5/21/2021 Slavoj Žižek: 'Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots' | Slavoj Žižek | The Guardian

myself that she really likes it. I always had this suspicion, what if she only pretends, to make
herself more attractive to me? It's the same thing for fellatio; I was never able to finish into the
woman's mouth, because again, my idea is, this is not exactly the most tasteful fluid. What if
she's only pretending?"

He can count the number of women he has slept with on his hands, because he finds the whole
business so nerve-racking. "I cannot have one-night stands. I envy people who can do it; it
would be wonderful. I feel nice, let's go, bang-bang – yes! But for me, it's something so
ridiculously intimate – like, my God, it's horrible to be naked in front of another person, you
know? If the other one is evil with a remark – 'Ha ha, your stomach,' or whatever – everything
can be ruined, you know?" Besides, he can't sleep with anyone unless he believes they might
stay together for ever. "All my relationships – this is why they are very few – were damned
from the perspective of eternity. What I mean with this clumsy term is, maybe they will last."

But Žižek has been divorced three times. How has he coped with that? "Ah, now I will tell you.
You know the young Marx – I don't idealise Marx, he was a nasty guy, personally – but he has a
wonderful logic. He says: 'You don't simply dissolve marriage; divorce means that you
retroactively establish that the love was not the true love.' When love goes away, you
retroactively establish that it wasn't even true love." Is that what he did? "Yes! I erase it totally.
I don't only believe that I'm no longer in love. I believe I never was."

As if to illustrate this, he glances at his watch; his 12-year-old son, who lives nearby, will be
arriving shortly. How is this going to work when he gets here? Don't worry, Žižek says, he's
bound to be late – on account of the tardiness of his mother: "The bitch who claims to have
been my wife." But weren't they married? "Unfortunately, yes."

Žižek has two sons – the other is in his 30s – but never wanted to be a parent. "I will tell you
the formula why I love my two sons. This is my liberal, compassionate side. I cannot resist it,
when I see someone hurt, vulnerable and so on. So precisely when the son was not fully
wanted, this made me want to love him even more."

By now I can see we're not going to get anywhere near Žižek's new book about Hegel, Less
Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Instead, he tells me about the
holidays he takes with his young son. The last one was to the Burj Al Arab hotel, a grotesque
temple to tacky ostentation in Dubai. "Why not? Why not? I like to do crazy things. But I did
my Marxist duty. I got friendly with the Pakistani taxi driver who showed to me and my son
reality. The whole structure of how the workers there live was explained, how it was controlled.
My son was horrified." This summer they are off to Singapore, to an artificial island with
swimming pools built on top of 50-storey skyscrapers. "So we can swim there and look down
on the city: 'Ha ha, fuck you.' That's what I like to do – totally crazy things." It wasn't so much
fun when his son was younger. "But now, we have a certain rhythm established. We sleep 'til
one, then we go to breakfast, then we go to the city – no culture, just consumerism or some
stupid things like this – then we go back for dinner, then we go to a movie theatre, then we play
games 'til three in the morning."
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jun/10/slavoj-zizek-humanity-ok-people-boring 4/5