By Ihsan Gursoy
ANKARA
Published on Dec. 9 on the website of the U.K.'s New Statesman magazine, Slavoj Zizek's article entitled "We need to talk about Turkey" and aimed at associating Turkey with the Daesh terrorist organization, was criticized for attributing the claims of a website -- notorious for fabricating news -- to Anadolu Agency, for running afoul of the ethics of proper citation, and for containing, precisely because of these reasons, quite a bit of black propaganda material.
In an article published on Dec. 9, Anadolu Agency’s In-Depth News Analysis Department accused New Statesman of failing to comply with editorial ethics and Zizek of trampling on the ethics of accurate citation.
Another plagiarism debate, not covered by the Turkish media at all, reveals that the popular academic has “far greater sins” in his personal record regarding citation ethics. Roughly a summary of the debate in question, Zizek’s article on Turkey seeks to compensate for the Turkish media's lack of interest about plagiarism accusations leveled against the most popular communist intellectual of our day.
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.
Let us give an embarrassingly simple example in order to further expand on such a clear issue: If Zizek gave one of his students an assignment to write a book review, and this student brought him a critique that he copied and pasted from another writer, Zizek would raise no objections and accept this assignment as legitimate.
But the explanation Zizek gives as an apology is even stranger than our example: A friend wrote it! "A friend" whose ridiculous adventures were recounted in friendly chats for centuries and whose problems we sometimes blushingly conveyed to a doctor finally joined the academic community as well, where he embarrassed our famous thinker.
As a matter of fact, there are academic procedures that would surely spare one such an embarrassment but these procedures apparently had not occurred to Zizek. To be able to use "a friend's" summary in your article, you should have clearly cited the name of "a friend" to whom the summary belonged. Intellectual dignity and honesty would require this. Let alone a written text, in order to use a piece of information related to you orally in a private conversation, you should have cited the name of the person who related the information to you. If you violate these codes of ethics and claim the summary of "a friend" about a theory as your own intellectual property, then you inherit all the academic sins committed by that friend as well.
Although Zizek insists on not disclosing this friend's name, a joke caught on in intellectual circles: "A friend" who could drag Zizek into this trap could be none other than Chomsky. The fact that the article that Zizek plagiarized had been published in a racist magazine brings to mind another case where he had attributed a racist quote to Chomsky some years ago for which he was eventually obliged to apologize as well.
These, in fact, are not rare apologies that Zizek has had to offer regarding plagiarisms and sloppy quotes and citations. When it was told him that in his book Violence he had "lifted" a paragraph from Jean-Marie Muller's book entitled “Non-Violence in Education”, he pinned the blame on his publisher.
On another occasion, when the New York Times rebuked him for plagiarizing his own work after publishing his article entitled "ISIS is a True Disgrace to Fundamentalism", he defended himself saying that he saw no harm in using passages from his previously published texts.
All of the cases reported thus far demonstrate that Slavoj Zizek has been confirmed by the media and the academic community as a writer who not only violates the ethics of accurate citation but also totally abuses it, who does not quite know how to properly use sources or who, despite knowing, insists on quoting non-existent sources in particular.
