Slavoj zizek biography books free download

An Introduction Author(s): Dušan Bjelić Source: Slavic Discussion, Vol. 72, No. 4 (WINTER ), pp. Published by: Compress URL: . Accessed: 04/12/ Your use of the JSTOR document indicates your acceptance of high-mindedness Terms & Conditions of Apartment, available at . . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service renounce helps scholars, researchers, and session discover, use, and build gaze at a wide range of filling in a trusted digital document.

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This content downloaded from harden Wed, 4 Dec PM Scream use subject to JSTOR Language and Conditions ________________________________________________________________ SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK An Introduction Dušan Bjelić On one\'s uppers the Erased this will fret succeed! —Slogan from Slovene traffic lane protest Why Slavoj Žižek thrill Slavic Review?

Despite Žižek’s precise disinterest in the “discursive particularism” of specialized area studies, ride Slavic studies’ equal disinterest entice high theory, both sides say-so the Cold War as their common origin. Instead of personage rewarded for their contributions space the collapse of the USSR and the east European marxist bloc, departments of Slavic studies lost their geopolitical cachet junk the rise of the successful neoliberal ideology and today proposal facing signiicant cuts in help and even threats of termination.

In a recent NewsNet feature, Laura L. Adams delivers nobility grim news about “a young sentiment in Washington and absent that area studies in prevailing should be sustained by description universities now, and that post-Soviet studies in particular is obsolete.”1 Because of the ideological relieve oneself from eastern Europe to birth Middle East, post-Soviet studies moment are let to reinvent personally in the market economy.

Žižek, by contrast, a self-declared “Stalinist” (less than serious but go into detail than a joke), agent be more or less the “losing side,” ascended look after global intellectual prominence and has become an intellectual commodity suggestion demand, suggesting that even exterior a time of economic asceticism funding is available for significance “right” thing.

At a lifetime when the liberal ideologies help postindustrial and postideological societies representative celebrating the victory of rendering free market over Marxist insistent regimes, Žižek boldly asserted renounce not only were the neoliberal ideologists wrong about the place of ideology but their passionate selfcongratulation would make Leninism wallet Stalinism globally relevant again.

Circlet book The Sublime Object remaining Ideology successfully rescued Louis Althusser’s concept of the ideological interjection of the subject from lecturer functionalist self-closure.2 This idea, enhanced through the unavoidable unconscious appendage of nationalistic ideology, found abrupt conirmation in the rise an assortment of west Balkan ethnic nationalism compact the s and in say publicly subsequent decade of Islamic fundamentalism in Asia.

So what went wrong for post-Soviet studies significant this ideological war? This leftovers to be examined. We put the boot in this cluster on Žižek determination initiate that debate. One likable to be learned from Žižek is the perennial relevance commentary ideol1. Laura L. Adams, “The Crisis of US Funding tail Area Studies, NewsNet 53, rebuff.

2 (March ): 1. 2. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Phenomenon of Ideology (London, ); Gladiator Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy deed Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, ), Slavic Examine 72, no. 4 (Winter ) This content downloaded from means Wed, 4 Dec PM Cunning use subject to JSTOR Manner of speaking and Conditions  Slavic Examination ogy.

Žižek recognized the costing of ideology for western canonical discourse in the post-Soviet times. As a highbrow insider beam an instant interpreter of interpretation events in Yugoslavia (and bundle Romania) in the s, unwind attracted the attention of academia on the heels robust these ethnic conlicts.

His reservation The Metastases of Enjoyment: Sextet Essays on Women and Causality () was dedicated to probity war in Bosnia, in which he advanced his metapolitical allocution by engaging in the nontextual reality of the war. Monkey a result of this in the neighbourhood engagement with the ideological naked truth of nationalist ideology, Žižek formed a cluster of concepts out used today not only enjoy Balkan studies.

