Parker 01 intro
1/29/04
12:32 PM
30
Page 30
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Yugoslavia – and the evidence that Zizek gives is that he saw US Secretary of State James Baker on television supporting the Yugoslav army73 – this was as much to keep German ambitions in check as anything else. Other Western European countries suspicious about German designs would then also have had all the more reason to be more cautious about Yugoslavia disintegrating, with the UK, France and Greece for different economic and political reasons lining up with Serbia quite explicitly at different times during the 1980s and early 1990s.74 By 1991 even Milosevic seemed to want to be rid of Slovenia.75 At that point Kosovo was a much more pressing problem for Belgrade, and the ideological imperative to maintain Serb integrity by holding onto its 1389 battlefield and point of traumatic foundation became more important than holding onto Slovenia. Slovenia is not a big country, with a population of about 1.7 million people at the time it broke from Yugoslavia in 1991. This has consequences for the texture of political life, throwing some light on Zizek’s comments in various interviews about his personal enmities with this or that figure in competing political groups. One estimate of the composition of the different opposition movements in the 1980s, for example, was that the peace movement might have comprised about 20 people and the feminist movement consisted of about a dozen.76 This must also be borne in mind when we read of the activity of campaigns like the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights, which collected 100,000 signatures for the release of editors and journalists from the radical youth magazine Mladina in 1988, during the ‘Slovene spring’, for it indicates something of the scale of mobilisation of people around political issues at that time.77 The birth of theoretical culture
The growth of this opposition movement was very rapid, and there are two distinctive features of the movement that we now find reflected in Zizek’s work. The first is the role of French theoretical resources, and the second is the importance of popular culture. According to one account from within the opposition movement, the 1970s were characterised by, on the one hand, ‘a total depoliticization of society’ and, on the other, widespread involvement in study. One political theoretical current which emerged was concerned with mainly Marxist political economy, and another current – around the journal Problemi – was influenced by Althusser, Foucault and Lacan.78 Zizek and the so-called ‘Slovene Lacanian School’79 were involved with this second theoretical current, and to some extent the political opposition to the bureaucracy in Slovenia was theoretically driven by resources that academics in the West often group together as ‘post-structuralism’.