JULY 2004

Slavoj iek
[CULTURAL CRITIC]
IDEOLOGY IS A CERTAIN UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF THE UNIVERSE AND YOUR PLACE IN IT, TO
PUT IT IN STANDARD TERMS, WHICH SERVES THE PRODUCTION OF THE EXISTING POWER
RELATIONS AND BLAH BLAH BLAH.
Modern ideas that only seem anticapitalist:
Stalinism
Western Buddhism
Antiglobalization
Radical human-rights liberalism
Positivist psychology
Ecological food

Slavoj iek is as paradoxical as his world-renowned work, as much a serious

intellectual as a comedian. Were it not for his vivid examples drawn from popular
culture, the tangential though insightful ideas in his many books would be lost on
the world and limited to a select few. He is an expert in Lacan, Stalin, Hitchcock,
and Christianity, and coming from Slovenia has a fresh, surprising response to
Western consumer products. He is a favorite speaker in Ivy League academia and in
the contemporary art world, though he attacks them both.

He is the Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Studies, University of

Ljubljana, as well as the author of a dozen books of criticism including Looking
Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, On Belief, The
Ticklish Subject, The Plague of Fantasies, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and The
Puppet and the Dwarf. His most recent book, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, is an
analysis of the strange logic that was used to justify the attack on Iraq.

My interview was typical of a conversation with iek: a conflicting competition to

stop his rapid speech and jump in with my own ideas versus the fascination of
listening to how his mind unfolds. I am still not sure which side won.

I will just say that iek, though tough to describe on paper, can be perhaps best
encapsulated by what he once told me of going to the movies in a Chicago multiplex.
It included half mainstream Hollywood theaters and half art theaters. It is
beautiful; when my friends drop me off, I can play the intellectual and say that I
am going to see the new independent film, and then when they are not looking, I
will run to see the blockbuster.

Dianna Dilworth

I. WHY STALINISM WAS MORE

PERVERSE THAN NAZISM

THE BELIEVER: You have raised many eyebrows with your controversial rethinking of
todays accepted positions in philosophy. For example, you have said that Stalinism
is worse than Nazism, despite the grand spectacle of the Holocaust. Can you
describe your interest in Stalin here and why you think that his regime is a
greater problem philosophically than Nazism?

SLAVOJ IEK: It was typical in philosophy after World War II to evoke Nazism and
the Holocaust as the most radical evil. You cannot comprehend it with any rational
strategy. The idea is also that the experience of the Holocaust is something which
undermines the entire traditional philosophy, which was basically the divine
regulation, the idea that even if things appear thwarted, failed, and so on,
ultimately, in some kind of rational totality, all of these tragedies are
relativized as part of a harmonious project. It can be a divine plan; it can also
be the development of humanity or whatever. The idea is that the Holocaust cannot
be rationalized philosophically here.

Of course, I think that the Holocaust was horrific (my god, it is gross to even
have to say that), but for me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem
than Nazism. For example, there is a basic difference between Stalinist and Nazi
victim status, from a simple phenomenological approach. Under Nazism, if you were a
Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are
guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, thats it. Under Stalinism,
of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were
not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were
tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

BLVR: So your line of questioning is of the functioning of the system?

S: Yes. Why this strange need to make them confess? And why the total absence of
this in Fascism? In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had
the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because
in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being. The very fact that you had to
confess makes Stalinism paradoxical and perverse. The idea is that, in a strange
way, it admits that you are still a free human being, you had a choice. You are
guilty, you have to confess. This does not make Stalinism cause any less suffering;
nonetheless, this pure quarrel of radical objectivization, You are a Jew, you are
guilty for who you are, was absent in Stalinism. In a totally perverted, thwarted,
and twisted way, some margin of human freedom was acknowledged under Stalin. So the
result is that in Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally
contingent way.

BLVR: So your interest is not to forget Nazism, but to reexamine Stalinism.

S: To put it in simplistic terms, Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a

reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and
unfortunately succeeding in realizing them. In Stalinism the tragedy is that its
origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind
of workers uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so
wrong. This is a much greater enigma. The most representative orientation of
Marxism in the twentieth centurycritical theory of the Frankfurt schoolobsessed
over Fascism, anti-Semitism, and so on, and simply ignored the topic of Stalinism.
Sure, there are a couple of small books, but there is no systematic theory of what
Stalinism is. So for me, the key phenomenon to be accounted for in the twentieth
century is Stalinism. Because again, Fascism is simple, conservative reaction going
wrong. The true enigma is why Stalinism or communism went wrong.

