Are we all in the movies now?

Hollywood could never cast a more convincing version of an Eastern European left-wing Freudian intellectual than Slavoj Zizek. He's got the beard, the thick Slovenian accent and the slightly disconcerting stare all safely in the bag. That he's also one of the most brilliant thinkers in the world shouldn't distract us from his unavoidable charisma. It's his already-cast resemblance to our idealised Hollywood fantasies of an intellectual that actually serves to reinforce his status and appeal, above and beyond his unequivocally groovy ideas about the relationship between film, culture and the dark recesses of our heads.

There must be a whole lot of donkeys bereft of their hind legs in his native Slovenia. Zizek is compelled to talk, often about films, and even more often about Alfred Hitchcock. On the one hand the talking functions as a kind of psychic expurgation of all his thinking, as though he's constantly munching on a cerebral version of the chocolate laxatives to which he so often refers. Indeed, he has a somewhat unseemly obsession with toilets, referring to a sudden horrific break in the fabric of normative reality (the expected-unexpected murder, the coming of aliens, or seagulls/747s crashing into you, for example) as akin to the obscene surprise of the 'floater' - that nasty poo that keeps coming back to haunt you long after you'd thought it consigned to history. You can't imagine Bertrand Russell talking about floaters, but Zizek is truly fearless.

On the other hand - and with Zizek there is always another hand, usually placed in some contrary dialectical relationship with the other one - he feels the need to speak constantly so that he doesn't just disappear into a pure trace element, into some kind of undiscovered inert gas that we'd have to christen Zizekium.

Next page • "Impress the chicks with your sexy renditions of progressive Freudian dialectics"