Slavoj Zizek's In Defense of Lost Causes

...We need “an entirely different society” beyond “the space of European modernity” with its “miserable utilitarian / egoistic universe of market calculation,” “vulgar reality of commerce,” and “hedonist permissivity...

...For Badiou, ‘the time of the fidelity to an event is the future anterieur,’” he writes...

...Every day without fail,” says Jocho, the warrior “should consider himself as dead...

...reactionary...

...and freedom, real freedom, is necessity and ruthless discipline...

...exchange is socially destructive...

...As Badiou’s hero Mao put it, “The people are a blank sheet of paper on which the Communist Party will write beautiful words...

...Crucially, he and Engels believed, “The ‘idea’ always disgraced itself insofar as it was different from the ‘interest.’” The pair were contemptuous of the idea of a minority revolutionputsch, organized by a violent elite, to impose a new social order from above—Zizek’s “lost cause” —calling it “the old crap...

...He illustrates the spontaneity of racism by reference to his own instinctive anti-Semitism...

...It was the terrible consequences of imposing a vision on reality through revolutionary terror, and the intellectual roots of that totalitarian temptation, that formed the twin concerns of antitotalitarian thought...

...rotting infected, gangrenous toes...

...and it is fascinated by popular culture...

...The decisive theoretical influence on Lost Causes is the French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou, who invites us to renew the communist hypothesis by resurrecting “the ‘eternal idea’ of egalitarian terror” that Zizek informs us is a compound of strict egalitarian justice, terror, voluntarism, and “trust in the people...

...izek claims there is no difference between these three statements: “the Church synod has decided,” “the Central Committee has passed a resolution,” and “the people have made clear its choice at the ballot box...

...It was an astonishing exchange...

...There are Zizek T-Shirts, Zizek YouTube pages, an International Journal of Zizek Studies, Zizek CDs and DVDs, even Zizek!, the movie...

...izek describes his response to reading a tale in Janusz Bardach’s Gulag book Man Is Wolf to Man: “My immediate racist assumption was, of course: ‘Typical Jews...

...One booster of Zizek says he “will entertain and offend but never bore,” a statement that reveals much about what counts in intellectual culture these days...

...And this is the bloody lost cause Zizek wants to rehabilitate...

...It licenses Zizek to make two giant strides backward toward what Karl Marx called “the old crap...

...Social democrats inherited the glorious promises of the eighteenth-century liberal democratic or “bourgeois” revolutions...

...izek’s, one presumes, was a Freudian slip...

...izek’s book seeks to rehabilitate the idea of a violent lurch at utopia by depicting a liberaldemocratic West so inauthentic, so disgusting, and so imbecilic that it is worth any risk to transcend it...

...He has travelled the globe like an intellectual rock star for the past twenty years, gathering as he goes an immense fan club,” says literary critic Terry Eagleton...

...So much for Terry Eagleton’s bromide that “Zizek is by no means a champion of political terror...

...Who are we to lecture anyone...

...Robespierre is applauded because he viewed his own eventual death at the hands of the revolution as “nothing...

...There is definitely something terrifying about this attitude,” writes Zizek, “however, this terror is nothing less than the condition of freedom...

...In this—and, I suspect, much else—Zizek is talking about matters he does not really understand...

...In his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real (the title is taken from a line spoken by Morpheus in The Matrix), Zizek pleads for a world of “final victories and ultimate demarcations” and of “radical and violent simplification...

...This despite the fact that the book jacket shows a guillotine and the text attacks antitotalitarianism...

...I received 76 votes, he 8 (in an open vote...

...He then praises “The great philosophers, from Plato to Heidegger” for being “mistrustful of democracy, if not directly antidemocratic...

...He praises the example set by a Zen priest, Yamamoto Jocho...

...izek presents all this as some kind of Marxism...

...This Zizekian enthusiasm for enthusiasm is another very old story...

...Indeed, Marx rejected the views of the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer precisely because the latter’s “conception of social reorganization [was] based on the antithesis between spirit and mass,” The Bauerites wrote, “In the mass, not somewhere else . . . is the true enemy of the spirit to be found,” the same baleful thought lodged deep in Zizek’s new “leftism...

...izek, by contrast, knows of the millions dead, but he wants a do-over...

...Over here, the Philosopher-Kings, the custodians of the General Will who have escaped the conditioning of the existing reality...

...izek praises those Japanese soldiers who, during the Second World War, performed their own funerals before they left for war...

...lacking the capacity, latent or otherwise, to emancipate themselves...

...It’s called Democracy...

...Revolution is etherealized as an eruption of the Lacanian “Real,” fantasized as a Badiouian “Event,” aimed at democracy itself and contemptuous of the will of the majority...

...Because they did so, they, not the thugs, despots, and fellow travellers that Zizek seeks to rehabilitate, will be forever the intellectual heroes and heroines of that century...

...Here was another case of “the reckless mind” described by Mark Lilla, another display of philo-tyranny...

...This is not a matter of being careful...

...Augustine, not yet...

...He certainly never called for “the universal militarisation of life...

...The new reactionary Left, by contrast, offers a toxic mix of anti-Westernism (“Down with Us...

