Conversations With Zizek Review 15154178

8/2/2019 Conversations With Zizek Review 15154178

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Roger Deacon is Honorary Research Fellow in Human and SocialStudies and Honorary Lecturer in Education at the University ofKwaZulu-Natal, and Managing Editor of Theoria. His most recentpublication is Fabricating Foucault (Marquette Universi ty Press ,2003), and he is currently researching the origins of early moderneducation, and the art and politics of war.Email: [email protected]

Conversations with tizek, by Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly. Polity:Cambridge, 2004. ISBN: 0745628974Reviewed by Richard PithouseThe astonishing exuberance of Slavoj Zizek's theoretical promiscuityhasn't always made his work easy. On the contrary a productiveengage m ent w ith his work has required a solid groun ding in L acaniantheory and its occasionally obtuse terminology (not to mention a lit-tle Kant, Hitchcock, Hegel, M*A*S*H* and so on). But getting intoZizek has been getting easier for two reasons.

The first is Zizek's anti-capitalist shift. The central political thrustof his early work is an attack on the totalitarianism of the authoritar-ian state but his more recent work, beginning with the last chapter ofThe Ticklish Subject (Verso 1999), moving through On Belief (Rout-ledge 2001) and culminating in his superb afterword to his edited col-lection of Lenin's 1917 writings. Revolution at the Gates (Verso2002), develops a sustained attack on the tyranny of the market. Hestill uses Lacanian ideas to illuminate the processes of dominationand to defend the possibilities of revolutionary intervention in theform of the act chosen without recourse to the legitimation of a 'bigOther' but the Lacanian jargon has slipped away. One doesn't need tobe initiated into Lacan's technical vocabulary to understand Zizek'snewer anti-capitalist work.


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and is able to offer a clear view into its basic structure without sacri-ficing the complexity and subtlety of his thought. It also comes witha very useful glossary of Zizekian terms that is quite extensive andwhich includes explanations of how his use of these terms haschanged as his thinking has developed.

But Conversations with Zizek is the best route into Zizek. More andmore interview books are being published. Some, like Negri on Negri(Routledge 2004), provide new illumination but many don't alwayswork well for the simple reason that people who write well don'talways interview well. The book on Castells in the same series asConversations with Zizek never seems to get around Castells's largeand unlovely narcissism. But Zizek is clearly a man who can speak ashe writes insofar as his humour, vast erudition and refusal to separatetheory from lived experience come through magnificently. Conversa-tions is also blessed with the same absence of Lacanian jargon thatcharacterizes his more recent work. It doesn't provide much that isnew but it does provide an excellent entry into Zizek's thought.There are five conversations in this book. The first is an often fas-cinating intellectual biography which includes the startling observa-tion: 'I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing.'This is later qualifiedby an explanation that the books come at such a rate because he Justwrites some things down in order to delay the actual act of writing. Nodoubt this explains his errors and tendency to repetition but it mayalso explain his willingness to take such productive risks. The secondconversation is an equally stimulating exploration of the state andimportance of contemporary philosophy. Unsurprisingly Zizek seeksa radical empiricism that can transcend the sterilities of cognitivismvia an appreciation of Hegel's insight that the transcendent is immi-nent or, in Zizek's favourite Hegelian phrase, that the spirit is a bone.The third conversation explores Zizek's widely appreciated defence ofthe subject. He argues, in a surprisingly productive discussion of theKinder children's eggs that contain a plastic toy in the centre of achocolate egg, that liberal capitalism and organicist totalitarianismsshare the same belief in factor X the toy inside the egg. In responsehe prescribes the introduction of historicity into the absolute via the


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makes up for his unfortunate omission of Fanon in the afterword tothe Lenin book with an argument that claims that the eruption of thereal into the sym bolic m ust be violent. But Fanon is merely referencedin a rather caricatured way rather than engaged with as a complexthinker. Because Zizek misspells his first name in the same way thatHardt and Negri do, one wonders if he has read Fanon through theircaricature. While Zizek's attacks on multiculturalism as a racializingand patronizing discourse are well made and hugely welcome, it doesseem that while his experiential base is universal his theoretical baseremains disablingly circumscribed by the borders of whiteness.Amongst other unfortunate consequences this crippling limitationdramatically weakens his articulation of the left assault on multicul-turalism's Kinder-egg-style pieties.

The final conversation takes up Zizek's new anti-capitalism. It's avery rich discussion that centres around his insistence that ethics mustbe subordinated to politics. This leads him to an attack on the pseu do-politics of the cult of the victim in favour of the politics of the act thatcan't be accommodated by the symbolic legitimation of domination.He argues that, since Kant, there has been an entrenched philosophi-cal suspicion that such acts are really driven by some unconsciouspathology but that in reality it is the act in-itself and for-itself that cre-ates so mu ch trauma that its visceral power m ust imm ediately be con-tained by some form of symbolic delegitimation.

Ne ither the blurb writers w ho present Zizek as the court jeste r ableto provide 'the best high since Anti-Oedipus' with a barrage of jokesthat move 'from Kan t to cu nn ilin gu s', nor the pedan ts w ho seize onhis ultimately minor errors are able to successfully contain his hardand supple radical energies. His blasphemy stands firm on its com-mitment. The South African academy is urgently in need of moreblasphemers to stand with Ashwin Desai. Zizek's inspiration mightencourage new rebels. If not it is, at least, and unlike the World Bankand the African Re naissan ce, a toy withou t an egg. It stands as whatit is to be liked, left or opposed as what it is.Richard Pithouse is a research fellow at the Centre for Civil Society


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Conversations With Zizek Review 15154178

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