlying stance of profound disgust of life.” To be sure, he is the only one out there applying Lacan to everything, and it shows.

Žižek says he seeks simplicity to both absorb and communicate his positions: “When I saw The Matrix at a local theatre in Slovenia, I had the unique opportunity of sitting close to the ideal spectator of the film – namely, an idiot. A man in the late [twenties] at my right was so immersed in the film that he all the time disturbed other spectators with loud exclamations, like ‘My God, wow, so there is no reality!’ I definitely prefer such naïve immersion to the pseudo-sophisticated intellectualist readings which project into film the refined philosophy or psychoanalytic conceptual distinctions.” Similarly, he “hates professors who believe they really are professors.” I wonder what he thinks of Oscar Wilde.

And so academe has turned on him worst of all. Possibly because of his global renown as a speaker and pundit on everything from mass media to old films (plus his voluminous media production), Žižek is not recognized as a respected academic. He does not hold an endowed chair at any globally recognized university, even though he has multiple degrees. He has occasionally disappointed in live debates, and his books tend to recycle old themes he has already published elsewhere. He enjoys less serious things, like writing captions for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog (they were looking for his “Karl Marx meets Groucho Marx” kind of thing, they said). And then there are the jokes, which like a standup comic are part of the act, and he repeats them often. Academics frown on this. Global public intellectuals thrive on it.


Sadly, the book is enormously dense. Bar-El does not like the concept of paragraphs. They can go on for over a page, including multiple thoughts, multiple quotes and endless interpretations. It makes reading a burden rather than a pleasure. Sentences can ramble on, coming full circle and ending up with essentially no new information. That and the sheer density of his sentences made me despair this would be an unfathomable book after I finally made it out of the Introduction (1/8 of the whole book). But fortunately, Žižek, through sheer force of personality, overtakes Bar-El. His varied and complex professional life carries the day.

What Bar-El never hits upon, but which is painfully obvious to me, is that Žižek has simply not grown. He has his little trick of superposition, and that’s it. He looks at something and evaluates it from the point of view of the philosophers and psychoanalysts he follows. And then suggests these alternative analyses. It allows him to stay above the fray, never taking an actual position. This is remarkable for a leftist, even communist. Simply comparing Žižek to others of his ilk, say, Noam Chomsky, shows that where Chomsky has definite positions to build on or defend, Žižek just floats with no commitment. It has gotten predictable, old and unsatisfying. Yes, it has been tremendously successful for decades, but the public has cottoned onto it now, and it is no longer so inspiring or fascinating.

Žižek needs a manager.

David Wineberg… (mehr)