...izek’s idea of revolution—“this magic moment of enthusiastic unity of a collective will”—is, in truth, more Mussolini than Marx...

...Under the banner “Down with Us!,” this Left-cum-Right wages a war of sorts on the West...

...So he is keen to exculpate those who have done so...

...First, as a colleague at Historical Materialism (whom I suspect had little time for Zizek) put it to me, Zizek must be indulged because he breaks the taboo of a global emancipatory alternative to capitalism, and this allows one to address a whole range of questions that a procapitalist position, however democratic, would not...

...Learning nothing from the historical record concerning the use of “iron will” and “ruthlessness” in the pursuit of utopia, Zizek told the HM editors that revolutionaries must “act without any legitimization, engaging oneself in a kind of Pascalean wager that the Act itself will create the conditions of its retroactive ‘democratic’ legitimisation...

...It’s hard to believe...

...BOOKS The Reckless Mind of Slavoj Zizek ALAN JOHNSON In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek Verso, 2008 504 pp., $34.95 In a stream of writings and talks since 1989, the Slovenian social theorist Slavoj Zizek has blended Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy with film criticism, cultural studies, and authoritarian Marxism to earn a reputation as “one of the most dazzling figures on the intellectual left,” in the words of social theorist Alex Callinicos...

...The interview was utterly depressing...

...izek had capitalized the word “Act” and added the qualifier “Absolute...

...He smashed up the Printers Union, a bulwark of Menshevism, launched a frame-up of the Mensheviks as “Polish spies,” and arrested the majority of their leaders and activists...

...What would be the position of workers, after the revolution...

...And that’s what the new “leftism” is selling—a new tyranny...

...For Zizek, the Hollywood film The Matrix is best watched as a documentary...

...The Left has been very quick to criticize the neoconservatives for thinking they could “make reality” but indulges the same thing in the new “leftism...

...Marx did not seek to impose an idea by terror, but to pursue the interest of ordinary people by a politics of self-emancipation...

...Alan Johnson is a professor in the Department of Social and Psychological Sciences at Edge Hill University in England...

...In Lost Causes, Zizek quotes Badiou approvingly: “Today the enemy is not Empire or Capital...

...The thuggish quality of the new style in “leftism” seems more Tony Soprano than Karl Marx...

...The reactionary Left-cum-Right chants, “We are all Hezbollah now...

...In Moscow and Kharkov, Ekataterinoslav and Odessa, Kiev and Smolensk, the Mensheviks were winning seats to the Soviets, using the Constitution to challenge the Bolsheviks...

...izek is indulgent with intellectuals who flirted, or worse, with totalitarianism...

...And there stands the new “leftism,” arms folded, legs akimbo, chin jutting, lecturing on some balcony about divine violence and a new order...

...This reactionary Left-cum-Right does nothing less than invert the historic identity of the social democratic Left...

...Back to Kolyma...

...It means never having to say you’re sorry, because [miserable] reality does not matter...

...The antitotalitarians, he claims, were opposed to anyone who dared to “deconstruct [the] religious and moral foundations of our society...

...This intellectual sleight-of-hand is made— sometimes with whip in hand, sometimes in the ponderous tones of continental philosophy—by all totalitarian theorists...

...It then uses these institutions as a trelliswork to wrap Western political culture, and the Western mind, in thickets of Occidentalism, antiAmericanism, anti-liberalism, conspiratorial manias, and self-loathing...

...Lenin was right: after the revolution, the anarchic disruptions of the disciplinary constraints of production should be replaced by an even stronger discipline...

...smashed kidneys...

...In his essay “The Leninist Freedom,” he cheers Lenin’s death threats against the (social democratic and Marxist) Mensheviks who, in 1920, criticized the Bolshevik attacks on democracy...

...The problem of Zizek for the democratic Left is this: Why has a pure example of what the late Hal Draper would have called the authoritarian and elitist strain of socialism-from-above found a comfortable home, even adulation, on the Left...

...In his book, politeness is brutality...

...And that’s why Lenin made his move...

...In Defense of Lost Causes has only increased Zizek’s cult status...

...He wrote in The Parallax View, “If we really want to name an act which was truly daring, for which one truly had to ‘have the balls’ to try the impossible, but which was simultaneously a horrible act, it was Stalin’s forced collectivisation in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s...

...rehabilitates “egalitarian terror,” “ruthless discipline,” and authoritarian communism...

...honest, for sure, but why “of course...

...He had denied the need for “any legitimisation...

...In passing, note how badly Badiou’s fauxprofundity that “the time of the fidelity to an event is the future anterieur” turns out...

...izek knew much about pop culture but his history was shaky...

...These escapees can merrily commit “Absolute Acts,” make “Pascalean wagers,” and with an “iron will” and “ruthlessness” set about organizing “the global militarisation of life...

...and a tolerance, or worse, for reactionary political forces—which it redefines as “the resistance” to “the Empire...

...the more indulgently he is received by the academic left which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult...

...the] skull[s] pierced by a bullet...

...the open society is no more than liberal-skeptical cynicism...

