It seems to be an increasingly common pattern: whenever I talk with someone from the former Yugoslavia and Žižek comes up, some expletive usually follows. ‘Pthah, that fucking quisling’, says one. ‘I can’t stand that traitor’, says another, ‘he was one of those who worked overtime to dismantle the former socialist system and now he claims to be a communist!’ Now, I must admit that I’ve spoken with people from Serbia and Croatia, not Slovenia or Macedonia or any of the other centrifugal pieces of Yugoslavia, but it makes one wonder.
22 December, 2009
Why is Žižek disliked so much in the former Yugoslavia?
Posted by stalinsmoustache under marxism, philosophy | Tags: Slavoj Žižek, Yugoslavia |[4] Comments
22 December, 2009 at 10:29 am
i dont like him either. but not because im familiar with his work- im not. i just dont like him because i dont know how his name is supposed to be pronounced. people with weird names cant be trusted.
22 December, 2009 at 11:40 am
Ah M. Vest, I believe it’s pronounced like sh but with noise – zh maybe closest.
22 December, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I’ve always heard it as ‘zhee-zheck’.
As for the question, perhaps it’s because many people directly associate any and all forms of communism with the 20th century tragedies/failures. While I think that’s definitely a conversation worth having (and Zizek and others will occasionally comment on it), it’s awfully hard to have a conversation with such people.
22 December, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Dave, in Yugoslavia (the former one) I keep getting the sense that something valuable was lost when centrifugal forces set in (and I think the centripetal ones will draw it closer once again, since it is a nation state about as old as Australia). The catch with Zizek is that he was all for dismantling it and now, in what can only be called nostalgia for the future, he stands for much of what he opposed in the past – and making a packet on the way. That’s what seems to piss them off to no end.