Zizek 3

The Suspended Aesthetic: Slavoj Žižek on Eastern European Film
Author(s): Robert Bird

Source: Studies in East European Thought, Vol. 56, No. 4, The Many Faces of Slavoj Žižek's
Radicalism (Dec., 2004), pp. 357-382
Published by: Springer
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ROBERT BIRD
THE SUSPENDED AESTHETIC: SLAVOJ ZIZEK

ON EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM
ABSTRACT. Slavoj Zizek's writings on Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrej

Tarkovskij represent direct challenges to the Central and Eastern European
tradition of spiritual art and to dominant aesthetic concepts as such. He
refuses to separate the solemn films of Kieslowski and Tarkovskij from
popular culture and stresses their import as ethical statements by their
directors. Despite this ethical emphasis, Zizek makes an important contri
bution to philosophical aesthetics. He implicitly defines art as a suspension
of reality which reveals time in its fragility and potentiality. Defining Zizek's
aesthetics in terms of suspension helps to explain his partiality for Kies
lowski and Tarkovskij and bears comparison to the Russian tradition of
philosophical aesthetics, in particular Aleksej Losev and Alexander Bakshy.
KEY WORDS: aesthetics, aesthetic distance, Aleksej Losev, Alexander

Bakshy, Andrej Tarkovskij, film theory, Krzysztof Kieslowski, narrative
suspense, Nikolaj Berdjaev, Slavoj Zizek, suspension
INTRODUCTION
Slavoj Zizek has devoted an important and impressive body of

work to major filmmakers of Central and Eastern Europe,
especially Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrej Tarkovskij. Zizek's
writings on these two major artists of the cinema have broken
new ground in the interpretation of their works. In particular,
Zizek gleefully disregards the almost religious reverence in
which Kieslowski and Tarkovskij are often held, particularly in
their native countries. Zizek's readings of Kieslowski and
Tarkovskij are also instructive with regards to Zizek's intel
lectual position vis-?-vis Central and Eastern European culture,
particularly towards an important tradition that focuses on
links between aesthetics and religion. Zizek is basically hostile
towards this "mystical" tradition in East European aesthetics.
In fact, I argue that he is distrustful of aesthetics as such, unless
it is subordinated quite firmly to ethical concerns. In his
Studies in East European Thought 56: 357-382, 2004.

?*
r* ? 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
358 ROBERT BIRD
pan-ethicism and rejection of an autonomous aesthetic realm

Zizek bears an unexpected resemblance to the Russian philos
opher of freedom Nikolaj Berdjaev. However, as in the case of
Berdjaev, Zizek's challenge to critical platitudes can serve to
invigorate ideas of religious aesthetics in Eastern Europe, for
example in the work of Aleksej Losev. In particular, after
analyzing Zizek's stimulating responses to Tarkovskij and
Kieslowski, I focus on the concept of suspension, which cap
tures the dialectic of aesthetic distance and ideological/religious
engagement both in Zizek's aesthetics and in the spiritual art of
Eastern Europe.
THE CONTRARIAN
Slavoj Zizek not only avoids being identified in terms of

geography, at times he even flaunts his exclusion from Central
and East European traditions. One of his most provocative
stands is his advocacy of the thought and deeds of V. I. Lenin,
whom Zizek promotes as a palliative to the post-communist
malaise of the radical Left in the West. Zizek is aware of the
almost universal rejection of Lenin by those who have experi
enced developed socialism first-hand, but he is openly derisive
of the anti-Leninists' "common sense," which he identifies with
Stalinist totalitarianism. He writes: "What we should stick to is
the madness (in the strict Kierkegaardian sense) of this Leninist
-
utopia and, if anything, Stalinism stands for a return to the
realistic 'common sense'" (RAG: 5). Seeing Lenin in this
manner as a "holy fool" or a Kierkegaardian "knight of faith"
fantasizes away the brutality of the man's rule and its conse
quences. A similar intellectual provocation is his repeated claim

that the censorship in Hollywood under the Hayes office was
"much stronger than in the Soviet Union" (TIS: 253). In this
view Zizek seems closest to western revisionist historians who
seek to dispel the very idea of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian
state. The revisionists have underscored the complex negotia
tions between various interest groups within Soviet society
while underplaying the influence of its punitive coercion. The
comparison between Hollywood and the Soviet film industry,
ZIZEK ON EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM 359
while apt and intriguing, is fraught with many layers of com

plications which Zizek intentionally ignores in order simply to
reverse the accustomed view of things, true to his status as
intellectual agent provocateur.
Such a studied irritation of post-communist sores is com
plemented by Zizek's tendency to denigrate the non-communist
traditions of Eastern Europe, most notably those which link
religion and art. For example, Zizek flaunts his conflation of
Kieslowski's and Tarkovskij's serious art with Hollywood pulp,
passing lightly from discussion of Kieslowski's Decalogue to a
popular American film starring Bruce Willis. Zizek likewise
accuses Tarkovskij of following the Hollywood method of
adapting novels to the screen, specifically in the case of Stani
slaw Lem's Solaris (TIS: 234). In his unceremonious ridicule of
Eastern European self-importance Zizek allies himself with
post-modernists in Eastern Europe, such as the Russian writer
Vladimir Sorokin. Zizek approvingly quotes Sorokin's send-up
of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, although he also non-chalantly
mistakes the name of Solzhenitsyn's famous interlocutor
Aleksandr Tvardovsky, as if to underscore his lack of concern
with Russian writers' earnest struggle for freedom of expression
under the Soviet regime (OB: 60-61).l
It is therefore somewhat of a surprise that Zizek would de
vote such attention to two "mystics" among east European
directors whom, in Zizek's own words, many film theorists
"abhor" as "New Age obscurantists" (FRT: 101). The super
natural and even religious themes in the films of both Kies
lowski and Tarkovskij might seem inappropriate for Zizek's
brand of psychoanalytic critique, which requires "subjects,"
not spirits. In fact, however, Zizek's book The Fright of Real
Tears: Krzyzstof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory is
only ostensibly about Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrej Tar
kovskij in their own right. In actuality the book is framed as a
manifesto against film historians David Bordwell and No?l
Carroll, who in 1996 heralded the demise of psychoanalytic film
theory with a collection of essays entitled Post-Theory. Zizek's
paradoxical appeal to Kieslowski and Tarkovskij in his defense
of radical "theory" reflects his strategy of joining battle on
enemy territory. In The Fright of Real Tears Zizek is battling
360 ROBERT BIRD
both "post-theory" and "post-communism" on the territory

