Our publisher looked tense. The audience felt eager. The speaker was disheveled, as if someone had tousled his hair and somehow continued the action throughout his entire head and torso.
In the short time our magazine’s book store had been open, several lessons had been learned. One concerned managing the staff from the nearby British Library at parties (it’s always the quiet ones). Another was certain events would always sell out. Alan Bennett was one. Slavoj Žižek, permanent nemesis of spell check, was another.
As our publisher, a model of Oxford formal first confidence on regular outings, stressed the need to keep questions to a reasonable length (a stipulation more often directed at an audience) his unease bordered on the queasy. Žižek sold out our venue and most others because his intellectual originality was matched only by the zeal with which he expressed it. A zeal that struggled to observe hard stop times, or most patience, or nearby licensing laws.
Our publisher took his seat, conspicuously within grappling distance of Žižek, the first hints of condensation gathered in the corners of the shop’s windows and we began to hear ideas from “The Puppet and the Dwarf”.
The exact details of what followed are for another time but more than one audience member left, another screamed and the windows clouded over entirely as Žižek perspired through his multiple layers in a state of feverish evangelism that bordered on the incontinent.
I was 24 at the time and had adored Žižek from my MA course. At the end of the event I queued up for the book signing, digesting a earlier Žižek remark that “the book I wrote BEFORE: Raaaabish! I was completely wrong” and waited for him to sign it.
When I reached the front of the queue Žižek seized my copy and demanded my name like I might be a lost nephew. I gave it only for him to fix me with a wide eyed stare.
“Comrade!” he bellowed, before continuing “You have THE perfect international name!”
I hadn’t expected this. I liked my name but mostly thought about it as an ultimate diminutive, the one that crossed Dickens’s mind perhaps before he reached “Pip”. I grinned and leaned toward my academic hero, hoping to hear more about my singular name.
“It is perfect because, EVEN AN IMBECILE can pronounce it” Žižek clarified with delight.
“And also spell it” he added, with a flourish of the pen.