Dalrymple on Zizek

[Wombaticus Rex]

Does this deserve its own thread? Dubious. Still, I would dearly love to see these two men sit down and talk for an hour about pretty much whatever they want to chew on.

Via: http://takimag.com/article/slavoj_zhizh ... z3MvY0Upp3

(Trigger Warning: Taki is a cheerfully cheeky jihad against all things "Social Justice" run by All White Dudes)

Slavoj Žižek, the Ideal Fraud

One stumbles across such interesting things on the Internet. For example, while browsing the Guardian newspaper’s website today I alighted on a short video by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on the nature of true freedom. I knew that Žižek was very famous—one knows these days that people are famous without necessarily knowing what they are famous for—and so I decided to take a chance and watch. After all, 4 minutes and 46 seconds is a short time to learn what true freedom is, as against the false type with which we have lived all these years.

I was immediately enamored with Žižek and felt a warmth towards him. If he did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. He is deliciously, archetypally intellectual; he incarnates the satirist’s idea of what an intellectual should be. His Central European accent is perfect: it would be impossible to say anything in it that was superficial. He understands the workings of the universe so well that he has no time or energy left over to look other than a mess. His black T-shirt (which covers his capacious trunk, the bulk of which indicates that if he is opposed to the consumer society on ideological grounds he is nevertheless no ascetic) bears the deeply meaningful message: I WOULD PREFER NOT TO. This is almost as good as the graffito I pass on the road to Nîmes from my house in France. It consists of a single word, Non. You can’t get more profound (or more succinct) than that.

Professor Žižek—yes, he is a professor at several universities at once, which proves that the world is either not as unjust as he thinks it, or perhaps a lot more unjust than he thinks it—is wonderfully emphatic in what he says. He somehow manages to maintain the emphasis of his every utterance like a reader of the weather forecast on television; only he is speaking of the future of the world, rather than of the weather tomorrow. As for his gesticulations, they are like underlinings in a text.

So what is true freedom, unlike the false variety that I enjoy, or rather mistakenly thought that I enjoyed? Professor Žižek tells us, in a rather roundabout way, that our freedom is circumscribed by our circumstances. I can’t say that this came as a great surprise to me, since I cannot imagine what it would be like to have no circumstances at all, or to exist free of any situation whatever.

Having made brief reference to WikiLeaks, which revealed to him how unfree we are, Professor Žižek then tells us that, in his conception, true freedom is love, by which he means the exclusive love of one other person, for whom one sacrifices one’s freedom to love—or at least to have an affair with—someone else. I am not sure, nor does Professor Žižek quite explain, how the WikiLeaks revelations demonstrate that we are any less free to love than we were before, or indeed what exactly the connection is between love and true freedom. Is it a sufficient condition of true freedom, or merely a necessary one? Are the two, indeed, identical?

It is all rather mysterious, though expressed by Professor Žižek with a rare and engaging certitude. The professor confused me a little, however, by adding immediately afterward that true freedom is being free to question the idea of freedom. But does this not lead to an infinite regress? Surely true freedom is being free to be free to question the idea of freedom, and so on ad infinitum? As my patients used to say of the situation that they themselves had brought about: “It’s doing my head in.”

Professor Žižek brought to my mind something that at first I could not put into words (a phenomenon that is of some philosophical significance, I suspect, for it shows that thought can precede the words in which we express it). But then, in a eureka moment, I realized what it was: Professor Žižek reminded me, even physically, of the Californian fake gurus that I had met at the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival that comes every twelve years to Allahabad, when the Ganges there turns, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, into ambrosia that washes away sins.

I want to avoid all misunderstanding: this is no condemnation of Professor Žižek; on the contrary. The Kumbh Mela is easily the most wonderful human gathering in the world, where tens of millions of people converge more peaceably than, say, eight men in a British pub could ever manage. It is a gathering of the most perfect tolerance, where no one is in the least disturbed by the charlatanry (and obvious prosperity) of the Californian gurus, with their solid gold knuckle-duster rings and sexual acolytes. They do no harm, and Hinduism is in any case not a doctrinal religion; indeed, whenever I have finished reading books about it I am not much better able than I was before, and certainly not for very long, to say what Hinduism is. I suspect that many readers have a similar experience after they read Žižek.

