We sit under the tree, a few of us, some smoking. Zizek is going by. – 'So this is where they exile the smokers!' he cries, with great vigour. W.: 'Yeah, it's shit, isn't it?' Zizek agrees, nodding vigorously as he goes by.
Where's he off to?, we wonder. He's got better things to do than hang round Oxford, we agree. He's probably going to see his wife, who's an Argentinian model, or something. A model-psychoanalyst. No, they got divorced, someone else says.
We remember the photograph of Zizek and his model wife the day they got married, which was circulated on the 'net. He looked hungover, regretful, vaguely surly. We felt he was one of us. How else would we look on the day of our weddings?
W. won't hear a word against Zizek, he says. In fact, it's only the petty, small-minded and envious who speak against Zizek, and when they do so, it is only as an excuse to exercise their pettiness, small-mindedness and enviousness.
He's what we all should be, Zizek, W. says. He's a grafter, just as we should be grafters. He fills bookshelves with his publications, just as we should fill bookshelves with our publications. He has a sense of his impending end, which makes him work ever harder, with ever greater ambition, just as our sense of our impending ends should make us work ever harder, and with ever greater ambition.
They've set up twelve fan sites for him on Facebook, but he ignores them all. He's has 214 invitations to speak by email, but he doesn't even open his inbox. His voicemail's full. Ranciere's been calling him. Badiou. Laruelle is wondering how he is … But Zizek's busy writing his latest magnum opus – is it his third? His fourth? He's busy writing his 1200 page reckoning with Hegel …
W. knows why everyone hates Zizek so much, he says. Zizek's got their number, he says. Zizek knows what he would have been had he not be banned from teaching by the Yugoslavian academia. He knows he would have been 'a poor stupid unknown professor from Ljubljana, probably dabbling in a little bit of Derrida, a little bit of Heidegger, a little bit of Marxism and so on'. A poor stupid unknown professor just like all the other poor stupid unknown professors. A dabbler, writing on this and then that, lecturing on this and then that …
Zizek's off, possessed by the most urgent of philosophical questions. And where are we going, who sit smoking under the tree? What possesses us, we dabblers, we poor stupid unknown idiots …?
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