“[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” – Paulo Freire
I recently interviewed, Slavoj Zizek at the Zizek Conference in Ohio. An article emerged from the general interest publication Slate dot com that was a direct attack on myself and Zizek.
The following is my response. You can watch the interview here.
Schuman is right about one thing, “The academy is in crisis”. But not because Slavoj Zizek made an ironic joke about American students and their demanding need for attention. Hell, this is how most American students are. Open. Honest. They talk too much. So what if the caricature was right? It was funny, and it was a joke.
I would laugh again.
The academy is in crisis because the academy itself is a structure that demands myopic allegiance to its historical presence. Once someone like Slavoj Zizek puts the academy in question, all hell breaks loose. For me, this is the point of his joke here, that the academy negates any space for real relationship between a student and her professor. That the very mediation is what defines the parameters of the
relationship between student and teacher to the point that there is no student or teacher present, simply cogs in a wheel.
Schuman has become one such cog.
The fact that Schuman doesn’t get that a joke is itself an unconscious critique of something material, tells me that she would rather embrace the fantasy of accepting her £18,000 servitude to a dead institution. Institutions like the European Graduate School and the Global Centre For Advanced Studies are attempting to develop new forms of dialogical pro-relational anti-institutional responses to the archaic out-moded hollow spaces we now refer to as the Academy.
We need this kind of critique that wakes us up from our slumber. We cant afford to be in debt to a dying system. Zizek is a necessary component to helping develop a new kind of student discourse. One that resists the comfortable allure of political correctness. We need more philosophers like him. Feelings get hurt all of the time. We learn how to respond to them in healthy ways. That’s up to us. One of the stupidest things to ever enter into the western television are these banal talk shows that interview people who were called a name on their school playground when they were ten and they spend their whole life being defined by this very thing. Maybe this is why Schuman wrote the article. Maybe its catharsis.
I have been following Schuman’s responses on Twitter, mainly to see if she has even put her attack into question, this is usually a sign of someone willing to learn, grow and develop, but it does not seem the case. The nature of education from preschool to adulthood as it stands only stands as a model of stagnant cognitive sedition or simply put its meant to provide a space for radical thinking but demands zombies. Or as Paulo Freire once said: “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
What this demonstrates in a much wider sense – is that of contextualization. What Schuman lacks is not academic rigor, what she lacks is understanding. Comprehension. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Is this also not the plight of education today? Namely, that students are leaving institutions by the thousands, impregnated with abstract forms of knowledge but no outlets from which to develop and practice that knowledge. Academia has become the fertile cultivating ground for the over-saturation of: nothing.The abstract critiques of people she personally does not know based on social symbolizations (myths and fantasies) is indicative of the counter-intuitive nature of the promise of freedom when one gets a degree (to do anything they want) but does not know what do with it. These abstract judgements are based upon her caricatures of Zizek, not anything material, hence why these linguistic hallucinations only encase her deeper into the much wider context that she seems wholly unaware of.. Has she had a drink with the man like myself? No. She is dealing with the ghosts of her own making.
Her assumptions are in a direct sense pedestrian obfuscations against her very critique of both Zizek and myself. That in her attacks the same attacks are leveled against herself. Moreso, in the fact that she agrees that Zizek might be an important voice for the academy today but only wants Zizek without the caffeine. She is a control-freak in simple terms, she wants to define what she gets rather than learn from what is and could be. Let’s be clear, Schuman is playing her role, in this we should not blame her. She is victim of a much bigger issue. Which is the the death of the academy trying to hold on too tightly to a future it no longer owns. But enough digression, why don’t we hear from one of Zizeks students on the matter, which represents the very antithesis of Schuman’s assumptions:
Agon Hamza, a serious student and philosopher of Zizek states the following:
“.. being his student for some time now (and the most recent bashing has todo with his comments on students/universities, etc), I have to say that he is an incredible supervisor. He has always read everything I have sent him and took his time to comment on my work, etc etc. (let alone responding to my queries, demands for texts, or other stuff). Third, before you engage in the now-too-boring-Zizek-bashing, *please* read his work first!”
One of Zizek’s former Teaching Assistants has this to say about Slavoj:
“Everybody is all of a sudden giving a shit about Zizek’s comments about how much he hates his students. I can’t help but notice that many of the people who are calling him out on this ritualistically mock and belittle their own students. As a former TA of Zizek’s, I can say with all honesty – he *treats* his students quite well.”
Clearly Schuman needs to do a bit more investigation before she makes some judgement calls.
