Conversations with Zizek

Slavoj Zizek, Glyn Daly

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745628974, 9780745628967
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this new book, Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly engage in a series of entertaining conversations which illustrate the originality of Žižek's thinking on psychoanalysis, philosophy, multiculturalism, popular/cyber culture, totalitarianism, ethics and politics.

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• An excellent introduction to one of the most engaging and controversial cultural theorists writing today.
  
• Žižek is a Slovenian sociologist who trained as a Lacanian and uses Lacan to analyse popular culture and politics.
  
• Illustrates the originality of Žižek's thinking on psychoanalysis, philosophy, multi-culturalism, popular/cyber culture, totalitarianism, ethics and politics.
  
• Provides a unique glimpse of Žižek's humour and character and offers new material and fresh perspectives which will be of interest to followers of Žižek's writings.

Conversation 1

Opening the Space of Philosophy

GLYN DALY You grew up in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in postwar Yugoslavia. By your late teens you had already decided to become a philosopher. What prompted this decision?

Žižek The first thing I have to say is that philosophy was not my first choice. An old thesis developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss affirms that every philosopher, every theoretician, had another profession at which he failed and that failure then marked his entire being. For Lévi-Strauss, his first choice was to be a musician. This was his kind of constitutive melancholy gloss. For me, as is clear from my writings, it was cinema. I started when I was already about 13 or 14; I even remember which movies absolutely fascinated me when I was young. I think two of them left a mark on me: Hitchcock's Psycho and Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. I saw each of them at least fifteen times. In fact, I was somewhere between cinema theory and cinema practice, because I also had a Super-8 camera. So the original decision was not to be a philosopher; this was kind of a secondary choice, the second best thing.

Did you make a film with the Super-8?

Yes, but that is a strict state secret! I made a 20–30-minute amateur film and I think I destroyed it; I am not sure. But if anyone comes up with it now he or she will certainly disappear! It is a strict state secret because, of course, it was an exegesis of early adolescent love affairs and so on – that traumatic teenage period which is best forgotten. So just to make it clear, this melancholic structure was with me from the start. Philosophy was something that came second, as a replacement for, as Judith Butler would have put it, a ‘primordial passionate attachment’. It's as if I need this structure.

While we know from psychoanalysis that every symptom has the structure of a primordial loss, at the same time I don't think there are any big secrets to be found there. Before I started as a philosopher, I had already, in my late teens, published some cinema reviews – even some attempts at theory – in Slovene cinema journals. But my ironic comparison would have been with St Paul when he was still a tax collector before his conversion on the road to Damascus. Wouldn't it be nice if we were to find today that he had left some notes about how to collect taxes on the streets and to publish these as his early writings? You know that St Paul, in affirming redemption through faith – the meaning of Christ's sacrifice – often uses this financial metaphor: Christ is paying for our sins. Now I can imagine that a deconstructionist reading of these imaginary early writings would find there a similar paradigmatic structure: one family member pays the tax and thus pays for the freedom of all the others. But nonetheless I don't think we should pursue this line of thought.

The second point I want to make is that it is interesting how my philosophical development went step-by-step, almost following the trend, as a kind of recapitulation of the typical situation in Eastern Europe at that point. I started when I was about 15 years old reading the standard Marxist classics stuff – dialectics and so on – and my first breakthrough was when, seduced by the Praxis group (this was a semi-dissident journal of so-called Humanist Marxism), I established my first distanciation from official ideology. I started to read this journal and then, because in Slovenia there was a strong Heideggerian presence, I passed to Heidegger. Then, as a next step, I discovered the so-called French structuralist revolution. So there was this strict succession. Interestingly enough, although I knew them very well, I never was influenced by the Frankfurt School.

What did you understand to be the purpose of philosophy and your role as a philosopher?

Oh my God, I don't think there was a clear vision of philosophy! I'm almost tempted here to quote the jargonistic Lacanian statement, ‘It was something in me more than myself which decided’, because it wasn't even a clear idea. But if I were to locate a specific insight I would say that – and this is something that stays with me even now – retroactively, at least, I only understood what philosophy was at a certain elementary level when I arrived at the Kantian transcendental dimension. That is to say, when I understood the central point that philosophy is not simply a kind of megalomaniac enterprise – you know, ‘let's understand the basic structure of the world’ – that philosophy is not that. Or, to put it in more Heideggerian terms: while there is a basic question of understanding the structure of the world, the notion of the world is not simply the universe or everything that exists. Rather, the ‘world’ is a certain historical category, and understanding what the world is means, in transcendental terms, understanding some pre-existing, at least historically, a priori structure which determines how we understand how the world is disclosed to us. This for me is the crucial turn.

When I understood that this is not to do with megalomania, in the sense of the standard counter-attack of naive scientists, namely, ‘we are dealing with hard facts, with rational hypotheses, but you philosophers you are just dreaming about the structure of everything’, I then realized that philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions. For example, when a scientist approaches a certain question, the point of philosophy is not ‘What is the structure of all?’ but ‘What are the concepts the scientist already has to presuppose in order to formulate the question?’ It is simply asking about what is already there: what conceptual, and other, presuppositions already have to be there so that you can say what you are saying, so that you understand what you understand, so that you know that you are doing what you are doing.

