In the May 1968 issue of Poetry magazine, Adrienne Rich published a poem entitled ‘The Break’ (Rich Reference Rich1968). Its final stanza concludes with the following imperative, a command that would be dutifully fulfilled in the rebellious months to come:

With its ruddy (if not quite red) invocation of October, its impenitent sexual demands, its schoolhouse visions of uprising, the poem announces May ’68 to itself; ‘The Break’ limns the social forces that, in the month of its publication, would sweep the corners of the globe. In one of those corners, in the alternative culture of a marginal republic of a non-aligned nation, a 19-year-old Slavoj Žižek was publishing his very first texts. He, too, was writing poetry, and he, too, was drawn to the concept of a ‘break’.

In the May–June 1968 issue of Problemi, Žižek published his first contribution in the Slovenian-language journal that would, several decades later, go on to become the de-facto publication arm of the Ljubljana School, the Lacano-Hegelian theoretical movement that Žižek would come to champion. But, at the time, Problemi was not yet beholden to that philosophical platform, and neither was Žižek; his first texts focused not on Lacan and Hegel, but on Derrida and Heidegger. This first contribution to the journal was entitled ‘Spraševanje gotovosti I: Teze preloma razpornosti’ (The interrogation of certainty I: theses on the break of splitting) and offered a poem-treatise on Heideggerian and Derridean notions of being and difference.

The piece’s subtitle evinces how pervasively the imagery of rupture dominated Žižek’s early work. The language of the poem-treatise is paragrammatical, wresting notions of bifurcation from Heidegger’s German and Derrida’s French into inventive, if occasionally incorrect, Slovenian. The poetics of rupture come to a head in the piece’s centre (Žižek Reference Žižek1968a, 845):

1. 1.21 being splits, Being is split:

2. 1.211 Being is a relation to being. (3)

3. 1.22 The split disappears in the division of the gathered.

Or, in the original:Footnote ¹

1. 1.21 Bivajoče se razpre, bit je razprtost:

2. 1.211 Bit je odnos do bivajočega. (3)

3. 1.22 Razpor se izmakne v razprtost branega.

The ‘razpor’ of the final line has an archaic flair in Slovenian; it is the kind of split that would divide villages and part clouds. In the piece’s subtitle, ‘Teze preloma razpornosti’, the ‘razpor’ is elevated to the kind of noun which demarks an essence, a state of being. A more accurate, if less accessible, translation would be: ‘Theses on the break of splitedness’. The poem-treatise’s repetition of ‘raz-’ – the Slovenian prefix for separation, ‘dis-’ – further emphasizes Žižek’s fascination with the theoretical topography of rupture.

In fact, just a few months later, in the July–August 1968 issue of Problemi, Žižek would go on to publish another piece that further developed the theoretical stakes of the ‘break’. This particular edition of Problemi was a special issue (subtitled Katalog), which was devoted to work by members of the OHO group, an artistic collective that was active between 1966 and 1971. OHO – the name comes from a portmanteau of the Slovenian words for eye and ear (oko and uho, respectively) – ‘gathered around a doctrine described by Taras Kermauner as reist’ in his attempt to grasp ‘the penchant of Slovenian poets for placing the word at the center of focus’ (Djurić Reference Djurić, Djurić and Šuvaković2003: 82). Žižek collaborated with OHO several times (see Jakovljević Reference Jakovljević2016, 230–233). His piece in Katalog was entitled (in English in the original) ‘The spy who loved me’, and features theoretical fragments that are interspersed with excerpts from Ian Fleming’s novel, with no explicit relevance. For instance, the piece begins with this juxtaposition of a citation from Fleming (in English), which is immediately followed by Žižek’s original text (Žižek Reference Žižek1968b, 123; in Slovenian, preceded here by my English translation):

