A new text by Ian Parker is circulating around the net – available, among other sites, at www.discourseunit.com – which begins with the claim that, towards the end of the 1980s, when the Communist regime in Yugoslavia was in its death throes, I acted as a “commissar” monitoring and controlling dissident activity – here is the full paragraph:
“Let us start with a true story. In the middle of a crisis and crackdown in Slovenia toward the end of the 1980s Slavoj Žižek telephones an academic colleague in Britain late at night. This is before Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia and when the League of Slovene Communists was making some last desperate attempts to maintain power. The crackdown was directed at the opposition movement, in which Žižek and the artistic political grouping Neue Slowenische Kunst, were active. So, Žižek is on the phone during this political crisis in an agitated state. He tells his colleague how bad things are, that there is a total clampdown on the opposition. His colleague is sympathetic. Žižek goes on to tell him that things are even worse than that, for in every workplace a ‘commissar’ has been appointed to monitor and control dissident activity. His colleague is very sympathetic, even slightly alarmed by the picture Žižek is painting. And it is even worse than that, Žižek says, for even in the universities, in every department a commissar has been appointed to keep order. His colleague in Britain exclaims that this is indeed dreadful. And, Žižek then informs him that there is only one good thing in the midst of all this. What is that, his colleague asks. In my department, Žižek says, ‘I am the commissar’.”
One should note the serious implications of these lines: I am accused of nothing less than being an infortmant of the Communist power against dissidents. Let me be as clear and unequivocal as possible: this “true story” is entirely false, everything in it is a lie. Not only was I never any kind of a “commissar,” I also never boasted – ironically or truthfully – via a phone – or any other – conversation that I am anything like that. The only thing to add is that anyone who knows a little bit about Slovenia in the late 1980s will immediately see that the “true story” doersn’t make sense, for two obvious reasons. First, which “department” should be “mine”? In Yugoslavia, I was never employed at any university department – how could I then be active there as a “commissar”? Second, from (at least) the middle of 1980s, the Communist party effectively lost control over the employment politics at the university. At the Institute of Sociology where I was then formally employed (formally, since I already spent most of the time abroad), if a candidate for a job was suspected to be too closely linked to the Communist party circles, he had no chance of getting the job – at the end of the 1980s, to be “against” the regime was already a way to make a career!
47 Comments
Well (first
).
One point is not so false at all: in a regime which is kind of forced to place commissars around its people it is indeed the best to be the commissar self.
This public story circulating around the net is a symptom.
Un symptôme encourageant…
What capital is there to be gained from such a pathetic fantasy? Is it still possible to economically and intellectually trade on this period in history? We are our own keepers, commissars of our own mind and memory…
Thank God we have no thought police in the internet! As a result venomous gossip, unfounded rumor and blatant lying have their field day. I am wondering if I can have my 15 minutes of fame if I claimed Zizek has personally told me he was a personal advisor to Iosip Vissaryanovich himelf in his final days. Of course Zizek was only an infant then, but there is no knowing with these Stalinists!
It is a symptom, I agree, and a contagious one…
the one to start the actual symptom was Simon Crichley a while ago, with his “violent thoughts about Zizek”
do you have a name for it Christian Dubuls…? you know how symptoms get named
isn’t overidentification irony?
irony aims to provoke consternation.
the ‘true’ story has the structure of a joke,no? the structure of something that ‘Zizek’ might say…it is at that level that it could be ‘believable.’
“What capital is there to be gained from such a pathetic fantasy?”
Yes, unfortunatly there is still, one at least can have some personal capital (=ego) from it. Additional there is still the possibility to either destroy ones personality (the imagined one) or to boost your own.
A symptom, for sure, unsure is only the amount of the capital to gain – and on which side of the fence one is residing.
Is Slavoj becoming a liberal whiner?
I thought the exact same thing, PG.
Is Ian Parker a neurology-behavioralist at Irvine, Ca.? Isn’t the Discourse Unit an assortment of cognitive behavioral and ego therapists?