In this sense Kant was always a model philosopher. For example, even in his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant's problem is not speculation about mortality of the soul. He asks a simple question: ‘What is it that we have to presuppose is true by the mere fact that we are active as ethical agents?’ Kant's answer is quite consequent – and at a different level affirmed even by Derrida. His answer is that, at least in the common understanding of ethics, people effectively presuppose the immortality of the soul and the existence of God; they silently presuppose this. That is what philosophy is about, not ‘I philosopher believe in a certain structure of the universe etc.’, but an exploration of what is presupposed even in daily activity.

So contemporary philosophical endeavour (if we can call it that) lies not so much with grand or specific questions as such, but in what lies behind them, what allows them to be formulated in the first place?

Yes, and in this sense I think (and here I am still unabashedly modern) that from today's perspective it is in a way clear – and now I will say something horrible for which some people, especially historians of older philosophy, would lynch me – that Kant was the first philosopher. With his transcendental turn, I think that Kant opened up a space from which we can in retrospect read the entire canon of previous philosophy. Pre-Kantian philosophy cannot think this transcendental aspect. And, interestingly enough, do you know who thought the same, if you read him closely? Heidegger, the early Heidegger. It is quite clear he thinks that Kant made the great breakthrough by enquiring about the conditions of possibility. His idea is just that Kant wasn't radical enough; that he still remained in debt to some substantialist ontology that was too naive. But essentially, Heidegger's endeavour is to take this basic Kantian insight into conditions of possibility – or what he calls horizons of minute – and then to go back and to read Descartes and Aristotle in this way. Incidentally, this is why I also think that Heidegger was on to something before he reversed his position – in the passage from early to late Heidegger in the early 1930s. Later, Heidegger abandoned his basic orientation towards Kant. At that point Kant's transcendental turn was, for Heidegger, simply another regression into metaphysical, subjectivist nihilism. But I think this is a great loss. I think that perhaps the key insight of the early Heidegger is that the whole previous history of metaphysics has to be reread through that transcendental turn.

And it is through this turn that all previous philosophers should be read. Let's take Aristotle as an example. Here I agree with Heidegger and Lacan, who say that Aristotle's so-called biological writings are the key. What Aristotle advances in his description of the structure of a living being, as that which moves itself out of itself, is not so much a theory of the world as it is a theory of what we mean when we say this is alive: that is to say, he engages with what preunderstanding we have when we, say, identify something as a living being. It is really in this sense a hermeneutical procedure not an ontological one. It is not a question about what it objectively scientifically means to be alive. It is, rather, a question of how, in our daily lives when we experience something as alive (an animal is alive, a stone is not alive), we apply certain criteria that we already have in ourselves: it's this hermeneutical approach. In this sense, again maybe behind all these names which I have mentioned, Kant is crucial.

You studied philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and wrote a doctoral thesis on Heidegger. Why did you choose Heidegger?

Maybe I should just add that while my doctoral thesis is on Heidegger, my first book – published when I was 22 – wasn't my thesis, it was my graduation paper. It was a mixture of Heidegger and Derrida with a very embarrassing title: The Pain of the Difference. It is another of those books which it is better not to mention in my presence! It's an early work, and a pretty confused one. After that, my Master's thesis was on French theories of symbolic practice, covering Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Foucault and others, but its orientation wasn't really clear. It was only with my second doctoral thesis, in the late 1970s, that a clear Lacanian orientation emerged.

But why Heidegger, since we are returning so much to Heidegger? I must say that I am more and more convinced that Heidegger, in spite of all the criticism which he deserves, is the philosopher who connects us in the sense that, in a way, almost every other orientation of any serious weight defines itself through some sort of critical relation or distance towards Heidegger. I mean this in the sense of Foucault, who said somewhere that all philosophy is anti-Platonic (every philosopher has to designate, to mark, his or her distance towards Plato), or as in the nineteenth century when it was possible to articulate an anti-Hegelianism, but this meant precisely that: a distance towards Hegel. I think that in our context it is a distance towards Heidegger that is critical.

And it is typical that this distance as a rule takes the form not of an absolute limitation but a kind of ambiguous conditional: you endorse part of it and then you say but Heidegger didn't go far enough. For example, Marxists would have said ‘Yes, Being and Time is a great breakthrough, with its abstract theoretical notion of ego as the subject of perception, Dasein, that is engaged or thrown into the world’, but they would say that Heidegger had missed the social dimension.

Even, for example, someone like Derrida would have said, ‘yes, Heidegger started the critique of metaphysics of presence, but his notion of the event of appropriation is still too closed’. Heidegger almost did it, but he didn't go far enough. In this sense I think that Heidegger is in a way a key figure here. To go back to the situation in Slovenia at that point, I think I was lucky in the sense that precisely because Slovenia wasn't a strong international philosophical presence (in other republics, such as Croatia and Serbia, there was, in the guise of this Praxis School of Humanist Marxism, more of an international presence), there existed representatives of all the other predominant orientations of philosophy. We had the Frankfurt School, Marxists, we had the Heideggerians, we had analytical philosophers and so on. So I was lucky enough to have been exposed to all the predominant orientations.

