CHAPTER 3
Žižek’s Poetry
Early Engagements with the Slovene Avant-Garde

In August 2003, American teenagers across the country opened their mailboxes to find an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue annotated by Slavoj Žižek. As they shopped for new jeans for the upcoming school year, they stumbled across an image of a couple embracing—she in a cable-knit sweater, he in an artfully frayed t-shirt—overlaid with the caption: “It is obvious that the couple in front of the window are fantasizing that someone is observing them through the window! They need that gaze in order to be in love: they perform their love for that gaze” (Žižek 2003, 82). To the Anglophone philosophical community, this development might have appeared as an anomaly. Not many other philosophers whose rise to theoretical prominence had been chronicled—just a few months earlier—in the pages of Critical Inquiry (Galt Harpham 2003, 453–85) could be found writing copy for teenage fashion catalogues. Over the coming years, Žižek would continue to resist implicit assumptions of philosophical habitus by inserting theory in places where it didn’t typically reside—green-screened into climactic scenes from classic films (as in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology) or amplified by a human microphone in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street. Indeed, these forays may have seemed like a striking departure from the theoretical texts for which Žižek had become famous. However, they were actually a continuation of a certain medial diversity that had long served as a hallmark of Žižek’s intellectual production.

In this article, I’ll give a brief overview of Žižek’s formative engagement with Slovene-language avant-garde movements in the 1960s and 1970s in order to contextualize this enduring facet of Žižek’s work. Beginning with his early collaboration with the Slovene-language avant-garde, I will examine some of Žižek’s own visual poetry and an early theoretical poem-treatise that served as his first publication in the Slovene-language journal Problemi. In closing, I will consider the significance of these poetic impulses for Žižek’s larger oeuvre, as well as its scholarly reception.

In October 1967, the Slovene-language (neo)avant-garde OHO Group compiled its first collection of poetry. The group’s name came from a portmanteau of the Slovene words for eye and ear—oko and uho—which reflected the emerging group’s interest in language as both a visual and aural phenomenon. Their aesthetic platform was dubbed reism—after the Latin res, or “thing”—and pursued a focus on the materiality of language. As Iztok Geister-Plamen, one of the contributors, summarized: “In classical texts, the word tries to be an image, although it is really a word. In [our] texts, the word tries to be a word, although it is really an image” (Plamen 1969; See also: Zabel 2004 and Kernev Štrajn 2014).

This inaugural volume, which appeared in print in 1969, two years after it was collected, featured provocative experiments in both concrete and visual poetry. It took its title, Pericarežeracirep, from a famous Slovene palindrome, which literally translates as “the washerwoman cuts the duck’s tail.” The group’s interest in the visual experience of language was also at play in the way that the volume attributed authorship—not with conventional bylines, but rather with graphic signatures, as you can see in the image below. (See Figure 3.1.)

All in all, the collection Pericarežeracirep assembled authors who would become major figures in the OHO Group—including Marko Pogačnik and Tomaž Šalamun—some of whom would come to represent the movement on the international stage when, for instance, the group’s work was first exhibited at MoMA in 1970.

From an historical perspective, the outlier among the contributors was the eighteen-year-old Slavoj Žižek, who, with some exceptions (Jakovljević 2016), wouldn’t really be remembered as a member of OHO in Ljubljana or elsewhere and whose path to international recognition would take a very different course. Yet he did in fact contribute two prose poems to this collection; one entitled “Cartesian Meditations” and the other “Octopussy, or about the very/same” (Octopussy, ali o (t)istem). (I should note that both of these contributions featured James Bond references, as did several other examples of Žižek’s early work.)

Both pieces deal with extensive phonemic play, making them effectively untranslatable. For example, “Octopussy, or about the very/same” is comprised of two sections. The first is entitled “Teorija raz-loga.” In this title (as I’ve written about elsewhere: Sorenson 2020), Žižek takes the word “razlog,” which, in an everyday sense means “reason,” and breaks it apart into its prefix “raz”—which is the Slovene equivalent of the English prefix “dis”—and then pairs this with the root “log,” which means “place” or “placement.” When the word is fractured in this way, the hyphenated “raz-log” conjures a meaning of “dis-placement”—a valence quite at odds with the word’s everyday meaning, “reason.” Thus the title, “Teorija raz-loga,” reads simultaneously as “The theory of reason” and “The theory of displacement.” This spirit of textual experimentation continues in the second section of the poem, “Teorija nosa” (“Theory of the nose”), which engages in the same kind of word play. While the overlaying of a deconstructed Slovene etymological meaning with an everyday meaning renders the text nearly impossible to translate, in the spirit of prismatic translation (Reynolds 2020) or non-translation (Apter 2013) I think that the poem’s extensive hyphenation (none of which is naturally occurring in Slovenian) allows even non-Slovenian speakers to appreciate the textual disintegration that Žižek is pursing here:

• Ko je z nosom v redu, je v-red-nos-t: pred nosom je pred-met, za nosom za-nos. (Žižek 1967/69, 47)
• When the nose is in order [z nosom v redu], there is value [v-red-nos-t]: in front of the nose [pred nosom] there is the ob-ject [pred-met], behind the nose [za nosom] there is en-thusiasm [za-nos].
• (Translated by K.S.)

