I forgot the password.

I've this summer, in my desperation, ended up watching both the Derrida documentary and the Zizek documentary, both productions of "Zeitgeist" films. I'm not going to apologize for this desperation -- it raises some interesting issues, and even allows me to better comment on the film. Precisely the only thing keeping me from exhibiting desperation would be this attempt at concealing the distaste I had for my surroundings all summer, in the name of maintenance of a public image. Rather than do that I find it interesting to think about the way Derrida and Zizek each reacted to the possibility of fetishization as it works through the public image which is being projected when something vaguely resembling a biographical film is made about you.

Both men seem to be aware of the constraints such a concern places on a sort of enlightenment-style disregard for style -- an emphasis on Derrida or Zizek's "style" taking priority over their "actual theoretical ideas," a distinction which Zizek at least thinks can be strictly maintained. But at the same time his thought seems to me to preclude such a distinction in some ways. Okay, so Derrida at first requested that no images be published of him, ever. This makes it seem as if he already had the problems that go along with having a public image in mind, and wished to avoid them entirely -- and indeed, a lot of what he says in the film seems to be predominantly concerned with the qeustion of tension between theory and praxis -- to a point he agrees with Heidegger, who agrees with Aristotle, that a philosopher is born, thinks, and dies. The preemptive rejection of a philosopher as a knowable human being, and the identification of a knowable human being with "style," surreptitiously sets you up to want to know more about the secret life of the philosopher, and the documentary tries to taunt you with this -- filming Derrida very ambiguously explaining his behavior is in many ways completely artificial because of the fact that he is being filmed, and so on. On the otehr hand, Zizek's reaction to the cult of personality forming around him is a blunt cry of "Confound it, you idiots!" which means not that you shouldn't want to know about a philosopher, lest you embarass him by emphasizing personal style, but more -- why are you not able to think about a philosopher as a living person without turning her into a caricature of herself?

Precisely what he is trying to avoid here appears in his other talk about surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment having the homology of desire -- precisely the problem he has with public images is the emphasis it places on philosophy without philosophy, precisely the way one seeks cybersex as sex without the sex-act. His realization, unlike Derrida's, admits its contingency on the reaction, admits that he didn't originally think it would even be necessary. His role as a philosopher, when he sees people coming to him as a brilliant thinker who will tell leftists finally "what to do," he sees as to react by making these people ask themselves to what extent such requests are even legitimate, why they might have such needs to begin with. His public image complements this with a public suicide, and an artificial image of himself on the ground after having leapt a flight of stairs. The image of his playing dead is not the black nothingness of a prohibitive warning, as in Derrida, but rather as the aftereffect of an insult, a rejection of flattery. The absence of an image still by its very being named can't deny its status of existing as an image for others, not the same as this image of something - of suicide. In fact it's more insulting to have nothing.

Ultimately, though, both Derrida and Zizek share animosity towards the idea of the passing fad, the ironic sitcom of the real. What we are lacking in popular culture is the ability to take anything seriously. We are afraid of the implications behind any move we might make and so we choose, in the name of not tarnishing reputations, not to say anything at all. Rather than what we fear as weight we prefer cartoons of weight, and to make our impotence more palatable we express it as a joke, as if self-awareness already is articulated freedom. But one cannot have chosen not to be in freedom, and so we still fail to say anything meaningdul when we make a joke of discrimination, of class oppression, in order to give the appearance that we are able to somehow disengage from our conditions simply by having a basic awareness of them. We replace any decisive action with ironic remarks and with style -- I still don't know if I understand how style can possibly have weight so long as it is measured against a distinction from underpinning theoretical content (Nietzsche, anyone?). And irony is so pervasive that even the deepest suffering can become a trinket of its amusement. We think that we bequeath fair treatment to the suffering person so long as she is able to address us colloquially with an affirmation of her satirization. In this way we miss the point of the morbid, as an impetus to challenge whatever conditions result in it. More important and less understood than the sheer morbidity is the reasoning behind its appearance in art. Why does the Zizek film end with him throwing himself down a flight of stairs? Well, his other option was what, to end his talk on the artificiality and insincerity of public image by waving goodbye? Sorry adoring fans, I'll deproblematize your adoration some other time. For now I have to go enjoy my champagne and the idle preening of small talk with the film producers. Life goes on.

The problem is that this fear of weight does not itself even indicate any real object around which the satire orients itself -- the elementary definition of the real, for Zizek, is "death which resists symbolization," the negative that resists symbolization -- and that, stated as such, is absolutely meaningless. For example, there is no "real difference" between the liberal and conservative camps insofar as there is not a definition of that difference which does not already originate from the liberal or conservative side; at most, positively, there is a "difference from." And yet this "difference from," weightless as it is, carries even greater and more insidious forms of the weight which is barring free possibilities for change -- because we do not have the trite but firmly established vocabulary for change that we do for the status quo, and the status quo is becoming global capitalism. Still we claim a so-called society of tolerance and free choice, and still we enforce the injunction to ENJOY which is even more pervasive than the injunction simply to DO. The alleged postmodern individual appeals to a basic humanity which has been recovered after a loss of the meaning, a loss of the real, but these appeals carry all the same and even further restrictions on our behavior -- we must tolerate even the petty sitcoms which ease their nausea lest we risk social alienation. This constitutes an authority which precisely disallows any opposition in its denial that it itself is even an authority. It denies that real radical change, expansion of vocabularies for articulating lack of freedom, and indeed real social tolerance would require us to make any compromises in our comfortable patterns of etiquette, even the etiquette of ironic self-abnegation!, at all.