Zizek to mold minds at Seoul college

By Kim Tong-hyung

Slavoj Zizek

South Korea can stop being jealous of Dennis Rodman as it appears to have landed its own bad boy cultural icon.

Slavoj Zizek, the rock-star philosopher and cultural critic who provokes both the right and left with his views on society, has agreed to teach and conduct research for a year at Seoul’s Kyunghee University starting in July, the school said Monday.

``Zizek has inked a one-year contract, after being invited to join the university’s Eminent Scholar program aimed at bringing outstanding researchers and supporting their research activities,’’ said a Kyunghee spokesman, admitting to the excitement of inking the man considered Europe’s most influential leftist.

``We will actively seek to renew his contract after the one-year term is up. We believe what he can bring to students and faculty members will be immense, and so will his presence to the general public. He prides himself as a communicator.’’

The Slovenian thinker, who has been called the ``world’s hippest philosopher’’ and ``the Elvis of cultural theory,’’ has shown significant interest in South Korean society and its issues and also its political tension with North Korea.

His latest visit to Korea was in June last year for a one-off lecture, which drew thousands of listeners, before he toured the demilitarized zone near the inter-Korean border and met striking unionists at troubled car maker Ssangyong Motor.

At Kyunghee, Zizek will meet students through special lectures during its international summer school and is expected to conduct joint research on a number of subjects with the university’s English literature professor Lee Taek-kwang.

In September, Zizek will hold a seminar in Korea that will be open to the public, titled ``Capitalism. Ideology. Technology.’’ and a forum on Communist ideology with French philosopher Alain Badiou.

Zizek, frequently linked to Jacques Lacan and Karl Marx, among others, is one of the world’s most controversial philosophers, thanks to his snarky attacks on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the global financial downturn, which he claim are symptoms of the liberal capitalist system in meltdown.

While conservative thinkers understandably have found Zizek offensive, he isn’t a comfortable presence among the mainstream left either. Not when he has been defensive about Stalin, compares Julian Assange favorably to Mahatma Gandhi under a context that defines both as terrorists, and write such things as, ``The problem with Hitler was that he was 'not violent enough', his violence was not `essential’ enough.’’

In writing for the British newspaper, The Telegraph, earlier this year, Alan Johnson questioned whether Zizek should be defined as a “leftist-fascist.”

Zizek earned global recognition after his first book in English, "The Sublime Object of Ideology," was published in 1989. He now serves as a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is a professor at the European Graduate School.