Isn’t this facetious, now squirmy tale their world projected: a structured joke! [The downward, central, counter-clockwise, circuitous flight away from S(barred A) to fantasy.]
These desperate conformists can’t help flinging their Ratman florins all over the walls.
And these are the Handicapper Generals in our Harrison Bergeron republic!
Well, brother Zizek, metonynically: “You da Daddy!”
there’s a sense of speed to the ‘a short clarification’, a kind of fastly movement, the ’short’ of it being further endowed in this regard by all we (well, I for one) have seen of zizek on you tube, on the sumptuous page–arms waving, frothing, delicious to look and hear speak zizek whose text races through the pages never once making you weary as do the other thinktankers–now, together, each–the rather obvious claim of some night call, the ’short(ness)’ of clarification, the exposure of the matter into the great big poisonous open we call the internet, all together serve to render the notion of some ‘frantic’ midnight call to some british pal very visual, very zizek.
appealing.
hilarious.
I always enjoy zizek as a sort of visual/aural gift from the gods.
Utterly absurd! Although I do have it on good faith that Zizek is actually the bastard love child of Stalin and Eva Braun…and Castro.
ANyway, I believe making outrageous claims about Zizek to be a symptom of ATTENTION WITHDRAWAL SYNDROME, which is quite contagious among desperate intellectuals for whom the public has stopped taking seriously.
Someone above wrote:
Is Ian Parker a neurology-behavioralist at Irvine, Ca.? Isn’t the Discourse Unit an assortment of cognitive behavioral and ego therapists?
No–he appears to be at Manchester Metropolitan University:
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/editorial_board.htm
I’m distressed by the circulation of this rumor. Part of me wonders whether it was designed to induce paranoia or was another kind of sadistic experiment. If so, then I dislike it even more.
My other thought about it is: Zizek has argued for a while that non-Eastern bloc people who accuse citizens of those countries of not doing enough to oppose the regime, etc., have no idea what they’re talking about, at best. My point being–so what if Zizek was the “Commissar”? I have enough trouble resisting the political forces in my own department…in the USA…
the mud reflects the extime of the locutor-this imbécile does not deserve any answer-
all my support & banzaï !
h de serrey
philosophe (e.g.s.)
analysand
I want to say to Slavoj that the slander against him arouses only the deepest disgust against the perpetrators, and that I trust that the solidity of his work and his many friends and students provide ample support and encouragement against this horrible campaign.
Rivka Warshawsky
I’m teaching in Croatia as I write this, on sabbatical on my university back home. I have seen the remnants of the destruction of the latter decade. Perhaps Girard has it right: it’s all about the scapegoat. And one other thing: Zizek is now in the position of proving the untruth of a negative — the true realm of the Real. Whatever you think of him, this kind of idiotic character assassination does not address the substance of his thought — neither at its best nor at its worst.
Posteado por A.A.delaR. a jueves, mayo 28, 2009
http://ampblog2006.blogspot.com
Lighten up comrades! The piece Slavoj objects to, ‘Ambivalence and oscillation’, was posted on the http://www.nskstate.com site five years ago. Readers can decide for themselves whether that bit of gossip works as a joke and as hook into the discussion of connections between his work and the NSK project, or not. My ‘Slovene preface’, just published, spells out in more tedious detail my admiration for his work and political solidarity with him against seriously reactionary attempts to undermine it. An English version is available at http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/34/250
Unfortunately, the only way I can understand Parker’s reply is to read it as an exemplary case of postmodern cynicism: he tries to sell as a harmless joke what the large majority of readers take as a serious insinuation. And why shouldn’t they? We are talking about the first paragraph of a long “serious” analysis of my alleged “ambiguities”: the story about my acting as a Communist party “commissar” denouncing colleagues is quoted as a starting point (or a “hook into”) the analysis of how my work relates to the NSK project. In short, Parker acts as a moral coward who wants to have a cake and eat it: to spread malicious lies about me while claiming they are innocent jokes exchanged among comrades. The least he should have learned from his visits to Slovenia is that here, stories about denouncing colleagues to the Communist authorities are NOT a joke!
