Thebes

Director:

Astra Taylor.

Cast:

Slavoj Žižek.

Slavoj admires a staircase.

According to the cover of Žižek!, Slovenian philosopher and psychologist Slavoj Žižek is “the Elvis of cultural theory,” and the film itself certainly seems to agree. Director Astra Taylor follows Žižek around the world (well, to Slovenia, New York, and Buenos Aires), as he lectures, gives interviews, and jokes around about his cultural theories. This is interspersed with graphics and archive footage, and with scenes of Žižek doing everyday things — talking with his son, eating dinner, buying DVDs.

And since Žižek is a charming manⁱ and fun to listen to, it’s rather an enjoyable journey, and the film manages some insights in his works. The problem is that there just isn’t enough time to fully explore or explain his ideas, and the film has an annoying tendency of leaving things unexplained so that it can cut to another clip of Žižek making jokes.

The most telling scene in the entire film is, I think, when he after a lecture gets a question accusing him of being a dogmatic Lacanian. Žižek replies with a vigorous defence that gives a glimpse of what the film could have been and that exposes its fundamental flaw: the film never questions Žižek, never explores his fameⁱⁱ or lets him fully develop his ideas. If Taylor had challenged Žižek a bit more, put him on the defensive even a little bit, I think it could have been much more interesting.

Don’t get me wrong — Žižek is fun to listen to and to follow around and Žižek! does give you a good if superficial tour of his thinking. I just think it would have been worthwhile if the film hadn’t gotten quite so close to him; a little distance from Žižek and his ideas could have meant a better understanding of them and and of him.

Rating:

1. With an, even discounting the accent, odd way of speaking. Like some programmers I know, he seems to prefer precision to immediate clarity. ↩
2. Which I have to say is probably a limited kind of fame. How many of you had heard of him before reading this review? I’d certainly never heard of him before seeing this film a few years ago. ↩

Tags: 2000s, Astra Taylor, Cultural Theory, Documentary, Jacques Lacan, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Slavoj Žižek

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 00:00 and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.