A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek
Recorded on April 15, 2005 in Syracuse, New York during
the St. Paul Among the Philosophers
conference.
ver the past two decades Slavoj Žižek has emerged as a leading transdisciplinary theorist, with critical writings on film, philosophy,
politics, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. His breadth of scholarship,
along with his novel understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and politics, has
lifted him to the status of academic celebrity—a position that Žižek rejects
outright, but cannot escape. Living down this paparazzi style attention that
follows him from lecture to lecture and the general problem of academic fanfare
is the subject of Astra Taylor’s documentary film,
Žižek!, that explores this
tension between Žižek’s intellectual commitment and his celebrity obligations.
Setting aside the burdens of academic “stardom,” if one were to fit Žižek’s
scholarship into the available modes of academic discourse, it would most likely
fall within Lacanian philosophico-cultural analysis, although Žižek’s Lacan
varies from the received “structuralist” Lacan of the 1970s (see Žižek’s The
Sublime Object of Ideology, London/New York: Verso 1989). Žižek’s Lacanian
inspired scholarship is not limited to the internal debates of psychoanalysis;
his reconsideration of Lacan in the context of the western philosophical
tradition, namely German Idealism, has opened new lines of transdisciplinary
inquiry. Presenting Lacan as a figure “outside” of the mainstream of American
“ego psychology” redefines the place of Freud and psychoanalysis within
contemporary cultural studies debates. “The genius of Žižek’s contribution,”
Kenneth Reinhardt writes, “[is] to demonstrate that this version of Lacan
offered an extraordinary fruitful approach to thought, culture, and religion.”
You may also wish to read other articles addressing Žižek's place in
religious theory:
Listen to the interview