Granted I haven’t followed Zizek too much, but my commie friends like him
What’s his problem?
Let me speak in very broad terms, both as I still hold to the 30 year rule from soc.history.what-if in terms of the ban on politics; and, as I will have to speak about Zizek’s person or at least persona.
Zizek is a pop intellectual who works in a field of cultural as opposed to workplace analysis. Pop marxists who analyse culture are often hyped in order to repressively desublimate the instinct to critique that young intelligentsia and workers feel. Zizek is basically Marxist McDonalds: unhealthy marketed pap. Sartre and Marcuse played this role. Foucault was too impenetrable (you may laugh) to work well. Additionally Foucault dealt with the material reproduction of labour power, too dangerous. Even Althusser was tried for this role, but he was far too systematic. Also the murder. Chomsky is one of these also with his political fixation on States instead of relations of production / reproduction.
Interesting the theory of repressive desublimation comes up quite often with pop Marxists. As if alienation is cultural distance and not the foreman. This is one reason cultural studies Marxist are promoted: they distract from the point of production (work) and the point of reproduction of labour (household/family structure ie patriarchy). This gives class struggle marxists the shits, the a grade fucking shits.
Lacan may have scholarly value. So does Zizek. But what it doesn’t have is intellectual observation that drives towards the immanent critique of a sit down strike or mass shoplifting. Their work does not inform the abolition of the boss class, the abolition of work, the abolition of us as wage slaves selling ourselves.
Zizek has some amusing personal problems. He “would rather not” fuck. His claimed chastity speaks (thanks Lacan) to a significant interior world. He has the appearance of an addicted cocaine user. His celebrity involves his persona built out of tics rather than critique.
We deserve more than an amusing accent and bawdy stories. What is worse is most people lack the tankie and Eastern European cultural context to get the depth of the jokes. “Stalin was right,” and him, a few Anarchist historians like me, and maybe 20 tankies get the *joke* ha ha only serious. Zizek has a theory that some of these things can only be communicated as a joke. But he also knows that individuals do not matter to history. If five guys get “Stalin was right” then he’s not telling jokes to his audience: the audience is his joke.
Finally is there value in conducting Lacanian critique of films. Yes. It literally reproduces Verso’s capital in an expanded form. Is it worthy? Well he can’t do anything else really. Does it drive forward working class self emancipation and is it valid humanities work. No and maybe. And importing Lacan is importing a highly questioned area of work. Verging on pseudo-humanities (as a parallel to pseudo-science.)
I’d honestly rather take a bunch of 16 year olds through Mao versus Stalin, Zhao Enlai officiating, as the basis for contemporary critique than hear “cut the balls.” The point is to give your wife the knife: she’ll handle the fucking rapist.