Ever wonder what type of chair Vladimir Nabokov sat on when he carefully penned the introduction to Bend Sinister, a precocious retort exclaiming, in effect, Freudians fuck off? How about what Simone de Beauvoir stuffed her face with come lunch time during the mammoth writing task that was The Second Sex? How many jars of whiskey surrounded Charles Bukowski as he spat out the prose that was to make up Post Office?

These are questions lacking an answer; a patchwork of texts that conceals the author, throwing up a wall from which we can only resort to sheer conjecture as to precisely what Woody Allen had in his coffee the day he thought up the story about the hookers paid for their ability to discuss Milton ("The Whore of Mensa"). These are disembodied reams of words, cut off from the wordsmith who suffered their conception, yet they somehow remain inextricably linked to that mind of origin.

Who were these men and women who were to express with such sublime triumph their talents for merging language and the floating images of consciousness? Despite the tidbits of inference afforded us, the convoluted mediation process hinders any clear-sighted gaze we’d wish to possess; the question is: where is the window?

Zizek! is one such window. This documentary, produced in 2005, takes on the task of following its eponymous subject, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, as he treks from one teeming mass of hungry young leftists to another, visiting university campuses all over the globe, forever articulating in suitably spectacular fashion all the tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis, a complex web of obtuse terminology and esoteric concepts read through as many multifarious and multifaceted cultural objects as possible.

Lobbed up on stage, serrated by the roar of the baying crowd, Zizek can orate for hours on the exact dimensions of ideology, interweaving his theoretical delineation with accessible examples ranging from Hitchcock to chocolate laxatives. Never shying away from inserting the odd obscenity, or the old Stalinist joke, or a witty rebuttal to some insolent query, he exudes confidence and erudition on stage, connecting with fresh-faced students high on Foucault by dissecting the culture of the quotidian, shirking ivory tower banalities by singing in a key comprehendible to those perhaps yet unaccustomed with Schelling.

But we all know this. Zizek’s competence in relaying his rereading of Hegel, his manic rescue of the German philosopher from the bowels of Idealism’s dark netherworlds, this comes across in the myriad of lecture videos swimming ashore on YouTube every week. His analysis of the Marx Brothers in terms of Freud’s id/ego/superego triad and such like, wasn’t this all presented with subtle ingenuity in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema? It was indeed. So, where’s the attraction of this film?

Quite clearly, what interests us here are the sequences that punctuate the engagements of public speaking. The film truly comes alive for the first time during a visit to Zizek’s residence, wherein he shows us his preference for storing clothes in the cabinets gracing the walls of his kitchen, commenting enthusiastically about this arrangement, everything found in one small corner. These personal little unveilings are the warm heart of the film; witness Zizek as he explains to filmmaker Astra Taylor the portrait of Stalin that greets all visitors to his office, or his hyperactive exuberance in purchasing DVDs from a store in New York, or his jocular reproach to the congress of vegetarians constituting the film crew as he cries out for a meat-fueled lunch.