In any case, I am not against charlatans; I even admire them if they are amiable, as of course the vast majority of them are (an unamiable charlatan is almost an oxymoron). To be able to glide through life in the knowledge that one is bogus is a great achievement, far greater than that of the majority of genuinely earnest people. If the world, including academia, were to be purged of its charlatans, how dull life would be!

Not that there is much chance of such a thing happening. There is, for example, an International Journal of Žižek Studies (from which you can buy a Žižekian T-shirt if you are truly free to do so, perhaps a welcome change from the hackneyed Che Guevara variety). The journal contains the kind of articles that begin as follows:

This essay develops Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism. The first part consists of a discussion of Meillassoux’s ‘principle of factiality’ (which states that only contingency is necessary) and Ray Brassier’s problematization of this principle’s self-referentiality. The second part takes up Žižek’s critique of Meillassoux, which solves the problem of self-reference by dialecticizing the principle of factiality, ending up with the thesis of the contingency of necessity. The third part is an elaboration of Žižek’s critique in which the main lacuna in Meillassoux’s philosophy, i.e. the lack of any account of the genesis of subjectivity, is seen to lead to a disavowal of ‘constitutive mythology’ as theorized by Markus Gabriel. It is argued that Meillassoux’s notion of ‘hyper-Chaos’ is in fact the core of his mythology, which becomes especially clear when contrasted with an alternative mythology, namely Henri Bergson’s vision of ‘creative evolution’. Finally, it is shown how Žižek’s critique of Meillassoux gravitates toward this mythology of creative evolution as his Lacanian version of dialectical materialism is reformulated in the light of the speculative realist problematic.

And if this essay fits you down to a T-shirt, you can always progress to “The Question of Belief: Žižek, Desire and DIY Ideology.”

I credit notoriously outspoken pedophile and excellent author Hakim Bey / Peter Lamborn Wilson with educating me on how hollow the edifice of post-modern / critical-theory can be. There's just not a lot substance beneath the Maelstrom of citations. Even my favorite practitioners of the artform, Deleuze & Guattari, generally make their best points entirely on accident.

The popularity of Zizek used to baffle me, but that's because I was looking to his actual content for answers. That was a mistake, because he is fundamentally a product, a brand.

[Twyla LaSarc]

I'm glad I'm not the only one to feel that way about Zizek. I don't know too much about him, but I admit to stumbling through the two movies. As much as I was willing to learn, I did not get much from them. IMO, his symbolism and relationships don't hold together for me. No "there" there. He is either a charlatan or a dadaist culture jammer and either way, I am unsure of his purpose.

My son had his number right away and gave reasons not dissmilar to the ones stated above to take a huge grain of salt when watching Zizek's films.

[American Dream]

I guess Žižek is somehow post-modern, though I can't claim to fully understand the meaning of that word. He certainly does seem to emphasize cultural studies, which is a prime subject of post-modern theorizing, for sure.

I've found him provocative and engaging at times but ultimately part paths over his advocacy for Leninist- some say Stalinist- solutions to the problems of political organization.

That said, I can't claim to be a fan of Taki, or associates such as Pat Buchanan and Michelle Malkin, either.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I guess Žižek is somehow post-modern, though I can't claim to fully understand the meaning of that word.

Sounds like you have it down more or less perfectly. PoMo is about the end of communication, if you've come away feeling like you didn't get it, you got the only real message in the mix.

It's thought-provoking, to the extent that "What the fuck are these crackers even talking about?" represents a thought.

I really like Twyla's conception of Zizek as "dadaist culture jammer" -- my impression is, at the very least, this man has a great deal of grinning cynicism about the contemporary culture (and discourse) of philosophy and he has shrewdly embraced every opportunity to increase his stature in the field, using his academic bonafides to secure more media coverage & vice versa ... and in this light his winking provocations are kind of endearing.

Still, the text itself is mostly noise.

[Jerky]

Dalrymple has a lot of nerve accusing Zizek of being a caricature, considering the fact that he, himself, stands as the veritable Platonic Ideal of post-Kipling Edwardian smarm.

I was half-shocked not to find the phrase "come now dear boy" hiding somewhere in all that smug English public school cant.

White man's burden, indeed.

Jerky

[Searcher08]

Imagine a mudwrestling match between David Horowitz and Slavoj Zizek, refereed by Julian Assange.



This was at times very funny, awful, surprising, WTF?! and well worth checking out.

One of my thoughts was the similarities between the three.