which seems least conducive to both Lacanian theory and
Leninist communism: the implicitly anti-communist, explicitly
spiritual art of Eastern Europe. Zizek combines the crisis of
theory and the crisis of the Left by addressing theory-resistant
filmmakers from Marx-resistant countries.
It is worth asking how Zizek imagines the conflict. His task
at hand is the demonstration of the universal (even metaphys
ical) legitimacy of Lacan and the materialism of Eastern
European film. On the one hand, Zizek constructs his various
opponents as so many kinds of obscurantists. The post-theory
partisans are called "cognitivists and popularisers of the hard
sciences" with whom the "exponents of post-modern/decon
structivist cultural studies" are locked in a "global battle for
intellectual hegemony and visibility" (FRT: 2). In fact, for
Zizek this battle is no more than shadow-boxing: the opponents
of postmodern theory are a mere "parody" of themselves,
insofar as they fail to comprehend their enemy (FRT: 4-5).
Similarly, "'post-secular' obscurantist readings" of Kieslowski
and Tarkovskij do not make any claim on Zizek's attention,
Tarkovskij's theoretical pronouncements are dismissed as
"cheap religious obscurantism" and Kieslowski's screenwriter
Krzysztof Piesiewicz is condemned as hopelessly "religious

apolitical" (TIS: 242; FRT: 189). Both the filmmakers them
selves and non-Lacanian film theorists are thus cast together
into the common purgatory reserved for retrograde enemies of
free thought.
On the other hand, Zizek constructs his own partisans as a
curiously disembodied and denatured population, a ubiquitous
yet unspecified "we," which is defined only by its common
appeal to "our standard ideological tradition" (FRT: 126, 102).
This "we" seems ultimately to denote well-read post-modern
leftists with a deep knowledge of American pop culture.2 This
dematerialized collectivity contradicts the definition of univer
sality to which Zizek often appeals. He views universality as
rooted necessarily in the authenticity of a "concrete social
constellation": "the fundamental lesson of dialectics is that
universality as such emerges, is articulated 'for itself,' only
within a set of particular conditions" (FRT: 8). Zizek seems
reluctant to investigate the particularity (indeed, peculiarity) of

the conditions within which he himself has appeared and which
have formed his view of Tarkovskij and Kieslowski among
other things. However, by Zizek's own dialectical logic, his
theoretical method could rise to universality only if rooted in
the specific conditions of his own appearance. In fact, Zizek's
response to Tarkovskij and Kieslowski betrays his own root
edness in the specific conditions of late-socialist Central and
Eastern Europe. My task in part is to reconstruct Zizek's aes
thetics by exploiting his connections to various aspects of
Eastern European art and theory.
PAN-ETHICISM
The elusive identity of Zizek's authorial voice is no mere trifle,

since his argument often rests on the authority of this denuded
"we." Moreover, these subjective judgments are taken up in an
irresistible sparkle of dialectic. Within the bounds of his sub
ject-matter Zizek has developed an impregnable theoretical
language capable of absorbing anything from Hegel to Hitch
cock, from psychoanalysis to terrorism. Zizek's universe ap
pears as a gigantic symbolic construct that is fully transparent
to thought, despite the pervasion of the "Real" and of various
unnameable "Things," which can always be molded into
familiar Lacanian nightmares. Engaging with this language on
its own terms is a losing proposition, for in the Hegelian
movement of his thought, any negation of Zizek's position
becomes its own self-negation, implicit in his original stance
and sublimated in his next step.
Given the allure of his pan-logical method, it is important to
recognize that its application is based precisely on the sub
jective, ethical judgment of Zizek's "we." In my view, Zizek's
pan-logicism is actually a variant of pan-ethicism, which re
duces all communicative situations to a basic judgment of right
and wrong, or of "subjecthood" and "obscurantism" in Zizek's
parlance. The main criterion of ethical judgment is the auton
omy of the subject. For Zizek, as for Kant, "direct access to the
noumenal realm would deprive us of the very spontaneity
362 ROBERT BIRD
which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom" (FRT:

153).3 Zizek recalls a school friend who had found himself
unable to write an essay on good deeds, claiming that he had
never performed any; for Zizek, the refusal to make up a good
deed for a passing grade raised the boy from the level of simple
morality to that of ethical action. This is "the ethical dimension
proper in the strict Kantian sense," where free actors choose
the right action without any coercion, whether by worldly or by
heavenly powers (FRT: 136-137). As he says in his discussion
of Heinrich von Kleist, man is "a free being who, due to his
very freedom, feels the unbearable pressure that attracts and
ties him to the earth where he ultimately does not belong"
(FRT: 153). It is this tension between dependence and freedom
that defines Zizek's underlying sense of things and informs his
suspicion of any truths which are proffered on institutional
authority, whether of the government or the church.
From Zizek's concern with the free subject as an ethical actor
there follows quite directly a near rejection of the aesthetic as an
autonomous set of values. The artwork becomes an ethical ac
tion performed by its author.4 In the practical sense, Zizek
prefers "not to talk about [Kieslowski's] work, but to refer to his
work in order to accomplish the work of theory. In its very
ruthless 'use' of its artistic pretext, such a procedure is much
more faithful to the interpreted work than any superficial re
spect for the work's unfathomable autonomy" (FRT: 9). For
Zizek, art is above all ethical action which operates most hon
estly and effectively in the same realms of Imaginary, Symbolic,
and Real, as does all human life. In this he is the latest repre
sentative of a Marxist tradition which has repeatedly tried to
reconcile economic materialism and cultural humanism, in or
der to theorize how autonomous art might at the same time
exhibit social commitment and achieve social engagement.
At this level of abstraction, if one brackets all of the
obvious differences in background and context, Zizek can be
profitably compared to the Russian philosopher Nikolaj
Berdjaev (1874-1948). Like Zizek, Berdjaev augments a basi
cally Kantian epistemology with an enthusiastic embrace of
Schelling's metaphysics of freedom which leads him to a po
sition that has commonly been termed existential and
personalist. For Berdjaev, freedom meant the rejection of any

"objectification" of spirit, whether as dogma, tradition, or
artwork. The human subject, centered upon the quest for
freedom, must project himself as a relentless act which never
settles into objecthood. This creative act is essentially partic
ipation in the Abgrund (abyss) of God as absolute freedom, a
term which Berdjaev takes from Schelling and Jakob Boehme.
Berdjaev's inner creativity resists communication in any
objective form. A curious testimony to Berdjaev's immunity to
aesthetic expression (particularly the cinema, which he at
tended regularly), and the aesthetically uncontaminated nature
of his thought, emerges from his following confession from
- in - I
1934: "Everywhere the woods, in the cinema continue
the inner work connected to my creative project [tvorchestvo].
This work never ceases within me, and often the most sig
nificant thoughts come to me utterly independent of the
external conditions" (Berdjaeva, 2002: 37, cf. 41).5 Signifi
cantly, Berdjaev feels he has nothing to learn from the cinema,
only from his own ratiocinations at the cinema.
A case in point is Berdjaev's major work of aesthetics Smysl
tvorchestva (The Meaning of Creativity, 1916), which basically
rates the creativity of ethical action higher than that of art:
Culture in its most profound essence and in its religious meaning is a great
failure. Philosophy and science are failures in the creative cognition of truth;
art and literature are failures in the creation of beauty; family and sexual life
are failures in the creation of love; morality and law are failures in the
creative power of man over nature [...] Culture achieves not knowledge, but
symbols of knowledge, not beauty, but symbols of beauty, not love, but
symbols of love, not the union of people, but symbols of union, not power
over nature, but symbols of power. (Berdjaev, 1994a: 299)
Berdjaev merges Marxist and Gnostic ideals of liberation into a