That Slate would allow this piece to be published without first recognizing Schuman’s rhetorical shortfalls is in and of itself telling of the caliber of journalism and investigation that goes on at Slate.com. I contacted Slate asking for the opportunity to respond as well as Rebecca through social media and to my lack of surprise, there was no response. Both are not interested in dialogue, only in a one-sided diatribe that itself lacks substance. This is yet another metaphor for the sad state of the academic curriculum, that it exists to just yell and rant but never to listen, never to be changed. I hope this is a wake up call to Schuman and to the insititutional academy, that things are in dire straits and we need to mobilize a revolution that no longer allows zombies to defend its existence.
I think it’s time to move on and grow up.
The Love Revolution 
If I can be a little critical here, I actually didn’t like the way you interviewed Žižek; as a consequence of the video’s upload I’ve discerned people are already dismissing him online as a “mere film theorist”.. like I’ve put it once before somewhere else: the problem is the very obsession with his private person, as if it’s actually important who he is privately apart from his work.
And I will take this opportunity to point out that the GCAS you’re so glad to celebrate may just be the kind of educational institution which Žižek would criticize the most as regressive (even though both him and Badiou collaborate with it): see my recent post Slavoj Žižek on Education, Tutors, Universities & Students as an example of his comments on education generally… he specifically specifies the kind of trends in institutions he doesn’t like and unfortunately GCAS gets uncannily close to what he describes. The same goes for the “cameraman” of the interview… unfortunately I’ve come to know him well enough to notice he might not be such a good friend of Ž as he wants to claim he is. Deleuze, Deleuze Everywhere! Or perhaps, to repeat/paraphrase Ž’s often repeated phrases: “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” or “save žižek from his saviours!”.
You repeat the same mistake Mrs. Schuman does, albeit in a different mode, here: you focus on her personally, as an individual, as a humanist would (a dose of Althusserian theoretical anti-humanism would be proper here, Althusser being one of Žižek’s big influences), ignoring that she is nothing but an example of an often repeated phenomenon in the liberal press; it’s not that she personally is evil for attacking him, maybe she’s a bit too narcissistic, maybe a bit corrupted, but the main problem is with this very mode of gonzo journalism that focuses on private individuals instead of their work or their role in the general structure of things.
For genuine Marxian thought, an individual, even a liberal, is the effect of the general ideological struggle, an effect of the capitalist structure and should not be attacked in the fascist mode of blaming her for a general trend in reporting on Žižek. Žižek once said that he even sympathises with some mega-capitalist manager (I forgot which one) who got blamed in the USA for the 2008 financial meltdown, saying that the ideological operation was almost anti-semitic in it’s structure, blaming a manager who just followed the logic of the system to the end was wrong, as if greed an evil would be his personal attributes and not a tendency of the functioning of the economic system itself.
But my post might itself be to blame for starting this snowball of bad journalism in pointing her out specifically.
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I think you too mirror the same obsessive need to control your very own personal image of zizek. I purposefully asked the questions I did because I want people to know zizek beyond the very caricatures they make of him as I have seen you do in your blanket defended of him across social media as if he is some long lost father figure. It’s not strategic or smart to make enemies across all political platforms. If I had the chance to ask again I would ask the same questions
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You’re still caught in the illusion that there is an actual Žižek beneath the caricature, which is quite contrary to his own theoretical writings; there is more truth in Schuman’s ideological caricature (someone was mentioning a suicide among students and she seems to be quite obsessed with the issue of grading papers, an issue he mentions in his joke) than in trying to find a “true Žižek behind the mask”, as if there is something hidden there beneath the grumpy old man… the truth of Žižek is not in the flesh you’re interviewing before your eyes, it’s in his books. Or, at least, that truth that has any philosophical or historical relevance whatsoever.
You’ll find out more about him by reading about Hegel than you will by trying to uncover a traumatic event in his childhood, as if practising a form of wild psychoanalysis.
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But you’re caught in the philosophical illusion that there isn’t. Lacan won’t save us. There are no savours. What are you trying to save? Which of your caricatures of zizek are you trying to protect from the Real?!
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I hate to cite Žižek to you, but in Žižekian terminology, you’re caught in the Kantian illusion of the thing-it-itself being accessible without, or with the removal of ideological mystifications and have not yet made the Hegelian step of realizing that ideological mystifications are a part of ding an sich, constitutive of reality as such.
Your aversion to Lacan doesn’t have much to do with this specific philosophical issue, except that he did also repeat the Hegelian formulation with his phrase les non-dupes errent.