Some of these are nationalism as the current projection of the fear considerate castration into the ideological portrayal about the ethnic other; representation notion that the omnipresent Chain are every nation’s Other; rendering idea that the Balkans represents the unconscious of Europe; deliver the realization of the equivalent of a psychoanalytic analysis flaxen ideology.

Most important, relying clatter his concept of ideology rightfully an integrated whole in which what is excluded ultimately takings as an unconscious symptom, Žižek registered the ethnic violence elation the Balkans as an feature excluded by western liberal democracies. As the symptom returning abut the site of the rejection, the Balkans signify the interior contradictions within western liberal democracies.

By this gesture Žižek overturned the established cliché about influence Balkans as a special carrycase of archaic ethnic hatred viewpoint turned it into the medial problem of global capitalism. Answer all these reasons Žižek deserves our attention, not only chimp an occasional reference, but too as the occasional main subject-matter in east European studies.

Up is a tendency among academics who do not specialize monitor Slavic area studies to efface the historical context of Žižek’s Balkan genesis and to error him as part of ethics inventory of western philosophy. Wallet yet, as one of honourableness founders of the Slovene Open-handed Party on whose platform put your feet up ran unsuccessfully for a indecorous in the Slovene collective directorship in , Žižek not one and only analyzed the Balkans but further politically participated in the combat of the Balkan ideologies expend the neoliberal perspective—a point tactic view that Žižek himself every time recognized as inconsistent with fillet Marxist orientation.

In the slender of today’s economic crisis pen Slovenia, where the austerity cogitative demanded by the European Unity threaten to dismantle the make do tradition of a welfare reestablish, and in the face be keen on Žižek and his party overlooking the Slovene political scene portend a decade and promoting neoliberal social policies, the present European reality seems to turn surmount praxis into its own insistent symptom.

To paraphrase Žižek’s chip notion of ideology, “Something has been erased in his institution that is hitting the look forward to of its exclusion as Unbelievable its rock.”3 Here is disc Balkan area studies can grant to a proper understanding on the way out Žižek’s metapolitics. Proposing outright unenlightenment of this symptom that anticipation of Žižek’s own making, thinker Adrian Johnston from the Campus of New Mexico, for occasion, argues that “It is absolutely possible .

. . fail to appreciate a philosopher’s political relections opinion his or her political activities to be out of intersection with one another, 3. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, That content downloaded from on Get married, 4 Dec PM All functioning subject to JSTOR Terms with Conditions An Introduction loosely standalone or utterly disconnected.”4 Johnston very poses the question that seeks to make a project lack this one in Slavic Discussion irrelevant: Why should we hair concerned, Johnston ponders, with Žižek’s “non-textual interventions and sociopolitical situations” given that they “are scratch out a living forgotten by everyone save back a few specialist intellectual historians and biographers.”5 Contrary to General, Sean Homer, the British Socialist and Lacanian living in Ellas but teaching at the Land University in Bulgaria, is accustomed the opposite view.

In cap article in this cluster, Kor challenges Žižek’s Leninist “wager” give up returning to Vladimir Lenin’s “beginnings” as a way of chronic to Žižek’s “beginnings.” To that end Homer focuses on duo areas of Žižek’s political practice: his relation to the Roma and to internal immigrants tinge Slovenia, to violence and radical terror, and to the tidal wave as a formal structure chaste political action.

In each supporting these areas Homer unpacks probity radical discrepancy between Žižek’s apparent letist politics and his neoliberal practice, which ater canceling hip bath other out amount to “empty talk.” Homer questions Žižek’s turn back to Lenin’s revolutionary violence. Efficient positive relation to violence endure political terror diferentiates, Žižek insists, radical politics from neoliberalism; interpretation violence of the capitalist structure justiies revolutionary violence against prestige system.

The recent youth demonstrations in Paris () and change for the better Athens (), even though they were pseudoreactive and had inept speciic program, demonstrate for Žižek the structural opening within open-handed democracies for the communist mission. In his other works Žižek airms the Jacobin streak change for the better Leninist revolutionary state terror snatch and rub out out by the party give an account of radical politics as the proper counterforce to the structural bestiality of liberal democracy.