In the first line of the theoretical portion, Žižek invokes the same imagery of rupture that was seen in his first piece; he repeats the same ‘break’ (‘prelom’) from the poem-treatise’s subtitle, and this time modulates it into a more political key: a ‘revolutionary break’. In addition to this new political dimension, Žižek also develops the concept of the ‘split’ (‘razpor’). He writes (Žižek Reference Žižek1968b, 123): ‘The split splits: the “absence of the world” reveals the plurality of PLAY as the “im-purity” of the source. What is happening is the splitting of BEING.’ (‘Razpor razpira: “odsotnost sveta” odstira pluralnost IGRE kot “ne-čistosti” izvora. Dogaja se razpornost BITJA.’) Compounding this more developed notion of the split’s negative ontology, the piece’s formal innovation and generic indeterminacy performs its own type of break. The text alternates between the two modes sampled above no fewer than five times, alternating between Fleming’s fiction (in English) and a programme for structuralism (in Slovenian). This montage itself performs a kind of split-screen, thus gesturing towards a formal manifestation of the text’s more abstract ontological concerns.

In fact, this tactic of using formal innovation as a way to explore theoretical claims endured as a feature of Žižek’s early work. A year later, in 1969, Žižek published another experimental piece in the OHO group’s collection Pericarežeracirep (the text mentions that the collection had been completed two years earlier, but no dates for the composition of individual texts are given). The collection was named after a Slovenian palindrome (which translates literally as: ‘The washerwoman cuts the duck’s tail’), and featured visual and verbal poetry from Tomaž Šalamun, Vojin Kovač – Chubby, Iztok Geister – Plamen and Marko Pogačnik, among others. Like Žižek’s other early work, his contributions can be described as poem-treatises; they likewise mixed formal provocation with theoretical experimentation, and, somewhat gratuitously, referenced James Bond.

For instance, one of his contributions to Pericarežeracirep was entitled ‘Octopussy, ali o [t]istem’ (Octopussy, or about the [very] same). In this piece, the experimentation shifts from generic jostling to the disintegration of language itself. The piece deals in extensive phonemic play, making it effectively untranslatable. However, in essence, Žižek breaks apart the words razlog (‘reason’, ‘cause’) and vloga (‘role’, ‘function’), drawing attention to their contrasting prefixes (raz- and v-, which mark displacement and inclusion respectively), and playing on their shared root (log). The extent to which these words are sundered can be seen even by non-Slovenian speakers due to the poem’s extensive hyphenation (none of which is naturally occurring in Slovenian):

By breaking these words apart into their prefixes and roots, Žižek conjures the meanings of the etymological components of razlog and vloga (literally ‘dis-placement’ and ‘en-placement, respectively) in addition to their common meanings (as ‘reason’ and ‘role’). In effect, this move renders language itself into Heidegger’s proverbial hammer – an illustration of the distinction between the functional, everyday usages that are ready-to-hand (zuhanden) and the broken-apart, etymological components that stand out to us as present-at-hand (vorhanden). Yet another experiment in the aesthetics of the ‘break’, this poem moves closer to the theoretical conception of the ‘break’ that would soon become a focal point in Žižek’s work.

In 1972, Žižek published his first book, Bolečina razlike (The Pain of Difference), in which the proverbial red thread is the concept of a break – razdor. The change in terminology (the one-letter difference between razpor and razdor) seemingly served to bring the concept closer to Heidegger’s notion of ein Bruch, which, like razdor, is a more quotidian word for ‘break’. On the very first page of this text, Žižek cites a somewhat unusual segment from Heidegger and Fink’s lecture on Heraclitus, in which Žižek (Reference Žižek1972, 5) has strung together several excerpted statements by Heidegger (Heidegger and Fink Reference Heidegger, Fink and Seibert1979, 87–88):

This makes for a conspicuous beginning, as the string of excerpted comments effectively turns Heidegger’s original dialogue with Fink (which is markedly lucid) into a series of non-sequiturs. In fact, as the text progresses, the placement of this somewhat stilted introductory quotation is underscored. In the third and final chapter, Žižek (Reference Žižek1972, 40) twice poses the question: ‘Why begin a text about language according to Heidegger with a break?’ (‘Zakaj pričeti spis o govorici pri Heideggru z razdorom?’)