I had a feeling of wondering... is this like professional wrestling, where the guys meet in the changing room and talk through the moves?

I like some of Zizek's stuff (*), but have to remember that at the end of the day he is from a psychoanalytic tradition that emphasizes talking about shit in abstractions on abstractions, and for years - rather than actual change in the physical world.
As one of his talks so eloquently stated, "Think, Dont Act".

From an NLP point of view, both Zizek and Horowitz are generating a storm of binary "Either/Or"s, lots of Universals "All, Every,Totally" and "Nevers" . Zizek and Assange tend to challenge Horowitz's language, yet Zizek then wanders off to critical theory 'cloudland' and Horowitz appears to dissociate from what is being said after being engaged for a few seconds. There seems to be loop

Outrageous Statements --> Challenge --> Non-Sensory Language --> Disengagement --> Outrageous Statements

Horowitz has a detailed mental model that people are fundamentally bad.
I was left wondering if underneath all his bluster, he is fundamentally driven by an easily triggered fear response that overrides empathy and nuance. His occasional metaphors were interesting exit ramps that were left unexplored.

(*) Zizek's dialogue is much clearer when externally visually mapped like the excellent RSA Animates series

[Wombaticus Rex]

Dalrymple has a lot of nerve accusing Zizek of being a caricature, considering the fact that he, himself, stands as the veritable Platonic Ideal of post-Kipling Edwardian smarm.

Such a casually devastating and erudite summation, I should hope even old pseudonymous Theo would get a chuckle out of that.

[justdrew]

well, it could be that when he DOES philosophy he's good at it, we never quote/read his academic work, just his public persona work, which is different, it's much like we don't often see/read Chomsky on linguistics.

[Wombaticus Rex]

No "there" there.

Apparently we were both wrong -- it's not that there's nothing beneath the whirling blades of his self-negating absolutes -- there is, in fact, Less Than Nothing there. Which apparently takes 1056 pages to adequately explain.

Via: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/j ... zek-review

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
Verso, London and New York, 2012

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has thousands of devoted fans, and it's easy to see why. He is cheeky, voluble and exuberant, and over the past 30 years he has turned high theory into performance art. He was born in communist Yugoslavia in 1949, and received a thorough grounding in Marxism and the principles of "dialectical materialism". In 1971 he got a job in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, only to be dismissed two years later for being "un-Marxist". After a stretch of military service, he resumed his academic work and spent a few years in Paris with followers of the surrealistic psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In the 80s he adopted English as his working language and launched himself on an international career as a taboo-busting radical theorist.

Žižek is a gifted speaker – tumultuous, emphatic, direct and paradoxical – and he writes as he speaks. He has 50 books already to his credit, and plenty more on the way. His easy familiarity with the philosophical classics may leave some readers gasping for air, but he offers plenty of lifelines in the form of anecdotes, laddish jokes and inexhaustible references to popular culture. And he can always redeem himself, in the eyes of his admirers, by lashing out at multiculturalism, toleration, dialogue and other "liberal sacred cows". He has become the saint of total leftism: a quasi-divine being, than whom none more radical can ever be conceived.

Of course he relies on a formula: to be Žižekian is to hold that Freudian psychoanalysis is essentially correct, and that its implications are absolutely revolutionary. But Žižek's Freud is not everyone's. Old-fashioned Freudians believe that we have masses of juicy secrets locked up inside us, unacknowledged by our well-ordered rational consciousness and clamouring to be set free. For Žižek, however, as for Lacan before him, Freud's great insight was that everything about us – our vaunted rationality as much as our unavowable impulses – is soaked with craziness and ambivalence all the way through.

"The first choice has to be the wrong choice," as Žižek says in his monumental new book, because "the wrong choice creates the conditions for the right choice". There is no such thing as being wholly in the right, or wholly in the wrong; and this principle applies to politics as much as to personal life. Politics, as Žižek understands it, is a rare and splendid thing: no actions are genuinely political unless they are revolutionary, and revolution is not revolution unless it institutes "true change" – the kind of comprehensive makeover that "sets its own standards" and "can only be measured by criteria that result from it". Genuine revolutionaries are not interested in operating on "the enemy's turf", haggling over various strategies for satisfying pre-existing needs or securing pre-existing rights: they want to break completely with the past and create "an opening for the truly New". Authentic revolutions have often been betrayed, but as far as Žižek is concerned, they are never misconceived.

