COMBAT ŽIŽEK

I was certain this was common knowledge, but two people have asked me to clarify, so I’m providing the full Žižek quote here. Bear in mind that this is my retranslation into English from the Polish translation that I own, so it will definitely differ from the original text. Still, the gist will be there, I’m sure.

One of the specifically pernicious effects of the politically correct Cultural Studies position is a (concealed, but hence even more effective) prohibition against revealing the structural problem of lesbian subjectivity; against an attempt to understand the clinical fact that most lesbian relationships are unusually cold, emotionally distant, radically narcissistic; that love within their context is impossible, and the subject’s own position is problematic. As if drawing logical conclusions from this fact (and not just handwaving it away as an effect of internalized patriarchal repression) was equivalent to accepting classical patriarchal “wisdom”.

(Rewolucja u bram. Pisma Lenina z roku 1917, Posłowie, str. 441. wyd. ha!art, Kraków 2006, tłum. Julian Kutyła; here’s the English version)

Clinical fact! Did you fucking see that? Old boy Slavoj presumes to know clinical facts about lesbian relationships — and what a very specific word that is, too, clinical. Pathological, he might as well have written. Thus spake the privileged interpreter of female sexuality. How he came to possess the objective knowledge of these clinical facts, we can only speculate. (Personally, I’d assume he’s extrapolating from something Judith Butler told him about a friend of hers. Clinical facts indeed.)

When I read it first, I was furious, but seeing how everyone around me was enamored with Žižek, I kind of let it slide. I figured they’ve read it too, and there’s already been a shitstorm about it, and one way or another, the matter’s been settled. But… I don’t think it has, actually.

So that’s why I’ve never liked him, and I never will. I don’t give a shit if this is “on purpose” or to rile up “the liberals” or what. It’s dehumanizing and patronizing shit, turning the lived identities and experiences of women who love women into some abstract post-Lacanian theory that speculates upon their subjectivity — right after it erases their existence. This point he attempts ot make here clearly shows that he hasn’t made the slightest critical engagement with feminist theory, besides ransacking it for whatever he thought sounded cool, and yet he wants to be taken seriously?

Actually, “pretending he gets it” is still giving him too much credit. I think he is quite consciously working to reestablish the acceptability, or even necessity, of male privilege in leftist discourse.

We must reject this completely. Combat Žižek.

EDIT: And lest we forget his principled stance against the menace of multiculturalism. Thanks to @Aidan_Rowe for linking me to this, I wanted to include it but couldn’t find it in my bookmarks.