Tanisha Rowland writes: The story begins with blogger Steve Sailer’s mentioning an article of Zizek’s entitled “A plea for a return to difference (with a minor pro domo sua)”, posted in 2006 on a philosophy blog, Critical Theory. In this article Zizek summarizes Kevin MacDonald’s book, The Culture of Critique, where MacDonald analyzes the Jewish involvement in the intellectual and political movements of the 20th century, and Sailer draws particular attention to these summarized sections.
Assuming an ironic tone, Sailer writes that “a reader inclined toward deconstructionism might note that Zizek summarizes MacDonald’s controversial argument quite lucidly. In fact, the superstar professor achieves a higher degree of clarity while expounding MacDonald’s message than in any other passage I’ve read by Zizek.”
An explanation that elucidates Sailer’s suggestions came from another blogger, writing with the nickname Deogolwulf. In his online post entitled “Slavoj Zizek: Philosophaster and Plagiarist”, Deogolwulf gives glad tidings of clarity, saying: “Under the man’s name [meaning Zizek], clarity has appeared at last,” but goes on to remark that this unusual clarity in a Zizek text, discovered by Steve Sailer in Zizek’s commentaries of MacDonald, was “owed albeit not to some un-fogging of mind, but to plain old stealing”.
As demonstrated by Sailer in his side-by-side comparison of the two texts, the parts of Zizek’s article where he comments on Kevin MacDonald’s book had been stolen from an article of Stanley Hornbeck, published in 1999 in the American Renaissance magazine. His plagiarism was verbatim for the large part with a small number of passages lightly rephrased.
While plagiarism committed by such a widely recognized academic is a great scandal in itself, this case involved yet another scandal: Why did the most renowned communist intellectual of our time take so much interest in a white racist publication and its writers as to plagiarize them? The revelation that “Stanley Hornbeck” is a pen name gave the whole incident a touch of hilarity with some even alleging that Zizek assumed this pseudonym to be able to give vent to his racist views.
In a post on the internet site Critical Theory, Zizek offered an apology: “When I was writing the text on Derrida which contains the problematic passages, a friend told me about Kevin Macdonald’s theories, and I asked him to send me a brief resume. The friend sent it to me, assuring me that I can use it freely since it merely resumes another’s line of thought. Consequently, I did just that — and I sincerely apologize for not knowing that my friend’s resume was largely borrowed from Stanley Hornbeck’s review of Macdonald’s book.”
However, the problematic passages were purely informative and a report on another’s theory, Zizek claims, insisting, therefore, that what he did could not be described as plagiarism and rejecting any accusations about stealing ideas.
Zizek must have been so engrossed by the thought that for something to be regarded as an “idea”, it must incorporate some strange elements that he did not consider a report on Kevin MacDonald’s theory as an “idea”. If such a report was not regarded as an original idea, Zizek could not be called a thief of ideas as a result. However, since it is impossible for two distinct authors to comment on a theory in an exactly identical manner, any commentary on a theory and even on any piece of mainstream information is regarded as an original idea.
If this were not the case, no teacher could dismiss student assignments that contained texts copied and pasted from Wikipedia as unoriginal. Moreover, no academic journal would publish texts produced in the genre of “book review”, and even if they did, they would not put a name under them, and in this way book reviews would become a source freely looted by any person like Zizek.
