Perverts, revolution and Zisek

Slavoj Zisek’s new film re-sparks questions about the strength of his philosophy.

Why Lenin? Because, according to Slavoj Zisek, ‘he wasn’t afraid to succeed’. And neither could anybody accuse Zisek of any such reticence. Zisek has taken on Lenin’s mantle as a militant academic whose voluminous body of work deserves credit for bringing a revolutionary perspective into public discourse during the recent era of neoliberalism. Since the publication of his first English-language book, a lengthy manifesto titled ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’ (1989), Zisek has enjoyed a steady rise to hyper-prominence as a lion of the radical Left. A public intellectual par excellence, his frequent appearances at lecture theatres and concert halls across Europe and the United States have ensured a large academic and activist audience for his heady mixture of continental philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis and revolutionary polemics. In an age of academia defined by the pressure to publish, nobody is more prolific than Zisek (born in 1949), whose Wikipedia bibliography lists more than eighty books to his name in several European languages. Since the start of the 2000s he has been a constant presence across the mainstream press, on the internet, in cinemas and on television, and his continuing stoush with Noam Chomsky has until recently been receiving daily, tabloid-like, ‘clash-ofthe- titans’ coverage online.