In fact, Žižek not only begins his first book with the concept of the break, but also applies this concept to different theoretical problems throughout the entire text. In the first chapter, ‘Zveneči prelom’ (The sonorous fracture), he (Žižek Reference Žižek1972, 6) employs the concept of the break (razdor) as that which ‘marks the duality of man as Dasein (his essence) and the danger of his mundanisation in fulfilled self-availability’ (‘zaznamuje dvojnost človeka kot tu-biti (njegovega bistva) in nevarnosti njegove mundanizicije v izpolnjeni samo-razpoložljivosti’). In the second chapter, ‘Nemi prelom’ (The silent fracture), this razdor is that which marks the closure of appearances, understood in a distinctly Derridean (non-logocentric) sense. See, for instance (Žižek Reference Žižek1972, 35, emphasis in original): ‘This “radicalization” enables Heidegger to reveal the closure, marked with the break, as such: the relation-ship as mirror-screen, which is the very sameness-in-the-same as thinking and being, relationship-void from which presence is revealed; therefore the closure of appearance.’ (‘Ta “radikalizacija” omogoča Heideggru, da izpostavi ZAPORO, zaznamovano z razdorom, KOT TAKO: od-nos kot zrcalo-ekran, ki je sama Istost v Isto je mišljenje in bit, odnos-jasnino, od koder se prisotno lahko prikaže, torej zaporo kaznosti.’) Finally, in the last chapter, Žižek claims that it is the concept of the break, fused with the Heideggerian concept of movement (Bewegung), which allows for one Derridean answer to three Heideggerian problems (Žižek Reference Žižek1972, 40, emphasis in original): ‘the question of the body, the break of silence and the relationship between Dasein and Being, that is, three issues that mean the same thing and about which Heidegger himself recognizes that they pose “difficulties” – these three questions direct us to the source of break of the surface: elliptical inscription’ (‘vprašanje telesa, preloma tišine in odnosa med tu-bitjo in bitjo, torej troje vprašanj, ki pomenijo isto in glede katerih sam Heidegger pripozna, da gre za “težave”, ta tri vprašanja nas napotevajo k viru razdora površine: eliptično vpisovanje’).

In this text, the break is ultimately the precondition for the intervention of Derrida’s inscription into Heideggerian language theory. Thus, it is the concept of the break itself which delivers this analysis of Heideggerian language theory into a distinctly French-structuralist register. The very last pages of Bolečina razlike include a brief (paragraph-long) engagement with Lacan’s notion of the Big Other, the Symbolic, and suggest that it is precisely this concept that provides a way out of the deadlock of Heidegger’s thought. The final page of the text (Žižek Reference Žižek1972, 67) – ‘Namesto zaključka’ (In place of a conclusion) – both disclaims the text’s status as an ‘uncertain experiment’ (‘negotov poiskus’) and also foreshadows the development of Žižek’s thought, noting that ‘for a basic understanding we can only follow the path of the work of Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Lacan, and others’ (‘za temeljno razumevanje lahko le napotimo v dela J. Kristeve, J. Derridaja, P. Sollersa, J. Lacana itd.’). Thus, Bolečina razlike prefigures Žižek’s intellectual development both by introducing the figure of Lacan and by establishing the primacy of the concept of the break.

However, despite the consistency of the notion of the break, the book lacks theoretical as well as linguistic clarity. To give an idea of how thoroughly untethered this text is, it is worth mentioning that the text owes its title as well as several major theoretical points to Heidegger’s essay, On the Way to Language, and yet completely excises the centrepiece of that essay, which is Georg Trakl’s poem ‘A Winter Evening’ (‘Ein Winterabend’). The very phrase ‘pain of difference’ is beholden to Heidegger’s reading of the tenth line of Trakl’s (Reference Trakl and Stillmark2005, 60–61) poem: ‘Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle’ (‘Pain has petrified the threshold’), which Heidegger (Reference Heidegger and Hofstadter1971, 204) abstracts into: ‘Pain joins the rift of dif-ference. Pain is the dif-ference itself.’ Žižek’s title, Bolečina razlike, clearly descends from this interpretation (and Žižek includes the above quote from Heidegger in the text), yet Žižek never mentions that his bolečina descends from Trakl’s Schmerz. This omission serves as an indication of the extent to which everything beyond the purview of pure theory has been removed from this text.