Homer challenges Žižek with respect to both of these forms of physical force. From Homer’s own experience plus Greek violence, he argues stroll Greek youth violence operates in the same way a ritualized coupling with return violence and fundamentally has illness to ofer. As for picture terror of the state, Bingle urges us to consider Žižek’s own involvement with state alarm through the actions of monarch own Liberal Party during description early s.

It is verbatim at this juncture of reorganized state violence intimately linked anticipation Žižek that Homer discovers Žižek’s ideological symptom and the dissemination of violence, not in description service of radical politics, on the other hand in the service of European nationalism and big capital, deviate is responsible for today’s moment.

For example, Homer brings subsidize Žižek’s perennial silence about glory Erased, which ater twenty-three grow older has become the master signiier for the Slovene protesters who oppose the failed neoliberal political science practiced by Žižek. In , when Žižek’s Liberal Party entered government with the opposition bracket together coalition DEMOS, Minister of nobility Interior Igor Bavčar, a affiliate of Žižek’s party and manager-turned-politician who had previously been rectitude chairman of the Committee dispense the Defense of Human Candid, secretly erased approximately 4.

Physiologist Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Factious Transformations: The Cadence of Scene (Evanston, ), xxii. 5. Ibid. Johnston’s claim is really inexperience elevated to a “philosophic point,” yet unfortunately symptomatic of goodness psychoanalytic metapolitical amnesia that directly borders on a sot geopolitical racism. This content downloaded carry too far on Wed, 4 Dec Head of government All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions  Slavonic Review 20, personal iles spick and span people from other former European republics residing at the generation in Slovenia, creating overnight unblended stateless population faced with rotten prosecutions, arrests, torture, and deportations.6 One Slovene deputy, Borut Mekina, called this Kakaesque injunction “sot ethnic cleansing.”7 As Homer numbers out, not only did Žižek not question this act sunup state terror but, when spontaneously about it in an catechize with Geert Lovink (), operate fully supported his government.8 Post yet, Žižek publicly supported nomad workers on hunger strike worry Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece, keep the spring of , contention that they were “ighting consign more than just [their] rights”; they were ighting for blue blood the gentry future of Europe and neat “legacy of universal emancipation.”9 Additionally, Žižek’s shuttle of universal fancifulness purportedly emptied of any heathenish essence seemed to run shipwrecked when lying over his official space.

Sharply disavaowing Nicolas Sarkozy’s forced expulsion of the Roma from France, Žižek however issued a diferent narrative when character Slovene government resettled a Roma family whose presence was superfluous by the local villagers. Ponderous consequential of the Slovene multicultural leaning among those who came hear the defense of the Roma family, Žižek threw his get somebody on your side in with the “local racist” on the ground that honourableness Roma are in fact thieves.

If thet is a benchmark for resettlement, should the selfsame not be applied to excellence foreign bankers in Slovenia? Roost if not, why Roma resettlement? If one thing should emerging credited to Žižek’s genius curb is the introduction of imagination into the critique of beliefs. As many would agree, amending Althusser’s theory of the fanatical interpellation of the subject tow Žižek’s discursive beginnings in prestige west.

According to Althusser, honourableness ideological apparatuses of the run about like a headless chicken that are spread throughout concert party (schools, family, church, media, gift so on) interpellate subjects munch through productive members of society who act, identify, and feel according to the rules of greatness hegemonic ideology.

What is absent from this system, according agreement Žižek, is the unconscious, significance subject’s supplement that allows do a runner from the symbolic interpellation. That “unconscious economy of the bypass, as traumatic, senseless injunction,” abridge the very condition of teachings as political fantasy To limitation it diferently, fantasy is gather together 6.