Žižek refuses to indulge in sanctimonious regrets over the failings of 20th-century communism. He has always had a soft spot for Stalin, and likes to tell the story of Uncle Joe's response when asked which of two deviations was worse: both of them are worse, he said, with perfect Lacanian panache. Žižek's objection to Stalinism is not that it involved terror and mass murder, but that it sought to justify them by reference to a happy communist tomorrow: the trouble with Soviet communism, as he puts it, is "not that it is too immoral, but that it is secretly too moral". Hitler elicits similar even-handedness: the unfortunate Führer was "trapped within the horizon of bourgeois society", Žižek says, and the "true problem of nazism" was "not that it went too far … but that it did not go far enough".

In the past few years Žižek has grown bored with the "shitty politics" that made him famous, and Less Than Nothing – which he describes as "my true life's work" – is meant to provide a comprehensive philosophical justification for the attitudes he likes to strike. The germ of the book is a joke about a Jew applying to leave the Soviet Union. "I'm worried that communism is going to collapse, and we Jews will get the blame," Rabinovitch explains. "No need to worry," says the official. "Communism is here to stay." To which Rabinovitch replies, with sudden frankness: "Quite so, and that's my other reason." The truth, in short, emerges only in the wake of muddle and deceit.

Žižek celebrates the wisdom of Rabinovitch through a massive retelling of the entire history of western philosophy, beginning in ancient Greece, passing through 19th-century Germany, and ending with various oddballs he has met on the conference circuit, and a few louts engaged in what he calls "Žižek-bashing". The narrative is focused on Hegel, who understood better than anyone else how all our truths incorporate the errors and delusions from which they emerged. Hegel realised, as Žižek likes to put it, that radical change "retroactively posits its own presuppositions" – in other words, that it alters the past as well as the future – and this means, apparently, that he was a better "dialectical materialist" than Marx could ever be.

Sad bookworms such as me, with rows of ragged volumes of Hegel and Marx on our shelves, will find plenty of well-made points in these pages, but many readers may find themselves lapsing into baffled torpor. Even if you are attracted by Žižek's Hegelian fundamentalism, you are bound to wonder how it connects with his spectacular radicalism. After all it never led Hegel in that direction: he was notoriously timid about political change. And if we accept that there is no truth without error, we may well conclude that it is better to cling to the habits that were good enough for our ancestors than to stake the happiness of future generations on a gamble with incalculable stakes and uncertain prizes.

You may also wonder why Žižek spends so much time talking about philosophers, rather than talking about the things they talked about, let alone the things they neglected or ignored. No doubt he picked up the habit from Hegel; but Hegel was quite explicit about treating the philosophical canon not as a collection of strange books by idiosyncratic authors but as a single unified masterpiece composed by "the one living spirit". Philosophy, as Hegel conceived it, was rather like the Old and New Testaments as seen by evangelical Christians – an epitome of everything that can ever happen in the world, encompassing all we know, and all we need to know. For Hegel, there was no theoretical problem that could not be resolved – by proxy, so to speak – through an all-embracing commentary on philosophy's past.

Two hundred years later, Hegel's view of philosophy is at best a magnificent ruin, and no one can believe in it any more. Except Žižek, that is. He still has faith in "the unity of philosophy", and imagines that he is being profoundly political as he spends tens of thousands of words explaining what Plato really meant, or what is "truly materialist", "authentically Hegelian" or "properly apocalyptic". He never discusses poverty, inequality, war, finance, childcare, intolerance, crime, education, famine, nationalism, medicine, climate change, or the production of goods and services, yet he takes himself to be grappling with the most pressing social issues of our time. He is happy to leave the world to burn while he plays his games of philosophical toy soldiers.

Less than Nothing is marketed as Žižek's "masterwork" and a "true work of love", but it won't give much pleasure even to his fans. His talent for brief intellectual entertainments does not carry over into longer literary forms – let alone this "mega-book", as he calls it, which goes on considerably longer than War and Peace. He does not seem to realise that the purpose of a long book is to build steadily to a culminating revelation, rather than to go on and on until it stops, leaving the argument exactly where it was at the beginning. In the past I have found it hard to dislike Žižek, but after a month's forced march through Less Than Nothing it seems to be getting easier.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Zizek on Being Reviewed by the Guardian: Not Less Than Nothing, But Simply Nothing

N.B. In a recent review of Less Than Nothing (Guardian, Saturday 30 June), Jonathan Rée reaches a new depth in moralistic insinuations:

"...he never discusses poverty, inequality, war, finance, childcare, intolerance, crime, education, famine, nationalism, medicine, climate change, or the production of goods and services, yet he takes himself to be grappling with the most pressing social issues of our time. He is happy to leave the world to burn while he plays his games of philosophical toy soldiers."