vision of disalienated creativity in freedom, i.e., in the realm of
the absolute. Berdjaev's philosophical language pales next to
Zizek's; he was fundamentally hostile to fine conceptual dis
tinctions such as Lacan provides. Yet the underlying pattern is
similar: an ethical disgust at inauthentic existence results in the
rejection of aesthetic expression as mere simulacrum capable of
revealing only its own lack of authenticity.
364 ROBERT BIRD
For Zizek, as for Berdjaev, all symbolic action must be

understood against the abyss which it papers over, within "the
radical discontinuity between the organic continuity of 'life'
and the symbolic universe" (EYS: 53). In his reading of
Schelling, Zizek focuses on the moment of decision when God
acted as subject to counter the subjectless primordial abyss;
"creation," the "pronunciation of the Word in God," the
"founding gesture of consciousness" and "decision" is an
opening and an illumination of spiritual light (TIR: 32-33). This
decision inheres in the subject as the unconscious basis of the
Self, "the highest deed of my self-positing" (TIR: 34). Thus
achieving selfhood is always predicated on an unconscious
decision in favor of freedom: "In this precise sense, freedom is
atemporal: a flash of eternity in time [...] Schelling's effort here
is to think freedom as the atemporal abyss of identity [...] and
as the predicate of a free Subject who decides in time" (TIR:
35). However the temporal subject's atemporal origin means
that human life is "marked by a maximum gap between pos
sibility and actuality" (TIR: 57): "his terrestrial life is a spec
tacle of horrors; on the other hand, the true world, the world of
spirits, appears to him as a spectral, unattainable Beyond"
(TIR: 58). Zizek identifies this split as endemic to the materi
alist subject: "if Freedom is to actualize itself - that is, to be
come the predicate of a free Entity - it has to 'contract' the
opaque Ground" (TIR: 72). This is where, for Zizek, Schelling
converges with Lacan: "the symbolic order can never achieve its
full completion and close its circle, since its very constitution
involves a point at which Meaning stumbles upon its boundary
and suspends itself in Enjoy-Meant [Jouis-sense]" (TIR: 75). In
this manner the potential for being can never be realized, but
always remains in suspension.
Something similar to this cosmology underlies Zizek's basic

ethical stance, usually expressed in terms of the Lacanian
subject. The ethical subject must abhor imaginary fantasies and
seek to base his symbolic identity upon the unnameable Real on
which he is founded. However, he must also recognize that any
other person is likewise indeterminate in his core being and that
he has a choice of perceiving the other according to his own
fantasies or according to the symbolic identity which the other
projects: "since I cannot take hold of the Other, of the abyss

which forms the elusive centre of her being, directly, I can only
take her at her Word" (TIR: 71). Zizek recognizes that this
ethical injunction bears a distinct resemblance to Kant's cate
gorical imperative and the complementary aesthetic judgment:
the concrete formulation of a determinate ethical obligation has the structure

of an aesthetic judgment, that is, of a judgment by means of which, instead of
applying a universal category to a particular object or subsuming this object
under an already-given universal
determination, I as it were invent its uni
versal-necessary-obligatory dimension, and thereby elevate this particular
contingent object (act) to the dignity of the ethical Thing. (TIR: 169)
Zizek stresses that this reclamation of the categorical impera

tive does not posit some transcendent final instance:
In so far as we "reify" the moral law into an agency that exists "in itself
and exerts its pressure upon us from without, we reduce its status to that of a
representation (of a voice and/or gaze) [...] In clear contrast, the moral Law
qua pure transcendence is no longer an entity that exists independently of its
relationship to us; it is nothing but its relationship to us (to the moral sub
ject). [...] that which appears as the Law "in itself," existing independently
of the subject, is effectively a subjective phantasmagoria, a spectral non
entity that merely materializes, gives body to, the non-purity of the subject's
ethical stance. (TIR: 172)
Each ethical act is a confrontation with the abyss of freedom

(i.e., the Real), and as such is a symbolic suicide (EYS: 44).
Indeed, the definition of the act as the subject's withdrawal from
reality, which Zizek calls a "suspension of constituted reality,"
is the point at which Zizek's psychoanalytic approach converges
with German idealism. Aesthetic representations are like any
ethical act in that they "suspend" constituted reality and rees
tablish its relation to the Real, projecting the deed within a
symbolic fiction (EYS: 52). For Zizek, the contradiction be
tween mental construct and stubborn reality can only be over
come inpragmatic action, just as Zizek seeks to overcome the rift
between theory and art in "the work of theory" (FRT: 9).
Based on the parallel with Berdjaev, I would venture to argue
that Zizek's denial of the aesthetic is not merely a function of
366 ROBERT BIRD
his adherence to Lacan, but bears deep connections to the

traditions of Central and Eastern European thought. This
kinship is especially palpable in the creative appropriation of
Schelling's early metaphysics combined with a broad suspicion
of the aesthetic. This means that Zizek's unlikely encounter
with Kieslowski and Tarkovskij occurs on a fertile ground of
philosophical and aesthetic debate which makes them ideal
sparring partners. That Zizek is nonetheless able to make
important aesthetic judgments demonstrates that he is a far
more subtle thinker than Berdjaev. Lacan's distinction between
the Imaginary and the Symbolic provides Zizek with two dis
tinct methods of coping with the intrusion of the Real into
human existence. Unlike the "false representation" of the
Imaginary realm, the Symbolic provides a means of authentic
representation. For example, Kieslowski began his film career
with documentaries in order to demonstrate the falsity of offi
cial propaganda, but "then he noticed that, when you let go of
false representation and directly approach reality, you lose reality
itself so he abandoned documentaries and moved into fiction"
(FRT: 121; Zizek's italics). It follows that the achievement of
authentic (i.e., symbolic) representation, which avoids hiding
the protuberances of the Real, is dependent upon establishing
the appropriate distance from which to represent reality. Yet
this is not aesthetic, but ethical distance; Zizek commends
Kieslowski's move to fiction precisely as "a shift from morality
to ethics" (FRT: 137). Here again the aesthetic conditions of art
dissolve in ethical judgments; Zizek is not interested in judging
a film as beautiful, touching, cathartic, etc., but only as moral
or ethical.
A key difference between Zizek and Berdjaev can be illus
trated by their respective responses to Heidegger's concept of
time. Berdjaev commented on Sein und Zeit that Heidegger
"sees the ontological basis of Dasein, i.e., of the existence
thrown into the world, or of objectification inmy terminology,
as temporality" (Berdjaev, 1994: 284). However, for Berdjaev,
it iswrong not to differentiate between time as care and time as
creativity, or between time asfear of the future and hope for the
future. Indeed, only the latter interpretation of time as creative
liberation is, for Berdjaev, authentic insofar as it overcomes
objectified time and reasserts lost eternity. Berdjaev embraces

