"to talk through our collective delusions and paranoias"

[Doug Millison]

[...] It was only later, in 2001, that I had an opportunity to hear Slavoj
Zizek speak. The event was standing room only, and the venue was a very
high-brow, conceptual art gallery called the Drawing Center in NYC. Zizek
was reading/performing "Il n'y a pas de rapport religieux" from the latest
edition of Lacanian Ink (#18), the movement's journal. In this particular
essay he rehearsed Lacan's notion that there is no such thing as a sexual
relationship but re-enscribed it in the context of something else (in this
case 'religion') -- as he is wont to do with most all his tactical
maneuvers. The print version is illustrated with works by Damien Hirst.
More striking, however, was that this perhaps marked the beginning of
Zizek's appropriation of St. Paul. This appropriation of St. Paul is
significant insofar as when Zizek performs one of his acts of re-writing he
is taking/ripping the original out of one context and
inserting/transplanting it into another. In the case of St. Paul, what
interested him most was that here was a figure (not a disciple!) who
constructed the entire edifice of the Christian faith on the crucifixion
and resurrection. Recall that in Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ
(or at least Scorsese's) Paul appears in the delusionary vision Jesus has
-- i.e., that he has escaped the cross and gone on to live, marry and have
children -- and repudiates Jesus as an imposter. Zizek is quick to point
out (often) that post-modernists have multiple versions of everything --
e.g., multiple versions of Nietzsche and multiple versions of Marx or Freud
-- but he also is the master of re-branding a concept, or a historical
figure, to elucidate what might be best termed "synchronic or structural
phenomena". As a skilled structuralist (though he'd deny this too), Zizek
constructs castles in the air and then sends a barrage of waves in pursuit
of these tentative forms. He is Neptune to his own Odysseus -- But he is
also Minerva. In the case of Paul, as in the more recent resuscitation of
Lenin, we witness Zizek isolating a critical moment, or even a failed
moment, for purposes wholly related to the exasperating state of the
current critical or failed moment -- late-modern capitalism and
post-modernity.

In such an intelligence we see the mark of an archaic synthetic brilliance
-- an almost heroic intelligence -- that assembles, analyzes and destroys.
His actual performances are theatrical events. He sweats bullets as he
unpacks his torrent of complex references, flings asides, flings aside
asides, tackles a hard kernel of Hegel or Marx, drops in an allusion to
Hitchcock or even some pop cultural trash like the Worst-Case Scenario
phenomenon or "Reality TV" to explain away our symptoms -- to talk through
our collective delusions and paranoias. His agitated (agit-prop)
presentations are exhausting for the audience and for the actor. When he
concludes, he invariable loses his bearings and is led off stage by his
host or hostess. At the Drawing Center, he was whisked away by handlers
(before the Lacanian bacchantes/babes could get to him?). [...]


from:
July 27, 2002

Sublime Zizek
Guarding Lenin's Tomb
by Gavin Keeney
http://www.counterpunch.org/keeney0727.html