[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sFqfbrsZbw&w=700] "The birds are outbursts of raw, maternal energy." Slavoj Žižek from his upcoming film, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, an investigation into what psychoanalysis can tell us about film (I just like what he says about Mitch). More clips here.

Zizek rocks. Here's him on why Love is Evil (which is pretty darned brilliant).

And here's a Q&A he did in The Guardian:

Slavoj Zizek, 59, was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's institute of sociology. He has written more than 30 books on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin and 9/11, and also presented the TV series The Pervert's Guide To Cinema.

When were you happiest? A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it - never when it was happening.

What is your greatest fear? To awaken after death - that's why I want to be burned immediately.

What is your earliest memory? My mother naked. Disgusting.

Which living person do you most admire, and why? Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the twice-deposed president of Haiti. He is a model of what can be done for the people even in a desperate situation.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Indifference to the plights of others.

What is the trait you most deplore in others? Their sleazy readiness to offer me help when I don't need or want it.

What was your most embarrassing moment? Standing naked in front of a woman before making love.

Aside from a property, what's the most expensive thing you've bought? The new German edition of the collected works of Hegel.

What is your most treasured possession? See the previous answer.

What makes you depressed? Seeing stupid people happy.

What do you most dislike about your appearance? That it makes me appear the way I really am.

What is your most unappealing habit? The ridiculously excessive tics of my hands while I talk.

What would be your fancy dress costume of choice? A mask of myself on my face, so people would think I am not myself but someone pretending to be me.

What is your guiltiest pleasure? Watching embarrassingly pathetic movies such as The Sound Of Music.

What do you owe your parents? Nothing, I hope. I didn't spend a minute bemoaning their death.

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why? To my sons, for not being a good enough father.

What does love feel like? Like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

What or who is the love of your life? Philosophy. I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

What is your favourite smell? Nature in decay, like rotten trees.

Have you ever said 'I love you' and not meant it? All the time. When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

Which living person do you most despise, and why? Medical doctors who assist torturers.

What is the worst job you've done? Teaching. I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.

What has been your biggest disappointment? What Alain Badiou calls the 'obscure disaster' of the 20th century: the catastrophic failure of communism.

If you could edit your past, what would you change? My birth. I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

If you could go back in time, where would you go? To Germany in the early 19th century, to follow a university course by Hegel.

How do you relax? Listening again and again to Wagner.

How often do you have sex? It depends what one means by sex. If it's the usual masturbation with a living partner, I try not to have it at all.

What is the closest you've come to death? When I had a mild heart attack. I started to hate my body: it refused to do its duty to serve me blindly.

What single thing would improve the quality of your life? To avoid senility.

What do you consider your greatest achievement? The chapters where I develop what I think is a good interpretation of Hegel.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you? That life is a stupid, meaningless thing that has nothing to teach you.

Tell us a secret. Communism will win.

Extract from a thought-provoking article by Slavoj Zizek in the London Review of Books. Click here to read the full article. Well worth it. I've written a few other things about yer man Slavoj. Click here to find 'em.

...The conspiratorial mode is supplemented by its apparent opposite, the liberal appropriation of WikiLeaks as another chapter in the glorious history of the struggle for the ‘free flow of information’ and the ‘citizens’ right to know’. This view reduces WikiLeaks to a radical case of ‘investigative journalism’. Here, we are only a small step away from the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth!

The ultimate show of power on the part of the ruling ideology is to allow what appears to be powerful criticism. There is no lack of anti-capitalism today. We are overloaded with critiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-depth investigative journalism and TV documentaries expose the companies that are ruthlessly polluting our environment, the corrupt bankers who continue to receive fat bonuses while their banks are rescued by public money, the sweatshops in which children work as slaves etc. However, there is a catch: what isn’t questioned in these critiques is the democratic-liberal framing of the fight against these excesses. The (explicit or implied) goal is to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on. But the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned. This remains sacrosanct even to the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’ (the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement etc).

WikiLeaks cannot be seen in the same way. There has been, from the outset, something about its activities that goes way beyond liberal conceptions of the free flow of information. We shouldn’t look for this excess at the level of content. The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.

What WikiLeaks threatens is the formal functioning of power. The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs etc) – as the Indian academic Saroj Giri put it, WikiLeaks ‘challenged power by challenging the normal channels of challenging power and revealing the truth’. The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power that might reach beyond the limits of representative democracy.

However, it is a mistake to assume that revealing the entirety of what has been secret will liberate us. The premise is wrong. Truth liberates, yes, but not this truth. Of course one cannot trust the façade, the official documents, but neither do we find truth in the gossip shared behind that façade. Appearance, the public face, is never a simple hypocrisy. E.L. Doctorow once remarked that appearances are all we have, so we should treat them with great care. We are often told that privacy is disappearing, that the most intimate secrets are open to public probing. But the reality is the opposite: what is effectively disappearing is public space, with its attendant dignity. Cases abound in our daily lives in which not telling all is the proper thing to do. In Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig explains to her young lover the difference between politeness and tact: ‘Imagine you inadvertently enter a bathroom where a woman is standing naked under the shower. Politeness requires that you quickly close the door and say, “Pardon, Madame!”, whereas tact would be to quickly close the door and say: “Pardon, Monsieur!”’ It is only in the second case, by pretending not to have seen enough even to make out the sex of the person under the shower, that one displays true tact...

Click here to read the full article.

Would be interesting to know how/whether/if the Tunisian situation - brought about directly through revelations from WikiLeaks - affects this.