Augustine's vision of an eternal present formed out of the
temporal shards of eternity (op.cit.: 284-285). "If, according to
Heidegger, care temporalizes being, then creativity may liberate
being from the power of time [...] Creative flight itself escapes
time and de-temporalizes existence" (op.cit.: 287). For Zizek,
by contrast, temporality remains, as for Heidegger, the most
obtrusive form of resistance thrust up by the Real against our
attempts to "gain access to consistent reality" (FRT: 100), and
is therefore a guarantor of authenticity in symbolic communi
cation. Zizek links time as the Real to the figure of earth in
Heidegger's aesthetic treatise Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks;
earth/time is what juts out of the rift that the work of art opens
up in the world. In many respects, this aesthetic appears related
to the Russian Formalists' concept of defamiliarization or
Brecht's Verfremdung: art is seen as a jarring, discomforting
experience that causes the subject to question both the fiction
presented by art and the fictions with which he endows his own
life. Ironic distance allows for ideological engagement. In this
manner the equation between the Lacanian Real and Heideg
ger's earth provides artworks with a specific function in Zizek's
universe, but is this function not merely that of a signpost into
the temporal void, or rather as a running illustration of Laca
nian metaphysics? Is there nothing that art, and only art, can
actually reveal to viewers that is beyond the ken of theory?
I will argue that art performs a vital function for Zizek as the
revelation of potentiality which calls for ethical action. While
this potentiality can never be actualized, neither can it ever be
exhausted. Art succeeds in suspending the very potential of
time in a way which renders it measurable by the viewing
subject and applicable to his real life.
CINEMA AS GEISTIGE K?RPERLICHKEIT
Zizek's analyses of Kieslowski and Tarkovskij are filled with

insightful observations, some witty, some quite momentous,
almost all couched in Lacanian terminology. A good example is
his discussion of Kieslowski's Decalogue 6, which concerns a
368 ROBERT BIRD
young voyeur who enters into direct contact with the object of
his obsession with disastrous consequences. When the woman
confronts the boy at his job in the post office, Kieslowski
"elevates a common phenomenon like the glass reflection of a
human face into the momentous apparition of the Real for
which there is no place in our experience of reality" (TIS: 67).
However, Zizek's satisfaction with this Lacanian conclusion
causes him to stop his interpretation at this point and compare
Kieslowski's film to Sixth Sense, a Hollywood film starring
Bruce Willis. Is this an intentionally provocative denigration of
Kieslowski to the level of Hollywood, or is it the natural effect
of Zizek's homogenizing analytical gaze?
For Zizek, the artist's intention is always crystal clear, even
when the film form is not, and this authorial intention becomes
a matter for ethical judgment outside of any formal consider
ations. Of Tarkovskij's Solaris, for example, Zizek contem
plates two readings, a Jungian one and a correct one. In
Jungian terms, the "point" of the planet Solaris is "simply [the]

projection, materialization of the (male) subject's disavowed
inner impetuses" (TIS: 234). But for Zizek a spiritual reality of
this kind is merely an imaginary fantasy that feeds on the
subject's own unacknowledged desires, which form an
impregnable core of subjectivity. "In fact," Zizek continues,

"what ismuch more crucial is that if this 'projection' is to take
-
place, the impenetrable Other Thing must already be here the
true enigma is the presence of this Thing," which Zizek defines
as Lacan's Real (TIS: 234). Even if the Jungian reading is
moral, it is incapable of rising to the ethical, which is the pre
serve of Lacanian theory. Furthermore, the form of the film, of
which he enthusiastically approves as "materialist theology"
(EYS: 103), is ultimately inconsequential with regards to the
preferred reading. Zizek gleans from an interview with Tar
kovskij that the director "obviously opts for the Jungian
reading, according to which the external journey is merely the
externalization and/or projection of the inner initiating journey
into the depth of one's psyche" (TIS: 234). By contrast,
according to Zizek, the "point" of the original novel by
Stanislaw Lern "is precisely that Solaris remains an impene
trable Other with no possible communication with us" (TIS:
234). There is a grievous reduction involved in discussing a

work based on its "point" as if it is something separable from
the film form. Zizek's analysis seems to assume some primor
dial narrative "Solaris" which yields a finite number of possible
interpretations, from which artists effectively choose as if on an
election ballot. Since the "point" of the film narrative is equally
communicable via a three-hour film or a two-page magazine
interview, Zizek denies the aesthetic work any autonomous
value whatsoever. The "crucial dilemma" of Tarkovskij's films
is not an aesthetic question at all, but rather one of ascertaining
the author's standpoint; Zizek asks, "is there a distance be
tween his [Tarkovskij's] ideological project (of sustaining
meaning, of generating new spirituality, through an act of
meaningless sacrifice) and his cinematic materialism?" (TIS:
254). Likewise, Zizek is prepared to blame the screenwriter
Zbigniew Piesiewicz "for the alleged religious-apolitical turn of
Kieslowski's late work" (FRT: 189, n.l) as long as Kieslowski
himself demonstrates sufficient distance from his own films'
religious discourse.
Zizek's ideological bioses do not preclude his readings of the
films from opening up completely new aspects of the works in
question. Zizek's Lacanian framework provides a neat way to
conceptualize Kieslowski's move from documentary filmmak
ing to increasingly elaborate fictions. For Zizek, Kieslowski's
initial cin?ma v?rit? proved incapable of capturing the gaps and
rifts which puncture phenomenal reality and bear witness to the
pervasive Real in the formless beyond; Zizek remarks that the
director's "fidelity to the Real [...] compelled Kieslowski to
abandon documentary realism" (FRT: 71). In order to "su
ture" the gap in reality, Kieslowski began to create "spectral
fantasies" which frankly bear the mark of the Real: "the only
way to depict people beneath their protective mask of playing is,
paradoxically, to make them directly play a role, i.e., to move
into fiction" (FRT: 75). However Kieslowski's evolution as an
artist can be explained just as well without Lacan in terms
of the conditions of communist Poland. Kieslowski himself
defended his use of documentary film by referring to the
yawning gap between social reality and the media image of
it in a communist society. The discrepancy between "official"
370 ROBERT BIRD
and "real" reality was itself commentary on shortcomings of

