Chuck Klosterman: belief

Transcript context

…I think he’s underrated. He has his cult followers, and presumably a lot of them overrate him, but a lot of serious people don’t think of him as a force. He is, as a person, truly a force, in a way not actually that many thinkers are. So I’m a big fan, even though I really don’t agree that much with him. Oh, so am I, but the underrated-overrated thing — it’s hard to place on him because, in a sense, his notoriety for what he does completely goes beyond the vast majority of people who are philosophers or whatever. In that sense, if you go from an individual’s importance to their field relative to their notoriety in that field, I think he might be at the top of that. It is just not many people — I think Cornel West maybe, or whatever. You find a few people who are philosophers who are famous. But in terms of his ideas themselves, they could be underrated because I think that his notoriety is very often used against him. The fact that he’ll talk about Titanic or whatever in this very commercial way builds in this assumption that these ideas must not be really meaningful as much as they are attention-grabbing. In some weird way, he’s a little bit like Evan Dando of the Lemonheads, where Evan Dando of the Lemonheads was making records that people made fun of and didn’t take seriously because he was so overtly handsome. He was good-looking in an obvious way. There was this assumption, particularly at that time in the ’90s, that if you were conventionally good-looking, or banal good looks or whatever, that made people look at his songwriting as, “Oh, meaningless.” Now we go back and listen to him as a songwriter — it’s like, “Oh, well, he is real good.” He was better than most. We thought he was bad because he was handsome. I think sometimes people think that Žižek is full of shit because he’s famous, but that’s not necessarily true. His best side, I think, is his Hegelian side, when he insists the truth is to be found in the reconciliation of diametrically opposing ideas, and then he’s quite good. If he gets too wrapped up in Marx or some of the heavier continental stuff, sometimes I just think he is drifting. It’s also amazing when you’re with him, how he uses his body. It’s such an integral part of how he thinks and talks, and a lot of us aren’t used to that. He is hurling his whole body at you all the time, and how he moves is part of his thought, and that’s a funny notion, but you need to meet him to grasp him.…

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