Si comme Watzlawick, on reconnait l’étranger comme celui qui rit de tout sauf d’une plaisanterie, Parker démontre par sa réponse qu’il n’est par devers soi nullement étranger à lui-même (lui m’aime)…
Marque de reconnaissance des cyniques postmodernes.
Zizek says he wasn’t a commissar and I believe him. Parker says, “Readers can decide for themselves whether that bit of gossip works as a joke”. As far as I can tell, Parker isn’t saying that he has any solid evidence for thinking that Zizek was a commissar. I take this salient omission to show that Parker’s claim is a mere piece of unsubstantiated gossip. Whether such character damaging gossip works as a joke or not is irrelevant. It is potentially damaging to Zizek’s reputation and should never have been written.
Let me have just one more turn in this unfortunately un-comradely exchange. Are there not two paradoxes here? The first is that once upon a time, until about 2004, my worry about Žižek’s work was over the way he might be read, that his flirtation with reactionary ideological themes would encourage people to take those themes seriously. I see this now as my rather queasy liberal worry about what people will do with dangerous ideas if they do not understand them correctly. I was wrong. He taught me this, as did my encounter with NSK. Žižek, meanwhile, insisted on taking that risk, working with whatever ideological stuff is to hand and trying, in the process, to seize ground from the enemy. He was right. Now, however, he says he is worried that people will read what he claims to be quite patently malicious lies and believe they are true. How could he know? The second paradox is that while he seems to be sure that he knows what people will make of such stories – that they will believe them – it could quite possibly be precisely the reverse; that it is those who really believe such a story (that Žižek said something in a phone call) to be true who wonder what the fuss is about, while those who read it as a joke, or a lie even, are those who take it seriously. Why does he take the story seriously? Why now? His ‘short clarification’ that is circulating in English is a version of a more detailed complaint about me and his ex-comrades in NSK that was published as an interview in Mladina (in Slovene) in which he accuses me of continuing to engage in intrigues against him. Yes, there was one instance (in my chapter on overidentification in the problematic edited Truth of Žižek book) where I did make a direct claim, as if it were fact, that he was asked by the Slovene government to help with their pro-NATO campaign in the referendum there. As he notes in the Mladina piece, I apologised to him when he visited Manchester last year. There was no evidence for that claim (though it was the case that he did publicly call for a yes to NATO vote in the referendum). He also in the interview accuses some in NSK of being lucky to be in the right place at the right time; rather like Duchamp’s urinal, he says, they have become an everyday urinal into which one pisses. Now there are at least two of us in this exchange who are pissed off. Now my 2004 book has just been published in translation in Slovenia by ROPOT, with a cover by the NSK design group, and I suspect that this bizarre reaction to my story is a function of a series of squabbles there. His reaction (and, sure, my response) is perhaps, as some commentators have suggested, a symptom, but this still does not answer the question: Why does he take the story seriously? Who knows? Is the worst here not that this rather ridiculous argument serves to obscure more important political questions that need to be argued through, if not resolved, and not just by us two?
Unfortunately, (or fortunately?) there is a lot of hatred for Zizek’s work out there amongst the masses of post-modern scholars, post-colonialists, third world nationalists, identity theorists etc. – and every other intellectual persuasion unable to grasp the inadequacy of their politics to have anything meaningful to say in regard to the current impasse of global capitalism and the collapse of politics in the Western world.
Zizek is one of few in the academy who has realized this and been brave enough to argue it forcefully. The very truth of many of his propositions rattles the thousands of scholars who have invested decades of their careers in post-structuralist analysis and claims that ‘teaching is micro-political praxis’ etc.
Autrement dit, afin de poursuivre l’instruction dans les conditions les mieux adaptées à la situation, faisons appel au sens de la justice immanente du regretté Pierre Desproges : Ian Parker est-il un cynique postmoderne? La question reste posée. Et la question restant posée, il ne nous reste plus qu’à poser la réponse. Ian Parker est-il un cynique postmoderne ? De deux choses l’une : ou bien Ian Parker est un cynique postmoderne, et ça m’étonnerait tout de même un peu, ou bien Ian Parker n’est pas un cynique postmoderne, et ça m’étonnerait quand même beaucoup.
