A Theological Approach to Zizek

Well, I was sat outside a certain café on Chalton Street today and these two academics from the British Library (just round the corner) plonked themselves on my table. One of them had a paper on ‘Philip Larkin: A Theological Approach’ (or somesuch) and was gleefully talking theology department politics with his sidekick – all the little buzzwords and terms of art. So at one point, and not for any reason I remember, the sidekick mentions Zizek, and the Theological Approach to Philip Larkin replies with ‘Oh, I understand he’s a complete charlatan’, where ‘understand’ means of course ‘have heard’ or ‘this is the consensus among the Theological Approach people isn’t it?’. He then goes on to reproduce his available stock of Zizek hearsay, to nods of recognition from the other. And the point of this anecdote is, well, not very much. Other than this word ‘charlatan’ and the concept of ‘charlatanry’ in the academic community – it is, in fact, a spectre they are constantly having to exorcise. It haunts all academic communities. Not because these communities are full of impostures, but there is an element of ‘imposture’ that accompanies their increasingly specialised activities.

One has to give off, to emit, certain social/group signs, which are not simply the same as intellectual content, but signs of elective belonging to a community, signs of a specific rhetorical competence, signs that one knows the recognised moves and the shibbolethic names. This includes what is pejoratively dismissed as ‘jargon’ but goes beyond it. It incorporates the in-house lingua franca, the 'correct' (but often quickly remaindered) capital, and so forth. And it can happen that someone who has mastery of the recognised insignia but little intellectual content can achieve greater success than one inversely blessed. So…there is always the haunting possibility that one has been seduced by the game and its signifiers, that one is responding to this as much as anything else.

Moreover, it is an unsurprising and frequently observed law that when one academic groupuscule encounters the linguistic and rhetorical signs of another, it can see only an empty game, a protective cordon around nothing. And in that moment, it catches sight of its own image in the glass.