society and its self-representation. Eventually, however, he
realized that documentary film-making is severely limited both
in terms of the subject matter available to it and in the sincerity
it can capture on film. Frank engagement with social reality
required that the camera be removed from reality at the
distance of fiction.
In this manner, what to Zizek seems an inexorable conflict
between "spiritualist mysticism" and "materialism" is actually
explicable as a dialectic between ideological engagement and
aesthetic distanciation, between ethics and art. Zizek allows for
two possible interpretations of the abundant coincidences and
fatalistic accidents in Kieslowski's films: they either indicate
the director's faith in some higher reality, or else his tacit
acknowledgement of an unnarratable core within the narrative.
Of course, Zizek is quite concerned to demonstrate the prece
dence of the latter interpretation, arguing that, "The very
notion of alternative realities is also grounded in the excess of
documentary material which resists incorporation into a single
narrative: it can only be organized as the texture of multiple
narrative lines" (FRT: 77). Zizek's materialist reading of
Kieslowski brazenly ignores any supra-logical significance, but
it also issues a steep challenge to those who would seek deeper
meaning in the film. In fact, this is the challenge of Kieslowski's
films themselves, which communicate an aura of mystery in
stories of the everyday: whence the mystery? It is a paradox of
film that the most materialist filmmakers are also the most
religious, but it is a paradox that bears great value for aesthetic
theories that would seek to make room for the supernatural.
Zizek's unwillingness to countenance positive spiritual
meaning limits his sensitivity to much of Tarkovskij's cinematic
world, but it also frees him from the hieratic clich?s that often
accompany discussions of Tarkouskij's films. This is certainly
the case in Zizek's reading of the problematic crucifixion scene
in Andrei Rublev, when a summer landscape suddenly and
inexplicably changes to a wintertime enactment of Christ's via
dolor osa by actors in traditional Russian garb. The stylization
of the scene after Bruegel's winter landscapes has often been
taken as evidence of its earnestness. Zizek, however, following
Antoine de Baecque, highlights the scene's overwrought and

heavy-handed presentation; he mercilessly brands the scene as
"mockery and satire" of Tarkovskij's own "most sacred gesture
of supreme sacrifice" (TIS: 242; de Baecque, 1989: 98). The
same freshness pervades Zizek's interpretation of Tarkovskij's
use of sound (TIS: 255) or the director's notorious long take,
which is usually taken as a sign of the scene's especial solemnity
and gravity. Zizek discusses a scene in Nostalgia where the fe
male protagonist Eugenia erupts into a sudden hysterics
"against the hero's tired indifference, but also, in a way, against
the calm indifference of the static long shot itself, which does
not let itself be disturbed by her outburst" (TIS: 233). Zizek's
irreverent observations liberate the viewer from pious presup
positions and draw attention to the play of detached gaze and
embodied materiality in Tarkovskij's world.
Zizek often fails to heed the cues of his own insightful
observations. In the case of Eugenia's hysterics, for example,
despite his intuition of a more subtle interplay between camera
and character, Zizek reduces the entire scene to Tarkovskij's
"barely concealed disgust for a provocative woman" (TIS:
233). Here, as so often is the case, Zizek unabashedly reads
Tarkovskij's authorial position into the film based on extra
neous evidence. However Zizek also allows for a more positive
(i.e., "materialist") interpretation based on the density of time
within Tarkovskij's cinematic world. Zizek notes that the
temporal "anamorphosis" in his films makes Tarkovskij per
haps the most illustrative example of the time-image, which
Gilles Deleuze identified as the defining characteristic of con
temporary film, and of Tarkovskij in particular (TIS: 249;
Deleuze, 1985: 60-61). Unlike Deleuze, however, Zizek fails to
note any of Tarkovskij's own thoughts on the nature of time in
his aesthetic writings. Zizek refuses to attribute the material
texture of Tarkovskij's cinematic aesthetic to the director
himself, concluding that, "to use Althusserian terms, there is a
dimension in which Tarkovskij's cinematic texture undermines
his own explicit ideological project, or at least introduces a
distance towards it, renders visible its inherent impossibility
and failure" (TIS: 242). A more sensitive reading of Tarkov
skij's theoretical musings might suggest that he was not blind to
372 ROBERT BIRD
the formal discontinuities and impossibilities of his cinematic

world, but Zizek is unwilling to countenance Tarkovskij except
as a symptom of some general crisis.6
Another case of Zizek failing to utilize the full potential of
his own observations concerns Tarkovskij's Stalker. Com
paring Tarkovskij's film to the original novel by the brothers

Strugatsky Piknik na obochine (Roadside Picnic), Zizek ac
cuses Tarkovskij of an "idealist mystification" insofar as "he
shrinks from confronting this radical Otherness of the mean
ingless Thing, reducing and retranslating the encounter with
the Thing to the 'inner journey' towards one's Truth" (TIS:
238). Yet Zizek finds it possible to "redeem" Tarkovskij's film
by insisting on a materialist reading of it, refusing to attribute
supernatural origin to the Zone, which instead appears as the
void of "phantasmatic space" (TIS: 238). Zizek presents the
Zone as basically indeterminate, which makes the film itself
indeterminate as well, an exercise in positing an explicitly
meaningless sacrifice or podvig. Zizek's reversal of the usual
interpretation of the film shifts attention from its ostensible
ideology, which can be surmised only from Tarkovskij's
writings and interviews, to the actual film as a material arti
fact and to the viewer's experience before it. The Stalker's
commitment to the Zone and its dubious secret parallels the
viewer's own commitment to the film, which attains meaning
only as a physical experience of attending to a matter of great
obscurity and opacity. The film attains meaning for the viewer
precisely because it refuses to foist meaning upon him; instead
it brings the viewer to the very edge of meaninglessness and
extorts from him a decisive act of faith or dereliction. How
ever Zizek fails to develop his observations here, and else
where he shows himself to be comfortable imposing a
determinate meaning on the Zone as the "post-industrial
wasteland" that is the "obverse of the incessant capitalist
drive to produce": "The ultimate irony of history is that it
was a director from the Communist East who displayed the
greatest sensitivity to this obverse of the drive to produce and
consume" (TFA: 41). Of course, it is possible to view this
aspect of Tarkovskij's film as a commentary on the funda
mental identity of capitalist and Marxist versions of
materialism, both of which promote ideals of economic con

sumption and prove incapable of preserving the spiritual
textures of life. However Zizek's allegiance to Marx closes off
the interpretation of the film and prevents it from revealing
anything authentic about Marx and communist society.
Zizek's analyses still succeed in elucidating Tarkovskij's aes
thetics. Tarkovskij's long tracking shots and attentive explo
ration of material texture exemplify the double movement of
distance and engagement which Zizek identifies also in Kies
lowski. However, while he recognizes the immediacy of Tar
kovskij's cinematic texture, Zizek refuses to acknowledge the
immediacy of its effect on the viewer: "What [...] redeems
Tarkovsky is his cinematic materialism, the direct physical
impact of the texture of his films: this texture renders a stance
of Gelassenheit, of pacified disengagement that suspends the
very urgency of any kind of quest" (TIS: 248-249). In fact, I
would argue that this distancing effect translates Tarkovskij's
material immediacy into spiritual immediacy and ethical action;
the viewer leaves the cinema not with the intention of copying
the Stalker's unlikely quest "in real life," rather with a renewed
belief in the potential for meaning in reality, and with the more
significant imperative of explicating life as meaningful. As in
Kieslowski, removal to the distance of fiction vouchsafes a
meaningful engagement with reality.
THE SUSPENDED GAZE
Throughout these passages, indeed throughout Zizek's entire

