On Interviewing Slavoj Zizek

Been revising an introduction for my forthcoming interview with Slavoj Zizek, which will appear in its entirety online in ebr and in condensed form in the the minnesota review. I'm posting my draft here to get a better sense of the online layout. I need to see if I should break up my three paragraphs for easier reading on the screen.

The following interview with Slavoj Zizek took place on the morning of September 29, 2003 in the Palmer House Hilton, a Gilded Age-era hotel in downtown Chicago. In the hotel's opulent lobby, it was easy to spot the bearded Zizek amongst the nattily dressed businesspeople and well-healed tourists. As befits a self-described "old-fashioned left winger," Zizek seemed to be dressed down for our meeting. Yet when Zizek lectured at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute later that night, he wore the same striped knit shirt and casual pants and looked even more disheveled. But although Zizek's comfortable attire and his unassuming demeanor lacked the authority and panache of an 'academostar' such as, say, Edward Said (who had passed away just four days before and whose elegant and opulent fashions even The Nation remarked upon favorably), once Zizek began to philosophize he instantaneously grew in stature. He spoke extemporaneously with an arresting verve and displayed the theoretical prowess and outrageous sense of humor that have established him as one of the world's foremost intellectuals.

Not that such academic accolades probably mean much to Zizek, who described himself as a philosopher with "a very technical, modest project"--to reactualize the legacy of German Idealism. After determining that it was too noisy in the bustling lobby to conduct the interview, we headed to Zizek's room. "So, what's your agenda?" he asked me conspiratorially as we entered his room, which appeared almost ascetically empty. Zizek was on the road for several weeks, but he apparently traveled with only a single duffel bag, a laptop computer, and some novels by Henning Mankell, the Swedish detective novelist. Zizek was coming down with a bad cold, and apologized for his sniffling. While I readied my recorder, he climbed into bed, pulled up the covers, and in an comfortably reclined position, cracked a joke about waxing philosophical from his sickbed. His self-deprecating humor helped me to relax, not least because Zizek's posture reminded me of the provocative author's photo adorning on the back cover of The Puppet and the Dwarf. Shot at the Sigmund Freud museum, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacques Lacan, the photo features an intense looking Zizek lounging on a canopied couch covered with a southwestern-style rug. Immediately above Zizek's outstretched legs, affixed to the back of the couch, is a framed picture of the bottom half of a woman's torso with her hairy vagina prominently displayed. I half expected to see the picture hanging above Zizek's hotel bed, but in the interest of professionalism refrained from telling him so and launched into the interview, which lasted just under two hours.

Despite being under the weather, it didn't take long for Zizek to display the vigor and loquaciousness for which he is famous. As he launched into a polemic against the Other as posited in Levinasian-Derridean theory, Zizek lurched up from the bed and began gesticulating with his arms, his strength increasing with each idea that rapidly came to mind. For the remainder of our interview Zizek was extremely animated, and the rapidity of his speech increased with each passing minute. It quickly became clear that I would be unable to ask all of the questions I had diligently prepared and, in retrospect, I wish I'd more thoroughly interrogated him about his animosity towards deconstruction. My sense was that, were I to ask only one question, Zizek would've continued to talk for the remainder of the interview. In order to get my questions in, I had to speak quickly and risk interrupting the verbose Zizek, who was understanding of my desire to direct the interview but clearly wanted to insure that he was able to elaborate upon and clarify his points. Not surprisingly, then, the interview ran over its allotted time by almost an hour. After all, two new books on Deleuze and Iraq were forthcoming, and Zizek enjoyed joking with Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva, my Russian-born wife, about Western misconceptions regarding Soviet-era life behind the Iron Curtain. As he apologetically escorted me and Ira out the door, Zizek was still theorizing at a machine-gun rate. "When does he get the time to write?" we wondered, in awe of our encounter with this sublime, yet humble, Slovenian philosopher.