IJZS: Zizek's response to Parker

The International Journal of Zizek Studies has posted Zizek's response to a story recounted by Ian Parker:

A SHORT CLARIFICATION
Slavoj Žižek

A new text by Ian Parker is circulating around the net (available, among other sites, at www.discourseunit.com/publications_pages/parker_papers/2004%20PINS%20Zizek.doc), which begins with the claim that, towards the end of the 1980s, when the Communist regime in Yugoslavia was in its death throes, I acted as a »commissar« monitoring and controlling dissident activity – here is the full paragraph:

»Let us start with a true story. In the middle of a crisis and crackdown in Slovenia toward the end of the 1980s Slavoj Žižek telephones an academic colleague in Britain late at night. This is before Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia and when the League of Slovene Communists was making some last desperate attempts to maintain power. The crackdown was directed at the opposition movement, in which Žižek and the artistic political grouping Neue Slowenische Kunst, were active. So, Žižek is on the phone during this political crisis in an agitated state. He tells his colleague how bad things are, that there is a total clampdown on the opposition. His colleague is sympathetic. Žižek goes on to tell him that things are even worse than that, for in every workplace a ‘commissar’ has been appointed to monitor and control dissident activity. His colleague is very sympathetic, even slightly alarmed by the picture Žižek is painting. And it is even worse than that, Žižek says, for even in the universities, in every department a commissar has been appointed to keep order. His colleague in Britain exclaims that this is indeed dreadful. And, Žižek then informs him that there is only one good thing in the midst of all this. What is that, his colleague asks. In my department, Žižek says, ‘I am the
commissar’.«

One should note the serious implications of these lines: I am accused of nothing less than being an informant of the Communist power against dissidents. Let me be as clear and unequivocal as possible: this »true story« is entirely false, everything in it is a lie. Not only was I never any kind of a »commissar,« I also never boasted – ironically or truthfully – via a phone – or any other – conversation that I am anything like that. The only thing to add is that anyone who knows a little bit about Slovenia in the late 1980s will immediately see that the »true story« doesn't make sense, for two obvious reasons. First, which »department« would be »mine«? In Yugoslavia, I was never employed at any university department - how could I then be active there as a »commissar«? Second, from (at least) the middle of 1980s, the Communist party effectively lost control over the employment politics at the university. At the Institute of Sociology where I was then formally employed (formally, since I already spent most of the time abroad), if a candidate for a job was suspected to be too closely linked to the Communist party circles, he had no chance of getting the job – at the end of the 1980s, to be »against« the regime was already a way to make a career!

(cross-posted from I Cite)

Comments

[Dave]

The "true story" told here by Parker sounds a bit suspiciously like any number of blackly ironic jokes about power and bureaucracy of the countries under what passed for "communism" in Europe. Of course these are kind of jokes that Zizek is conversant with and often cites himself. To hear this story thirdhand immediately makes me skeptical of its veracity.

[Jason Gonella]

How Ironic. Jodi Dean accused of something she didn't do. Now why does that sound so familiar to me...

[Joanne Blaath]

This is a joke on the order of Marx... Groucho. Clearly the story is true. But not in the way Parker means. This is precisely Zizek's sense of humor regarding totalitarianism. Zizek was clearly telling it to his friend, who misunderstood it as truth in "the real" sense.