BLVR: Any conclusions?

S: It is very difficult; I am still working on it. My conclusions are not some

kind of conservative or liberal vision according to which Stalinism should be
pointed out as kind of a logical demonstration of any project of our so-called
post-political era: the idea that the time for projects is over, all we can do is
accept capitalist world-market economy, globalism, and so on. Today, whenever
somebody tries to risk something politically, you immediately get, Oh, didnt you
learn the lesson from history, this will end up in Holocaust. This is the eternal
topic of modern liberal-conservative skeptics, that the lesson of the twentieth
century is that every radical attempt at social change ends up in mass murder.
Their idea is a return to pragmatism, Lets strictly distinguish politics from
ethics, politics should be limited, pragmatic, only ethics can be absolute. What I
aim at in my rethinking of all of these problems is precisely not to draw this
conclusion.

II: THE END OF LIBERAL MODESTY

BLVR: So you obviously strongly disagree with this liberal reading of the ideology
behind World War II. This leads me to think about how in your work you are known to
criticize liberalism, as it is manifested in political correctness, pragmatism,
American academia, etc. So would this be your criticism of this way of thinking?

S: First of all, I dont have any big problems with liberalism. Originally,
liberalism was quite a noble project if one looks at how it emerged. Today it is a
quite fashionable criticism, with feminists, anti-Eurocentric thinkers, etc., to
dismiss liberalism in principle for preaching the equality of all people, but in
reality privileging the white males of certain property, addressing automatic
limitations. The next usual accusation is that liberalism is ultimately founded in
what the American moral-majority religious Right likes to call secular humanism:
the idea is that there is no Supreme Being or mystery in the universe. Their
criticism is that this ideathat the ultimate prospect of humankind is to take over
as master of his own destinyis mans arrogance, criticizing that it always
misfires and so on.

First, I dont think it is as simple as that, for two reasons. It is a historic

fact that at the beginning, the idea of human rights and all of those liberal
notions, effectively in a coded way implied the exclusion of certain people.
Nonetheless, in this tension between appearance and reality (appearance: everyone
has human rights; reality: many, through an implicit set of sub-rules, are
excluded), a certain tension is set in motion where you cannot simply say that
appearance is just a mask of the reality of oppression. Appearance acquired a
social emancipatory power of its own. For example, of course at the beginning,
women were excluded, but then very early on, women said, Sorry, why not also us?
Then blacks said, Why not us? And workers, and so on. My point being that all of
these groups that criticize liberalism emerged out of these early bourgeois liberal
traditions. It set certain rulesthis tradition of universality of human rights and
so onand in this way it opened up the space. So that is the first thing to say for
liberalism.

BLVR: So even though liberalism was started by a limited few, built inside of it is
the ability for all others to use it to their benefit?

S: Yes. The second thing to say for liberalism is that originally it was not an
arrogant attitude, but it was quite a modest, honest attitude of confronting the
problem of religious tolerance after the Thirty Years War. In the seventeenth
century, all of Europe was in a shock, and then out of this traumatic experience,
the liberal vision came. The idea was that each of us has some existential or
religious beliefs, but even if these are our fundamental commitments, we will not
be killing each other for them. To create a coexistent social structure, a space
where these inherently different commitments can be practiced. Again, I dont see
anything inherently bad in this project.

BLVR: Neither do I. But last year I attended a lecture you gave in which you
vehemently attacked liberalism. Can you help clarify this for me?

S: The problem that I find today, with liberalism, not economic liberalism, but
radical human-rights liberalism, is the philosophical approach. The saddest thing
to happen in the last thirty years is the loss of the belief that we had in
communism, and even in the social-democratic welfare states of the West, the
accepted fact that the fate of humanity is not simply an anonymous fate. This
belief that some blind fate does not control us, that it is possible, through human
collective action, to steer development, is gone. I think what happened in recent
years is that this logic of blind fate returned. Global capitalism is simply
accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, Will
you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded? A certain
type of question, and it neednt be put in the old-fashioned Marxist way as class
struggle, but the general anticapitalist question, basically has disappeared.

