Contradictions of the Intellectual

I know I'm only supposed to comment this week but I couldn't help thinking of Zizek and how he's been represented and understood in different media. He seems to embody all the contradictory things we expect from intellectuals today.

We expect them to give us the answers (for the pragmatic British "post-politicians" this means technocratic knowledge, or how to fix the economic situation); radicals expect the magical formula for revolutionary/emancipatory political transformation (in the guise of a magical bullet, or if we only had a more accurate account of the subject...); his publishers expect him to sell books and to provide a persona accessible to a "wide" audience while still being taken seriously; and then there is the professional status of the intellectual in her field of work (innovation --rereading German idealism through Lacan-- in effect, using one intellectual to reinterpret the works of other intellectuals).

As a psychoanalyst who trained with Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan's "representative on Earth") his writing can be understood as expressing, in different formats and settings, the four Lacanian discourses. The most prominent one is the "discourse of the analyst" which plays AGAINST the expectations and transference of the would-be analysand: the reader. As readers we expect intellectuals to be the subject supposed to know, the fantasy that someone else has the key to our antagonism. The aim of the analyst is essentially to get us to recognize how our own expectations grow out of this very antagonism. As such, it seems Zizek (in form, if maybe not in content) might give us an insight into how an intellectual today might function in an emancipatory fashion: by liberating us from our expectations of intellectuals and forcing us to question how and what we demand of them.