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Roger Deacon is Honorary Research Fellow in Human and Social Studies and Honorary Lecturer in Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Managing Editor of Theoria. His most recent publication is Fabricating Foucault (Marquette University Press, 2003), and he is currently researching the origins of early modern education, and the art and politics of war. Email: deacon@ukzn.ac.za

Conversations with tizek, by Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly. Polity: Cambridge, 2004. ISBN: 0745628974 Reviewed by Richard Pithouse The astonishing exuberance of Slavoj Zizek's theoretical promiscuity hasn't always made his work easy. On the contrary a productive engagement with his work has required a solid grounding in Lacanian theory and its occasionally obtuse terminology (not to mention a little Kant, Hitchcock, Hegel, M*A*S*H* and so on). But getting into Zizek has been getting easier for two reasons. The first is Zizek's anti-capitalist shift. The central political thrust of his early work is an attack on the totalitarianism of the authoritarian state but his more recent work, beginning with the last chapter of The Ticklish Subject (Verso 1999), moving through On Belief (Routledge 2001) and culminating in his superb afterword to his edited collection of Lenin's 1917 writings. Revolution at the Gates (Verso 2002), develops a sustained attack on the tyranny of the market. He still uses Lacanian ideas to illuminate the processes of domination and to defend the possibilities of revolutionary intervention in the form of the act chosen without recourse to the legitimation of a 'big Other' but the Lacanian jargon has slipped away. One doesn't need to be initiated into Lacan's technical vocabulary to understand Zizek's newer anti-capitalist work. The second reason why it's getting easier to get into Zizek is that there are now some very good books designed for this purpose. Blackwell's The Zizek Reader gives a good overview of his work before the anti-capitalist turn and Sarah Kay has written an absolutely superb critical introduction, Zizek (2003), in Polity's Key Contemporary Thinkers series. Kay's book surveys the full range of Zizek's work

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and is able to offer a clear view into its basic structure without sacrificing the complexity and subtlety of his thought. It also comes with a very useful glossary of Zizekian terms that is quite extensive and which includes explanations of how his use of these terms has changed as his thinking has developed. But Conversations with Zizek is the best route into Zizek. More and more interview books are being published. Some, like Negri on Negri (Routledge 2004), provide new illumination but many don't always work well for the simple reason that people who write well don't always interview well. The book on Castells in the same series as Conversations with Zizek never seems to get around Castells's large and unlovely narcissism. But Zizek is clearly a man who can speak as he writes insofar as his humour, vast erudition and refusal to separate theory from lived experience come through magnificently. Conversations is also blessed with the same absence of Lacanian jargon that characterizes his more recent work. It doesn't provide much that is new but it does provide an excellent entry into Zizek's thought. There are five conversations in this book. The first is an often fascinating intellectual biography which includes the startling observation: 'I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing.'This is later qualified by an explanation that the books come at such a rate because he Just writes some things down in order to delay the actual act of writing. No doubt this explains his errors and tendency to repetition but it may also explain his willingness to take such productive risks. The second conversation is an equally stimulating exploration of the state and importance of contemporary philosophy. Unsurprisingly Zizek seeks a radical empiricism that can transcend the sterilities of cognitivism via an appreciation of Hegel's insight that the transcendent is imminent or, in Zizek's favourite Hegelian phrase, that the spirit is a bone. The third conversation explores Zizek's widely appreciated defence of the subject. He argues, in a surprisingly productive discussion of the Kinder children's eggs that contain a plastic toy in the centre of a chocolate egg, that liberal capitalism and organicist totalitarianisms share the same belief in factor Xthe toy inside the egg. In response he prescribes the introduction of historicity into the absolute via the historicizing of the eternal questions. The fourth conversation centres around Zizek's thinking of the eventthe act freely chosen in the existential void. This is at the core of his recent work and while it does, in man^ senses, constitute an unacknowledged return to Sartrean thinking, Zizek does reconstitute this idea in the contemporary material and theoretical world. He

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makes up for his unfortunate omission of Fanon in the afterword to the Lenin book with an argument that claims that the eruption of the real into the symbolic must be violent. But Fanon is merely referenced in a rather caricatured way rather than engaged with as a complex thinker. Because Zizek misspells his first name in the same way that Hardt and Negri do, one wonders if he has read Fanon through their caricature. While Zizek's attacks on multiculturalism as a racializing and patronizing discourse are well made and hugely welcome, it does seem that while his experiential base is universal his theoretical base remains disablingly circumscribed by the borders of whiteness. Amongst other unfortunate consequences this crippling limitation dramatically weakens his articulation of the left assault on multiculturalism's Kinder-egg-style pieties. The final conversation takes up Zizek's new anti-capitalism. It's a very rich discussion that centres around his insistence that ethics must be subordinated to politics. This leads him to an attack on the pseudopolitics of the cult of the victim in favour of the politics of the act that can't be accommodated by the symbolic legitimation of domination. He argues that, since Kant, there has been an entrenched philosophical suspicion that such acts are really driven by some unconscious pathology but that in reality it is the act in-itself and for-itself that creates so much trauma that its visceral power must immediately be contained by some form of symbolic delegitimation. Neither the blurb writers who present Zizek as the court jester able to provide 'the best high since Anti-Oedipus' with a barrage of jokes that move 'from Kant to cunnilingus', nor the pedants who seize on his ultimately minor errors are able to successfully contain his hard and supple radical energies. His blasphemy stands firm on its commitment. The South African academy is urgently in need of more blasphemers to stand with Ashwin Desai. Zizek's inspiration might encourage new rebels. If not it is, at least, and unlike the World Bank and the African Renaissance, a toy without an egg. It stands as what it is to be liked, left or opposed as what it is. Richard Pithouse is a research fellow at the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His current research interests are in the broad areas of political philosophy and political economy and in both instances he is particularly interested in resistance and the constitution of counter power. Email: Pithouser@ukzn.ac.za