Really it’s almost a test. If you hear someone one posing as an intellectual cite, or take seriously the views of the the Slovenian sophist Slovoj Zizek, you know you are in the resence of a pseud.
But at last one of my favorite critics Adam Kirsch has taken on the long needed task of exposing the Augean stables of intellectual bullshit that is the work of this fraud.
I once had a close encounter with Zizeck when I was told by someone he wanted to meet me after reading my book Explaining Hitler. For some ridiculous book he’d written explaining why Stalin was superior to Hitler because communists had “good intentions”– or something like that–which excused the fact they’d murdered tens of millions more than Hitler. It turned out he had lifted much of my critique of Hitler theories and then in an offensively ungrateful footnote acknowledged the lift while calling my work “undertheorized”. As if not until someone with his grand theoretical sophistication could make it opaque and meaningless would it be worthy. It is precisely his over theorized, under thought approach that is so apalling. Thank god he didn’t praise it, it would have been an utter embarassment to me he;s such an obvious fraud, but it demonstrated the mendacious and parasitical quality of the man and his work for all to see. I refused the invitation to share a meal with the dimwit.
Cleaning out the Zizek stables may be beyond the abilities of Hercules by now, their noxious pollution has infected the susceptible minds of so many in and out of academia. But Kirsch has performed a Herculean service, and at least we know now that we don’t have to waste time explaining to the intellectually naive what the stink is. Just send them the link above.
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