The Leader's Two Bodies: Slavoj Zizek's Postmodern Political Theology

Abstract

Over the course of the last decade, Slavoj Zizek and his "Slovenian Lacanian school" have gained renown in the Western theory market. Academics are fascinated not only by Zizek's performances as a speaker, his nondogmatic approach to issues of genre and (inter)mediality, 1 and the "literary" character of his theoretical texts [Laclau, Preface xii], but also by the political turn given to psychoanalysis by the "Slovenian school." Already in his preface to Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Ernesto Laclau wrote that this school's work made Lacanian theory "one of the principal reference points of the so-called 'Slovenia spring'—that is to say the democratization campaigns that have taken place in recent years" [xi]. More than ten years later—after a decade of authoritarian rule, war, and genocide in former Yugoslavia—recent revolutionary events in Serbia once more allow one to hope for a thorough democratization of the region. In a newspaper article evaluating the uprising, however, Zizek warned that these hopes might be premature: while Milosevic could find his new role as "a Serbian Jesus Christ," taking upon him all the "sins" committed by his people, Kostunica and his "democratic" nationalism might represent "nothing but Milosevic in the 'normal' version, without the excess" [Zizek, "Gewalt"]. 2