corpus of writings, one notes constant reference to "suspen
sion" or "suspense," which however remains undefined as a
term.7 However, as I have suggested above, the idea of the
fictional "suspension of reality" and its subsequent recalibra
tion vis-?-vis the Real is the fulcrum of Zizek's ethics and
aesthetics. I would like to suggest that Tarkovskij and
Kieslowski are important to Zizek insofar as their works are
among the most radical suspensions of reality in contemporary
cinema, and that this concept of suspension (very different from
the narrative suspense typified by Hitchcock) provides a key to
374 ROBERT BIRD
an overall aesthetic framework shared by these film-makers and

their latter-day Slovenian exegete.
Zizek's concept of suspension originates in Hegelian Aufhe
bung: "the fundamental gesture of a dialectical analysis is pre
cisely a step back from content to form, i.e., a suspension of
content which renders visible anew form as such" (EYS: 133).
This dialectic of suspension and vision must be constantly re
peated at each level of knowledge. Symbolization is a suspen
sion that imposes a preliminary form on inexpressible content,
but this form itself must be suspended to prevent it being
mistaken for the content. The ethical act, for Zizek, is "the
moment when the subject who is its bearer suspends the net
work of symbolic fictions which serve as a support to his daily
life and confronts again the radical negativity on which they are
founded" (EYS: 53). This ethical suspension is achievable only
in ritual or art. In his analysis of A River Runs through It, Zizek
identifies two levels of reality: the inner decomposition of Brad
Pitt's character, and his redemptive fishing trips with his father
and brother. These trips signify "a kind of sacred family ritual,
a time when the threats of the life outside family are tempo
rarily suspended" (EYS: 197). However this suspension is
constantly undermined. What provides the film with aesthetic
efficacy is "tension between the two levels [...] the gap that
separates the explicit narrative line from the diffused threat
ening message delivered between the lines of the story" (EYS:
197). This gap is the source of suspense in the classical,
Hitchcockian sense, as the viewer's tense anticipation of the
denouement. In Hitchcock's Vertigo, the two levels correspond
to two temporal planes, which culminate in a single 360? shot
?
(which bears a clear resemblance to the 360 shot around
Kris's cabin in Tarkovskij's Solaris): "It is this multiple reso
nance of surfaces that generates the specific density, the 'depth'
of the film's texture" (EYS: 199).
The definition of aesthetic suspense as the "multiple resonance
of surfaces" resulting in a dense physical texture approaches the
peculiar suspension of Kieslowski's and Tarkovskij's films,
which combine engaged attention with a detached gaze. In
Kieslowski, as Zizek notes, each film presents multiple possible
outcomes (EYS: 206). As discussed above, Kieslowski originally
showed the contingency of life via cin?ma v?rit?, but later aban
doned this approach as a documentary fallacy: real, lived time
can be shown only with great aesthetic care, which requires
reduction to a consummate narrative and removal into the fic
tional realm. For Zizek this distanciation from documentary to
fiction was a shift from morality to ethics (FRT: 137). Zizek notes
that each film in Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy ends with
tears caused by "the painful act of gaining the proper distance
towards (social) reality after the shock which exposed her/him
naked to reality's impact" (FRT: 177).Whereas the real tears of
the documentary films bring the viewer into dangerous proximity
to raw pain, the fictional tears affirm the "regained distance" that
allows for happiness (FRT: 177-178).
Tarkovskij's aesthetics of suspense eschews narrative interest
almost entirely and creates a dense cinematic texture mainly by
encouraging a peculiar kind of attention on the part of the
viewer. Tarkovskij emphasized using the synaesthetic potential
of cinema to reveal the temporal texture of life. Andrei Rublev is
ostensibly a biographical (or hagiographical) study of its pro
tagonist, the most famous medieval Russian icon-painter. The
two most suspenseful sequences, however, feature two other
characters who appear nowhere else in the film and whose
adventures serve almost as bookends to Rublev's less eventful
story. The first sequence concerns Efim, a medieval aeronaut
who eludes a crowd of superstitious folk, clambers into a crude
balloon at the top of a church tower, and lurches vertiginously
along a river before crashing to earth, never to be mentioned
again. The second sequence occurs at the very culmination of
the film, at a time when Rublev has renounced icon-painting and
is bound by an oath of silence. The viewer meets Boriska, an
impudent and indolent youth who bluffs his way into the con
fidence of the Grand Duke and improvises an ultimately
successful bell. Soaring weightlessly, the camera adopts the
bird's-eye perspective of a creative spirit in full flight, driven by
inner necessity and guided by irrational faith, but in both cases
the camera returns to the earth, which imposes itself forcefully
onto the lives of the characters and onto the screen. At first
glance, the two scenes appear to be mere allegories for Andrej
Rublev himself, who rose above a brutal and crude age in the
376 ROBERT BIRD
contemplation and communication of transcendent calm and
beauty.8
Taking this allegorical approach a step further, however, one
sees that these isolated scenes of creative heroism reflect what
Tarkovskij called "the equivocal position of cinema between art
and production" (Tarkovskij, 2002: 281; 1986: 164). In both
cases the creative project is homespun medieval technology,
which uses crude pulleys and a cruel expenditure of human
labor to achieve a primal human aspiration - to fly, to ring a
bell. There occurs a literal suspension of objects - one of which
comes crashing down, one of which stays gloriously aloft and
becomes a thing of resonant beauty. So Tarkovskij, in Andrei
Rublev, employs the raw technology of cinematography to
capture the inner life of his hero within his own sense of time.
The tension in the film arises less from the anticipation of its
narrative d?nouement than from the very precariousness of the
filmmaker's own suspension of everyday reality against the
heavy pull of earth. The resulting heaviness of time merits
Zizek's particular approval:
Pervading Tarkovsky's films is the heavy gravity of the earth, which seems
to exert its pressure on time itself, generating an effect of temporal ana
morphosis, extending the dragging of time well beyond what we perceive as
justified by the requirements of narrative movement (one should confer here
on the term "earth" all the resonance it acquired in late Heidegger). [...]
This time of the Real is neither the symbolic time of the diegetic space nor
the time of the reality of our (spectator's) viewing the film. [...] This inert
insistence of time as Real, rendered pragmatically in Tarkovsky's famous
slow five-minute tracking or crane shots, is what makes Tarkovsky so
interesting for a materialist reading; without this inert texture, he would just
be another Russian religious obscurantist. (TIS: 249; FRT: 102).
Thus, as Zizek indicates, Tarkovskij's cinematic materialism is

indeed linked directly to his ideological project of sustaining
meaning, insofar as both involve immersion into living time,
understood as the obtrusive presence of the inconceivable
within human existence. Both Tarkovskij's spiritualist texts and
his materialist films therefore manifest a seemingly meaningless
and empty sacrifice, which justifies itself only as the breaking
down of comfortable fictions and the revelation of a potential
for meaning in reality and of a potential for ethical action.
In his analysis of Tarkovskij, Zizek is careful to acknowledge