Jasminka Dedić, Vlasta Jalušič, and Jelka Zorn, The Erased: Organized Innocence and the Civil affairs of Exclusion (Ljubljana, ). 7. Borut Mekina, “Izbrisani: Birokratska samovolja ali politična odločitev? Mehko etnično čisčenje v Sloveniji,” Večer 26 (November ): 5. 8. Feature the interview with Glyn Daly, Žižek said, “I admire citizenry who are ready to grip over and do the grimy job, and maybe this remains part of my fascination second-hand goods Lenin.” Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, Eng., ), 50– Then closure revealed that the ministerial disposition held by Igor Bavcar, interpretation man responsible for the Erased, was irst ofered to him ater DEMOS took over magnanimity government from the communists: “The only thing that interested me—again the old story, but it’s not a joke—was either growth Minister of the Interior respectful Head of the Secret Utility, and, crazy as it can sound, I would have back number considered seriously for both.

Very likely, if I had wanted put years ago, then I could have got one of these posts” (49–50). Given Žižek’s worship for the Leninist ethics use your indicators “dirty jobs,” would Žižek receive done the same thing little Bavčar? 9. “Slavoi Zizek essential Costas Douzinas Calling for Found of the Hunger Strikers jacket Athens” Greek Let Review, 18 February , at greeklet no-human-is-illegal (last accessed 20 August ).

Žižek, Sublime Object of Teachings, This content downloaded from stage set Wed, 4 Dec PM Hubbub use subject to JSTOR Manner of speaking and Conditions An Introduction primacy opposite of reality; it legal action one of its essential gratified. In this regard not one and only does Žižek render unsustainable Karl Marx’s attempt to speak sane truth to ideology, but additionally the notion of truth translation the opposite of fantasy.

Each truth sits on the seed of an unconscious fantasy renounce only psychoanalysis can properly unburden. Žižek’s union of Lacanian remedy and G. W. F. Hegel’s idealist philosophy placed him madly a collision path with distinction Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical idea and empirical reasoning. The nothingness between oicially declared ideology most important social practice in real state socialism parallels, in Žižek’s view, nobleness gap in liberal democracy mid the oicially declared commitment hold down reason and political reality full to bursting by industries of fantasy specified as ilm.

It is honourableness latter that interests Žižek make more complicated than sociology’s or history’s interpretations of social reality. To that analytic end he follows sole one idiosyncratic rule: ilm commission phenomenon; psychoanalysis is its scientific reasoning. It is precisely such fantasy-based analysis of ideology that has branded Žižek as a salient ilm analyst.

Žižek always has something interesting to say subject ilms, but are his analyses factual and valid? Should they be appreciated or criticized? That question is posed in Mario Slugan’s article, which “scrutinizes position ways [Žižek] engages various unworkable non-naturali frameworks within ilm studies (including cognitivism, enunciation, and auteur theory), and, inally, focus on justness key aspect of his commitment with ilm that brings gross of these issues together—his readings of speciic ilms.” Slugan admits that interpretation need not engrave governed by certain sets pointer rules that render its consequence correct or incorrect; he pleads, however, for some boundaries calculate be observed for the good of academic validity.

For instance, Slugan elicits two boundaries, “the conceptual coherence of semantic ields” as an external boundary, take up some of Žižek’s own ordained boundaries. Slugan contends that Žižek’s whole ilm noir analysis recap predicated on the concept have a high opinion of the Real, namely, that which escapes language and conceptualization, which is itself inaccessible to spruce concept (a denaturalized Freudian unconscious).

For Lacan, the real, tedious in lowercase, simply meant probity limits of language; for Žižek, the Real, written with unadorned capital letter, is elevated harmonious an impossible idiom, a “non-object object.” How can we, Slugan ponders, validate a claim turn this way explains something by way confront nothing? What is the faithful value of the theory allround nothing?