BLVR: Generally speaking, yes. But I disagree, as would I think a number of others,
that everyone accepts global capitalism. What about the antiglobalism movements
that have been taking place all over the world in the last decade? Seattle, Genoa,
etc. What do you think of these groups?

S: Now with the antiglobalism movement, they are still, in a limited way,
reemerging. But the idea is that the fundamental conflicting areas are no longer
those of vertical up-vs.-down social struggle, but more horizontal differences
between me and you, between different social groups: the problem of tolerance; the
problem of tolerance of other races, religious minorities, and so on. So then the
basic problem becomes that of tolerating differences. I am not saying this is bad,
of course we should fight for this, but I dont think that this horizonwithin
which the ultimate ethical value is then that of tolerating differenceis the
fundamental place for question. My problem with liberalism is in principle. This
move of the new Left, or new radicals, towards a problem of identity politics
(minority politics, gay rights, etc.) lacks a certain more radical insight into the
basically antagonistic character of society. This radical questioning has simply
disappeared.

For example, take my friend Judith Butler. Of course from time to time, she pays
lip service to some kind of anticapitalism, but its totally abstract, what its
basically saying is just how lesbians and other oppressed sexual minorities should
perceive their situation not as the assertion of some kind of substantial sexual
identity, but as constructing an identity which is contingent, which means that
also the so-called straight normal sexuality is contingent, and everybody is
constructed in a contingent way, and so on, and in this way, nobody should be
excluded. There is no big line between normality identity and multiple roles. The
problem I see here is that there is nothing inherently anticapitalist in this
logic. But even worse is that what this kind of politically correct struggling for
tolerance and so on advocates is basically not only not in conflict with the modern
tendencies of global capitalism, but it fits perfectly. What I think is that
todays capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even nave positivist
psychologists propose to describe todays subjectivity in terms like multiple
subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents itself, and so
on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-
identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and
constant reinventing should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am
not impressed by this problem. I think that this is a certain logic, totally within
the framework of todays capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce
itself, to function in todays condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics
of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed
patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself.

III: ORGANIC FOOD, NEW-AGE

SPIRITUALITY, AND NEW CARS

BLVR: OK, so you think that these antiglobalist movements arent asking the right
questions and this can be really dangerous. I can see what youre saying. This
reminds me of the example that you gave in On Belief about the health-food market.
How purchasing organic food, though seemingly good in intention, can really be a
bad thing because of how it is appropriated. Can you explain what you meant by
that?

S: More and more crucial today are specialized markets, and in this sense, I think
that its even more interesting to see how trends which were originally meant to be
subversive or critical can be perfectly reappropriated and sold for consumption.
Ecological food, organic food, green products, and so onthis is one of the key
niche markets today. Lets take a typical guy who buys organic food: he doesnt
really buy it in order to be healthy; he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as
the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance. Its
the same way as if you have stonewashed jeans, you dont really buy it for the
jeans, but you buy it to project a certain image of your social identity. So again,
you are not buying a product, you are buying a certain social status, ideology, and
so on.

BLVR: Does this also include your model of Western Buddhism as new-age philosophy
being a product that can be purchased in capitalism (true Buddhism not being able
to exist outside of the East)?

S: Yes, you know why? Because this basic Buddhist insight that there is no
permanent self, permanent subject, just events and so on, in an ironic way
perfectly mirrors this idea that products are not essential, essential is this
freedom of how you consume products and the idea that the market should no longer
focus on the product. It is no longer: this car has this quality blah blah blah.
No, its what you will do with the car. They are trying as directly as possible to
sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a
product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing
concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your
own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy
back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so
much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on.
What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your
market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

BLVR: OK, so ironically, when Westerners buy into a Buddhist mentality, then they
set themselves up to be perfect consumers in contemporary capitalism. It is kind of
sad and funny at the same time. While looking for spirituality or God, they become
ideal consumers to marketing executives. Sounds like science fiction.

IV: THE DANGERS OF EASTERN

SPIRITUALITY IN THE WEST AND
THE REVOLUTION OF ST. PAULS
CHRISTIANITY, ALL THROUGH
THE EYES OF AN ATHEIST.

BLVR: Do you believe in God?

S: No, I am a complete atheist.

