Zizek dislikes people?

Watched the Zizek documentary on Youtube. Easy to find, easy to follow. He goes on generating words, some brilliant, some incoherent. So this entry is an attempt to press pause on his tape, and figure out just what he means in one or two sentences. Let’s start with a simple statement:

When Zizek says that he dislikes people, that he hates them all, it really is not that simple. What he hates most of all is himself. People who praise him he despises because they do not recognize that he is worthy of contempt, so he speaks disdainfully of them because they have too easily fallen for the trap of his ceaseless talk. They do not realize that behind it all he is hiding from his own belief that he is contemptible.

He dares his audience to see this, his self-scorn manifests itself in his slovenly dress, his spitting speech, his general disregard for social form, --all of these traits are there on the surface of his persona as if he is daring you to dislike him because he is loud, obnoxious, disgusting. He is baiting you to dislike him, and those who take these bad manners as just signs of his genius are the most contemptible in his eyes. They are not worthy of recognition because they have not solved the trap that he has set for them.

He does not want to be debased, he wants someone to overpower him with their intelligence, to declare him stupid, ugly as he knows at base he is. His endless flow of theory keeps such criticism at bay. You have to wade through all the distractions to come up close to Zizek himself. The ordinary person who is intimidated by his speed and who dislikes him for his appearance is also contemptible in his eyes, for they have not even entered into the ruse that his speech presents, they do not even comprehend the game, and they have fallen for the obvious truth, too easily. He would prefer to toy with his self-hatred, rather than just be hated.

His speech is filled with fantasies of a totalitarian father, one who is not impressed by his discourse, one who like K’s father recognizes that his success is all fake, a father who can brush aside his son’s worldly acclaim to recognize him for what he is, shit. This requires a father who is not impressed by his son, who knows him better than he knows himself. Against this father Zizek would fight tooth and nail, he would become the frenzied dissident who attacks the regime endlessly until he is shot, because again he knows that is what he deserves.

Much of his analysis aims to bait authority, to make them come after him. If they do not, then they are not true totalitarians, which means they are again worthy of scorn and contempt. He would have had more respect for Bush if he had planted weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, if he had squashed the first rumor of Abu Ghraib, if no one had ever realized what was going on at Guantanamo.

French theorists who dress elegantly, speak with rhetorical fluency he mocks, for they play an entirely different game. They are the Socratics who refuse to give you a diagnosis, they drive you mad with their open-ended pose, thus Zizek has to reduce them to philosophical principles. He gets past Lacan’s noncommittal lecturing pose, his challenge to the viewer to reflect for themselves about themselves, by reducing his speech to ideological statements. He shouts down psychoanalysis’s imperative that you look at yourself by turning queries into dogmatic statements that can then be applied against the father and any other authority, rather than at himself.

If Zizek ever read this, the first thing he would do is agree completely, then start deflecting away from himself by saying that this whole dynamic is all the result of authoritarian structures, which of course it is.