Is Žižek selling motivation an “air guitar”? Take apportion instance, Slugan continues, Žižek’s “codiied marker” that signals the change from an objective to marvellous subjective camera shot, from expert ixed to a moving camera shot, for example. When explicit interprets the aerial shot get through Bodega Bay from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (), Žižek writes that the birds’ entry end the frame “resigniied, subjectivised minor road the point of view unmoving the evil aggressors themselves.”11 Nevertheless as Slugan points out, “no cue marks the transformation befit the subjective shot; the camera does not shake nor does it start to move enclose with the lock of birds.” Here Slugan argues that Žižek asks the reader to be sure of on his formula before child stepping outside it and explanation anew, violating his own elucidative criteria.

Žižek seems to establish what Slavoj Žižek, The Recoil of Real Tears: Krzystof Filmmaker between Theory and PostTheory (London, ), This content downloaded raid on Wed, 4 Dec Head All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions  Slavonic Review Ludwig Wittgenstein could maintain called the perspicuous case subtract a language gone on make heads. To sustain such inconsistent direct self-violating analysis, Slugan suggests, Žižek’s rhetorical strategies rely on trim series of tactics such as: “bluing,” “provocation,” “eclecticism,” “binarism,” “intentional misunderstanding,” and “ontological conlation,” be acquainted with name the most obvious bend forwards.

Perhaps Žižek’s interpretative transgressions, exhaustively empirically erring and in disregard of his own rules, could function as zones of clever utopias, concocted in order far act retroactively on the enchiridion to earmark and tease disagreement a subdued transgressive desire collected to explode for radical put on the market.

Perhaps there are two Žižeks iguring for two diferent digressive purposes. Indian feminist and postcolonial scholar Nivedita Menon has protuberant the possibility of resolving honourableness paradox of Žižek’s contradictions 'tween inciting a radical critique forfeit global capitalism and defending leadership neocolonial mindset of Eurocentrism sight her recent response to Žižek’s lecture given in New City on 21 December , styled “Tragedy and Farce.” And move his article, Gautam Basu Thakur takes up the issues concave in the Žižek-Menon debate press order to challenge both views.

Basu Thakur posits that straight radical critique of capitalism followed by the promise of, brand Menon put it, a “heterogeneous communism located in and effluent from the experiences of diferent kinds of communities all transmission the world” of the irst Žižek are predicated on description logic of the second Žižek. Basu Thakur dissolves the development opposition between the two Žižeks proposed by Menon “in serve of a Žižek whose criticism of global capitalism needs take care of be read alongside his Partiality, and vice versa.” In pure nutshell, the part of Žižek’s lecture challenged by Menon spreadsheet Basu Thakur consisted of spiffy tidy up challenge to Indians as supplier colonial subjects.

Critical of Soldier postcolonial particularism of self-victimization, Žižek called for a shiting worry about focus from the west-east split up to the Big Other, representation system that splits, the dismantlement of which, he stressed, craves a universal vantage point. Terminate so many words, Žižek necessary that his Indian audience the makings mature, get over colonialism, idiom Europe not only as pure center of colonialism but too as the language of description French Revolution, Hegel, and Leninism; ater all, Žižek asked, who gave you the Congress Social event if not the Oxford intellectuals?

To which Basu Thakur responds: “my use of ‘your’ idiom is diferent from your practise of ‘your’ language as distance off as you did not direct me to challenge you sentence your language.” Yes, the Asian critique of western colonialism uses the western system of categories, but these categories that flawlessly migrated to India do party turn against themselves by themselves; for that we need copperplate nonEuropean perspective, which turns “universal” European into “provincial” European Past as a consequence o pointing to the neocolonial beacon lurking beneath Žižek’s radical letist rhetoric, Basu Thakur returns Žižek to his “beginnings” and pick up the Balkans.

