"He owns neither jacket nor tie." (Image by Andy Miah.)

From “The Marx Brother,” Rebecca Mead’s smart 2003 profile of superstar Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek:

“Zizek is bearded and bearish, and restricts his wardrobe to proletarian shirts and bluejeans, with an occasional excursion into corduroy. He owns neither jacket nor tie. He speaks six languages, is made uncomfortable by conversational lapses, and avoids them through the ample use of animated monologue. He speaks English at high speed in an accent recalling that of Latka, the character of indeterminate Mitteleuropean origin played by Andy Kaufman on Taxi. If, in the progress of intellectual fashions, Jacques Derrida’s appeal was that he was fascinatingly difficult, and Michel Foucault’s was that he was sexily rigorous, then Zizek’s lies in his accessible absurdity. Unlike earlier academic superstars, however, Zizek has no disciples: there is no School of Zizek, no graduate students writing Zizekian readings of the novels of Henry James or of Star Trek for their theses. Such a thing would be impossible, since one of the characteristics of Zizek’s work is that he applies his critical methodology even to the results of his own critical inquiry, which is another way of saying that he contradicts himself all the time. Eric Santner, who teaches at the University of Chicago and is a dose friend of Zizek, says, ‘One of his fundamental gestures is this: he will present a problem, or a text, then produce the reading that you have come to expect from him, and then he will say, ‘I am tempted to think it is just the opposite.'” To a generation of students raised on Seinfeld, Zizek’s examination of the minutiae of popular culture – his observation, for example, that when he sees a tube of toothpaste advertising ‘thirty per cent free’ he wants to cut off the free third and put it in his pocket – could not be more familiar, and neither could the ironic, self-undermining gesture. As Zizek might put it, he may appear to be a serious leftist intellectual, but is it not the case that he is in fact a comedian?”

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Zizek gets philosophical about toilets: