De-Romancing Žižek

Poor Slavoj Žižek. Now even his followers are on to "the Slovenian philosopher, self-proclaimed Stalinist and academic superstar."

Žižek's mounting eccentricities and difficulties go beyond Bloomsbury. Over the last twelve months, between an Argentinean dance club being launched with his name, and the International Journal of Žižek Studies selling doggie T-shirts embossed with its logo, Žižek has championed the Hollywood action film 300 (a comic-book adaptation of the Battle of Thermopylae) as a suitable model for left politics, advanced the almost LaRouchian view that "liberal communists" (Silicon Valley CEOs, plus George Soros and court philosophers like Thomas Friedman) "are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today" and appeared in the advert breaks of the British television station Channel 4 as a sort of human screen wipe, delivering pearls of gnomic wisdom in fifteen-second bursts. As a result of these incidents, many of Žižek's former allies in his natural constituency of the para-academic blogosphere have begun to desert him. "The gruesome spectre of another Hitchens looms," noted one former admirer in the wake of the 300 rave, while another, blogging under the pithy title "Žižek the Embarrassment," suggested that "the dialectical 'double movement' that used to serve Žižek's uncompromising intellect has become a contemptible tool for his egotism."