Unveiling Truths: Teaching at Saas-Fee's White Mountain College
Delve into the unique educational atmosphere at Saas-Fee’s White Mountain College, where humor plays a crucial role in engaging minds like that of Slavoj Žižek.
Peter Hulm·
Delve into the unique educational atmosphere at Saas-Fee’s White Mountain College, where humor plays a crucial role in engaging minds like that of Slavoj Žižek.
Slavoj Žižek embraces his sobriquet as “the Elvis of cultural theory”. Among the academic superstars who have regularly appeared in the Upper Valais resort of Saas-Fee since 1994 at the invitation of the Swiss-based European Graduate School (dubbed the ‘White Mountain College’ in memory of its idol, the historic Black Mountain College), the Slovene philosopher has gained an international reputation for his outrageous apothegms grounded in postmodern theory. Peter Hulm looks back over Žižek‘s career at age 75 in the year of EGS’s 30th anniversary.
“Enjoy your symptom!”, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”, “A pervert’s guide to cinema”, “Everything you wanted to know about Lacan but were afraid to ask Hitchcock”, “Enjoyment as a Political Factor”, “The art of the ridiculous sublime” — even Žižek’s title and subtitles are provocations via jokes.
No wonder wikipedia has a long section entitled “Criticism and controversy” as well as critiques of his thought within the other sections of the biography (LINK).
The British philosopher John Gray described Žižek’s work as “intellectually worthless”. Edward R. O’Neill reviewed Cogito and the Unconscious as “a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies [which] are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance.” (LINK)
Looking at what Žižek actually says may change your mind. For example, on Sigmund Freud. Žižek, professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at EGS, notes in one book that Freud only once mentions a Slovene in his works (Žižek himself was born in the Slovene capital, Ljubljana). The reference is to correspondence from 1922 with the Trieste psychoanalyst Eduardo Weiss.
Weiss’s patient was a young Slovene, just demobilized from serving in the First World War. He was “completely impotent” but also had “a thoroughly immoral Ego”. Weiss reported: “A number of people had fallen prey to his deception”.
At the same time Weiss wrote about an impotent man in middle age of “high culture and mores” whose wife had committed suicide. Freud suggested this patient should continue to be treated since he suffered simply from “exaggerated remorse”.
As for the young Slovene, Freud opined, he “is obviously a good-for-nothing who does not warrant your efforts. Our analytical art fails when faced with such people, our perspicacity alone cannot break through to the dynamic relation which controls them”.
Žižek judges that Freud’s words suggest he thinks the Slovene unworthy of psychiatric care because of “direct, superficial evil, immorality without any kind of ‘depth'”. Yet, though though the young man can exploit others without any moral scruple, the Slovene is unable to enjoy sex. Its pleasure is forbidden to him.
Freud did not understand it, but the French postmodernist Jacques Lacan provided the explanation for Žižek:
“Enjoyment itself, which we experience as ‘transgression’, is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered. When we enjoy, we never do it ‘spontaneously’. We always follow a certain injunction,” writes Žižek.
This call comes from the Freudian superego.
As an example, Žižek quotes a sketch from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. Awaiting teaching on sex education, bored schoolboys yawn in the classroom. When alerted to the teacher’s arrival, they start to make a noise, shout and throw things at each other. “The entire spectacle of wild uproar is here exclusively to impress the teacher’s gaze.”
When the boys show ignorance at sex, the teacher demonstrates penetration with his wife in front of the class. Bored, one of the boys glances through the window. The teacher asks him sarcastically: “Would you be kind enough to tell us what is so attractive out there in the courtyard?” Our amusement comes from the inverted presentation of the “normal” everyday relationship between Law (authority) and pleasure, Žižek observes.
“It exhibits in broad daylight the usually concealed truth about the ‘normal’ state of things where enjoyment is sustained by a severe superego imperative [i.e. instruction],” says the EGS professor.
One reason Freud had trouble is that the young Slovene was able to overturn the “basic psychoanalytic condition” in gouging money from his father.
“The rule of the patient’s payment is well-known: — by accepting the patient’s money, a distance is maintained between the analyst and the patient-analysand; the analyst can keep himself outside the intersubjective circuit of desire in which the analyst is caught (payment of the subjective debt, and so on. [And] Weiss wrote: ‘Some days ago, I learned that he had quoted to his father as my fee a total somewhat higher than that for which I had asked. The father […] gave the money intended for me to the patient, who retained the surplus himself’.”
In his popular book on disturbances by young people in France, Violence: six sideways reflections, Zizek similarly notes the tyranny exercised by bureaucratic “science”. Young people, told that scientifically they are objectively judged failures in their society, reacted violently against such judgements.(2008)
In the 2008 preface to Enjoy Your Symptom! (1992), Žižek asserts: “Schindler’s List is, at the most basic level, a remake of Jurassic Park (and, if anything, worse than the original), with the Nazis as the dinosaur monsters.”
About the creator of Psycho and Vertigo Žižek says: “If there is an author who epitomizes [the] pleasure of ‘estranging’ the most banal content, it is Alfred Hitchcock”, and goes on to prove it. “It is not difficult to recognize, in the typical Hitchcockian hero of the 1950s and early 1960s, the features of the ‘pathological narcissist’, the form of subjectivity that characterizes the so-called ‘society of consumption’.”
He also notes the psychological weight of various objects in Hitchcock’s films: the birds themselves in Birds, the giant ship at the end of the street where Marnie’s mother lives, giant statues in a number of films — and provides an explanation according to the postmodern psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan: they are markers of an impossible jouissance [achievement of definitive satisfaction] for the main actors.
So perhaps it should be no surprise if his latest YouTube appearance (posted on 9 December) argues “Trump is a fetish figure” (LINK), meaning he speaks to ordinary, suffering Americans — in way the Democrats did not learn — and the Democratic Party asked voters to celebrate the economy when they did not see its successes. Yet in 2016 Žižek had advised Americans to vote for Trump.
Žižek’s recommendation now: Leftists might enter into a tactical alliance with small business against big corporations. And he said of Gaza: “Israel needed this war.”
His favourite phrase seems to be when discussing theories about what is happening: “No, it’s the contrary.” And, as always, his fingers continually struggle with his pullover or his face as he talks.
As for EGS, he has praised it for “its much higher density” of talented professors and being “a place apart” offering “a creative interspace”. Its mixture of French theory and American academic style he thinks is “quite unique”. “One almost wonders, why is it that no-one else has got the formula?”
“I hate teaching [but] here I like it,” he declares.
At the age of 18, enrolled at the University of Ljubljana, Žižek (born on 21 March 1949) published the first translation of a text by Jacques Derrida into Slovenian. He mixed with dissident intellectuals and published articles in alternative magazines. wikipedia records: “In 1971 he accepted a job as an assistant researcher with the promise of tenure, but was dismissed after his Master’s thesis was denounced by the authorities as being ‘non-Marxist’.” 10 years later he was awarded a doctorate for a dissertation on French structuralists, and spent the following years in “professional wilderness”.
He translated works by Lacan, Freud and Louis Althusser. In 1986, he completed a second doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy in psychoanalysis) at the University of Paris VIII under the controversial Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller.
Žižek showed his knowledge of G.K. Chesterton and the detective novelist John Le Carré with introductions to their Slovene translations. While he was involved with Slovene civil society movements for democratization, he gained international recognition with his first book in English, on ideology, in 1989. Since then he has earned his reputation as “the most dangerous philosopher in the West” in the judgement of the VICE YouTube channel (LINK).
What makes it different for professors, too, from conventional courses, he says, is: “We share with students our work in progress.”
The European Graduate School, originally with the indication “for Interdisciplinary Studies”, has two divisions, now known as Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought (PACT) and Arts, Health & Society (AHS).
Swiss scientist Paolo Knill (1932-2020) founded the forerunner of the current EGS in 1994 to train art therapists. Wolfgang Schirmacher was founding dean of a media and communications division at EGS in 1998.
Since 2016 the Graduate School has held 24-day intensive seminars for its students from diverse academic and professional backgrounds at Valletta in Malta as well as in Saas-Fee. It also moved its registration address from Leuk to Visp. Its legal domicile remains in Saas-Fee.
Because of its approach to teaching without standard university curricula, it is not recognized by the Swiss University Conference, the main regulatory body for universities in Switzerland, though it is recognized in the Valais. Its registration with authorities in Malta means its degrees are accepted in the European Union and in the U.S. because of its connections.
wikipedia lists a panoply of faculty members in the PACT division, from film-maker Chantal Akerman, creator of what has been voted the best movie ever by the film magazine Sight and Sound, to Žižek himself. Film directors Peter Greenaway, Claire Denis, Atom Egoyan and John Waters have taught there (and I can testify to the interactivity of their classes). Alumni and students have included a co-creator of the Occupy Wall Street protests Micah White and Mexican actor/film-maker Gael García Bernal.
One example of EGS’s links with other host countries comes from the Expressive Arts Division. Its annual symposium next year will take place in Costa Rica in April under the title Expressive Artscape: Playing with Artistic Intelligence (AI). In March 2025 the division is offering a four-day course in Valletta on Health-building and the Expressive Arts: Trauma Informed Practice in Communities and Society.
The current President, Prof. Christopher Fynsk, has steered EGS towards a strategic plan for 2025-2030 to be adopted in December.
In his first statement under this plan, he explains that EGS “seeks to enable forms of modern thought and interactive practice that embody new syntheses of human knowledge and possibilities of worldly engagement. […] The EGS also seeks to foster joy in intellectual challenge and free inquiry, leaving behind stultifying structures for the administration of knowledge. […] Significant past success […] (with mature students who have already secured paths in architecture, law, finance, museum curation, psychoanalysis or the arts) point to the possibility of redefining the very meaning of the phrase, ‘continuing education’.” (LINK)
On its website EGS points that that it “has functioned wholly on the basis of tuition since the time of its founding in 1998. It has not enjoyed state subsidies or significant patronage of any kind. Nor does it have an endowment. Those who founded the institution wanted to preserve a very ‘pure’ construction.”
Come 2018 and 2019, like other institutions with international student bodies, EGS registrations took a hit: down more than 20%. Then COVID-19 was declared an international pandemic and its finances were in obvious difficulty.
“Some may wonder how an institution that employs such famous faculty should face financial constraints,” the website notes. “But the EGS has never drawn large numbers to its beautiful (and remote) locations, and it has always directed its proceeds to its classrooms, devoting almost all of its resources to faculty honoraria and related costs. The modest functioning of the programs was actually considered something of a blessing — it provided for an ideal teaching situation. And the EGS never sought to ‘monetize’ the exceptional faculty resources it held in the PACT Division. Rather, it sought to strengthen its devotion to a set of intellectual ideals and enhance the quality of its offerings. It functioned (and sought to function) essentially as an intellectual society devoted to teaching. The fact that the distinguished faculty returned year after year speaks to the exceptional conditions that were nurtured.” (LINK)
EGS observes: “We must enhance our income streams and continue to streamline our costs, even as ensure ongoing renewal of our programming and preserve the quality of what we offer. We must develop the resources required for effective marketing, and we must strengthen an overburdened administrative team. We therefore continue our efforts in fundraising and the development of partnerships with institutions around the world. But we must also begin to take a series of modest steps such as charging small fees for particularly popular speakers. By this means, we will advertise our need and also gain the means to subsidize events involving lesser known (but important) researchers we wish to bring to the attention of our public.”
And it talks about expanding its campus to include a library and more meeting rooms.
The PACT division is continuing to offer discounted online courses introduced as a result of COVID and a no-credit auditing facility online and in person. It points out: “Our normal faculty are all participating.”
Peter Hulm received his Ph.D. from EGs in 2004 and is its advisor in innovative journalism (though he has done little to deserve this title). He did NOT study with Slavoj Žižek but was just by chance, not a choice.
Peter Hulm’s writings on EGS and its faculty:
Chantal Akerman – In search of lost culture. 3 December 2022 (LINK)
“I’ll kill myself at 80,” said film innovator Peter Greenaway. 11 April 2022 (LINK)
Baudrillard’s Bastards: ‘Pataphysics after the Orgy. 2008 (LINK)
Unheimlich maneuvers: Live8 and the media. Poesis 8 (LINK)
Exploring the secrets of Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’. (LINK)
Agnès Varda: a maker of ‘home movie’ masterpieces — and much much more (LINK)