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* "[[Joker Apart]]." ''The Guardian''. 8 October 2005. [[James ]] Harkin. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1587546,00.html>

It is a sparkling Sunday morning in early autumn, and one of the [[world]]'s leading [[public ]] intellectuals, dressed in a mod jacket and sandals and swigging from a can of Diet Coke, is giving me the benefit of his [[experience ]] on cheap [[London ]] hotels. "This one" - he points to it - "is pretty reasonable. Not cheap, you [[know]], but cheap for London. There are [[other ]] [[good ]] ones around here, if you know where to look. And you can walk everywhere from here."

We are in the heart of bohemian Bloomsbury, but this is a far cry from what I had expected. When I agreed to meet Slavoj [[Zizek ]] in Tavistock Square, it was because he mentioned that he'd like to look at a house in the square where [[Lenin ]] had once lived and written one of his books. When we get there, there is little to see apart from a statue of Gandhi - Lenin no longer packs in the tourists, and there is no record of him having stayed here - and so he entertains me and the photographer with quips and apercus from everyone from [[Brecht ]] to [[Kierkegaard]].

Zizek positively fizzes with enthusiasm for anything that might be hoisted into the world of [[ideas]], so much so that it is sometimes difficult to get him to shut up. When the photographer tells him to keep his mouth closed for the pictures, he dutifully obeys for [[about ]] two seconds before launching into a half-serious aside in which he compares the camera to a [[phallus]]. "You spoke," fumes the photographer in jokey exasperation. On discovering that the photographer is Scottish, Zizek assures him that they share a bond of kinship. "We Slovenians are even better misers than you Scottish. You know how Scotland began? One of us Slovenians was spending too much [[money]], so we put him on a boat and he landed in Scotland."

For someone like [[Slavoj Zizek]], even a [[joke ]] can be an exercise in [[theory]]. In the flesh, the bearded, intense Slovenian looks a little like [[Jesus ]] might have done, if Jesus had lasted [[another ]] 10 years, upped sticks to the chillier climes of eastern [[Europe ]] and converted to revolutionary [[Marxism]].

A one-man heavy industry of [[cultural ]] criticism, the 58-year-old Zizek has authored more than 50 books, which have been translated into more than 20 [[languages]], on [[subjects ]] as diverse as [[Hitchcock]], Lenin, and the terrorist attacks of [[September 11]]. His brand of [[social ]] theory - a peculiar amalgam of Karl [[Marx]], the [[French ]] [[psychoanalyst ]] Jacques [[Lacan ]] and the trash can of contemporary popular [[culture ]] - has long afforded him a cult following among fashionable young academics.

No longer tethered to a single institution, Zizek spends his [[time ]] roving between [[speaking ]] engagements at institutions all over the world. He is leaving London first [[thing ]] tomorrow, he tells me, for [[Paris ]] to be profiled by the newspaper Libération. Then he is off to headline a [[Design ]] Congress in Copenhagen ("€7,500," he shouts to me, still under the photographer's cosh, "first-[[class ]] everything, and all that for 40 minutes selling [[them ]] some old stuff") and then it is back to [[Slovenia]].

On April 1 this year ("a great day to get [[married]]"), he married a 27-year-old Argentinian former lingerie [[model ]] and now spends one [[third ]] of his time in Slovenia [[looking ]] after his young son from a former [[marriage]], a third of his time with his new wife in Buenos Aires, and the rest of his time on the road.

As soon as he has been released from the photographer's grip, I decide to whisk him off for Sunday lunch. I am a little lost, and take out my map, but Zizek immediately grabs it. It turns out that he [[knows ]] the area well - he stays here whenever he is in town - and he decides to take me on a tour of it. He delights in showing me the restaurant in Russell Square that is using the [[name ]] of Virginia Woolf ("that nasty bitch, a [[total ]] snob") to sell its pasta and burgers. He pokes gentle fun at the Brunswick Centre for its attempts to use architecture to create a [[community]]. And he leads me directly to the pub I have been trying to find on his behalf.

