archive › Slavoj Zizek
On Philosophical Debates
Whenever we are dealing with an “official” progressive succession of philosophers, the truly interesting thing is to consider how a philosopher who was, according to this “official line,” “overcome” or “completed” by his successor(s), reacts to his successor(s)…
What is the philosophical status of these “retroactive” rejoinders? … They do not so much undermine the underlying line of succession … as, rather, bring forth its most interesting and lively moment, the moment when, as it were, a thought rebels against its reduction to a term in the chain of “development” and asserts its absolute right or claim… That is to say, when the Old is attacked by the New, this first appearance of the New is as a rule flat and naïve—the true dimension of the New arises only when the Old reacts to the (first appearance of) the New. Pascal reacted from a Christian standpoint to scientific secular modernity, and his “reaction” … tells us much more about modernity than its direct partisans. The true “progress” emerges from the reaction of the Old to the progress. True revolutionaries are always reflected conservatives.
— Slavoj Zizek, “Fichte’s Laughter,” in Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, pp. 122-123.
Philosophy and Crisis
Slavoj Zizek in an interview with Michael Hauser:
So I think that, I’m very traditional basically, that German idealism, the metaphysics of German idealism, still offers the best conceptual tools to deal with the crisis we are approaching. Because, as Hegel knew, philosophy and crisis are always connected. All philosophy, it’s clear, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, even Plato. Plato—you cannot imagine Plato without the political crisis of Greece. No wonder that Plato’s representative book is The Republic which typically, although you have all of Plato’s ontology there, the metaphor of the cave and so on, but nonetheless all this emerges to answer which kind of political order do we need.
I like this because not only does it conform to some of my own ideas about the intersection between history and philosophy, but Zizek also manages to tie together issues relating to the overlap between politics and ontology in a brief but clever way. Another good example: the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake.
What Does It Mean to be a Revolutionary Today?
Slavoj Žižek’s speech at the Marxism 2009 conference:
Slavoj Zizek Audio Lectures at Birkbeck
Zizek is teaching several master classes this month (or summer?) at Birkbeck University in London and the lectures are publicly available on the Internet. So far there have been five lectures which I will link to individually below:
- Monday, 15 June 2009: Utopias
- Tuesday, 16 June 2009: Architecture
- Wednesday, 17 June 2009: Wagner
- Thursday, 18 June 2009: Populism and Democracy
- Friday, 19 June 2009: Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism
Use Your Illusions
Žižek offers hope for those of us burdened by cynicism. He also touches on genocide, farming and the importance of awakening from our dreams. (Tom Waits might counter, “you’re innocent when you dream” and Zizek may reply, “Shut up you’re not real!”)
I wanted to be the one who links to a Žižek article for a change. I even went to Wikipedia to copy the funny Z’s.
Obama’s victory is a sign of history in the triple Kantian sense of signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum. A sign in which the memory of the long past of slavery and the struggle for its abolition reverberates; an event which now demonstrates a change; a hope for future achievements. The scepticism displayed behind closed doors even by many worried progressives – what if, in the privacy of the voting booth, the publicly disavowed racism will re-emerge? – was proved wrong. One of the interesting things about Henry Kissinger, the ultimate cynical Realpolitiker, is how utterly wrong most of his predictions were. When news reached the West of the 1991 anti-Gorbachev military coup, for example, Kissinger immediately accepted the new regime as a fact. It collapsed ignominiously three days later. The paradigmatic cynic tells you confidentially: ‘But don’t you see that it is all really about money/power/sex, that professions of principle or value are just empty phrases which count for nothing?’ What the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom which ignores the power of illusions.
…It is unlikely that the financial meltdown of 2008 will function as a blessing in disguise, the awakening from a dream, the sobering reminder that we live in the reality of global capitalism. It all depends on how it will be symbolised, on what ideological interpretation or story will impose itself and determine the general perception of the crisis. When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a ‘discursive’ ideological competition. In Germany in the late 1920s, Hitler won the competition to determine which narrative would explain the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it; in France in 1940 Maréchal Pétain’s narrative won in the contest to find the reasons for the French defeat. Consequently, to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terms, the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown on the global capitalist system as such, but on its deviations – lax regulation, the corruption of big financial institutions etc.
Through the Glasses Darkly
Another Zizek article in In These Times—this one’s on the presidential election and financial crisis. Here’s an excerpt:
But was the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?