BLVR: Your book The Puppet and the Dwarf deals with St. Paul. In fact, it
celebrates St. Pauls Christianity in contrast to other forms of spirituality, i.e.
gnosticism, new-age spiritualities, etc. So why would an atheist defend
Christianity?

S: Today, spirituality is fashionable. Either some pagan spirituality of

tolerance, feminine principle, holistic approach against phallocentric Western
imperialist logic or, within the Western tradition, we have a certain kind of
rehabilitation of Judaism, respect for otherness, and so on. Or you are allowed to
do Christianity, but you must do a couple of things which are permitted. One is to
be for these repressed traditions, the early Gnostic gospels or some mystical sects
where a different nonhegemonic/patriarchal line was discernible. Or you return to
the original Christ, which is against St. Paul. The idea is that St. Paul was
really bad, he changed Christianity into this patriarchal state, but Jesus,
himself, was something different.
What I like is to see the emancipatory potential in institutionalized Christianity.
Of course, I dont mean state religion, but I mean the moment of St. Paul. I find a
couple of things in it. The idea of the Gospel, or good news, was a totally
different logic of emancipation, of justice, of freedom. For example, within a
pagan attitude, injustice means a disturbance of the natural order. In ancient
Hinduism, or even with Plato, justice was defined in what today we would call
almost fascistic terms, each in his or her place in a just order. Man is the
benevolent father of the family, women do their job taking care of the family,
worker does his work and so on. Each at his post; then injustice means this hubris
when one of the elements wants to be born, i.e. instead of in a paternal way,
taking care of his population, the king just thinks about his power and how to
exploit it. And then in a violent way, balance should be reestablished, or to put
it in more abstract cosmological terms, you have cosmic principles like yin and
yang. Again, it is the imbalance that needs to establish organic unities. Connected
with this is the idea of justice as paying the price as the preexisting established
order is balanced.

But the message that the Gospel sends is precisely the radical abandonment of this
idea of some kind of natural balance; the idea of Gospels and the part of sins is
that freedom is zero. We begin from the zero point, which is at least originally
the point of radical equality. Look at what St. Paul is writing and the metaphors
he used. It is messianic, the end of time, differences are suspended. Its a
totally different world whose formal structure is that of radical revolution. Even
in ancient Greece, you dont find thatthis idea that the world can be turned on
its head, that we are not irreducibly bound by the chains of our past. The past can
be erased; we can start from the zero point and establish radical justice, so this
logic is basically the logic of emancipation. Which is again why I find any
flirting with so-called new-age spiritualities extremely dangerous. It is good to
know the other side of the story, at least, when you speak about Buddhism and all
of these spiritualities. I am sorry, but Nazis did it all. For Hitler, the Bhagavad
Gita was a sacred book; he carried it in his pocket all the time. In Nazi Germany
there were three institutes for Tibetan studies and five for the study of different
sects of Buddhism.

BLVR: That is a really interesting point. Im not religious at all, but when it
comes to religions, Ive always really distrusted new-age spiritualities.

S: I agree. So lets at least be clear of where in the West this fascination with
Eastern spirituality originated. Of course when I advocate Christian legacy, I make
it very clear that this legacy today is not alive in the Catholic or any Christian
Church. Here I am kind of a vulgar Stalinist; churches should either be destroyed
or turned into cultural homes or museums for religious horrors [laughs]. No no no,
its not that, but nonetheless, a certain logic of radical emancipation exploded
there. And all original emancipatory movements stopped there. This should be
admitted. So the point is not to return to the Church, to rehabilitate
Christianity, but to keep this certain revolutionary logic alive. I mean this is
the good news that the Gospel means: you can do it, take the risk.

V: IDENTIFICATION WITH FICTIONAL

MOVIES, WITH MURDERS

BLVR: So then is your problem with the rest of Christianity the ideology of
institutionalized religion?

S: This is not ideology. Ideology for me is a very specific term. Ideology, in a

classical Marxist way, has nothing to do with what we usually take as an
ideological project. The project of radically changing social orders, this is not,
per se, ideology. The most conformist, modest empirical attitude can be ideology.
Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to
put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power
relations and blah blah blah. I claim that the minimum necessary structuring
ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to
denounce its other as ideology. Every ideology does this. Which is why, the worst
ideology today is post-ideology, where they claim we are entering a new pragmatic
era, negotiations, plural interests, no longer time for big ideological projects.

