Episode #196 ... The improbable Slavoj Zizek - Part 1

Hello, everyone. I'm Steven West. This is Philosophize This. So at the end of last episode, I asked about the possibility of doing an interview with Slavoj Zizek in the coming weeks. And the response was overwhelmingly positive, but there were some people expressing their concerns, like, don't change the format of the show, Stephen West. Don't turn this into an interview show. And sorry I wasn't more clear about it last time. We're doing a series of the show on GJEC right now, and then several other big thinkers doing their work today, and that's the direction we're moving in. And I really just wanted to know if anyone was interested in a conversation totally additional to the podcast that I'd put out there if anybody wanted to hear it. I mean, do you guys think I wanna make this into an interview show? Do you think I wanna turn what we're doing here into just, you know, background noise that people put on whenever they're doing actually important stuff? Please. I love this show. I love how much we can pack into thirty minutes. Just feel the need to reiterate. I just wanna keep doing the stuff you find people enjoy. That's what I'm going for. That said, in retrospect, I probably should have waited to ask if anyone wanted to hear about Zizek until after I did this first episode of the series. Reason being is with every one of these podcasts, there's always a different challenge that comes up specific to the episode that needs to be solved. And the one that came up for was how do you make someone that's as complex as can be sometimes accessible to people who may not even know who he is or what he's even talking about, but do that in a way where it also doesn't make it too boring for people that are already fans of his work. So just keep in mind, that's what I'm trying to do in this episode. As dumb as that may be, you can never cover all of Zizek in a day. And because I'm writing this and I'm trying to be respectful to both those audiences, I guess it just needs to be said at the start that if you've never heard of the philosopher Slavoj Zizek before, first of all, he's a Slovenian philosopher, alive today, doing his work right now. And I guess the most accurate way to describe what some people think about him as a philosopher is that people are often confused about what it is he's trying to say when he says it for a number of different reasons. In fact, if you're new to him as a thinker, you probably should take a listen to him first so you can get a frame of reference here. Good news is there's tons of them out there. Just go to wherever you watch videos, type in z I z e k, and I guess sit …