the importance of Gilles Deleuze's concept of the time-image,
of which Tarkovskij's films are "perhaps the clearest example"
(TIS: 249). Yet it is not immediately clear how well Zizek's
aesthetics of defamiliarization sits with Deleuze's Bergsonian
aesthetics of attention. In a recent essay Jon Beasley-Murray
has opposed Deleuze's "time image" to Lacanian gaze theory
precisely on the issue of distanciation. He claims that the
accentuation of "the distance between spectator and screen" in
gaze theory contrasts with Deleuze's definition of the time
image as the "unfolding of the image in the real time that
becomes the lived time of thought and the body" (Beasley
Murray, 1997: 39). "Rather than entering into a relation of
distance and synchronicity established between subject and
screen (understood in terms of fetishism, disavowal, and so
on), what opens up is an 'optical unconscious' [...] in which
bodily sensation of time is prioritized over its narrative dis
junctive coding" (Beasley-Murray, 1997: 49). Zizek demon
strates that the dense temporal texture of Tarkovskij's films is
in fact due precisely to their complex distanciation from
everyday reality, their suspension of both the symbolic and
the real in pure time. In Tarkovskij's own words, he sought
to "immerse the viewer into [the heroine's] state [and] brake
the instant of this state, accentuating it" (Tarkovskij, 2002:
218; 1986: 110). The effect of this is that the various levels of
reality involved in watching a film interact in their common
suspension. Tarkovskij complained about "montage" film
makers precisely because "they don't let the film continue
beyond the borders of the screen, that is to say, they don't let
the viewer plug his own experience into what he sees before
him on celluloid" (Tarkovskij, 2002: 229; 1986: 118). The
viewer's own life is another dimension that thickens the
experience of time on the screen.
I would therefore disagree with Zizek's claim that in Tar
kovskij's films "spiritual reconciliation is found not in elevation
from the gravitational force of the earth but in a full surrender
to its inertia" (TIS: 233). The peculiar effect of Tarkovskij's
aesthetic is precisely the interplay of elevation (distance) and
gravity (immediacy), suspended together in (or as) the passage
378 ROBERT BIRD
of time. In this, Tarkovskij is fully in the tradition of Russian

aesthetics. I have already noted the Formalists' de-familiar
ization as one variety of aesthetic distance. In addition to this
purely cognitive category, however, one can cite Aleksej
Losev's concept of detachment, by which he defines the
expressive realities of art and myth.9 Losev illustrates the dif
ference between aesthetic and mythic detachment by depicting
different attitudes towards a theatrical performance. Spectators
of the performance as art do not react to the play as real events,
but remain seated regardless of the needs or actions of the
actors in their fictional roles. Art "removes us from 'reality' and
'interest'," claims Losev (Losev, 2001: 85). Myth, by contrast,
distinguishes itself from "normal reality" by manifesting
"something unexpected and almost miraculous" (op.cit., 86).
The "mythic subject" believes in myth as "literal reality,"
rushing to the stage to participate in the spectacle (ibid.). While
the spectator of an artistic performance does not believe in the
factual nature of the representation, the mythic subject expe
riences myth as reality whose meaning is different than one
would usually expect. Losev defines these two distinct types of
detachment as "detachment from the fact" (i.e., fictiveness) and
"detachment from the meaning, the idea of everyday and
normal life" (ibid.). "Myth takes the side of things that makes
sense of them and animates them, which makes them variously
detached from everything that is excessively usual, prosaic and
quotidian" (op.cit., 96). While Losev is contrasting myth and
art, he ends up basically projecting mythic detachment as a
model for all cognition, since it alone is capable of elevating
experience to understanding: "Real things are things that are
understood in some way," Losev writes (op.cit., 45). Applied
back to art, Losev's cognitive model projects an ideal of en
gaged attention and detached interpretation on the part of the
viewer, capable of both deepening the viewer's participation in
reality and broadening his apprehension of it. Tarkovskij's art
pursues a similar goal of drawing and fixing viewers' attention
upon representations in suspended time in order to deepen their
experience of lived time. Tarkovskij himself expressed this in
almost Heideggerian terms: "The goal of art is to prepare man
for death" (Tarkovskij, 2002: 141; 1986: 43).
The gap between Losev's theory of detachment and Tar
kovksy's cinema of time is bridged somewhat by Alexander
Bakshy, who came of age in symbolist Russia but became an
English-speaking theater and film critic. Bakshy's fundamental
insight was that aesthetic detachment was the condition sine
qua non of art in the modern sense. In the introduction to his
book Paths of theModern Russian Stage, Bakshy wrote:
the phenomenon of art arises neither in the work itself, nor in the spectator,
but just between them, in that line of contact and division, which is estab
lished by their reaction one upon the other. Stated in other words, this
means that a detached observation of an object asserts its reality for the
spectator, or, what is the same, brings out its form as an entity complete in
itself. But it is obvious that the object viewed must possess certain properties
that would enable it to assert itself against the spectator, and here the
distinction between a work of art and an ordinary object ismade manifest in
the greater power with which the former realizes its particular "self in the
medium selected. (Bakshy, 1918: xiv-xv; Bakshy's italics)
This insight led Bakshy to develop a highly original theory of

film as the frank presentation of fiction, rather than the simu
lative representation of reality. Bakshy postulates that the
bracketing of the fiction qua fiction would allow the spectator to
focus fully on the object, to engage with itsmeaning. Any artistic
work or performance requires a suspension of the usual laws of
reality and a tacit acceptance of its autonomous integrity. Taken
together with Losev's philosophical concept of detachment,

Bakshy's cinematic aesthetic suggests the broad contours of the
aesthetic tradition within which Tarkovskij worked.
By encouraging viewing stances of increasing attentiveness,
both Tarkovskij and Kieslowski eschewed simplistic ideological
formulae in their fictional films and stressed instead the open
potential for meaning in reality. Their suspension of reality as
fiction engages viewers' attention less through narrative
uncertainty than through a more basic anxiety about mean
inglessness, what Zizek calls a "multiple resonance of surfaces."
In Losev's terms, this aesthetic distanciation can be distin
guished from mythical detachment precisely because it affirms
not a particular meaning, hallowed by tradition and expli
cated by narrative, but the very possibility of meaning in a
380 ROBERT BIRD
dangerously empty world. In other terms common to Tarkov
skij and Zizek, this art reveals not the actualization of time in
action, but rather time itself as the potential for action.
Ambiguous as itmay seem in this provisional form, the concept
of suspension thus unites Zizek with his favored exemplars of
Eastern European cinema. In addition, the similarities between
Zizek's readings and the works of Bakshy and Losev indicate
how his insights might yield a fuller aesthetic theory, shifting
his focus from ideological platitudes to the open dialectic be
tween ideological engagement and formal distanciation. It
might even transpire that Zizek's universal appeal is rooted in
his particular background in the tradition of suspended art,
which Tarkovskij and Kieslowski made common currency in
the waning Soviet bloc.
CONCLUSION
As a materialist and Lacanian, Slavoj Zizek is naturally hostile

