The suspended aesthetic

Slavoj Žižek on Eastern European film

Robert Bird

pp. 357-382

in: Evert van der Zweerde (ed), The many faces of Slavoj Žižek's radicalism, Studies in East European Thought 56 (4), 2004.

Abstract

Slavoj Žižek's writings on Krzysztof Kies´lowski 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 Kies´lowski and Tarkovskij from popular culture and stresses their import as ethical statements by their directors. Despite this ethical emphasis, Žižek makes an important contribution to philosophical aesthetics. He implicitly defines art as a suspension of reality which reveals time in its fragility and potentiality. Defining Žižek'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.

Cited authors

Tarkovskij Andrej

Žižek Slavoj