In addition to the complete absence of any kind of application or example of the various theoretical positions included in Bolečina razlike, the book is made even less accessible by virtue of the language it employs. Žižek’s first book is littered with philosophical terminology that has been somewhat tortuously calqued into Slovenian from both Heidegger’s German and Derrida’s French, neither of which survive translation very well. Laden with unusual participles (enotujoče), invented nominalizations (godevanje for Heidegger’s Eignen) and liberal hyphenations (po-potenje as a rendering of Heidegger’s Bewegung), the text requires of the reader a kind of theoretical-linguistic calisthenics in order to simply follow the line of argument.

A certain amount of this ambiguity comes from the particularity of the language play that animates both Heideggerian and Derridean discourse, but the fact that many of these terms and concepts were entering Slovenian for the first time, absent of any consensus regarding how they should be translated, results in some especially perplexing renderings. For instance, Žižek translates Derrida’s concept of différance into Slovenian as ‘razloka’ (Žižek Reference Žižek1972, 70, n. 4). Apart from indicating that the term comes from Derrida, he provides no further explanation of the origin of the unusual calque. In fact, Žižek had first coined – and justified – this translation in the article ‘Spraševanje gotovosti II’ (The interrogation of certainty II), which was published in Problemi in 1969. There, in a note on the term razloka, Žižek (Reference Žižek1969b, 286) explains that although razloka loses the homophony upon which Derrida’s concept is grounded (that is to say, diffèrance is pronounced the same as diffèrence, whereas this homophony is lost in the pairing of razlika and razloka), this translation has the added benefit of the earlier meanings of razloka in Slovenian as ‘diereza’ (‘dieresis’), which means both ‘a break in verse between two [metrical] feet’ and ‘the separate pronunciation of two neighbouring vowels’ (‘premor v verzu med dvema stopicama; ločena izreka dveh sosednih samoglasnikov’). Žižek defends this choice by arguing as follows: ‘With this translation we at least get somewhat closer to the double meaning of the original: to distinguish and a break or interval; [pre-mor], death in life, etc., the “dead” rest or beat that postpones the pronunciation of the second vowel.’ (‘S tem prevodom se vsaj nekoliko približamo dvojnemu pomenu izvirnika: razloka-razločiti in razloka-premor, interval: pre-mor, mrtvo v živem itd., “mrtvi” odmor, ki odloži izreko drugega samoglasnika.’) Although Žižek’s translation of diffèrance as razloka did take hold for a certain period, later Slovenian translations would adopt the arguably more faithful razlîka, which, like diffèrance, is pronounced the same as razlika, the ordinary Slovenian word for difference, and can only be distinguished in written form. (This tendency begins to take hold in the 1990s and is explicitly defended by Uroš Grilc, who, incidentally, would go on to become the Slovenian Minister of Culture in 2013; see Grilc Reference Grilc2001, 14–17.) However, Žižek’s usage of razloka in Bolečina razlike reveals the nature of the burgeoning discourse community in Ljubljana in the 1970s. The fact that a young Žižek could have expected his audience to be able to gloss an unusual calque that he had coined three years prior indicates that his intended audience was limited to those who had followed Problemi fairly closely for several years.

