Between Gazes: Zizek and the Politics of Articulation

In the film documentary Zizek! (2006) Astra Taylor, the film’s director, introduces Slavoj Zizek and his central notions of Lacanian psychoanalysis as they tie in with Marxism, ideology, and culture. Apart from following Zizek from New York to his home in Ljubljana, the documentary presents the viewer with a mixture of written texts in the form of quotations from Zizek’s work, video footage from recordings with Lacan that are juxtaposed with recordings of Zizek’s public appearances such as giving lectures or introducing his books on night-time TV shows, and ‘staged’ settings in which Zizek delivers his thoughts on philosophy while in bed or in the bathroom. It is clear that one of the devices that the documentary uses in its portrayal of Zizek is the palimpsest, and what is being layered is the gaze. My essay introduces the idea of layering as a case of intermediality between different art forms such as visual art and style as rhetoric.