BLVR: So even post-ideology is ideological?

S: For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful
experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic
tensions and antagonisms of social orders. Which is why for me no attitude is a
priori ideological. You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic
development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological. You
can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way,
not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data
and nonetheless your point is ideological.

For example, I would like to use the wonderful model of Lacan. Lets say that you
are married and you are pathologically jealous, thinking that your wife is sleeping
around with other men. And lets say that you are totally right, she is cheating.
Lacan says that your jealousy is still pathological. Even if everything is true it
is pathological, because what makes it pathological is not the fact that is it true
or not true, but why you invest so much in itwhat needs does it fulfill? Its the
same with the Jews and the Nazis. It is not a question that they attributed false
properties to the Jews; the point is why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew
as part of their ideological project? It is clear why: their project was to have
capitalism without individualism, without tensions, capitalism which would
magically maintain what they thought previous eras shared, a sense of organic
community and so on, so in order to have this, you must locate the source of evil
not in capitalism as such, but in some foreign intruder, that through its
profiteering just introduces imbalance and disturbs the natural cooperation between
productive capital and labor.

BLVR: So there is no escaping ideology? We are always participating in it?

S: I would say that this just brings about a certain tendency that was here all
the time. Like if I go to a more general phenomenon like reality TV, the lesson of
it is much more ambiguous, because the charm of it is a certain hidden reflexivity.
It is not that we are voyeurs looking at what people are really doing. The point is
that we know that they know that they are being filmed. The true reality TV would
be to plant cameras and really shoot people unaware of their being watched.

BLVR: That exists already.

S: I wonder if they would be able to go beyond that level, because its basically
the same as snuff movies. I claim that the way we identify with fictional movies,
with murders, is not that we identify it, no: the awareness that its not true is
part of our identification. Even when we cry and so on. Because, imagine watching a
detective story, and someone is shot. If you were to learn that he was really shot,
it would ruin your identification with the story. There was this Polish movie from
the mid-sixties, a historical spectacle about a pharaoh that has a scene where they
sacrifice a horse. And the way that it is shot, they throw lances at the horse, and
you can see bleeding. Its obvious that they are really killing the horse. And it
was a dramatic point, people in Poland protested, people in the West didnt want to
see the movie. So you see how much more refined identification in the movie is.

BLVR: We have a strong identification with fiction.

S: My point is this: the problem is that of acting. I think that there is only one
radical conclusion here, with reality soaps, that we are seeing people acting
themselves. And the conclusion that I would draw is that it is not so much that it
is fake, but that in everyday lives, we act already, in the sense that we have a
certain ideal image of ourselves and we act that persona.

VI: NOSTALGIA AND

IRRATIONAL POWER

BLVR: What do you think of the fact that California has an actor for governor?

S: What I would like to avoid here is precisely this cheap conservative cultural
criticism that this shows the decadence of our times. As if at some point
politicians were substantially betterI dont believe that. The fact that Bush is
president is worse for me, because he is not even a good actor, and probably not
much more intelligent. You never know what will happen. Schwarzenegger has advisors
around him and they may give him good advice. I never quite agreed with the simple
dismissal that there is no substance; when was there substance in politicians? The
duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an
expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on. A politician is
more of

BLVR: An actor that mediates?

S: Yes, there is a dimension of identification of a master figure and so on. And

for all that, it doesnt matter if an actor does it. The problem for me is not that
Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not
actors are functioning like actors. But even this I am tempted not to simply
dismiss as a bad phenomenon. Here I agree with Habermas, who made a very
intelligent remark. Its not so much that times are worse today, but that
imperceptibly our standards are higher. For example, we dont have feminism today
because women are exploited only today, but they became much more sensitive to it
today. The paradox is the following one, if you look, for example, at the typical
genesis of a revolution: the terror never became so bad that the people exploded.
No, it was always a kind of spiritual revolution, which raised the standards. And
then usually those in power began to lose their nerves and accept these new
standards silently. Out of this loss of legitimization, it exploded.