Despite the prematurity of Bolečina razlike, despite its apparent obsolescence and sheer abstruseness, this text is important to the intellectual history of Slavoj Žižek as well as the Ljubljana School more broadly, precisely because it offers the first glimpse of the break – a concept that would go on to feature as a critical concept in the intellectual history of the Ljubljana School. After all, it is the central, if slightly more developed, concept of a retroactive cut which allowed the Ljubljana School to pair a materialist reading of Hegel’s cut into Being with the Lacanian psychoanalytic split subject, thus establishing the cornerstone of their theoretical apparatus. From Žižek’s very first text (Žižek Reference Žižek1972), through Alenka Zupančič’s work on Kant (Zupančič Reference Zupančič2000) and Mladen Dolar’s work on materialism (Dolar Reference Dolar2013), this concept of a constitutive, retroactive cut through repetition has endured as one of the central tenets of the Ljubljana School’s thought, and it is the nuances of their conception of the cut which set them apart from other prominent spatial metaphors in continental philosophy, such as Badiou’s exception or Deleuze’s difference. Through more than three decades of the Ljubljana School’s development, the concept of this cut or split or break – in Slovenian, razcep, razkol, razdor – remains the centrepiece of the School’s philosophical agenda. (These terms are used somewhat interchangeably in naming the same philosophical concept in both the English-language and Slovenian-language work of the Ljubljana School; there are some important distinctions and nuances that I hope to analyse at a later time.) As Mladen Dolar noted in an interview with Mladina published in January 2015:

This article has covered Slavoj Žižek’s first ‘break’ in two senses. On one level, it traces how Žižek’s notion of the ‘break’ developed, from his first usage of razpor in his poem-treatises of 1968, to the refined notion of razdor in Bolečina razlike, finally into the later usage of razcep, which would go on to become a central concept for the entire Ljubljana School. But on another level, it refers to Žižek’s own early history – his first break onto the theory scene – and in so doing, draws attention to texts that have been thoroughly extracted from both international and domestic receptions of Žižek’s oeuvre. Even despite challenges of linguistic access, the silence around these texts is, to me, somewhat puzzling.

It is true that, for instance, Žižek has rebuked the book, and some in Ljubljana have interpreted this as an effective moratorium on discussing the text (or indeed exposing it to English-language audiences). However, given the dynamism and verve of intellectual discourse in Ljubljana, I find it unlikely that this reason alone is responsible for the silence surrounding Bolečina razlike. It seems more likely that the text is unattended because it is Žižek’s proverbial first pancake – both raw and burnt, decisively lumpy with overwrought terminology, this text has been ignored in favour of the later English-language texts that would turn Žižek into a dorm-room (if not quite household) name. It seems that, in general, Slovenian-language philosophical discourse is more interested in engaging the current forefront of (global) critical theory than in reflecting upon its (local) past.

Bolečina razlike is a false start of sorts, but it deserves attention precisely because an analysis of its raw, rudimentary and somewhat unfashionable argument can yield a more robust and contextual appraisal of the works that followed. It can show, for instance, how the imagery of rupture – born in 1968 of a global moment of revolutionary poetics – informed a theoretical sensibility that would gain global recognition in the late 1980s, just in time for the next generation of revolutionary spirit. In this article, I have tried to briefly show how Žižek’s notion of the break developed, from his first usage of razpor in his poem-treatises of 1968, to the refined notion of razdor in Bolečina razlike, finally into the later usage of razcep, which would go on to become a central concept for the entire Ljubljana School. Despite shifting theoretical allegiances, despite the subsequent privileging of Lacan and Hegel over Heidegger and Derrida, I would argue that the endurance of the concept of the break proves that these two chapters in Slavoj Žižek’s intellectual history aren’t at odds. In fact, this sentiment is reflected in what is one of the very few allusions to Bolečina razlike in Slovenian cultural production. It comes from Laibach’s 1986 label to the ‘organigram’ that outlined the different sections of Neue Slowenische Kunst (quoted in Mo Reference Mo, Jeklič and Soban2015), and reads: ‘The head is the head, the hand is the hand, and the differences between them aren’t painful.’ (‘Glava je glava, roka je roka, razlike med njima pa niso boleče.’)