Zizek writes,
“Unfortunately, the only way I can understand Parker’s reply is to read it as an exemplary case of postmodern cynicism: he tries to sell as a harmless joke what the large majority of readers take as a serious insinuation. And why shouldn’t they? We are talking about the first paragraph of a long “serious” analysis of my alleged “ambiguities”: the story about my acting as a Communist party “commissar” denouncing colleagues is quoted as a starting point (or a “hook into”) the analysis of how my work relates to the NSK project. In short, Parker acts as a moral coward who wants to have a cake and eat it: to spread malicious lies about me while claiming they are innocent jokes exchanged among comrades. The least he should have learned from his visits to Slovenia is that here, stories about denouncing colleagues to the Communist authorities are NOT a joke!”
Isn’t Zizek the moral coward here? The defender of Lenin, Stalin and Mao is upset by a “falsehood”. Oh,, Slavoj!
I’m with Slavoj on this, no doubt. “It’s just a joke” is the current reason right-wingers give here in the USA to justify their racism, etc. To cap it all, the injunction to “lighten up” is truly obscene, and was used by McCain-Palin “excuse” their rallies against Obama last year.
Thanks for pointing this out Timothy, I would not have used that formulation if I knew how it would signify in the US, it sure does give an unpleasant twist to these exchanges. My apologies for any offence it caused. Ian
Look here: several marginals of the professoriate slinging epithets of “moral cowardice” and distinguishing “inappropriate” or–better yet– “politically incorrect” models of conduct by mythologizing Palin-esque attacks on Obi-wan.
Could you brats be more whipped?
Parker did something exceptionally stupid. Why is pathetic, interesting and repudiated. Story is over. Or should we call in Geraldo Rivera? This smells very bad!
Although I am on Mr. Zizek’s side on this, that the accusation is presented not as a joke and is certainly unjust, I would like to point out that Mr. Parker has apologized.
But regardless of Ian Parker’s morals, I believe his work to be very important. Many of the things Mr.Zizek stands and fights for are also Mr. Parker’s struggles; and as such he is an extremely valuable comrade. His book, revolution in psychology, does an admirable job of describing the ways modern psychology inscribes us into the dominant capitalist system.
Any fan of Zizek will likely enjoy Ian Parker’s work, and I implore readers to check it out.
Jonathan McCormack, your visual taste is definitely too bad to be credible.
Lacan said “Faites comme moi, ne m’imitez pas!”
You and Ian Parker would be more inspirated to do what Slavoj Žižek does, and really support his work and his struggle, than try to imitate him.
Hey, great Santini, I’m just a fish butcher earning minimum wage, I read Lacan on my lunch break. Zizek seems to be doing just fine; I feel he ought to be supporting my struggle! Comments like yours are why the working class instinctively distrusts the intellectual elites. I don’t know what you do to support Zizek’s struggle, I do what I can with my abilities. For change sake, we need to educate and work with each other, not snipe at each other’s heels like bitchy dogs.
Hey Big Jonnie, at the beginning of this page I wrote my first comment.
So, a symptom of what?
Slavoj Žižek is so famous than his worst enemies now are those who pretend to like him, but misread his work and betray the “cause”.
You just cannot tell you are “on Mr. Zizek’s side” and “believe (Ian Parker’s) work to be very important”. You have to choose your side, “comrad”!
“Comments like mine are why the working class instinctively distrusts the intellectual elites” do you argue? I dont believe in “intellectual elites”, I am not an intellectual, I am a typographer, an art director, and a reader. And working class is me.
“What you do I do to support Zizek’s struggle?” I virtually snipe…
So you are condamned to 2 years of reeducation camp, try learning to read… and studying visual art, too!
