Answer from Profile Books in re Zizek

I've been in contact with Penny Daniel, managing editor and rights director at Profile Books, about the apparently inadvertent plagiarism of Jean-Marie Muller in Slavoj Zizek's Violence (Profile, 2008) that I blogged about earlier this month. Zizek, you might recall, blamed the error on his publisher, saying that his manuscript had been changed "without [his] knowledge" before publication. To me, this raised some questions.

The answer from Profile is a bit disappointing, but probably as forthcoming as can be expected. Daniel explains that they no longer have the page proofs or any other relevant files so, while she "can neither confirm nor deny what actually happened", and while it would be somewhat at odds with their "usual practice", it is probably true that a copy editor mistakenly formatted what should have been a block quote as a separate paragraph and thereafter inserted the description of Simone Weil as a French religious thinker "out of a desire to help the reader" without informing Zizek. She assumes that Zizek was given page proofs to review before publication and regrets that the error wasn't caught until now. I get the impression that it will be corrected in any subsequent editions of the book.

This will have to do, though it doesn't answer all my questions. There seem to be plenty of stylistic differences between what Zizek describes as "the last version [he has] of the complete manuscript (already copy-edited by the publisher)" and the printed version of the book, for example. I asked Daniel about this since it suggests that the manuscript Zizek has made public is not the last version that was seen by the eyes of a copy editor. Unfortunately, she had no further comment on the matter, citing, like I say, the fact that this all happened six years ago.

I'm working on a final post on this issue, which I'll probably post on Friday. For those who are interested, Adam Kotsko has in the meantime offered a defence of Zizek to keep the conversation going. I'll have some thoughts on his argument in my next post.