Žižek represents a comforting spot for overgrown graduate students.
Update, August 5, 2020
I wrote this piece in 2013. Žižek has become, over the years, ever more ridiculous. I still think a portion of his work is significant and important, but I’m not sure he has anything to say about anything anymore. Here’s a link to a recent video where he makes claims that Nathan J. Robinson, publisher of Current Affairs (whom he refers to as a “boss”), is engaged in some Noam Chomsky-led conspiracy against him.
Slavoj Žižek is, predictably, in the news again. In a piece titled, “Syria is a pseudo-struggle,” he writes that, “the ongoing struggle there is ultimately a false one.”
His words have, predictably, sparked anger and furious retorts, including this one . So it seemed the right time to write a short blog on how tired I am of the ZIC, or the Žižek Industrial Complex.
Or, to be clear, it’s less of an industrial complex and more of a cottage industry that functions like a carnival show even on its best days.
I first encountered Žižek during graduate school, just as I was entering the world of critical theory and film studies. Works like Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock appeared around the same time, and for a while I was an avid reader of his books.
Over the years since then, I’ve been struck by the repetitious quality of many of his analyses.
I don’t fault Žižek for the fact that he has become Theory’s biggest pop star – it’s tough making a living as a writer, as I know too well, and the life of an academic is far more precarious and time-consuming than most people understand. But I’m both wary and weary of what it means that The Word from the ZIC frequently supplants any real discussion of issues and/or texts.
The ZIC has managed to make us lazy thinkers and critics. People anticipate and yearn for a “Žižekian take” on everything under the sun in a way that reflects our general herd mentality when it comes to intellectual work. In the case of Syria, Žižek is taking, as Liza Featherstone has pointed out, a view from a distance to make a condensed point. I’d add that his views here might sit too comfortably with Western leftists who are apt to be smug about their own uncomplicated views about how revolutions ought to work.
It might well be that this provocative point here is worth taking up (and if Western leftists are too quick to dismiss revolutions, they’re also much too quick to embrace petty uprisings as such), and he’s entitled to make it.
My larger point here is that Žižek represents a comforting spot for overgrown graduate students. I’m often struck by the very gendered response to Žižek, whose biggest fans seem to be men and particularly men who look for neoligistic responses to culture which allow them to sneak in vague responses to Marx and Hegel to impress people. There’s a clueless dude-osity to many of their responses to Žižek, often imbued with an intellectual chest-butting of sorts. The most thrilling parts of Žižek, for them, are the more scatalogical bits and parts. In effect, Žižek allows people to engage in academic potty humour, to delight in what they think is the profane, everything they weren’t allowed to discuss openly while growing up in suburbia.
It’s not that Žižek’s not smart, and often dazzlingly provocative. I just don’t think he’s particularly brilliant. To me, someone truly brilliant is usually shocking in the sense that, in their work, you encounter something you’d never thought about before and are compelled to rethink your assumptions. But Žižek only really needs to be read every five years or so, if that, because his analyses (and I’m referring here to his work in outlets like The Guardian), are so repetitious.
Reading any new piece by him is like listening to a playlist on Pandora: After a while, you raise your head from your work and wonder why you’re listening to “Gypsy” for the tenth time in an hour.
I want to be clear that I don’t place all the blame for the ZIC on Žižek alone, and I don’t begrudge him his money. A lot of the anger levelled at Žižek is appallingly mean-spirited. I once witnessed someone at a Žižek presentation call him “stupid,” over and over during the comments segment, and then ramble on angrily. To his credit, Žižek calmly addressed his points at their face value and we carried on with the discussion.
All of which is to say: I have little patience with some of the pettiness hurled at Žižek, and I’m also not in the camp of people who whine about “intellectual discourse” taking the place of home-spun wisdom and/or knowledge: We don’t need less intellectual discourse, we need more of it (and I want to be clear that I remain wedded to the possibilities offered by both critical theory and film theory, particularly the schools emerging from psychoanalysis). The problem is that the ZIC may represent a waning of that possibility, not its rise.
After a while, I got bored with his work on Lacan and film, because he wasn’t saying anything new. It’s fine to make provocative points, but Žižek’s provocations are, bizarrely, bound up in inevitability. Which is to say: Even his most interesting and tendentious points seem like they could have been anticipated. That should be a point of concern for him (though I suspect it won’t be), but an even bigger one for us. In the case of Žižek, we’re just being force-fed regurgitated blobs of worn thought.
Even more bizarrely, we keep craning our necks like hungry chicks, desperate for more.
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