Slavoj Zizek. Photo by Neotint

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek turned up at Zuccotti Park to address the Occupy Wall Street demonstration on Sunday, offering up a seminar on Radicalism 101 for an appreciative crowd.

Despite some difficulty with the Human Microphone—the sometimes unwieldy but strangely appealing system the protesters have adopted of repeating a speaker's words, phrase by phrase, for the benefit of the crowd—he held the floor for the better part of an hour.

Standing above the assembly in a red T-shirt, the heavily bearded dissident–turned–academic superstar at first spoke from prepared notes, hitting on many themes that will be familiar to fans. Several riffs were recycled almost word-for-word from earlier talks included in the 2005 documentary Žižek!, but to be fair, they killed at the time and are perhaps even more relevant today.

He told, for instance, an old Eastern Bloc joke (borrowed from the introduction to 2002's Welcome to the Desert of the Real) about a dissident who's about to be sent to a work camp in Siberia. Since he knows his letters will be censored, he tells his friends he'll write to them using a simple code: Blue ink for the truth, red ink for lies. His first letter arrives, and it's a glowing report of life in the camp—a lovely apartment, great food, beautiful women. Then he concludes, "The only thing we can't get is red ink."

Occupy Wall Street, he explained told the crowd, is pointing out the lies that underlie American capitalist society. "You're the red ink," he said.

Mr. Žižek also offered some practical advice. Noting the festive atmosphere in the park, he warned, "Don't fall in love with yourselves. Carnivals come cheap." The meaningful work will be what comes afterwards.

He steered the discussion away from the Cold War debate between communism and capitalism, noting that former communists, particularly in China, "are today the most efficient, brutal capitalists."

The communist revolution "failed absolutely," he said, suggesting that "the only way we are communist is that we care about the commons," citing the environment as an example.

Mr. Žižek suggested that the left "abandon certain taboos," including hard work, discipline and following orders, if they support the agreed-upon goals. And he advocated reclaiming certain notions that had been adopted by the right wing, including family values.

Somewhat controversially, he described organic food as a "pseudo-activity," designed to make consumers feel they are having a positive impact on the world and thereby absolving them from looking at the more destructive systemic issues.

Noting that he supports George Soros, he compared the lefty billionaire financier to a chocolate laxative. Since chocolate is said to be constipating, he explained—a controversial point—Mr. Soros is similarly exhibiting an internal contradiction. "First they take billions from you, then they give back half," he said. "And that makes them the world's greatest humanitarians." Take the money, sure, he advised, but don't stop fighting to overturn a system that makes it necessary.

In answer to one question, he suggested that Organize Wall Street embrace the Tea Party rather than be seen as its opposite. "The tragedy is that many of the Tea Party people should be on our side," he said. "That's where we should work. They may be stupid, but don't look at them as the enemy."

The most interesting bit of advice may have been a little hard to parse for some, but given that this quickly spreading movement seems still to be in its infancy and unsure about how to proceed, it seemed especially worth pondering: "People often desire something but don't really want it," Mr. Žižek told the crowd. "Don't be afraid to want what you desire."

On July 28 from 6 to 8pm, Mr. Abreu is hosting a book event for his star artist,  the painter R.H. Quaytman, who is a standout at this year's Venice Biennale, and was a star of last year's Whitney Biennial. Ms. Quaytman has a thick -- 400 pages!--new monograph out from Sequence Press, in collaboration with Sternberg Press and Kunsthalle Basel, the museum in Basel, Switzerland, that currently has a show of her work.

Sharing the evening's bill with Ms. Quaytman's book is the latest installment in the publisher Urbanomic's limited edition "Collapse" series, called Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism. From its description, the book appears to -- well, let's say it adds a gristley poststructuralist chapter to the current craze for Michael Pollan-ish foodie-ism. Isn't it high time theory made it's plodding way into the kitchen? Chew on this, foodies:

Is it possible to maintain that cookery has a philosophical pertinence without merely appending philosophy to our burgeoning gastroculture? How might the everyday sense of the culinary be expanded into a culinary materialism  wherein synthesis, experimentation, and operations of mixing and blending take precedence over analysis, subtraction, and axiomatisation? Drawing on resources ranging from anthropology to chemistry, from hermetic alchemy to contemporary mathematics, Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism undertakes a trans-modal experiment in culinary thinking, excavating the cultural, industrial, physiological, chemical and even cosmic grounds of cookery, and proposing new models of culinary thought for the future.

"Hermetic alchemy"? "Cosmic grounds"? Aside from a feast at Peter Luger's, has food ever been quite this heavy? Considering that essays include "Black Cake (A Recipe for Emily Dickinson, for Emily Dickinson)", "Whey To Go: On the Hominid Appropriation of the Pig-Function", "Spiritual Meat: Resurrection and Religious Horror in Bataille", and  "Corn Bomb: An Extended History of Nitrogen", we're not sure whether to be frightened or excited to hear that it comes with an appendix of recipes.

