Published by marco on
Lord knows that Slavoj Žižek doesn’t need me to come to his rescue, but I wanted to point out that the article Slavoj Zizek and Harum Scarum by Hamid Dabashi (Al Jazeera) uses comments that Žižek made about “capitalism with Asian values” as a springboard from which to launch an entirely-too-long and under-researched article against Orientalism. A noble cause, no doubt, but using Žižek’s name as a modern-day proponent of Orientalism is laughable. The man is many things, but an Orientalist he is not. He often goes on and on and on and ties a thousand ideas together under one roof and won’t sit still and loves tangents, but he’s not an Orientalist. He takes a semantic shortcut in an interview and this guy jumps all over him. Žižek has made his views abundantly[1] clear:
Kudos to Mr. Dabashi for scaring up a few extra page views by featuring Žižek’s name, but his argument rings hollow. Not everyone who is indiscriminate with an epithet is actually a racist—and it would be nice if the preponderance of his work would weigh more heavily than one off-the-cuff remark in one interview.