I feel anyone with the name ‘Christian Dubius Santini’ has forfeited any working class claims. But seriously, the aims of Ian parker, especially in recent versions of his critical and radical psychology, seem to me to coincide with many of Zizek’s political aims, especially Parker’s use of Foucault in understanding the power relations and hidden ideological assumptions of certain western psychology movements perceived as truth within a capitalist society; so I see no reason to pick a side. I support a truth of which I see both Zizek and Parker, both in their own unique ways as revealed by their theoretical texts, as being inscribed therein. As far as my art, I’m trying my god damn best, have a heart.
“As far as my art, I’m trying my god damn best, have a heart.”
…and so the original battle has been echoed, its triteness exposed, and we all come away feeling worse.
Right Christophe!
“I support a truth,” “my art” and “heart” ? “Working class claims”?
What happened to Lacan?
R we DEVO?
Get me off planet Knechtshaft!
>>> All the accomplices of postmodern cynicism : I would tell you the words of Henri Michaux : “The bird’s delirium does not interest the trees.”
And I’ve always wondered why Lacanian’s are said to lack a sense of humor…Anyway, I don’t know why everyone is skirting the issue and talking about me, but I still don’t see how Mr. Parker’s and Mr. Zizek’s Lacanian reading of the cultural “politics of Truth” in the west, especially in Parker’s latest work, intrinsically differ to the point of contradiction and needing to pick a side. I’m willing to learn if anyone’s up to a serious discussion. These forums always seem to end up in absurd petty bickering – yes, what happened to Lacan !
I would like to ask Ian Parker a question. Do you believe that Zizek was a commissar in a university department? Of course, you could point to the fact that Zizek has denied it, but I’d like to know, yes or no, whether you think that this was a real possibility, that Zizek was hired by the communist party to inform on university staff.
“The Cause”, “working class”, “comrade”? – I must have typed “lenin.com” instead of “lacan.com”, although it’s odd as the letters don’t seem to be so close to each other.
Ian Parker perhaps would feel he needn’t answer my question, but I ask you, does a true comrade refer to Zizek’s defences as ‘claims’ i.e. “what he claims to be quite patently malicious lies”, effectively leaving the accusations open without taking a subjective stance of his own? Or does he say as quick as he can, “of course, I do not believe for a minute that Zizek, my friend and comrade, would have done this”. Ian Parker, you are a coward. What’s the expression? With ‘comrades’ like these…
A Press Conference at the Ministry of the Interior…
More from scenes of class struggle in Slovenia. This is the last I will write on this topic for a while. I am upset that Slavoj is upset and friends and ex-comrades I met during the last few days are also upset, and this affair now needs a little time to settle down and for some dust and feelings to settle. His comments about NSK which were made in the Mladina interview alongside his complaint about me have been wounding, and I heard much speculation about who he really was pissing on in those comments. I have actually spent quite a lot of time defending him in discussions and interviews there, and arguing that he has been a progressive political force here. This is against a perception by many left activists in Slovenia that many of his interventions have been reactionary.
The discrepancy between his activities there and those abroad may be one reason why he appears to be discomfited by the first major critical appraisal of his work appearing in Slovene, and by the translation of a story about a story about the telling of a story in a telephone conversation five years after it first circulated in English. Anyone who believes this is about him being a commissar, which he was not, is missing the point. The argument activists make is that it his stance on actually-existing capitalism in Slovenia that is at issue for them, not the many jokes he tells about being a Stalinist under the old regime. There is, for example, bewilderment at his statement of support for a corrupt minister for higher education, science and technology in the new coalition government in the last month and anger at his call in the recent elections for a vote for one of the two main bourgeois parties, this following his call for a yes to NATO vote in the referendum. These are matters that the left in Slovenia will write more about no doubt, and for me to discover this or that misdemeanour evidently just gets turned into a personalised exchange, at the level of the imaginary we might say, rather than a properly political discussion about strategy and tactics, a discussion that is, in part, made possible by his revolutionary interventions in theory.
