Larval Subjects has a great response to The New Republic hit-piece put out a few days ago, which I suggest reading in whole, but here’s a small excerpt:

As an ironist, just when you think you’ve pinned down his position, he reverses everything and articulates yet another position contradicting the first. Hence the sense that he never gets anywhere. The paradox is that the more Žižek tries to disavow and undermine this position of being the subject-supposed-to-know, the more he tends to provoke transference in his audience, convincing them that he must contain some secret (just as Socrates’ interlocutors invariably thought that he knew and was just withholding the answer).

As Dr. Sinthome goes on to explain, Žižek’s key rhetorical tactic used to subvert conformist liberal democratic discourse is irony. This involves something peculiarly Žižekian, something that is palpable in every book he has written and every article he has published. The first move involves a rejection of the (typically hegemonic) liberal response to a given issue. One might think that, given Žižek’s political commitments, the next move would be to assert the far Left/Marxist view to counter the liberal position. Instead, Žižek often takes a stance that is uncomfortably close to the right-wing position, but then argues that the right-wing position simply makes a much stronger case for the far Left position.

In this way I think Žižek avoids the kind of dogmatic, ideological platitudes that are so often mistakenly attributed to him by his critics. And, in fact, if one failed to take the time to read his work, this might even be the view they came away with. Simply glancing at his writings on Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao would confirm it almost outright. But Žižek also has a great fondness for figures like G.W.F. Hegel, G.K. Chesterton, and Jacques Lacan, who seem to be incompatible with liberal thought in a way that can’t be easily integrated into any opposing ideology (either Left or Right). And even when he endorses figures from the Left-wing pantheon, such as Lenin, a parallel is often drawn between them and other less notably Left-wing leaders like, say, Jesus or Saint Paul—names that would, here in the U.S., conjure up images of the evangelical Right as opposed to figures of a Revolutionary Event.

If it were simply the case that Žižek sided with a given ideology, this might in fact lead towards the kind of dogmatism—and perhaps even violence—attributed to Žižek’s thought by his less intelligent critics. Instead, Žižek seems to position himself as “pure contradiction.” He does not fit in at all with the typical New Left thought, opting instead for psychoanalysis—often viewed as suspicious by most traditional Marxists as too pessimistic, individualistic, scientistic, and counter-revolutionary—as a vehicle for revolution. He focuses as much on theology and God as he does political economy and capital. His materialism is almost (speculatively) identical to idealism, making him appear even more suspicious to both traditional Hegelians and traditional Marxists. He writes with fondness about Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism, while simultaneously endorsing class struggle.

And none of this is recent either, despite Žižek’s now out-dated support of liberal democracy in The Sublime Object of Ideology (which ought to be taken in context) and his most recent (mostly positive) writing on Barack Obama. Looking back at Žižek’s activity in Yugoslavia, particularly his involvement with Laibach and NSK, one sees a similar tendency in regards to his effort to subvert the ruling ideology (and, as he has claimed, by “taking it seriously”). One particularly good example I can think of is that Laibach had a tendency to conduct interviews by pretending to act as if they were all reciting, from memory, Party-line statements delivered in droll, monotonous unison. This had the intended effect of making the interviewers very uncomfortable, believing that the band members were suspicious, brainwashed ideologues. Their music, with its militaristic goose-stepping, salutes, and disturbing lyrics, could not be easily distinguished from either Stalinism or fascism, as many critics at the time remarked.

What all of this amounts to is that, from a certain “Žižekian” perspective, any attempt at articulating a political position requires “traversing the fantasy” such that the fantasy of ideological “wholeness” or consistency is subverted. This means that Žižek’s other task is to constantly reveal the way in which our thoughts and enjoyments are sustained by our relationship with fantasmatic objects—l’objet petit a. This entails a minimum of (political) “subjective destitution,” a tarrying with otherness that is politically antithetical to one’s own views—and in this respect Žižek is unafraid of entering into the dark depths of “enemy territory.” The next step in Žižek’s dialectic is to simply co-opt the enemy’s position, transforming one’s acceptance of failure into the ultimate victory by converting the enemy to one’s own “language” (Lacanese, in Žižek’s case)—and Dr. Sinthome rightfully describes this in terms of a “game.”

To summarize (again): for Žižek there can never be any unmediated articulation of a political cause—all of it amounts to coming to terms with the lack in any given ideological system by passing through the entire political/ideological field. This is what his Hegelianism amounts to in this respect. And this, to me, seems to be quite at odds with the kind of violent totalitarianism and ideological perversion that Kirsch is unfairly condemning Žižek for allegedly endorsing. But (along with what I’ve been saying) if I were Žižek, my first move wouldn’t be to simply lampoon or dismiss Kirsch. I would first accept some vital premise of his (say, taking Žižek seriously) and then use that to argue for something in favor of my own position.

UPDATE: Mikhail over at Perverse Egalitarian has a great response to the TNR piece as well.

UPDATE II: Jodi Dean over at I cite has more thoughts on the subject that are worth reading.