Conversations With Zizek

An anecdote by Lacan recounts a chance remark made by Freud to Jung. Following an invitation from Clark University, the two psychoanalysts travelled to the United States and upon arrival in New York harbour Freud gestured towards the Statue of Liberty and said, 'They don't realize that we' re bringing them the plague ' In today's world we might say something similar about ZiZek. That is to say, in the context of the platitudes and triteness of a predominantly postmodern culture ZiZek represents the philosophical equivalent of a virulent plague or perhaps, to update the metaphor, a computer virus whose purpose is to disrupt the comfortable appearances of what might be called the matrix of glob alliberal- capitalism. Continuing in a certain C artesian tradition, what ZiZek infects us with is a fundamental doubt about the very presuppositions of our social reality. But this is merely the starting point of a much wider ethico-political engagement with a radical emancipatory universalism; one that is capable of taking on the increasingly prohibitive nature of contemporary capitalism and its corresponding