Slavoj Žižek in Liverpool, Andy Miah, 2008.
4. Stalin, Fascism, and Today's Left, from the documentary, Žižek! (2005). At some point halfway through the documentary, Žižek gets asked a fair question - why do you have a pro-Stalinist advertisement mounted in obvious view near your front door?
His answer, as you may have already guessed, is a winded and interesting one. Long story short, it appears to serve multiple functions - A. To scare people away, I suppose, the literal minded, humorless types, who down the road would probably not be able to stomach this man's ridiculousness for very long, and B. amounts to a good critique on today's political left that involves this interesting division between Stalin's obviously awful deeds and the positive aspects of the archetypical centralized socialist government, the things that aren't inherently bad but are often thought to be.
Thus it seems that Slavoj's gesture protests the left as conditioned to distance itself from a regulatory government based on fear of its association with its well propagated expletive-level objects such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, etc. In this way, Žižek's fascination and love-hate with Stalin could be in many senses similar to Freud's interest in porcupines. Then again, perhaps this is saying too much.
More can be read of Žižek's interest in Stalinism in this printed interview : that is assuming of course that you are 'twenty something and post-ironic-hipster-enough' to feel comfortable with reading The Believer Mag. Thanks, Žižek Watch!
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