The scenery imagined by Harpham is not simply empirically wrong with regard to this specific case; at a more substantial level, this is not how Lacanian intellectual communities function. Let me be quite frank, in my long years of travels and visits to academic institutions all around the world, on five continents, I encountered only one place that (more or less) fits Harpham's description: the type of intellectual discussions that take place at receptions after cultural studies colloquia, where theorists, artists, curators, and the like mingle, throwing around pretentious judgements on how we live in a post-Kantian universe, or how the subject is turning into an impersonal field of virtual intensities. What, then, to make of Harpham's conclusion?

If we could imagine Zizek as a symptom of the academic West, we might come to a sharper appreciation of the snags and inconsistencies in our own institutions and premises. The enthusiastic reception accorded to Zizek despite his bitter opposition to our most fundamental values and practices suggests that we are, as he would say, "enjoying our symptom," but also that, in our eager preoccupation with enjoyment itself, we have so far failed to understand what our symptom is a symptom of, and what it might, properly decoded, teach us about ourselves.

If the final statement is not to be taken as a mere rhetorical gesture, a semblance of deep thought appropriate to conclude a critical essay, it should have been at least minimally elaborated upon. Okay, I am a symptom--of what? What is wrong with the standard academic procedure; what are its "snags and inconsistencies"? What if the true symptom is not me, but the image of me Harpham seems compelled to paint? The way I see it, Harpham's distortion of my position is not simply a misreading, but a misreading overdetermined by the very "snags and inconsistencies" of what passes in American academia for the liberal-democratic critical discourse.

Harpham posits my work as the big Exception, the Enemy, the Foreign Body, with regard to the twin ideologies of political liberalism and the "objective" scientific quest for truth. Why me? Isn't, in the precise sense in which Harpham seems to use the term, the entire "French" or even "German" orientation a symptom of these twin ideologies? Doesn't deconstruction teach us to render problematic a naïve direct reliance on the predominant forms of the assertion of freedom, democracy, human rights, and so on, as well as the predominant form of the scientific quest for objective truth? And doesn't the tradition of the Frankfurt School, in its critique of late capitalist civilization and modern science, accomplish a similar thing in a different way? Harpham's question (rhetorical, in my view, not because the answer is obvious, but because it is literally posed in order not to be answered) about the way in which I am a "symptom" of American academia and its ideology, should be addressed to this entire field: why did deconstruction and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the Frankfurt School, enjoy such success in American academia, although both traditions are fundamentally foreign to the so--called American spirit? As to the questioning of the predominant democratic consensus--of the untouchable, properly fetishist, status of democracy as our Master-Signifier--I am also far from alone in this orientation; apart from Foucault, Badiou, and others, it suffices to recall Gilles Deleuze's clear and unambiguous statement: "There's no democratic state that's not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery."³

3. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York, 1995), p. 173.

Slavoj Zizek, philosopher and psychoanalyst, is senior researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His most recent publications are On Belief (2001), Opera's Second Death (2002), and Welcome to the Desert of the Real!(2002).

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