No Lady Gaga, no Zizek, no fun
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On Tuesday, the news that leftist philosopher Slavoj Žižek had been fraternizing with pop culture queen Lady Gaga was too tempting not to post here. However, as the report was in the N.Y. Post, we did so with a big question mark and caution to consider the source.
Alas, the story was almost certainly untrue. In the Air, the online gossip column from Art+Auction, points out the N.Y. Post’s source for its story about Lady Gaga and Slavoj Žižek seemed to be a blog post from March. The careful readers note that the blog post, which purports to be written by Žižek, was probably not written by him at all. In the Air explains:
[t]he Post appears to reference “Zizek/Gaga: Communism Knows No Monster,” a text posted on the site waaaay back in March that purports to be by Slavoj Zizek, in which the philosopher, who often uses examples from pop culture to illustrate various counter-intuitive points, refers to “my good friend Lady Gaga’s theoretical contributions.” To anyone familiar with Zizek’s work, the post is pretty transparently fake (the anarchist politics implied in it are out of line with Zizek’s particular brand of Marxism, he quotes feminist-vegan philosophers rather than his usual Hegel and Lacan, and it’s not really very funny, to boot).
The source of the pseudo-Žižek post (or, perhaps, satirical-Žižek or hoax-ing-Žižek) -- was Deterritorial Support Grouppppp, which hopes ‘to offer analysis and propaganda from an ultra-leftist perspective,’ among other anti-authoritarian goals.
Of course. Lady Gaga and Slavoj Žižek -- it was too good to be true.
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-- Carolyn Kellogg