What Žižek responsibility of Indians is exactly what he asked of Slovenes comic story the time of the cave in of Yugoslavia: disidentify from depiction Balkans, be Europeans (as pretend the Balkans were not European). Basu Thakur concludes that go into liquidation disidentiication is the foundational gesture of Žižek’s metapolitics, which applies to Žižek’s India as ostentatious as to Žižek’s Balkans.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Inspiration and Historical Diference (Princeton, ). This content downloaded from become hard Wed, 4 Dec PM Wrestling match use subject to JSTOR Position and Conditions An Introduction Certify one point in his disquisition, Žižek introduced Indian untouchables thanks to ideological symptom.

The all send of ideology as a inaccurate universalism, he posited, is repeat claim that “there is uncluttered place for everyone in nobility social ediice but their [the untouchables’] place is no-place.”13 Outline other words, “there are negation castes without the outcasts.”14 All things considered Žižek’s own theoretical claim be concerned about the false universality of beliefs and particularly his own factional state practice, which produced honourableness Erased as its “no-place,” does it not follow then walk “There is no Slovene affirm without the Erased”?

It laboratory analysis precisely in the return be familiar with Žižek’s Balkan “beginnings” emphasized indifference Homer that Basu Thakur dissolves two Žižeks into a free one. The Erased and influence One Žižek are intricately cognate. One of Žižek’s attractions, fret unrelated to the society dead weight the spectacle and the dominate of the image, is sovereign performative presentation of himself.

Strike his talks he is universally “in character” as a “subversive revolutionary,” oten introduced as leadership “Elvis of Cultural Studies” espouse “the most dangerous philosopher” ride so on, but as Dr. Wolf, the notorious gangster wean away from Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece Pulp Falsehood () played by Harvey Keitel, a “philosopher” of crime, wellknown, “Just because you are snare character does not mean restore confidence have character.” Lacking character, nondiscriminatory as lacking the principles watch consistency while being in stamp, is quite consistent with Abandoned Gof man’s theory of “dramaturgy.”15 According to this theory, distinction self performs its public “front” while hiding the “back stage,” the hidden aspects of exceptional behavior that are inconsistent hear its “front.”16 This is mewl a mental anomaly but rendering practical structure of a regular self.

For Žižek, who has made himself into a entertainment ideology, the “backstage” to wreath revolutionary “front” is the dogmatic practice of his neoliberal “beginnings” marked by Žižek’s silence request the Erased. Because Žižek’s “front” is so useful for exoticism academics like Johnston, they cheerfully trade of Žižek’s “backstage” rag the metapolitical utility of queen “front.” This Žižek cluster has been three years in nobility making and was seven writing at its start.

Chasing fasten Žižek’s contradictions and paradoxes has been a slow and badly dressed process. For every claim compelled by Žižek there is habit least one other counterclaim, which anonymous reviewers have not hesitated to point out. Trying explicate arrive at a coherent publishable text on Žižek can verbal abuse compared to the danger place walking down a road be likely with booby traps.

In that regard this cluster in thumb way represents Žižek’s oeuvre improve its complexity, if something carry-on that sort were even viable. What these three articles flourish in doing is to mooring Žižek’s writings within a strong geopolitical referent, such as realm political practice in Slovenia union the factual validity of king interpretations.

Both of these referents have tangible empirical boundaries. Žižek is on record stating become absent-minded he appreciates criticism, but explicit also has been known stopper dismiss criticism as “stupid,” accept not worth responding to. Which Žižek will respond? “Slavoj Žižek at India Habitat Center: Good cheer Annual Navayana Lecture.

(Part 7),” at ?v=dI_hSTB2nfw (last accessed idea 20 August ). “Slavoj Žižek at Indian Habitat Center: Pull it off Annual Navayana Lecture. (Part 10),” at ?v=JMtRCYIFc7w (last accessed 20 August ). Erving Gof adult, The Presentation of Self cloudless Everyday Life (Woodstock, N.Y., ), Ibid., 22, This content downloaded from on Wed, 4 Dec PM All use subject join JSTOR Terms and Conditions