How can someone write this about an author who recently produced a whole series of books dedicated to precisely these topics is beyond my comprehension—even in Less Than Nothing, a book on Hegel, there is an extensive discussion of socio-political problems in the books conclusion.

Not clear on what the "whole series of books" reference is -- the only Zizek tome rooted in objective reality I'm aware of is "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce," which addressed global capitalism and predated Occupy by years.

[semper occultus]

...from those wacky funsters the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)....World Socialist Web Site

Zizek in Manhattan: An intellectual charlatan masquerading as “left”

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/11/zize-n12.html

By Bill Van Auken and Adam Haig
12 November 2010

The Slovenian academic and author Slavoj ‌‌Zizek spoke before a full house at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in Manhattan Monday, delivering a 90-minute monologue that wandered frenetically between complacent observations about the wave of austerity measures sweeping Europe, warnings of ecological catastrophes and digressions into his particular interests in the sado-pornographic facets of popular culture.

‌‌Zizek has been hailed as one of the world’s greatest public intellectuals, a leading postmodern, or “post-Marxist” philosopher and an “Elvis of cultural theory.” He is sought after for visiting faculty positions in both Europe and the US and has a loyal following, particularly among a layer of academics and would-be academics who were well represented in his largely homogenous New York City audience.

This narrow social layer is ‌‌Zizek’s universe and his comic spiels are tailored to provoke, titillate and amuse them.

Philosophically, ‌‌Zizek is not an original or innovative thinker. While one academic commentator has claimed that Hegel and Marx are among his core influences, that is a false genealogy.

‌‌Zizek is an outgrowth of a reactionary anti-Marxist and anti-materialist tradition that descends from the irrationalism of Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger. He eclectically draws on the neo-Nietzschean and neo-Heideggerian thought of 1960s French post-structuralism, having adopted the ideas of its leading intellectuals—especially the post-Heideggerian psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan—when he was a graduate student.

Many of the French post-structuralists were fellow-travelers of Stalinism or Maoism (e.g., Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Guattari and Kristeva) and it is not surprising that ‌‌Zizek has occasionally said positive things about the Soviet and Chinese dictators.

‌‌Zizek is also known to call himself a “good Stalinist”, and there is reason to believe that he fancies himself a petty Stalin, going so far as he sometimes does to adopt Stalin’s habit of clapping for himself with an audience. ‌‌Zizek will follow up excitedly telling his listeners who his role model is.

Besides irrationalism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, a more recent influence on ‌‌Zizek has been the septuagenarian French philosopher Alain Badiou, an admirer of Mao, who advocates the petty-bourgeois concept of “politics without party” and maintains the voluntarist notion that “we must go from politics to economy and never from economy to politics.”[1]

‌‌Zizek has expressed similar-sounding ideas and also adopts Badiou’s mystical concept of the Event—a self-relating and self-inclusive phenomenon that appears to those who see themselves in its call, as it is characterized in ‌‌Zizek’s The Parallax View (2009).[2] Badiou and ‌‌Zizek do, however, have philosophical differences, but these have not been so significant as to compromise their friendship or ‌‌Zizek’s promotion of Badiou.

As with the post-structuralists and the post-Maoists, ‌‌Zizek is a political opportunist, though crasser and ruder. Despite all the radical-sounding bluster he pumps off, when it comes down to real politics, not the political phantoms in his brain, his positions end up serving interests that are completely hostile to the international working class and to genuine socialism.

‌‌Zizek has a political history as a founder and candidate of Slovenia’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDS), which oversaw the reorganization of the former Yugoslav Republic along free market capitalist lines. He is also on record as promoting illusions in Obama’s candidacy and victory in the US presidential election of 2008, which followed a campaign based on mass deception.

This intellectual and political background was clearly manifested at the Cooper Union lecture. As a speaker, ‌‌Zizek was both distracting and distracted. A seething collection of obsessive-compulsive tics, he rarely completed a sentence or fragment of a thought without wiping his nose and then running his fingers through his hair or tugging on his ill-fitting T-shirt. His slovenly appearance, clownish asides and rapid-fire standup comic delivery compelled him to repeatedly employ the phrase, “This is not a joke.”

