LEARN TO LIVE WITHOUT MASTERS"

| by SLAVOJ ZIZEK

AN INTERVIEW WITH SLAVOJ ZIZEK BY OSCAR GUARDIOLA-RIVERA

London, November-December 2007

1. GETTING RID OF THE BIG OTHER.

OGR: It seems as if, in the end, your philosophical and political project is to break through the various impasses of extrinsic vs. intrinsic accounts of everything, from cinema to science and politics, without playing to the gallery of hysterics who want you to give them ‘the new law’. That would explain why your discourse (and your practice) cannot simply follow the conventions of the discourse of the university. Put otherwise, is this what you are getting at when you state that the task is ‘to get rid of the Big other’ in all its forms (including that of the ‘organic intellectual’)?

SZ: It was already Jacques-Alain Miller who elaborated the idea that democracy involves a kind of destitution of the big Other, with direct reference to Claude Lefort:

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The Sublime Object of Ideology

In his preface to The Sublime Object of Ideology Slavoj Zizek writes:

“When a discipline is in crisis, attempts are made to change or supplement its theses within the terms of its basic framework – a procedure one might call ‘Ptolemization’ (since when data poured in which clashed with Ptolemy’s earth-centered astronomy, his partisans introduced additional complications to account for the anomalies). But the true ‘Copernican’ revolution takes place when, instead of just adding complications and changing minor premises, the basic framework itself undergoes a transformation. So, when we are dealing with a self-professed ‘scientific revolution’, the question to ask is always: is this truly a Copernican revolution, or merely a Ptolemization of the old paradigm?”

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