What am I trying to save? His online image probably. I’m not “protecting caricatures from the Real”, which is an absurd formulation in itself, I’m “changing the caricatures” to “change the Real”. Again, you’re caught in the false Kantian problematic of the Real being somehow separated from the registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, as if they don’t form a knot (you don’t seem to be familiar with the IRS seminar, yet use the term), or in Badiouian terms, you seem to harbour the what he calls “the passion for the real”, which is a fairly negative and destructive term in his vocabulary, as far as I’m aware.
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Thanks Simon for your remark below on the passion of the real, good hypothesis. The post by atravelersnote says in her tweets, Schuman was not soften down her critic of Zizek. Well, on her blog she actually does. Schuman writes there: “after her piece in slate rebecca reflected on her blog that she was too harsh with zizek. interesting: “now that my Zizek piece is up, I believe I should have (or at least could have) written IT with more compassion. I could have (should have?) recognized that Slavoj Zizek is a deeply, deeply unhappy man, who has been miserable and lonely since his early childhood, who calls others “boring idiots” because he has been hurt by them one too many times, who seeks happiness in the company of young, beautiful women, but then divorces them once he realizes not even they can make someone as miserable as he is less miserable. A trickling handful of Zizek’s fans (again, a number much smaller than you might imagine) have chastised me for being “jealous” of him and “his genius.” I think that instead, Zizek–and his infantile insistence that the intelligent must be unhappy, and the happy stupid, which is something I thought when I was 17 and my high-school boyfriend broke my heart–is himself jealous of people like me, who manage to care about others, and eke out a little happiness now and then with no worry about how it reflects on our relative stupidity.
A few other people have chastised me for not “getting” Zizek’s “wicked” sense of irony. As someone with a relatively wicked sense of irony herself–who HERSELF has called, tongue-in-cheekily, for the end of “shitty papers” in college–I assure you that’s not the case. I just believe that there is a line of basic human decency that anyone who is not a psychopath knows not to cross. A “joke” about a student committing suicide crosses that line. Many of us, myself included, have had our lives turned upside down from the suicide of a student or other loved one. There are plenty of “jokes” that are unacceptable no matter their context–rape “jokes,” anything with a racial or homophobic slur in it–because they mean to hurt. A joke about “not caring” if someone commits suicide means to hurt. A joke about a student not trying hard enough when writing a paper introduction means to help students not to write introductions like that anymore.
At any rate, this is a rambling way of attesting that today I will indeed attempt to practice what I preach. I will react to hatred and vitriol with more compassion than I have been.”
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Also, Agon isn’t simply a “student” of Žižek, he is a serious Althusserian scholar who co-wrote a very important book with him.
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The point here seems, to me, to reveal how Schuman’s comments de-politicize Zizek and mystify the systemic practices under question – in this case, the student-professor relationship (or lack thereof) and what it might suggest about academia more generally. By interpreting his ironic comments in terms of moral qualities (he’s an asshole, not compassionate to students, and so on), Schuman, in effect, de-caffeinates Zizek, re-directing attention to a phantasmatic image of his “private personhood.”
The author, in mentioning that he had a drink with Zizek, is, counter-intuitively, not claiming access to a private “truer” Zizek, but re-iterating the obvious fact that he interviewed Zizek-as-public-theoretician, which, as Zizek himself ironically acknowledges, is his only substantial dimension, anything else being stupid flesh, body odor, and excretions. The Zizek-as-interviewing IS the Zizek-as-writing that Simon describes as containing ‘his truth.’
Ironically, if Schuman is concerned with the mental and emotional states of students, Zizek’s comments problematize the issue more effectively than she does for the very reason that her criticism of Zizek falls under a moral-humanitarian framework, as if having a few more compassionate teachers would solve the problem. While it may meliorate the problem to some extent, Zizek’s point speaks to the necessarily socio-political dimension of academia which gets closed off when Schuman moralizes the discussion.
The focus, then, is not on Schuman-as-a-person, but on her thought as symptomatic, exemplifying the moral-humanistic de-politicization of concrete issues. And certainly not on Zizek-in-Himself. As Zizek himself acknowledges, there is only Zizek-as-public-figure, which includes Zizek-as-interviewing, Zizek-as-writing, and Zizek-as-lecturing. It is precisely the attempt to isolate a Zizek-in-Himself, which is what Schuman (and not the author here) attempts, which constitutes the ideological mystification.
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Who did the fantastic portrait of Slavoj Zizek?
I want to buy a signed print of this.
Please contact me.
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