I saw the Žižek documentary. A friend of mine was talking about Žižek and Lacan a while back - I was wondering what all the uproar was about, so now I know. As far as I can tell, Žižek is talking about the failure of deconstruction, and the silliness of capitalism in fostering insatiable desires. Isn't that the basic teaching of Buddha? Aren't we all savvy to the idea that the advertising industry is completely cynical; they know people are never going to be satisfied materially, but regardless, they keep promising us material satisfaction.

My reaction to the film: it is a cute film, much in the vein of Derrida; you get little tidbits of boiled-down philosophy, it makes you anxious to read the books, and is overall a great sell for the philosopher himself. However, there were a bunch of quotes thrown up on the screen, taken from his books, that I could not decipher, either because I don't have a background in philosophy, or because the sentences were so long and awkward that they simply defied my ability to interpret. I'm sorry, if Žižek's fame is partly from making Lacan more understandable, then someone might make a fortune making Žižek more understandable. There was an excerpt from a news-talk show that was funny, when the sub-normal anchorperson asked the super-super-normal Žižek what it all meant, and Žižek boiled it down to a simple example:

"In the old days, when a father was going to take a son to see grandmother, and the child did not want to go, the father would simply say, 'you must go, I don't care if you're not going to enjoy it. Nowadays, a postmodern parent might ask, 'son, how would you like to go to see your grandmother?' That question carries the implication that the child must answer in a certain way (yes), but it also carries the implication that they must enjoy the visit to their grandmother."

I was also struck by something he said at his talk at the Deitch Projects:

"Today, you cannot simply say, 'I love you,' but rather you have to qualify it by saying something like, 'I love you in the way that a poet would mean it.'"

I guess he's just pissed off at how our society tends to deconstruct everything, that we need to make qualifiers for everything that is said, stipulations and rules of discourse. You know what? I'm pissed off, too. Just say what you mean and mean what you say.