Throughout this section, Žižek plays with the fact that the Slovenian word for nose (“nos”) appears in many other words; he draws attention to vred nos t, which means value or worth, and za nos , the word for enthusiasm or zeal. In each of these cases, Žižek’s word play conjures a distinct tension between the meaning of the word’s everyday usage and the semantic resonances of its deconstruction.

This focus on the materiality of the signifier was shared by the other contributors to Pericarežeracirep, if pursued by other means. For example, in Figure 3.2, Matjaž Hanžek severs the letters comprising the word Pozor! (“Beware!”) at their midline. Meanwhile, in Figure 3.3, the abovementioned Iztok Geister-Plamen experiments with clusters of letters—some vaguely evocative of potential meanings, others seemingly random—emanating from the central, all-caps phrase “poisonous mushrooms”:

This is all to say that Žižek’s experimentation with poetic hyphenation was very much in keeping with the spirit of the visual poetry of the day, which broadly shared a concern with the ability of language to be broken, split, and scattered—then reassembled in evocative ways.

Several months after the manuscript for Pericarežeracirep had been completed, Slavoj Žižek published his very first theoretical text in the Slovene-language journal Problemi. The piece is entitled “Spraševanje gotovosti I: Teze preloma razpornosti” (“The interrogation of certainty I: theses on the break of splitting”) and it has a curious formal composition. It begins with an epigraph from Lacan’s 1967 Seminar XIV (“Tu n’es que ce que je suis”; “You are only what I am”), which is followed by twenty-seven lines filled with extensive wordplay. Like the piece discussed above, most of the text’s language is based in theoretical neologisms, this time with a decidedly Heideggerian flair. It begins:

• 1. Svet je svetovnost BITI.
• 1.1 Tu-bit se drži noter v nič. (1)
• 1.11 Tu-bit odpira proctor, da je bivajoče v odprtem časnosti bivano.
• 1. The world is the worlding of BEING.
• 1.1 Dasein dwells inside nothing. (1)
• 1.11 Dasein opens a space, so that beings are in open temporality.
• (Translated by K.S.) (See Figure 3.4)

Contemporary readers will recognize Problemi as the functional publication arm of the Ljubljana School; indeed, as the school has always lacked a brick-and-mortar center of gravity, Problemi is the closest thing that the Ljubljana School has ever had to an institutional home. But, this particular inflection of the journal only dates to the mid-1980s; previously, the journal, which was founded in 1964, had a noticeably broader conceptual mandate and published works with a wide variety of theoretical allegiances, along with experimental literature and visual art. Thus, at the time, it was not particularly surprising that the first piece that Žižek published in Problemi could best be described as a poem-treatise. Rather, it was a clear reflection of the ways in which Slovene-language theoretical discourse and avant-garde practices intersected with and influenced one another in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is worth noting that this interdisciplinary impulse would endure: although this dynamic was briefly challenged by the disintegration of the OHO Group in 1971, it would return in the 1980s, which featured both the emergence of Neue Slowenische Kunst and the maturation of the Ljubljana School’s theoretical platform, alongside other aesthetic paradigms. Ultimately, it is fair to say that during this period in Ljubljana, the boundary between theory and the avant-garde was porous and permutable, always ready to be dismantled and reconfigured—much like their shared treatment of language itself.

In a 2010 Art Margins review of Avital Ronell’s Fighting Theory, Martin Jay invoked Žižek as a paradigmatic example of “remote philosophy,” which he describes as:

a style of philosophy that mimics the experience of watching television with the remote held by someone with attention deficit disorder, a style that will be familiar to readers of Slavoj Žižek at his most manic. That is, it flits from channel to channel, rarely pausing to finish a thought or defend a position before another one lurches into view. (Jay 2011)

In casting Žižek’s theoretical procedure as “remote,” Jay presumably intends to scold Žižek’s divergence from the discursive norms of academic philosophy. Yet his choice of an intermedial metaphor—the television remote—is telling, as it alludes to the medial shapeshifting that, as we’ve seen, was in fact a key feature of Žižek’s work from the very beginning. Ultimately, the provocation that our exploration of Žižek’s early oeuvre offers is that the moments in which Žižek takes up these different media—when he writes poems and film scripts and catalogue copy—shouldn’t be seen as “extracurricular” anomalies that distract from real philosophical insight. On the contrary, these forms are an integral feature of his intellectual production. They are not an excess of his thought, but its essence.