The press conference for the book, Slavoj Žižek: Kritični uvod, was held last week in the Ministry of the Interior in Ljubljana, on 19 June 2009. Why the Ministry of the Interior, in a grim old socialist building which it was only possible to enter with passes and official escorts? One reason is that Igor Vidmar, one-time roadie for Laibach, activist, punk and band promoter for many years was imprisoned twice under the old regime. Another reason is the story Žižek often tells, that after the election in which he just failed to win a place in the collective presidency of Slovenia he refused the offer of a ministerial post in arts and culture and declared that he wanted nothing less than the ministry of the interior and to be in charge of the police. It was as I sat in the opening of the press conference that it really hit me that in the publication of this book I was but a pawn in a bigger game, just as a comrade from Ljubljana warned me some time back. The cover of the book which I had no part in choosing shows a caricature of Žižek as a puppet and had attracted attention, delight and disgust, and needed to be addressed.
The translator of the book was not present. Vidmar reported to the press conference in the discussion that she has been ‘traumatised’ by the book and wished she had not agreed to translate it, partly because it was too critical. And she was further traumatised by my preface which was too critical of the book, too favourable to Žižek. Is this not the best as the worst of both worlds? The head of NSK’s department of pure and applied philosophy told me that one thing Žižek told him that they were in agreement on was that we were all controlled by dark forces in the universe. Anyhow, for all the attacks on me recently by those who think they are being loyal to Žižek, loyal but losing the plot, this is the statement I made at the press conference.
“This book gives you a way in to making sense of Žižek’s writings. I enjoyed his writing. I loved the anecdotes and jokes, the speed of movement from concept to concept. I enjoy it, but found it difficult to explain to someone after I had finished reading a book or article what the argument was. But there is an argument, or a complex cluster of arguments. Writing the book was a task I set myself to help me read it. I was lucky someone wanted to publish it. Now, to unlock these writings we need to notice three points.
First, that Žižek is a phenomenon. As a historical cultural-political phenomenon we need to ask why this work emerges here, why now? There was a kind of crack in reality in the 1970s and 1980s when something new emerged, an opening to something new; a new articulation of Marxism, a new reading of the philosophy of history, a new take on psychoanalysis as a theory of subjectivity. And, at the same time as Žižek is a manifestation of that opening, he theorises it. He shows us that what appeared was constituted, made possible at a particular conjunction of events. NSK was also a manifestation of, and intervention into this historical conjuncture, and so I am really pleased that the NSK design group came up for the cover of the book.
The second point is that I am concerned here with the domain of representation. My work in psychology, actually against psychology over the years has been concerned with shifting focus from what individuals think to how their words and actions function. So, here in the book I do not explain what Žižek really meant or what his intentions are. It is easy, too easy, to focus on his personality, to say he is mad or perverse or whatever. That is a convenient ideological move to dismiss the arguments in his writing; it is an ideological move used time and again. This means that identifying contradictions in his work also needs to locate those contradictions. Who is not contradictory? Psychoanalysis, Marxism and Hegelian philosophy insist that contradiction is at the heart of who we are. We are all marionettes, driven by forces we barely understand. You can see the cover of the book as a representation of that.
Third, my account, my reading is from a position, of an anti-psychologist, psychoanalyst, Marxist, and that leads me to attend to certain kinds of contradiction; more importantly, to want to read Žižek. He provides an account of the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis that is very different from the romantic expressive motifs that are usually at work in such theoretical discussion. The refusal of such romantic expressive motifs is of course at the core of the interventions by NSK.
I want to say something more about these three points, about the context for them that has become more and more important over the last twenty years, since Žižek’s books first appeared in English.
First, this phenomenon, Žižek and the questions he tackles, is affected by increasing psychologisation, that is, the reduction of explanation to the level of the individual and the search for therapeutic solutions to political-economic problems. His work provides a valuable corrective to that psychologisation but that psychologisation still operates as a powerful ideological frame for reading his work. It invites us to speculate about why he says this or that. It is for sure powerful in the UK and America and from what I have seen it is becoming powerful here.
