Many of the features of Zizek's thought I that tried to identify--rapidity, passion, high philosophical and political seriousness, a certain will to excess, and pure intellectual power--are in evidence here, and the stakes of his work are spelled out with admirable precision. On a personal level, too, I am grateful to Zizek for providing the bracing, once-in-a-lifetime experience of having a man I had just praised as the most formidable philosophical mind of his generation immediately denounce me as a lunatic.

I do find it difficult to grasp all parts of Zizek's response together, since much of it seems to have been composed for some other occasion. Still, its essential message is quite clear. Zizek says the following: Harpham's account of my work is filled with errors and misprisions, ranging from misstatements of plain fact to craziness, delirium, and a final madness; Harpham has gotten it all horribly, ludicrously wrong in a way that suggests he has taken temporary leave of his senses and even his identity, but if he has gotten it right--and "in a way, he is right"--I "plead guilty," "fully assume his central thesis," and even "hope" he is right, then . . . what of it? Did you think I was just "playing...games"?

So once again, I am grateful for Zizek's confirmation of my reading of his work in its broad outlines, and am more than willing to overlook smaller matters: Zizek does claim (like Lacan) that Marx "invented the symptom"; I was not opposed to NATO bombing in Kosovo; he himself gave the name "Slovene Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis"1; I fully recognize and have long asserted the deep complicity, both actual and theoretical, of democratic states in the production of human misery2; Chomsky is not especially "dear" to me, or even as dear as he is to Zizek3; and my conclusion represents no mere "semblance of deep thought" but the real thing. These are matters of little consequence, easily sorted out.

My claim is that Zizek's work is sufficiently distinct, in terms of its message and form, from normal academic practice in the West; that it enables Western academics to see their own conventions as non-necessary, non-neutral ideological constructions; and that, moreover, Zizek's work is powerful enough to represent a deep and inescapable challenge not just to academic practice but to the political and philosophical bases of that practice. I further claim that Zizek's work itself provides readers with a rare opportunity to observe the workings of a mind that is both accessible--a scholar discoursing with great learning and wit on such established subjects as film, philosophy, cultural studies, psychoanalysis--and genuinely different at the level of deep commitments. Reading Zizek, I contend, represents both an exhilarating emancipatory experience and a truly disturbing affront. Lastly, and profoundly, I invite readers to think of Zizek in other than binary terms, neither as an idiosyncratic friend of the academy nor as an obscenity-obsessed alien, but as symptom, in the Zizekian sense of that term--an externalized form of the pathologies (snags and inconsistencies) implicit in Western academic discourse. Indeed, since the essay speaks primarily about Zizek's reception in the West, one could plausibly say that the real project of the essay is precisely what Zizek now demands of me--a critical examination of the philosophical and, specifically, the ethical premises of the standard format of Western academic discourse, as disclosed by the example of Zizek.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham is president and director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. His most recent books are Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (1999) and Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity (2002).

 

 

Editorial Office main page * Back Issues * Subscribe to CI

---