One of the downsides for assholes like me when documentaries come out about trendy philosophers—like when the eponymous Jacques and his silver lamé suits were paraded across the big screen in “Derrida”, or when Jean Baudrillard was profiled in “The Matrix” (ha?)—is the sinking feeling that all these bitches get to buy their philosophy on the cheap while the rest of us who actually soldiered through the taxonomy of différance in Grammatology just end up looking like we got played, hard.
So Slavoj “Žižek!” Žižek makes a funny in his doc about Judith Butler and a bottle of Snapple that leads into a talk about distanciation and how nobody who means to say “I love you” ever really says “I love you” anymore but adds this rhetorical distance by saying something like “As the poets would say, ‘I love you’” (this is an ongoing debate outside of the film between Žižek and guys like Peter Sloterdijk on the status of belief and ideology in contemporary society, but this was probably lost on most viewers because Sloterdijk never said anything that got set in 50pt Gill Sans Ultra Bold over a soft-focus photograph of a woman looking woefully through the windows of a train passing through the Swiss Alps that got 500 notes on Tumblr).
Point being: I was in a meeting today and I said “fuck it” when what I really meant to say was “fuck you” and I thought of Žižek.
