Please. Just be loud enough, please. Good question, but not in the sense that now I will say “Aww, I am modest — so nice.” No, it’s a much more serious phenomenon. Let’s be quite frank. At a certain superficial level, I am relatively popular. But me and my friends — I don’t think you can (maybe you can) even imagine how non-influential are we within academia. Which is why it pisses me off how many — whoever they are — the enemies — portray us Lacanians as some kind of a phallogocentric power of discourse. It’s very fashionable to paint us as kind of a dogmatic power discourse. For example, yesterday, when I delivered (differently) an improvised version of the same talk at Columbia in New York, a lady kindly towards the end asked me “but why…” — her problem was why am I so dogmatically Lacanian? Yeah. What — which belief? Perfect. Perfect question. Yeah. Perfect question. Okay, I defy you with a very simple empirical (in the best Anglo-Saxon tradition) question. Apart from this brief conflict between Gayatri Spivak and Derrida, could you name me one Derridean who made a small critical remark on Derrida? Rodolphe Gasché? Avital Ronell? Name — Sam Weber — name me one. Why are we dogmatic? Why are they not? Name me one! Name me one point where Sam Weber makes an ironic critical remark on Derrida. Name me one point where Avital Ronell does it. Name me one point where Rodolphe Gasché does it. So why are we — why is my attach…why am I dogmatically attached to Lacan? And it’s not — why do you think this is about belief? I am a Lacanian. I mean you are knocking on the open door here. And you know, you don’t have to prove through some deconstructive analysis “Oh, but he is a Lacanian.” I am a card carrying Lacanian. Something is going on here and I just wanted to draw the attention to this — how all this popular. And I think so — to give you now the true answer. I think that I admit it. I — there is a clownish aspect to me like they put it in “New York Times” — Marx’s brother or whatever, no? All that — I maybe flirt with it. But, nonetheless, I’m getting tired of it because I noticed that there is, as it were — when there are some stupid reports on me — reactions to me — a kind of a terrible urge-compulsion to make me appear as a kind of a funny man and so on and so on. And the true question should be where does this urge come from? Why is there this necessity to portray me as somebody who can only thrive through jokes and so on and so on and so on. And even my publishers buy it. You know that my Lenin book — Introduction to Lenin — was almost turned down by Verso? Why? First, they always, at Verso, gave hints at me, “Oh you are just making jokes,” and so on and so on. Then I told them, “Okay, now you have a book on Lenin’s texts,” and their reproach was “Wait a minute, where are the jokes? Nobody will buy the book,” and so on and so on. So, you know, it’s much more than it may appear is going on here. It’s quite a complex phenomenon. I’m almost tempted to say that making me popular is a resistance against taking me serious. How should I put it — and I think it’s my duty, for this reason, to do a kind of a public suicide — of myself as a popular comedian or whatever.

19 July 2025