Then again, one essay is called "Reason in the Roasting of Eggs." Assuming reason is not some weird new spice, it's about time someone brought it to the roasting of eggs. Let them eat corn bombs...

Gaga, under wraps.

Slavoj Žižek speaks out after a group of anti-authoritarian communists called the Deterritorial Support Grouppppp slandered him by spreading false rumors that he and Lady Gaga were dating -- news that was picked up by The New York Post and other publications.

Speaking to the Guardian this weekend, Žižek said, "But fuck it, let's speak frankly, no bullshit, most of the left hates me even though I am supposed to be one of the world's leading communist intellectuals."

He concluded: "My mistake was that I should not have categorically denied a relationship to the press. I should have said 'no comment', leaving a gap for the obscene possibility that I am her lover."

Despite L-train maintenance and the kind of steady rain that can wreck perfectly asymmetrical bangs (not to mention a recent attempted occupation by students), about 100 attendees packed the Eugene Lang Center for a ridiculously wide-ranging discussion of hipster culture, which included heady thoughts on post-colonialism, deregulation, easy credit, Chinese ownership of U.S. debt, Leon Trotsky, Slavoj Žižek, Pavement, Nirvana, Debbie Gibson, and Scott Baio.

It was one of those kinds of events.

Mr. Lorentzen, who penned a polemic called “Why The Hipster Must Die” for Time Out New York in 2007, declared the idea of the hipster a great fraud, and said he had come to apologize for his part in it. “No member of my family, no close friend, no enemy, no rival, no dance partner, no party guest, no barkeep, no doctor, no lawyer, no banker, no artist, no guitar player, no deejay, no model, no photographer, no author, no pilot, no stewardess, no actor, no actress, no television personality, no robber, no cop, no priest, no nun, no hooker, no pimp, no acquaintance known to me, has ever been a hipster,” Mr. Lorentzen said.

“The fraud held that there are people called hipsters who follow a creed called hipsterism and exist in a realm called hipsterdom," he continued. "The truth is that there was no such culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young, and, more often than not, funny-looking.”

Mr. Lorentzen, dressed in a black suit, seemed to be the only one poking fun at the topic. N+1 editor and Eugene Lang assistant professor Mark Greif (grayish suit) offered a more academic talk, positing three definitions of the hipster, post-1999—which the panel seemed to agree was the year the neo-hipster was born. (No matter that by 2004, New York magazine was already declaring the end of them all in a satire by Zev Borow.)

There were some uncomfortable moments: the one guy sporting a trucker hat stared straight ahead as Mr. Greif talked about how guys in trucker hats were striving for some sort of faux-authenticity. And when Mr. Greif hit upon the prevalence of pornographic and pedophilic moustaches among hipsters, one heavily moustachioed man seemed to listen more intently, while his thinly ’stached friend mustered an awkward laugh.

Jace Clayton (black jacket, black t-shirt, and faded black pants), aka dj/rupture, wrapped up the panel portion by saying that artists, not hipsters, are “gentrification’s shock troops,” and that the hipster was just a “straw man in tight jeans.”

“I imagine that folks moving to Bushwick open their closet and find no tube socks and think, ‘I’m not a hipster, my parents don’t pay my rent, I listen to classic country music, without a trace of irony,’ and then go on being the same arrogant, over-privileged people with the smug satisfaction that it’s only hipsters who destroy neighborhoods, not them or their friends.”

During the question and answer portion, several people wondered whether hipsters were intellectuals beneath their fashionable get-ups. “I would dispute that at the core of hipsterism is intellectualism,” Mr. Lorentzen said.

“I say this based on my living in Williamsburg for two years. In Williamsburg, where everyone looked like that, a lot people didn’t know a damn thing.”

The moderator, who happened to be Mr. Lorentzen’s sister, Allison, challenged him on that: “Can you name the other places where you lived where people were well-read?”

“Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Cambridge, Somerville,” he replied. “Not necessarily Hoppington, Massachusetts.” (Mr. Lorentzen has written about at least one of these neighborhoods before.)

Later, there was a discussion about Mr. Žižek, who apparently stands as the Father of Modern Hipster Thought. “I used to work at American Apparel, and he was the only intellectual anyone had heard of,” a woman chimed in from the crowd. (Maybe it's Professor Žižek's shared affinities with American Apparel founder Dov Charney?)

Another woman asked about nostalgia (which felt, indeed, like a nostalgic question). “Do you guys think nostalgia is the right term for it? To me that sort of implies that we would have stopped talking about Charles In Charge, but I’m not sure that that conversation ever stopped,” she said.

“Why would nostalgia make you stop talking about Charles In Charge?” Mr. Greif wondered, which seemed to flummox the questioner.

One young man in wire-frame glasses and a green flannel over a button-up shirt bravely admitted to liking the idea of hipsterism when he read about it on Pitchfork in 2002 or 2003.

“The moment we’re pronouncing the death of the hipster is, in itself, something of a hipster moment," he said.

“I think we in New York have just reached a point of fatigue in talking about it,” proclaimed Mr. Lorentzen.

“People have stopped calling me up and asking me to write articles with the h-word on it.”