to any art that professes religious significance. His readings of
Tarkovskij's and Kieslowski's films are constructed in con
scious opposition to these directors' own "obscurantist" incli
nations. However Zizek's underlying position intersects with
Eastern European traditions of religious aesthetics in signifi
cant ways. First, like Nikolaj Berdjaev, Zizek stresses not the
aesthetic qualities of the artwork, but rather its status as the
artist's ethical gesture. Second, this panethicism leads Zizek to
assert that art achieves ethical meaning through a suspension of
reality in fiction. Specifically, the suspension of reality reveals it
as time and as potentially meaningful. This aesthetics of sus
pense bears comparison to other traditions in Eastern Euro
pean aesthetics, represented here by Tarkovskij, Aleksej Losev,
and Alexander Bakshy.
NOTES
1
Of course this could just be a mistake, but Zizek elsewhere demonstrates a
penchant for such games of hide-and-seek with the reader; see for example
his accidental self-ridicule in FRT: 5-6, 32-3.
2
Zizek seems to write specifically for an American academic audience; see
EYS: vii-viii.
3
The close correspondence between the thought of Lacan (and, implicitly,
of Zizek) and Kantian ethics, specifically Kant's analysis of the freedom of
the will in Critique of Practical Reason, is demonstrated by Zizek's colleague
Alenka Zupancic's book Ethics of the Real, especially the chapter "Subject
of Freedom" (2000: 21-42).
4
It should be noted that Zizek is far from the most radical denier of the
aesthetic; he calls "misplaced" the reported idea of Fredric Jameson that
Kieslowski should be held accountable for the death of the son inDecalogue
1 (RAG: 219).
5
This and all subsequent translations from the Russian are my own.
6
Here I acknowledge a suggestion by Evert van der Zweerde, who has
helped in many ways to clarify and improve my essay.
7
Zizek's arch-rival No?l Carroll has provided the most detailed analysis of
classic suspense in cinema; see Carroll 1996: 94-117.
8
For a more detailed reading see Robert Bird, Andrei Rublev (London:
BFI, forthcoming).
9
Cf. Robert Bird, "Mind the Gap: The Concept of Detachment in Aleksej
Losev's The Dialectic of Myth," Studies in East European Thought v. 56 nos.
2-3 (2004) 143-160.
REFERENCES
Bakshy, Alexander. The Path of the Modern Russian Stage and Other Es
says. John W. Luce & Company, Boston, 1918.
Jon. "Whatever Happened to Neorealism? -
Beasley-Murray, Bazin, Dele
uze, and Tarkovsky's Long Take," Iris 23 (Spring, 1997), pp. 37-52.
Berdjaev, N.A. Filosofija svobodnogo dukha. Respublika, Moscow, 1994.
Berdjaev, N.A. Filosofija tvorchestva, kul'tury i iskusstva, Vol. 1. "Liga,"
Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1994a.
Berdjaeva, Lidija. Professija: zhena filosofa, E. V. Bronnikova. (ed.) Mol
odaja gvardija, Moscow, 2002.
Bordwell, David, and No?l Carroll. Post-Theory, The University of
Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1986.
Carroll, No?l. Theorizing the Moving Image, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, New York, 1996.
De Baecque, Antoine. Andrei Tarkovski, Editions de l'?toile/Cahiers du
cin?ma, Paris, 1999.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cin?ma-2: L'image-temps, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris,
1985.
Losev, Aleksej Fedorovich. Dialektika mifa: Dopolnenie k <(Dialektike
mifa," Mysl', Moscow, 2001.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time, Kitty Hunter-Blair (Trans.), Uni
versity of Texas Press, Austin, 1986.
382 ROBERT BIRD
Tarkovskij, Andrej. Archivy, dokumenty, vospominanija. P. D. Volkova.

(ed.) EKSMO-Press, Podkova, Moscow, 2002.
Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant. Lacan. London, Verso, New
York, 2000.
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

The University of Chicago
1130 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
USA
E-mail: bird@uchicago.edu

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The Suspended Aesthetic: Slavoj Žižek on Eastern European Film

Author(s): Robert Bird

THE SUSPENDED AESTHETIC: SLAVOJ ZIZEK

ABSTRACT. Slavoj Zizek's writings on Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrej

KEY WORDS: aesthetics, aesthetic distance, Aleksej Losev, Alexander

Slavoj Zizek has devoted an important and impressive body of

Studies in East European Thought 56: 357-382, 2004.

pan-ethicism and rejection of an autonomous aesthetic realm

Slavoj Zizek not only avoids being identified in terms of

quences. A similar intellectual provocation is his repeated claim

while apt and intriguing, is fraught with many layers of com

both "post-theory" and "post-communism" on the territory

Krzysztof Piesiewicz is condemned as hopelessly "religious

reluctant to investigate the particularity (indeed, peculiarity) of

The elusive identity of Zizek's authorial voice is no mere trifle,

which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom" (FRT:

personalist. For Berdjaev, freedom meant the rejection of any

Berdjaev merges Marxist and Gnostic ideals of liberation into a

For Zizek, as for Berdjaev, all symbolic action must be

Something similar to this cosmology underlies Zizek's basic

projects: "since I cannot take hold of the Other, of the abyss

the concrete formulation of a determinate ethical obligation has the structure

Zizek stresses that this reclamation of the categorical impera

Each ethical act is a confrontation with the abyss of freedom

his adherence to Lacan, but bears deep connections to the

objectified time and reasserts lost eternity. Berdjaev embraces

CINEMA AS GEISTIGE K?RPERLICHKEIT

Zizek's analyses of Kieslowski and Tarkovskij are filled with

Jungian terms, the "point" of the planet Solaris is "simply [the]

impregnable core of subjectivity. "In fact," Zizek continues,

234). There is a grievous reduction involved in discussing a

and "real" reality was itself commentary on shortcomings of

Antoine de Baecque, highlights the scene's overwrought and

the formal discontinuities and impossibilities of his cinematic

paring Tarkovskij's film to the original novel by the brothers

materialism, both of which promote ideals of economic con

THE SUSPENDED GAZE

Throughout these passages, indeed throughout Zizek's entire

an overall aesthetic framework shared by these film-makers and

contemplation and communication of transcendent calm and

Thus, as Zizek indicates, Tarkovskij's cinematic materialism is

In his analysis of Tarkovskij, Zizek is careful to acknowledge

of time. In this, Tarkovskij is fully in the tradition of Russian

This insight led Bakshy to develop a highly original theory of

reality and a tacit acceptance of its autonomous integrity. Taken

together with Losev's philosophical concept of detachment,

dangerously empty world. In other terms common to Tarkov

As a materialist and Lacanian, Slavoj Zizek is naturally hostile

Tarkovskij, Andrej. Archivy, dokumenty, vospominanija. P. D. Volkova.

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

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