My ambition to write a musical about the arrival of Lacanian theory in Tito-era Yugoslavia has always hinged on the zestiness of the intended title: Žižek!
[Read more...]

Four Canadian feature documentaries are making their world premieres at TIFF 2005, and they are all looking for an international audience. The lineup includes Allan King's Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (in the Masters program; see sidebar right); Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, from Sam Dunn, Scot McFadyen and Jessica Joy-Wise (Midnight Madness); Souvenir of Canada by Robin Neinstein; and Astra Taylor's Zizek! (Real to Reel).
[Read more...]

Subject is a bearded, sweating, antisocial, eminently quotable bear of a man who throws out ideas in a heavily accented lisp. Zizek's work fuses Marxism and the thinking of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who put a post-structuralist spin on Freud.
[Read more...]

Zizek told the audience why he was a philosopher. He does not want to explain and account for the unaccountable, and instead wants to "render strange something we accept as given."
[Read more...]

"The Elvis of cultural theory," as he's called by the esteemed journal the Chronicle of Higher Education, is a Slovenian philosopher named Slavoj Zizek. In the world of academia, young, smart, fashionable students flock to his lectures, and he's brought French theory to bear on aspects of popular culture from Hitchcock films to "the sexual practice known as 'fisting.'"
[Read more...]

Let's face it. Intellect doesn't always get a good rap in our culture. Whereas in most situations, we might expect to roll our eyes at a blatantly stupid remark, we more often than not find ourselves scoffing at any thought that may very well be boldly intelligent.
[Read more...]

Slavoj Zizek -- philosopher, author, former presidential candidate of Slovenia, cult hero -- sat on a chair in front of a packed house at the Roxie Cinema looking oddly small.
[Read more...]

What did Jacques Lacan mean by "the Real"? I found out, sort of, by walking across my apartment in search of a copy of the recent re-translation of his Ecrits...
[Read more...]

Potty humor has no place in a family newspaper, but what about an analysis of geopolitics by a leading European intellectual that places toilet design at the heart of the argument?
[Read more...]

With the Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek (pronounced SLA-voy ZHEE-zhek), you get it all: sex, politics, theology, psychoanalytic interpretations of German philosophers, meditations on the cosmology of The Matrix....
[Read more...]