So I guess the Communism Conference taking place at Birkbeck College of London just ended recently (panelists included Zizek, Badiou, Eagleton, Hardt, Negri, etc.). Steven Shaviro has an excellent commentary on Michael Hardt’s lecture, apparently the only one that dealt at all with political economy, as well as a summary of the entire event which I violently urge our readers to check out. Here’s one key passage:

Awareness of these issues, I think, prevents Zizek from articulating groundless fantasies of revolutionary agency in the way that certain other speakers did. Yet the only solution Zizek had to offer, in his talk, was an appeal to Badiou’s transcendental formulation of politics as fidelity to an event of radical rupture, and of “communism” as the name of this event or rupture. In the course of his talk, Zizek called several times for a “radical voluntarism” — though, when called on this formulation in the Q&A, he backpedaled (at least rhetorically) and said that all he meant by such a phrase was that, unlike the old Marxists of the earlier part of the past century, we could no longer believe today that the “logic of history” was on our side, or that we could trust to the objective course of events to displace capitalism and create the necessary and sufficient conditions for communism.

I agree with Zizek on this — indeed, my largest disagreement with Hardt and Negri is precisely that they seem to affirm a soft version of the inevitable-movement-of-history, or “objective conditions” thesis — but I think that a phrase like “radical voluntarism” works to insinuate a positive thesis — a sense of “what is to be done?” — that simply isn’t there. Which leaves us back in our current condition: the demoralization of an impotent left. I have no solution for this dilemma — and I don’t think Zizek or Badiou (or Hardt or Negri either) have any more of a solution than I have, although they are way to eager to adopt the rhetoric of seeming as if they do.

A summary from The Guardian, sans snark, is also available here, via Pervegal. Perverse Egalitarianism also has some videos of the lectures, in particular Ranciere and Badiou’s lectures (but also some Zizek).