Over the weekend, The Guardian published a Q & A with Slavoj Zizek, the cultural theorist and film philosopher who will be guest directing the Telluride Film Festival later this month. From the sound of things, the Slovenian academic is in a pretty dark emotional state at the moment. His answers to Rosanna Greenstreet’s relatively innocuous, form-letter style questions are universally, comically negative, especially when the topic is love or sex. Examples:

Q: What does love feel like?

A: Like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

Q: Have you ever said ‘I love you’ and not meant it?

A: All the time. When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

Q: How often do you have sex?

A: It depends what one means by sex. If it’s the usual masturbation with a living partner, I try not to have it at all.

Ouch. Is it possible that the great pop academic of our time is reeling from a bad break up? In terms of what his state of mind means for Telluride’s secret-until-the-11th hour lineup, can expect him to program (and comment on) a bunch of classic romantic melodramas with subtexts about the impossibility human connection? Let’s hope so!