While he is not a believer himself, he sees it as his mission to rage against the demise of our Judaeo-[[Christian ]] heritage and its replacement by a burgeoning palette of destructive, new-age attempts at spirituality. Typically, his soft spot for both [[Leninism ]] and [[Christianity ]] is a deliberate kick against the tide of the [[times]].

Whereas it is now de rigueur for intellectuals to profess a certain grudging respect for Marx and his [[analysis]], Lenin's reputation - even among leftists - remains that of a brutal authoritarian pragmatist. Zizek begs to differ. For him, Lenin was the St [[Paul ]] of [[communism]], the organisational [[genius ]] who, just as [[St Paul ]] invented the Christian [[church]], turned communism from an [[idea ]] into a [[global ]] movement. We should miss both Lenin and St Paul, he argues, because these days we are retreating into a new-age spirituality that turns up its nose at any engagements in the [[real ]] world.

Zizek is keen to rubbish the assumption that we live in a decadent, consumption-obsessed [[society]]. There is, he maintains, plenty of [[belief ]] around. It is just that our beliefs are secreted within the fabric of our lifestyles, and we profess not to take them very seriously - [[witness]], he says, the popularity of everything from books like The [[Da Vinci ]] [[Code ]] to newspaper horoscopes.

Zizek sees it as his job to keep alive the revolutionary [[conscience]], and he specialises in needling leftwingers and [[liberals ]] who have moved on to make their peace with the [[political ]] [[system]]. It has won him some interesting [[intellectual ]] bedfellows, and a few enemies. He is critical, for example, of the [[liberal ]] [[notion ]] of harassment in contemporary western societies. He agrees that the real experience of [[sexual ]] or racial harassment can be terrifying, but goes on to argues that - almost imperceptibly - the idea of harassment has slid into a social [[neurosis ]] that means no more than an [[injunction ]] to keep out of our personal [[space]]. "The liberal idea of [[tolerance]]," he argues, "is more and more a kind of [[intolerance]]. What it means is leave me alone, don't harass me, I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity." He sees something suspicious in the way that smokers are increasingly kept at a distance and seen as polluters who are intent on violating space. It is part of the antiseptic [[nature ]] of contemporary culture, he says - coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, cakes without sugar.

But, I protest, he has just ordered a Diet Coke to go with his chocolate fudge brownie. "Come on," he says. "I don't have any problem violating my own insights in [[practice]]." Even the [[Iraq ]] war, he points out, was initially conceived as a decaffeinated [[conflict ]] - a war without victims, at least on our side. "Nowadays," he says, "you can do anything that you [[want ]] - [[anal]], [[oral]], fisting" - I stare down momentarily into my Yorkshire pudding - "but you [[need ]] to be wearing gloves, condoms, protection."

He is struck, he says, in his debates with American advocates of [[multiculturalism]], by how much their professed respect for other cultures is defined by their distance from the culture at hand. "For the multiculturalist," he argues, "white [[Anglo-Saxon ]] Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance."

As a former [[citizen ]] of [[Yugoslavia]], Zizek argues that, prior to its break-up, ethnic [[jokes ]] told by the different peoples of the country about each other were cathartic, helping to bond them to the devil they knew. The only effective antidote to our antiseptic multiculturalism, he remains convinced, "is the [[exchange ]] of obscenities, the practice of telling racist or xenophobic jokes in a non-racist manner".

Zizek's jokes are very funny, but it is about time that I let him go. He is leaving the next day, after all, and [[needs ]] to go to Tottenham Court Road to [[search ]] out some PlayStation [[games ]] for his son. His son's current favourite, he tells me, is one where the player assumes the [[role ]] of taxi [[driver ]] and is rewarded for ferrying passengers neatly to their various destinations. But instead of following the rules, Zizek's son delights in flooring just about everything in [[sight]]: cars, traffic lights, even passing pedestrians. Though I am too polite to say so, it strikes me that the boy Zizek might well have a [[future ]] in the [[family ]] business.