When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.
Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?
The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.
The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running.
(Via I cite.)
Degenerates
I’m not really sure what the context of this conversation with Zizek is, but the last line is amazing:
Don’t Just Do Something, Talk
Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books:
One of the most striking things about the reaction to the current financial meltdown is that, as one of the participants put it: ‘No one really knows what to do.’ The reason is that expectations are part of the game: how the market reacts to a particular intervention depends not only on how much bankers and traders trust the interventions, but even more on how much they think others will trust them. Keynes compared the stock market to a competition in which the participants have to pick several pretty girls from a hundred photographs: ‘It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.‘ We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Slavoj Žižek v. Bernard-Henry Lévy
The New York Public Library hosts a debate that sounds like it was narrated by Werner Herzog:
Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s “rock-star philosopher,” and Slavoj Žižek, the Slovanian “Elvis of cultural theory,” will scrutinize the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those of the future, as they argue for a new political and moral vision for our times and investigate the limits of tolerance.
Does the advent of capitalism cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of the neighbor? asks Zizek in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.
Are human rights Western or Universal? How is it that progressives themselves-those who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascism-have now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes? asks Lévy in Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against New Barbarism.
Audio available here. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
The Audacity of Rhetoric
Another Zizek article in In These Times, this time specifically on the subject of Barack Obama. I haven’t read it yet since I’m in a hurry, but I like the quote the editor highlighted:
Measured by the low standards of conventional wisdom, the old saying ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ is one of the most stupid things one can say.
Transcendental Revolution
No Useless Leniency:
How does Deleuze resist the problem Althusser courts – that of functionalism, in which the depth of ideological structuring appears to prevent any rupture with such a ‘system’? Deleuze argues that to perform this rupture requires the power to raise the false existent sociability to the level of a ‘transcendent exercise’ that can break this regime of commonsense. This ‘transcendental object’ is revolution as ‘the social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social idea.’ (Deleuze 1994: 208)
Communism
Mike Johnduff at Countermemory:
On the left, things seem just as nuts. There is no theory of this spread and the resistance to it, except those promising ones of micro-loans. This leaves them with the specter of Lenin: communism has not died out there either. The idea of mobilization (Zizek) and the general idea that social-democracy is, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, a “compromise” (“Is Everything Political?”) is flawed.
Regardless, one thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter—one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it. The key is to see that it does not return into our thinking as a big massive homogenous thing: we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Frederic Jameson’s insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists, against the pragmatists (and one needs to apply this critique to the Lacanians and to the Nancy-type radicals too), that this is actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.
Violence and its Vicissitudes
Jodi Dean:
What Zizek omits, though, is the creative, productive dimension of resentment. It can create power relations invested in refusal (an acquaintance of mine once used the expression ‘anti-war profiteers’). Differently put, even heroic resentment can become ordinary and normalized, ultimately exhausting itself and rendering the heroic feeble and pathetic. The challenge, then, of heroic resentment is this very risk, this unavoidable uncertainty.
Zizek on Haiti: Democracy versus the People
Slavoj Zizek reviews Peter Hallward’s book on Haiti in the New Statesman:
As Aristide himself puts it: “It is better to be wrong with the people than to be right against the people.” Despite some all-too-obvious mistakes, the Lavalas regime was in effect one of the figures of how “dictatorship of the proletariat” might look today: while pragmatically engaging in some externally imposed compromises, it always remained faithful to its “base”, to the crowd of ordinary dispossessed people, speaking on their behalf, not “representing” them but directly relying on their local self-organisations. Although respecting the democratic rules, Lavalas made it clear that the electoral struggle is not where things are decided: what is much more crucial is the effort to supplement democracy with the direct political self-organisation of the oppressed. Or, to put it in our “postmodern” terms: the struggle between Lavalas and the capitalist-military elite in Haiti is a case of genuine antagonism, an antagonism which cannot be contained within the frame of parliamentary-democratic “agonistic pluralism”.
This is why Hallward’s outstanding book is not just about Haiti, but about what it means to be a “leftist” today: ask a leftist how he stands towards Aristide, and it will be immediately clear if he is a partisan of radical emancipation or merely a humanitarian liberal who wants “globalisation with a human face”.
(Via I cite.)
Slavoj Zizek Interview in The Guardian
Some really great responses. (Via I cite.)