Zizek!

Christian Moerk's 12 column-inches in Sunday's New York Times got my attention: "The World's Most Unlikely Movie Star" turns out to be a Slovenian critical theorist whose "musings on postmodernism and popular culture - rich in deeply spun allusions to the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch - are inspired by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan." Oh my, how very rich, how deeply spun.

Turns out an intern at Verso Books, which distributes his books, made a film of Slavoj Zizek's 2003-2004 speaking tour, and it's being shown in festivals in Toronto, New York, and "several national dates" (Wexner Center, pay attention). "This is propaganda for nerds," according to Andra Taylor, the filmmaker. "I think it's fantastic to reveal the structures of ideology and challenge people. It's a public service." Call me a dilettante, call me a dabbler, call me a poser, but I had to know more!

So I googled a bibliography of his books at the site of something called The European Graduate School, located in Saas-Fee, Wallis; New York; and Dresden. (Where the heck is Saas-Fee, you ask? It's a little town in the Swiss Alps near the Italian border; Wallis [or Valais] is the canton. Social studies really is fun.) But dig the titles: Organs Without Bodies; Contingency, Hegemony, Universality; and my personal favorite, Enjoy Your Symptom!

A clip from the film "Zizek," as he responds to a question about belief, contains a line attributed to the physicist Niels Bohr: "No, I don't believe in it, but I'm told that it works even if you don't believe in it." You can also view the trailer there and treat yourself to another nugget to chew on: "Philosophy doesn't ask 'Is this true?' Philosophy asks, 'What do you mean when you say this is true?'" If you'll excuse me, I have to go to a style guide meeting, where a group of editors will sit around a table and argue which words should or should not be used, based on how other sources did or didn't use them. It's all quite pragmatic. Kolkata means something, not because it's right or true but because it means something to someone.

If all this seems dry as dust to you, okay, just pass it by. On the other hand, if this kind of discourse on discourse is your meat and potatoes, your rice and beans, your bread and butter, well dig in. This interview, for example, entitled "The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other," might be old news, coming shortly after 9/11, but there are some radical ideas there about tolerance and multiculturalism, for example:

Today's racism is precisely this racism of cultural difference. It no longer says: 'I am more than you.' It says: 'I want my culture, you can have yours.' Today, every right-winger says just that. These people can be very postmodern. They acknowledge that there is no natural tradition, that every culture is artificially constructed. In France, for example, you have a neo-fascist right that refers to the deconstructionists, saying: 'Yes, the lesson of deconstructionism against universalism is that there are only particular identities. So, if blacks can have their culture, why should we not have ours?'

I guess what appeals to me about this kind of thinking is that it breaks out of the 'right-wing vs. left-wing' cliche of telling opposing versions of the same tired story, putting most of us to sleep. Now I think I'll go home and read a spy novel.