This served to make an already fake situation even faker, by which, of course, I mean “Real”—this was Žižek, after all, the Yugoslav-born, Ljubljana-based academic and Hegelian/mock-Hegelian; mascot of the Occupy movement, critic of the Occupy movement; and former Slovenian presidential candidate, whose prime contribution to intellectual history remains his redefinition of ideology from a Marxist false consciousness to a Freudian-Lacanian projection of the unconscious.
Translation: To Žižek, all politics are formed not by deliberate principles of freedom or equality, but by expressions of repressed desires—shame, guilt, sexual insecurity, you name it. According to Žižek, we’re all convinced we’re drawing conclusions from an interpretable world when we’re actually just suffering involuntary psychic fantasies.
Žižek was spending the day in wall-to-wall promotion mode, talking up his new movie The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (described in the press materials as “a lecture on film, in film”), while his new wife, Slovenian journalist Jela Krečič, three decades younger and twenty floors upstairs, chain-smoked on her balcony (junkets make cheap honeymoons). Krečič is Žižek’s third wife, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology the sequel to 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema—I wondered how he felt about franchises: What would be different this time around?
“I can’t see the future,” he said. “And I haven’t seen the movie.”
So I told him about it. In the sequel, as in its predecessor, he stands around on the recreated sets of Hollywood classics and, between concussively edited clips, proceeds to desublimate their meanings: the shark in Jaws is not a shark but a semantic void, much like the Mitteleuropean conception of “Jewry”; it’s lucky that the Titanic hit the iceberg, because if it hadn’t, Kate would’ve left her rich fiancé for penniless Leo—death, then, spared her the fate of living poor.
Žižek, listening for the exact amount of time it took to de-recline his chair and cross his legs out of their manspread, exploded—with memories of the earliest foreign media he consumed, Perry Mason novels and Columbo in Slovene and Serbo-Croatian, which led, obviously, to a seminar on Hitchcock’s TV show and movies: “a true work of art, the definition of it is that it survives decontextualization.” About to make another jump, he stopped. A photographer had entered the room, then left. “How do you call this rule that the actor shouldn’t look directly into the camera?”
“The fourth wall,” I said. “Don’t break the fourth wall.”
“Yes. Yes. But what interests me is that there is one genre where it breaks—hardcore pornography.”
He tore away the page he’d been scribbling on—stacked squares—and began scribbling triangles on the next.
“Friends told me that the latest trend, at least in Europe, is public sex. They showed me some clips, and they’re terrifying. A couple enters a streetcar, half-full, simply takes a seat, undresses, and starts to do it. You can see from surprised faces that it’s not staged. It’s pure working-class suburb. But what’s fascinating is that the people all look, and then they politely ignore it.”
Žižek’s style in person is the same as in his Guides: verbose, associative, dissociative, obscene (“Fuck realism!”), anecdotal (“I was just in Istanbul…”), enjargoned (“jouissance”). He went on to analyze Angela Merkel, Joschka Fischer, Robert Redford and The Company You Keep, then transitioned to recaps of the dialectic and the Kantian categoricals: Government surveillance was “private,” Žižek insisted, not “public,” “precisely in the sense that we’re all embarrassed by it when it goes public.”
He flung his pen to the blotter and gripped his beard. “It’s bad if we’re controlled, but if we’re not, it can be even worse.” A theory of religions followed; Malevich and formalism; why Prokofiev was better than Shostakovich; Platonov, Shklovsky, Brecht; the importance of racism to foreign relations. The closest analogue to Žižek’s indefatigable critique is the very subject he’s always critiquing: global capital. It didn’t matter whether any of his “product” or “programming” was consistent or cohered; it didn’t even matter whether any of the thoughts he spewed for this interview—let alone the thoughts of his approximately fifty books to date—would ever be consumed: Instead, all that concerned him was production.
“What do others see in me?” Žižek finally asked, though it was unclear whether he was summarizing Freud, or summarizing Lacan summarizing Freud, or asking me—the last journalist of his junket’s day—my opinion.
“You say you love me, but why?”
But I’d never said that, so it had to be rhetorical.
“It’s absolutely my idea that the state is an agent of what Lacan called ‘the gaze of the Other.’ The gaze is always minimally erotic.”
This was the first moment he looked me in the eye. Then he went on to explain something else.