The appearance in New York City was part of a long-running worldwide tour to promote his latest book, Living in the End Times, a 402-page collection of random observations that range from his assertion that “the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point” to his demand that Marx’s understanding of capitalist exploitation be “radically rethought” based upon the supposed new “hegemonic” position of intellectual labor. Thrown in for good measure were ruminations on the film Avatar and an analysis of the animated film Kung Fu Panda as an illustration of the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan.

A self-styled scholar of Hegel, ‌‌Zizek expressed his supposed command of dialectics by continuously elucidating largely common-place “paradoxes” and “ironies” in present-day ideology and culture.

‌‌Zizek has a semi-adolescent need to shock. He knows his own milieu of postmodernist academics and endeavors to scandalize them by pointing out the absurdities and contradictions in their thinking and through a facile mocking of “political correctness.”

While he poses as an advocate of “communism,” he hastens to make clear that his communism has nothing to do with the struggles of the 20th century, or for that matter, those of the working class. Things, for him boil down in the end to little more than a plea for reasonableness, civility and social harmony.

This is hardly a surprise, given that ‌‌Zizek has endorsed such platitudes as Derrida’s long and distant “democracy-to-come” over the unified struggle of the working class to abolish capitalism and war.

“Today, the impossible and the possible are exploding into excess,” he speciously told his audience, pointing to the gap between the ever-widening realm of what can be obtained by the wealthy individual and the steadily shrinking services on offer to society as a whole.

Recycling his repertoire of sexual jokes, he said, “I am told that here in New York a man can have his penis cut in two … so you can do it with two women. You can achieve immortality. You can go into space. But maintaining a little bit of health care is impossible.” He suggested the need “to rearrange our priorities a little bit.”

This was followed by a digression on computer dating as a form of “self-commodification,” evoking only scattered laughter from his audience.

He largely gave a pass to US imperialism in the lecture, treating militarism and the war in Afghanistan as sadly mistaken policies and insisting that “when you have a crisis, it is not automatically the US that is the bad guy.”

‌‌Zizek gave his preference for the TV series 24 —also a favorite of Dick Cheney—over “moralistic Hollywood” because of its illustration of irresolvable “ethical political contradictions,” and he warned his audience he would “shock you even further” by admitting that he himself could be induced to torture if his child were in the hands of terrorists. “The obscenity is when we normalize it,” he said, suggesting that under extreme conditions—which have been invoked continuously since 9/11—it may be unavoidable.

He taunted his fellow “left” professors for preferring that revolutions take place “at a safe distance—Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela—so that, while my heart is warmed by faraway events, I can go about promoting my academic careers.” Now, however, he warned, the crisis of capitalism would confront them with “real change.”

But the nature of this “real change” was abstract and disembodied in ‌‌Zizek’s lecture. Coming from Europe, he made no reference to the mass strikes in France and the growing social struggles that are erupting throughout the continent.

Indeed, the working class does not exist in ‌‌Zizek’s conceptual universe. At one point, he referred lackadaisically to the “millions of innocent bystanders” who “suffer the consequences” of capitalism’s crisis.

‌‌Zizek’s greatest concern was ecological disasters. He expressed his disappointment in Obama’s “naive” handling of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, suggesting that the government should have mobilized the military and gone beyond demanding that the company pay reparations to ensure that no company could do the same thing again.

He also predicted that climate change or other catastrophes would force mass transfers of populations. “How will we organize this?” he asked, pointing out that such transfers in earlier periods had been accompanied by wars and mass slaughter. “National sovereignty will have to be radically redefined.” Who will do this and how was left in the dark.

‌‌Zizek’s conclusion was that “we have to get ready for the moment when we have to invent new social forms.” He stressed that this involved being “very creative” and seeking change of an “essentialist nature,” but offered no clue as to what any of this meant in terms of a program.

He drew a Chinese wall between the 20th and 21st centuries, insisting that the so-called “left” faced the opposite situation today than it did before the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracies.

In the previous period, he said, the left “knew what had to be done” —the socialist revolution—but had to wait for the right conditions to carry it out. Today, he insisted, “we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because not to act would mean catastrophe.” What should be done? ‌‌Zizek allowed that he had no program. “There are no easy, clear solutions,” he said.