How strongly were you aware of the Derridean interpretation of Heidegger when you were undertaking your research?

Very much so. I remember it clearly as a key shift, a great discovery, already in early 1968 when I was in the first year of my university studies. To be quasi-religious for a moment, it was almost mysterious in the sense that I remember that I barely spoke French, but, with some friends whose French was better, we started reading Derrida's Grammatology. It was like a magic year when the three books appeared at practically the same time: Grammatology, Voice and Phenomenon and Writing and Difference. There was really a structure of revelation (although later I turned away from Derrida); it was ‘That's it!’ – we somehow knew that this was it, even before understanding it. In retrospect I discovered that I had misunderstood many things, but the immediate insight was, ‘My God, this is the real thing’ and we somehow knew that we should follow that. So not only was I aware of Derrida's reading of Heidegger, but this was precisely what interested me. I think that without Derrida I would probably have ended up as a Heideggerian. It was Derrida who provided this first impetus to move away from Heidegger. What I was looking for in Derrida was how to break away from Heidegger, and I remember how frustrated I was that in this first very great book, Derrida himself avoided the topic of Heidegger. It is only in some later writings, I think in the early 1970s, that Derrida directly approached Heidegger.

So, yes, Derrida was crucial to my move away from Heidegger. In fact, for a couple of years, under the influence of Derrida, myself and my group were moving in a kind of naive ecumenical spirit, trying to take in everything which came from France: Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan and so on.

At the beginning, of course, Lacan was totally incomprehensible to us and it took us some years – to be quite honest, up until around 1975/6 – before, after a further quasi-religious revelation, finally we made the choice: Lacan. So this period was one of confusion and experiment. But it is interesting to note that in the 1967–8 winter issue of our Slovenian journal, Problemi, which is even now still our journal, we had already published a translation of two chapters from Grammatology. I think that this may be the first translation, not of the whole book, but of some chapters of Derrida into a foreign language.

By the early 1970s you had completed a doctoral thesis on Heidegger and had published your first book. For most postgraduates this would have signalled a promising career in higher education, but instead you found yourself rather marginalized in Yugoslavian academia. Can you explain these circumstances?

Yes – in fact I found myself unemployed. The period 1971–2 until the late 1970s represented an Indian summer of hardline communism and it was very difficult to get a job – practically impossible to get a teaching job – without being a Marxist. The professors in my department had promised me a job and I had already made the application to become an assistant in the Department of Philosophy. The post that was meant for me was as Assistant in Modern Contemporary Bourgeois Philosophy (of course I like this title – these were Marxist times after all!). But then at a certain point I heard rumours that things were looking bad for me and then all of a sudden I was informed ‘you are out’. After that I was unemployed for four years, from 1973 to the end of 1977.

Why were you considered not to be a Marxist?

I would say two things. First, in a way I wasn't a Marxist; I was some way between Heidegger and Derrida, and even when I moved more towards people like Althusser it would be difficult to claim that I was truly a Marxist. But what was more complicated was that all the predominant orientations in Slovenia – Marxists, the Frankfurt School, analytic philosophers, Heideggerians and so on – were ferociously opposed to French thought: structuralism, post-structuralism etc. So I would say that the latter was even more of a problem than not being an orthodox Marxist.

Your interest in French thought was seen as a threat?

Absolutely, yes. But officially they didn't put it this way. For them this was just a cheap fashionable phenomenon not to be taken seriously. So it was simply dismissed. I remember that when I finished my Master's thesis, I had to write a special supplement because the first version was rejected for not being Marxist enough! So I was unemployed for four years and then came a paradox: I worked for two years in something called The Marxist Centre in the Central Committee of the Party. This is a typical ex-Yugoslav paradox. I wasn't good enough from the Marxist standpoint to work at the Department of Philosophy, but I was good enough for the Central Committee – although it was rather meaningless work that involved taking minutes in minor meetings for different organs. It was somewhat cynical.

Maybe they wanted to keep an eye on you …

Definitely. But I think nonetheless that the professors who organized this were basically looking out for my interests. I was young, I had a child, I was unemployed and, to their credit, they were quite honest about the situation. They told me that in the present political situation it would be out of the question for me to become a teacher: it would be too problematic and politically too risky. So they tried to organize a research job for me as a temporary measure. But there were further complications, and it wasn't possible for me to get the job that they had wanted for me as a philosophical researcher. So when I saw that this was a deadlock, in 1979, through my Heideggerian friends, I got a job at the Department of Sociology in the Institute for Social Sciences at the Univ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Published
• Contents
• Introduction: Risking the Impossible
• Conversation 1: Opening the Space of Philosophy
• Conversation 2: The Madness of Reason: Encounters of the: Real Kind
• Conversation 3: Subjects of Modernity: Virtuality and the: Fragility of the Real
• Conversation 4: Tolerance and the Intolerable: Enjoyment,: Ethics and Event
• Conversation 5: Miracles Do Happen: Globalization(s) and Politics
• Bibliography
• Index