There’s an interview with Slavoj Zizek from the Guardian which pretty much confirms my suspicions as to why I shouldn’t take him seriously – I first heard of him a couple of years ago through a friend who was briefly infatuated with his writing; then looking into it I found it unintelligible, and then further it became Lacan inspired nonsense, and now James Harkins has laid it all out for us, in an interview subtlety designed to impress those with my prejudices, which he perhaps shares.

My highlights:

A one-man heavy industry of cultural criticism, the 58-year-old Zizek has authored more than 50 books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin, and the terrorist attacks of September 11. His brand of social theory – a peculiar amalgam of Karl Marx, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the trash can of contemporary popular culture – has long afforded him a cult following among fashionable young academics.

Comment: Marx and Lacan are two examples of pseudo-science, and refering to the trash can of pop culture is to say that as trash perhaps it’s not something worth dealing with. Zizek appeals to ‘fashionable young’ academics – which is to say the naive, impressionable, and shallow. Would it not be true that to build arguments out of things not really worth considering is to build an argument itself not worth considering, the equivalent of fantasy?

If I were as fame hungry and vain as Zizek, I might want to start interpreting everything through the lens of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

No longer tethered to a single institution, Zizek spends his time roving between speaking engagements at institutions all over the world. He is leaving London first thing tomorrow, he tells me, for Paris to be profiled by the newspaper Libèration. Then he is off to headline a Design Congress in Copenhagen (“??7,500,” he shouts to me, still under the photographer’s cosh, “first-class everything, and all that for 40 minutes selling them some old stuff”) and then it is back to Slovenia.

Comment: First class everything, eh? Not bad for a Revolutionary Marxist. The type that overthrows exploitative aristocracy to become aristocracy themselves. Some animals are more equal than others.

On April 1 this year (“a great day to get married”), he married a 27-year-old Argentinian former lingerie model and now spends one third of his time in Slovenia looking after his young son from a former marriage, a third of his time with his new wife in Buenos Aires, and the rest of his time on the road.

Comment: Here we have the degradation of men, especially of older men, who are represented as commitment phobic and chasing after women young enough to be their daughters. Here we have Zizek knocking up a ‘former lingerie model’ which is to say, she had nice tits and an exemplary body, and probably cannot converse at Zizek’s level when it comes to ideas. Zizek has a child from a former marriage, which is also to imply that the lingerie model is a home-wrecker. Zizek, being the ethical fellow we know him to be (“Come on,” he says. “I don’t have any problem violating my own insights in practice.”) could not resist the temptation offered by his new wife. In the end, one is left with thinking: what a fucking bastard.

And not to mention the whole thing about him resembling Jesus.

Geesus.