Everything You Wanted to Know about Organization Theory … but were Afraid to Ask Slavoj Žižek

Introduction: An encounter, not a dialogueSlavoj Z ˇiz ˇek has produced a plethora of books over the past 15 years (at the rate of over one a year), many of which are all curiously alike, as he recycles compulsively a limited number of key themes.Yet, one never feels any sense of sterile repetition.In revisiting a topic, he often sheds new light on it, and so continues the conversation he seems to be having with himself.Z ˇiz ˇek is not much interested in establishing a rational, sensible dialogue with his readers.Instead, he is a firm believer in clear-cut positions.His writing is invariably crisp, provocative, and devoid of any coyness.One of Z ˇiz ˇek's favourite one-liners is (paraphrasing Freud): 'Why are you saying that you're only giving a modest opinion when what you are giving is only a modest opinion'.Z ˇiz ˇek doesn't 'do' modesty.Z ˇiz ˇek is also unconventional with the choice of philosophies he reads.Although all of his work goes through Lacanian concepts, he is not simply someone who fetishizes post-war French thought (as so many organization theorists do today).Instead, he uncompromisingly connects Lacanian categories to German idealist philosophy -the latter hardly being overly popular in organization theory.But the real uniqueness in Z ˇiz ˇek's writing lies in the fact that he effortlessly blends together 'the 'highest' theory (Hegel, Lacan) and unrestrained enjoyment in the 'lowest' popular culture' (Z ˇiz ˇek, 2002a: 3), whilst casually (some would argue naively) moving from the psychoanalytic to the political and back again.Some might say: he's all over the place.At first glance he seems to write for the browser: 'They came up with the idea to do a CD-ROM, because I write in the same manner: click here, go there, use this fragment, that story or scene' (Z ˇiz ˇek, 2002b: 43).And indeed, the typical Z ˇiz ˇekian unit of discourse is a wittily titled (eg, 'the non-analysable Slovene'; 'let the emperor have his clothes') passage of between 5 and 15 pages, containing a dazzling cataract of demonstrations and examples from popular culture, for which a particular idea often seems a mere pretext.