For example, recently I read a wonderful text by Bernard Williams that deals with
David Mamets Oleanna, the harassment play, that made a nice point. If you look
closely, Mamet is a little more refined than people usually think. The point is not
that the young student is complaining about harassment, but that what she is
complaining about is that she came to him as a student, she wanted guidance from
him and so on. And basically, he was too liberal, not giving her any authentic
guidance as an authority, and precisely because he renounced his authority, his
power which remained as a professor appeared as irrational power. So paradoxically,
it is precisely when the professor renounces his standard authority and behaves
like we are all the same that, between the lines, he keeps his power (he can grade
you and so on). At the moment when he pretends to be tolerant, you experience his
power in all of its irrationality.

BLVR: Thats like your example of the employee and the boss. You said that when the
boss claims to be buddies with the employee, he is actually exploiting the employee
more, in that he is covering up all of his power, though in actuality, it still
exists.

S: Yes, these are the problems for me. The fact that something appears as
irrational unjustified power, its not simply that its horrible authority. It is
precisely when authority declines and you have the first steps towards a more equal
tolerant attitude. So again, my lesson here is kind of a pessimistic one, but not
pessimistic in the sense that nothing can be done. Pessimistic in the sense that
maybe the first step towards really opening up the space to change something is to
admit the extent to which there is no easy way out, nothing can be simply changed.
Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things
may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely
this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system. At this level, I quite
liked a modest movie, The Shawshank Redemption. The guy who doesnt accept that he
is in prison and dreams to get out, when he is let out, he hangs himself. And the
guys who accept that they are really there, they are the ones who can really break
out. So there are alternatives and in alternatives, a certain sense of false
opening, in that its not necessarily so bad, maybe luck is around the corner, we
can change things; those are the ideal ideological tools to keep you enslaved. The
system functions through the idea that it can be changed at any point. So maybe the
first step is to see that it cant be changed, that its pretty closed.

VII: LACAN AND

FASHION CATALOGUES

BLVR: I would like to go back to the problem of people acting as personas of

themselves. This sounds very Lacanian, in the sense that we do not experience the
world directly, but by interpretation. The real is itself, mediated (in this case
through acting as a persona). Could you describe for me your basic insight into
Lacans work and what you think is his idea of philosophy?

S: Lacan was a French psychoanalytic theorist, who despised philosophy officially.

For Lacan, the discourse of philosophy is of a complete worldview which fills in
all of the gaps and cracks. And Lacans idea is that precisely what we learn in
psychoanalysis is how cracks and inconsistencies are constitutive of our lives. So
officially he was against philosophy, but the paradox is that Lacan was constantly
in dialogue with philosophy. In his work, there are even more references to Plato
and Hegel than to Freud himself.

BLVR: So even though Lacan didnt want to define the world concretely, he was a
kind of philosopher himself?

S: Obviously, Lacan was playing philosophy against itself. The idea being very
simply that in our experience of the reality of the world, we always stumble upon
some fundamental crack, incompleteness. What appears as an obstacle, the fact that
we cannot ever really know things, is for Lacan itself a positive condition of
meaning. There is a kernel of philosophy here, what philosophers call ontological
difference; this is this experience of a rupture as a fundamental constituent of
our lives. So to cut a long story short, for Lacan (and I try to further develop
this idea, based on his insight), to properly grasp what Freud was aiming at with
the death drive (the fundamental libidinal stance of the human individual for self-
sabotaging; the basic idea of psychoanalysis is the pursuit of unhappiness, people
do everything possible not to be happy), is to read it against the background of
negativity, a gap as fundamental to human subjectivity, so in other words to
philosophize psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis in this way is no longer just a
psychiatric science which develops a theory of how we can cure certain diseases;
its kind of a mental and philosophical theory of the utmost radical dimensions of
human beings.

BLVR: So Lacan was reading Freuds death drive, the desire to self-destruct, as a
good thing, philosophically speaking. Incompleteness and cracks, themselves being
the place where difference is created.

S: Exactly.
BLVR: You wrote some Lacanian-style quotations for last falls Abercrombie & Fitch
catalog. How did that come about?

S: Oh yes, I was helping someone who helped me once. It was easy, he sent me a
series of provocative images, and I just wrote silly Lacanian statements about
them. My critics have attacked me, saying how can you conscientiously accept money
from such a company? I said, with less guilt than accepting money from the American
university system.

Dianna Dilworth is a writer and cultural researcher based in Brooklyn, New York.
She is currently working on a documentary film project about Michael Jackson fans,
entitled We are the Children.