He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual, and reported the following:
Page 99 demonstrates one of the ways by which Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian Hegelian-Lacanian thinker, became an international celebrity and global public intellectual. Particularly, it describes one of Zizek’s earlier books, The Ticklish Subject from 1999, and shows how in-and-through introducing the book, its topic and goal, Zizek also casts a wide net of intellectual-political positions through which he positions himself.Learn more about How Slavoj Became Žižek at the University of Chicago Press website.
As one would expect from a single page, this is a fragment of the entire story that my book unfolds, yet, nonetheless it is an indicative one: Zizek’s unique style of performance, his constant act of positioning, as well as frequent interventions in fields such as publishing and academia, these are just a few of the factors that eventually led to his global breakthrough a decade later.
In this regard, page 99 could be seen as a teaser. While it contains some key features related to Zizek’s emergence and reception, the whole story cannot be understood solely based on this page. Given the processual nature of public interventions, they are never a one-off. For Zizek to become a brand, and for his brand to stick, a more sustained positioning process had to be maintained by a network of people including close allies and fierce critics. In this precise sense, what happened before and after page 99 is crucial for understanding how Slavoj became Zizek. For example, Zizek’s early publication in France, roughly a decade prior to the episode on page 99, did not receive much positive attention. Therefore, Zizek started to expand his social network of personal and professional relations and to publish more in England. However, this was still not the big breakthrough that put Zizek on the global intellectual map. This happened shortly after page 99, in another episode that took place in the US. There Zizek brought his ideas to a wide range of publics by intervening with various mediums, including feature films and internet clips. Yet, such an academically unusual and diverse performance, in addition to other reasons as political positions and rate of interventions, resulted in a growing critique of his work and doubt of his intellectual seriousness or authenticity. This is explained as part of the “media-academia trade-off” through which Zizek keeps positioning and re-positioning himself to this day.
--Marshal Zeringue
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