Interview with Gabriel Rockhill about his article, Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek.
The interviewer doesn’t have much interesting to say IMO. I would skip over most of his segments.
[The cultural imperialist project] polices the left border of critique, but it does it at an objective vs subjective level. And what I mean by that is that there are coordinates for what the dominant discourse is, and what people need to know if they want to be in these conversations. And it creates a reality, which was very much my reality coming up, where I was interested in radical theory, because I grew up as a farm kid working construction. I knew what exploitation was. I knew what oppression was. I knew a lot of horrible things about the world because I was living them in the capitalist empire. And I gravitated toward what I thought were the most radical things, but I was not aware of the objective conditions that structured that radical discourse in such a way that all of the real discourses—which were anti-imperialist and liberatory—were actually largely excluded from those debates. And so I read a bunch of Negri and Žižek and Badiou and all of these people, and eventually realized, well, I’m looking in the wrong place. I’m looking in the place that the empire tells me I should look for radical theory.