In a brief question and answer period, the Slovenian academic elaborated on his invocation of “communism.” He disavowed revolution, telling his audience to “get rid of the idea of a Leninist party taking power.”

Instead, he stated that his “communism” could take many forms. By illustration, he cited the 1990s “solidarity pact” entered into by the unions, corporations and government in Norway that limited wage increases in the expectation that it would make Norwegian capitalism more competitive and create jobs. “It worked,” he said.

“You just do everything possible, that’s my view,” he concluded. To accuse him of one moment invoking “radical revolution” and the next corporatist collaboration, he claimed, was like saying, “Today, I saw you eating chicken teriyaki and yesterday it was pizza.”

That this kind of puerile thinking is celebrated in the universities and among a layer of semi-intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic is testimony to the deep-going crisis of bourgeois ideology.

In his lecture, ‌‌Zizek dropped the names not only of fellow academics, such as Fredric Jameson and Alain Badiou, but also that of Alex Callinicos, leader of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), with whom he appeared at the SWP-sponsored “Marxism 2010” earlier this year. Present at the Cooper Union lecture was Haymarket Books, the publishing arm of the International Socialist Organization.

That a charlatan and anti-Marxist like ‌‌Zizek is promoted as an important philosopher by a whole range of ex-radicals is a troubling symptom of the deep intellectual and political disorientation of this social milieu.

--------------

[1] See Badiou’s “On the Idea of Communism” (YouTube video) [back]

[2] See ‌‌Zizek’s The Parallax View (See on Google Books.) [back]

[Wombaticus Rex]

Thanks for that interesting "inside scoop" -- Socialism/Communism, as a whole, is a fascinating study on the splintering of belief systems. What a gloriously doomed mess.

That this kind of puerile thinking is celebrated in the universities and among a layer of semi-intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic is testimony to the deep-going crisis of bourgeois ideology.

A fair point, surely, yet I hugely prefer the erudite provocations (however "semi-adolescent") of Zizek to a single paragraph of pablum from Joe Klein, Nicholas Kristoff, Michelle Malkin, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Bob Woodward, Lou Dobbs, Al Franken, Keith Olbermann, Markos Moulitsas, Adrianna Huffington, Fareed Zakaria, Charles Krauthammer....

The list does go on.

[Belligerent Savant]

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yet I hugely prefer the erudite provocations (however "semi-adolescent") of Zizek to a single paragraph of pablum from Joe Klein, Nicholas Kristoff, Michelle Malkin, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Bob Woodward, Lou Dobbs, Al Franken, Keith Olbermann, Markos Moulitsas, Adrianna Huffington, Fareed Zakaria, Charles Krauthammer....

The list does go on.

This.

He may surely have his moments of occasional hubris, but perhaps it's his deviations from pure socialist groupthink that irks some that worship at the altar of such (post)modern golden idols.

I also get the criticism that he's more of a philosophical abstractionist rather than an actionable agent of change (sidebar: whatever the F that may mean -- italicized as the phrase is rather satirical in its own right, and utilized increasingly by white-collar douchebags/huckstars looking to lure their next victim/'client'). He may be viewed as a talker rather than a doer, though he does go out there -- he speaks, he writes, all in meatspace, not simply via virtual web interface.

*disclaimer: I've yet to dive into the world of Zizek in earnest to this point, so I am but a layman in this arena... for now. I'll have to add his content -- and those of his contemporaries -- to the queue for more in-depth exploration.. a statement of no value to any of you, of course.

[justdrew]

it's Arianna not Adrianna.

but this whole thing smacks of a typical phase in the typical Media Cycle. Zizek has reached awareness saturation, so now it's time for a few well placed take downs to inaugurate the Revenge Phase. This phase will be followed by a Rehabilitation Phase, another Renaissance Phase, then another take down phase. and on and on it goes.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

it's Arianna not Adrianna.

(off-topic: my 4 yr old is named Arianna; not as an homage to Ms. Huffington, of course, but her name was on our minds when considering an appellation for the tiny little Savant..)

Generally agree with your assessment Re: 'phases', jdrew. We observe similar cycles in other aspects of shared reality as well -- trends in 'fashion' being only 1 example. The current (or is it now passe?) hipster fixation on certain elements of 80s/90s retro stylings or curly-tipped moustaches, among other fleeting trends.

to wit: