“If at First You don’t Succeed”: Why Žižek Failed in France but Succeeded in England

Abstract

Why are some intellectuals more successful than others in conveying their ideas and making them public? Within this question lies another, which is the focus of this article: can the same intellectual be successful in some places and unsuccessful in others, and if so, what determines this variance? The present article answers this question by examining "one of the world's best-known public intellectuals" (Gray, 2016)-Slavoj Žižek.

‘The Fool’ Revisited: The Making of Žižek as Sacrificial Public Intellectual

“…Paratexts do things: they attribute certain attributes to a text for a particular audience (see also da Silva and Viera, 2019: 10). Laclau’s Preface was an act of vouching, where a symbolic value is bestowed by a senior position upon a junior one (Bar-El, 2020). Hence his depiction of Žižek’s and the Ljubljana school as ‘one of the most innovative and promising theoretical projects on the European intellectual scene’ (Laclau, 1989: x).…”

How Intellectuals Perform: Meaning Making and Community in the Czechoslovak Philosophical Underground

“…More recently, performance became a topic for sociologists of intellectuals as well (Bar-El, 2021; Bar-El and Baert, 2021), some of whom also take partial inspiration from the Strong Program performance framework. Morgan and Baert (2018: 455), for example, focused on the idea of ‘performative citizenship’ in the Black Consciousness Movement.…”

“…Here, performance is mostly positioning by other means. I think that there is significant room for extending the agenda of performance analysis in the sociology of intellectuals beyond questioning what made scholars like Žižek ‘more successful than others in conveying [his] ideas’ (Bar-El, 2021: 412). Such an extension highlights (1) the importance of the non-public, quotidian performance and (2) the effect that performance has on its audience – something that is central to Alexander’s neo-Durkheimian theory.…”

“…How could we not?’ (interview 3). Moreover, what occurred in these spaces, and what literature on intellectual performance seldom acknowledges (Bar-El, 2021; M Morgan, 2018) was also the reconstruction of social selves. This inner change clearly transcended the remits of pragmatic concepts like ‘intellectual self-concept’, developed by Gross (2008).…”