Second, the representations of Žižek are embedded in the problematic of globalisation. This globalisation feeds off particular idiosyncratic local contexts and voyeuristically commodifies those local practices to sell them on the world market. Just as there is a category of ‘world music’ there is now a kind of ‘world philosophy’, and Žižek is caught up in that problematic even at the same time as he gives us the conceptual resources to challenge it, to challenge globalisation as it operates as glocalisation of places like this.
Third, as a critical text my introduction is from a position that is also caught within the problematics of globalisation and psychologisation. This book is, of course, written from outside Slovenia. It cannot but be part of the gaze of the West on the peculiarities of theoretical debate here, as if they are peculiarities. And that orientalising, exoticising gaze is itself part of what Žižek is now. He theorises it and utilises it very efficiently. And that global context combined with psychologisation gives rise to a tendency to personalise conceptual critical work. That then expresses itself in stupid squabbles between different theoretical political positions, between comrades we might say.
This book is the still the best ‘introduction’ to Žižek in English, so it is great that Igor Vidmar decided to publish it here. This is precisely because it is a critical introduction and because I think it will incite readers to think about the arguments, to argue with them, and to go back and read Žižek. How to read Žižek and why you should read Žižek is what the book is all about.”
Is there a book to come : “A critical introduction to Parker’s introduction to Žižek’s books (that are all critical introductions to Hegel, Marx and Lacan.)”?
A question you should ask to yourself: who really needs an introduction to read Žižek?
yeah zizek for dumbells like me just fake it till you make it
shut up thats funny
Why does he take the story seriously?
Because on the rare occasions that Žižek actually appears in Slovene media, there are usually some of his old and obscure statements that the Right wing is circulating in order to make him appear as a crazy Stalinist (which goes nicely with the popular theory here in Slovenia that the current left wing active in politics today are really dark forces of continuity of the old Communist regime.) The only phrase most Slovenians know Žižek by, is marking the minister for higher education Gregor Golobič as Stalin, a statement which is deliberately taken out of context in order to damage mostly Golobičes (who is an important political figure), but also Žižeks reputation. (the article from which that statement is taken can be found online for anyone interested in details). This is the same minister which you were so quickly to accuse of being corrupt (probably because you were loosely informed of the recent affair – and this really shows your lack of sensitivity to political statements), ignoring the fact that he was a close theoretical friend of Žižeks (Golobič studied philosophy and was one of the people along with Žižek that were first reading Lacan, Derrida and so on..) and that since Žižek still supports Golobič after the recent Ultra affair, that has serious implications for him.
So if this story became public in Slovenia and Žižek would not preemptively denounce it like he did, it would surely be used as an another smear campaign against him.
So in short, he did the right thing and you obviously aren’t careful enough in circulating information (along with the two stories you already confessed are fabricated, you proceeded in these comments to describe Golobič as corrupt which is really not for you, but the courts and the people of Slovenia to decide).
Les métastases du cas Parker…
Bonjour,
Pour information :
Est paru sur un site français ceci: http://www.cahiersdusocialisme.org/2009/08/23/oscillations-et-derives-des-representations-dans-l%E2%80%99oeuvre-de-slavoj-zizek-2/
À quoi j’ai répondu, en signant comme d’habitude de mes prénom, nom et adresse, mais mon commentaire a été immédiatement censuré :
“Et si le choix devait se faire entre:
• un tel tissu d’approximations pseudo-philosophiques : “Cette vérité est pour Hegel dans le concept, tandis que pour Marx elle se situe dans la praxis. Représenter veut dire porter quelque chose devant soi et l’avoir devant soi, avoir quelque chose de présent à soi en tant que sujet, en le retournant à soi. La connaissance humaine consiste précisément à se rapporter à des objets, en les représentant”
• et l’œuvre de Slavoj Žižek, ce ne serait pas un choix bien difficile!
Sauf votre respect, pour “critiquer” efficacement Žižek, encore faut-il pouvoir s’élever à son degré de rigueur épistémologique.
Ce qui n’est déjà pas le cas de Ian Parker…”
Bien à vous,
Christian Dubuis-Santini