Mr. Zizek comes to London

Introducing the great man, the behorned Costas Douzinas declared: "Slavoj Zizek is a radical public intellectual, but this formulation is a tautology."

At this, the cynic in me wanted to sneer: do you mean oxymoron? Though perhaps Douzinas is right - if the idea of a public intellectual means anything at all, surely it does mean a radical public intellectual: a radical public intellectual, as opposed to a Sunday supplement doxosopher.

However - does a public intellectual mean anything at all? Yesterday, in the first of the series of his lectures at Birkbeck, Zizek addressed the topic of the Lacanian Big Other, and this question was in the background.

In the background, behind me, before the talk started, in my ears from the mouths of two witless academic as they went about conducting a witless and resentful conversation about politics - I still have no idea what they were saying, I could only make out the general sneering tone. In the background, during the talk itself, as one graduate student after another stood up, in a series of successive suicide missions devoted ostensibly to asking Zizek questions, but really to proving how clever they were by means of jargon (somebody kept asking something about Heidegger that made no sense whatsoever). And then finally, in the background after the talk, as on the strange square lawns of Birkbeck, I wondered in my stupid way about how to begin to engage in the conversation the stranger sitting next to me, who was reading the Logic of Sense.

Is Slavoj Zizek the Don Corleone of philosophy? Increasingly, there is seems about him a certain suggestion to his demeanor, a suggestion that he means business. Hinting at the start of his talk to an organization he is setting-up - "with my American friends" - called the Society for Materialist Theology, he went on to say that two of the major figures he will be addressing - indeed, defending - over the course of his lectures to come will be Heidegger and Foucault. Heidegger vis-à-vis the Nazis, Foucault vis-à-vis the Iranian Revolution.

This will be worth seeing - but it would be productive also to see him more carefully address Bataille - when Zizek introduced the idea of the Society of Materialist Theology, I thought of Bataille, the College of Sociology, and the Acephale. Interestingly, Zizek came out against Bataille here when asked - specifically, against the transgressor in him. But I wondered at the time whether this characterization was perhaps unfair - was not Bataille's critique of Surrealism precisely the critique directed at the transgressor in Breton - the critique directed against the idea of running amok as the simplest surrealist act?

"The big Other at its purest is legal order," Zizek said, and thence proceeded to developed this idea from two directions. First, he introduced the theme of habit, of meta-rules, of laws not intended to be taken seriously - in other words - as Lacan would have it, law is non-all, and one is still able to maneuver subversively within it - even as one follows it to letter. Zizek supported this with his own example of the late-edition "Communists look to still retain power" newspaper headline from his NSK days. In other words, to be a revolutionary, it is not immediately necessary to be a criminal.

Second, Zizek developed a critique of the pure based upon the idea profanation, asserting that the profane comes before the sacred, and furthermore opposes the idea of the secular as well. The major conception involved here was the idea of repetition, and the idea that profanation in some sense empties the gesture of meaning by making it sticky, indeed undead, by catching it within the machinery of language. His major example here was poetry - poetry as language taken out of context.

Thus we were moved to arrive at the question: how does one make oneself a big Other. In a certain sense, and in a Deleuzian way - how does one make oneself a big Other without organs - perhaps one could say that this was really the major problematic of the lecture (interestingly, Zizek seems to be moving closer and closer to Deleuze with every day that passes, on the basis of the surely double-edged (for Zizek) syllogism Deleuze = Hegel + Lacan).

The big Other - this strange ontological figure that at once is always there, and yet at the same time does not exist. In the audience, K-punk invoked the name of Highsmith (Zizek: "For me, she is the one, the One!") in order to pose the question of the relation between Ripley and the Big Other. As he put it, for Ripley it is something like only the big Other exists - there are no concrete, particular others. Indeed - one could say - not even "Ripley" himself - hence his protean, shape-shifting nature. Pursuing this line, we eventually arrive back at the figure of Sade and the perverse executioner.

Only the big Other exist - as opposed to the big Other, but more than that, the making of that Other. It is not enough for one to know that the big other exists. One also must be aware that one is oneself is some sense actively producing the big Other too. And this is the argument between idealism and materialism - idealism in which the example is never adequate, materialism in which it is always more than adequate. Thus, the Emperor is naked - says the child - and yet the Emperor remains in power. The point here is that - strictly speaking - the Emperor is not naked. Far from it: he clothes himself in our collective unbelief - indeed, it is in our very shouts of "nakedness" that he is most fully dressed.