Slavoj Zizek

In a London café, Anja Steinbauer chats with the philosopher who invented the word ‘idiosyncratic’.

- Anja Steinbauer

So Professor Zizek – Don’t call me professor if you don’t want me to kill you. I feel so uneasy when someone calls me professor. Where is the professor?

I have a deep problem with any official titles and so on. I’m not proud of it. When someone calls me professor I take it automatically as an irony.

A most obvious fact about you is that you are not just a philosopher but a famous philosopher – a rare thing. What does it mean to you to be famous? Is fame important?

First of all, fame is very relative. I have, as you know, many enemies: people who think that I’m just a clown, people who think that beneath my amusing nature there is some evil proto fascist or Stalinist dimension and so on. So I think my so-called fame is basically just a way to keep me at a distance and not engage seriously with what I am doing. What I’m really proud of is, you know my crazy book Less Than Nothing, the one that is almost the length of the Bible? It sold very well. That gives me hope that we nonetheless shouldn’t underestimate the public. The publishers put pressure on me to write a nice best seller on Donald Trump. But why should I? He’s not interesting as a person; he’s a boring idiot.

But are you worried about your books becoming coffee table books? You know, people buy them but don’t actually read them?

I am, but it isn’t just coffee table books that go unread. Take big best-sellers, classics; people buy them but nobody really reads them either. For example take John Rawls’