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Together, she and Zizek have mastered the intricacies of American academic politics and established a congenial teaching [[ritual]] that keeps them in the [[United States]] for one semester every year. Recently, they have held positions at Columbia, Princeton, Tulane, University of Minnesota, Cardozo Law [[School]], and the New School for Social Research; this fall, they are teaching at the University of Michigan. The duo has refined the process to a science. Each university must provide teaching positions, office s, and accommodations for both of them and agree that they will each teach one two-month course, consisting of one lecture per week on whatever subject they happen to be writing about. In addition to his U.S. pay, Zizek receives a full salary from his institute in Ljubljana. "When people ask me why I don't teach permanently in the United States, I tell them that it is because American universities have this very strange, eccentric [[idea]] that you must work for your salary," Zizek says. "I prefer to do the opposite and not work for my salary!"<br>
Zizek has developed an elaborate set of [[psychological]] tricks to manipulate his American students and enable him to have as little contact with them as possible. At the first meeting of each course, he announces that all students will get an A and should write a final paper only if they want to. "I terrorize them by creating a situation where they have no excuse for giving me a paper unless they think it is really good. This scares them so much, that out of forty students, I will get only a few papers," he says. "And I get away with this because they attribute it to my 'European eccentricity.'"<br>
Zizek says that he deals with student inquiries in a similar spirit. "I [[understand]] I have to take questions during my lectures, since this is America and everybody is allowed to talk about everything. But when it comes to office hours, I have perfected a [[whole]] set of strategies for how to block this," he says with a smirk. "[[The Real|The real ]] trick, however, is to minimize their access to me and simultaneously appear to be even more democratic!" Initially, Zizek scheduled office hours immediately before class so that students could not run on indefinitely. Then he came up with the idea of requiring them to submit a written question in advance, on the assumption that most would be too lazy to do it (they were). Zizek reserves what he calls "the nasty strategy" fo r large lecture classes in which the students often don't know one another. "I [[divide]] the time into six twenty-minute periods and then fill in the slots with invented names. That way the students think that all the hours are full and I can [[disappear]]," he explains.<br><br>
Undergraduates are apt to be tolerant of their professors' idiosyncracies, but Zizek may have less luck hiding from critics when <i>The Ticklish Subject</i> is published this winter. Just as he once saw socialist Yugoslavia as a count ry that had been cynically depoliticized by its leaders, so Zizek now believes that conservatives, [[liberals]], and radicals have effectively stamped out genuine politics in the West. The modern era, he argues, is decidedly "post-political." Instead of politics, he writes, we have a largely [[conflict]]-free "collaboration of [[enlightened technocrats]] (economists, public opinion specialists...) and liberal multiculturalists" who negotiate a series of compromises that pose as - but fail to reflect - a "universal consensus."<br>
This is a noble vision, but when Zizek turns to [[history]], he finds only fleeting examples of genuine politics in action: in ancient Athens; in the proclamations of the [[Third]] Estate during the French [[Revolution]]; in the Polish [[Solidarity]] movement; and in the last, heady days of the East German Republic before the Wall came down and the crowds stopped chanting <i>Wir sind das Volk</i> ("We are the people!") and began chanting <i>Wir sind ein Volk</i> ("We are a/one people!"). The shift from definite to indefinite article, writes Zizek, marked "the closure of the momentary authentic political opening, the reappropriation of the democratic impetus by the thrust towards reunification of [[Germany]], which meant rejoining Western Germany's liberal-[[capitalist]] police/political order."<br>
In articulating his political credo, Zizek attempts to synthesize three unlikely - perhaps incompatible - sources: Lacan's notion of [[The Subject|the subject ]] as a "pure [[void]]" that is "radically out of joint" with the world, Marx's political [[economy]], and St. [[Paul]]'s conviction that universal truth is the only force capable of recognizing the [[needs]] of the particular. Zizek is fond of calling himself a "[[Pauline]] [[materialist]]," and he admires St. Paul's muscular vision. He believes that the post-political deadlock can be broken only by a gesture that undermines "capitalist [[globalization]] from the standpoint of universal truth in the same way that Pauline [[Christianity]] did to the Roman [[global]] empire." He adds: "My [[dream]] is to combine an extremely dark, [[pessimistic]] [[belief]] that life is basically horrible and [[contingent]], with a revolutionary social attitude."<br><br>
As philosophy, Zizek's argument is breathtaking, but as social prescription, "dream" may be an apt word. The only way to combat the dominance of global capitalism, he argues, is through a "direct socialization of the productive process" - an agenda that is unlikely to play well in Slovenia, which is now enjoying many of the fruits of Western consumer capitalism. When pressed to specify what controlling the productive process might look like, Zizek admits he doesn't know, although he fe els certain that an alternative to capitalism will emerge and that the public debate must be opened up to include subjects like [[control]] over genetic engineering. Like many who call for a return to the primacy of [[economics]], Zizek has only the most tenuous grasp of the subject.<br>
What then are we to make of Zizek's eloquent plea for a return to politics? Is it just another self-undermining gesture? In part it is, but that may be the point. The blissful freedom of the [[utopian]] political moment is something, he believes, we all de sire. But so too, he would acknowledge, do we desire ideologies and institutions. And these contradictory impulses - toward liberation and constraint - are not only political. A central tenet of [[Lacanian Psychoanalysis|Lacanian psychoanalysis ]] is that the push and pull of anarchic desires and inhibiting [[defense mechanisms]] structure the psychic life of the individual. And why shouldn't this same [[dialectic]] characterize Zizek's own intellectual life, which has been devoted to proclaiming the universal relevance of Lacan's ideas?<br>
"Do not forget that with me everything is the opposite of what it seems," he says. "Deep down I am very [[conservative]]; I just play at this subversive stuff. My most secret dream is to write an old-fashioned, multivolume theological tract on Lacanian theory in the style of Aquinas. I would examine each of Lacan's theories in a completely dogmatic way, considering the arguments for and against each [[statement]] and then offering a commentary. I would be happiest if I could be a monk in my cell, with [[nothing]] to do but write my Summa Lacaniana."<br>
But wouldn't that be lonely? Once again, Zizek qualifies his qualification. "Okay, maybe not a solitary monk. I could be a monk with a woman."<br><br>