...In other words, “one acts now as if the future one wants to bring about is already here...

...Our duty lay in “the assertion of the unconditional, ‘ruthless’ revolutionary will, ready to ‘go to the end,’ effectively to seize power and undermine the existing totality...

...are the ultimate obstacle to the ‘final solution’ of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in an all-encompassing unity and flexibility...

...Actually, in 1919 Trotsky called for the temporary, emergency militarization of labor, and that was bad enough...

...and is dedicated to the French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou...

...He praises Mao’s “tremendous achievement” of showing us how “the victorious revolutionary subject is a voluntarist agent which acts against ‘spontaneous economic necessity,’ imposing its vision on reality through revolutionary terror...

...Heidegger, he declares, was great “not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement...

...Second, parts of the Left have lost their way...

...None are encouraging...

...It was the resurgence of the Mensheviks in the spring of 1920 that lay behind Lenin’s thuggery...

...And what on earth are we to make of this sentence in Lost Causes?: “The only true solution to the ‘Jewish Question’ is the ‘final solution’ (their annihilation) because Jews...

...tolerance is fanaticism...

...Second, displacing real people with the fantasy-category of “The People” allows Zizek to bracket democracy and the opinion of the majority...

...To imagine one can use democracy to change the world is to live wholly within an illusion, just like Neo did before Morpheus showed him that what he thought was reality was only the shimmering code of the matrix...

...They can be ignored, even abused, in the name of “truth...

...Lenin replied (in Zizek’s account), “Of course, gentlemen, you have the right to publish this critique—but, then, gentlemen, be so kind as to allow us to line you up against the wall and shoot you...

...This kind of leftist wants to be democratic but, like St...

...the natural or commonsensical is nothing but internalized ideology...

...Tocqueville’s charge that socialism sought a society of beavers not individuals did not apply to Marx, but it does describe Zizek, who, for example, praises the 1920s Russian avant-garde artists for (in his view) inventing a new Industrial Man “who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic co-ordinated industrial Machine...

...consumption is obscene (with the exception, one assumes, of his own consumption of airline travel, Hollywood DVDs, and mint tea...

...None of this has made the Left balk...

...Far from fearing the totalitarian temptation, Zizek urges us to embrace it as the “white intellectuals’ burden...

...The beehive or anthill conception of collectivism is not socialism but the image of a new tyranny...

...He quotes the French revolutionary Saint-Just (“That which produces the general good is always terrible”) and adds this gloss: “These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the temptation to violently impose the general good on a society but on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed...

...No, it is, rather, “constitutive of a radical revolutionary position...

...One imposes the truth against the people in the name of “The People...

...When I was an editor at the journal Historical Materialism, we interviewed Zizek...

...Anti-totalitarian thought appears in all its misery as what it really is, a worthless sophistic exercise,” writes Zizek, “a pseudotheorisation of the lowest opportunist survivalist fears and instincts, a way of thinking that is...

...Robespierre’s “sublime greatness,” he tells us, lies in the fact that he “is not afraid to die...

...In other words, Zizek’s theory of “revolution” is, let’s be blunt, fascistic...

...Their leader Julius Martov—a dedicated revolutionary since his Vilno days in 1893, and a better model for us, dare I suggest, than Zen priest Yamamoto Jocho—wrote that in early 1920, “wherever we [Mensheviks] could put up our candidate, regardless of the freedom to agitate, our candidates won...

...And like all authoritarian utopians from Plato through Rousseau to Mao, Zizek divided society into two parts...

...izek’s “lost cause” is the idea of revolutionary terror to impose a utopian order from above...

...Like many adolescents of all ages, Zizek confuses inversion with profundity...

...But Zizek mocks this tradition in the crude, bullying style of the Stalinist intellectual policeman, Andrei Zhdanov...

...tact is brutal insensitivity...

...benighted about their true needs...

...Mao’s insouciance before the threat of nuclear war and Che Guevara’s willingness to risk nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis are both praised...

...cultural relativism...

...Could political irresponsibility be more neatly justified...

...Michel Foucault’s support for the Iranian Islamists was a good thing because “what matters is not the miserable reality that followed the upheavals, the bloody confrontations, the new oppressive measures, and so on but the enthusiasm that the events in Iran stimulated in the external (Western) observer, confirming his hopes in the possibility of a new form of spiritualised political collective...

...we remind Colonel Rainsborough), and to the rest of the world (hence the claim to internationalism...

...Revolutionary politics is not a matter of opinions but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the ‘opinion of the majority’ and to impose the revolutionary will against it...

...There are no ‘democratic (procedural) rules’ one is a priori prohibited to violate,” he argued...

...Martov recorded that “here in the chemical factory they have put up Lenin against me as a candidate...

...Marx refused to follow Bauer, whose error, he argued, was to imagine that “the Spirit, or the Criticism, represents the organizing labor, the mass the raw material, and history the product” Marx’s socialism was not an organic “ism” in which the individual’s moral status and rights were to be abolished in the name of “society” or “truth” or “progress” or “history...

...He craves “the magical moment when the infinite pondering crystallises itself into a simple yes or no...

...izek takes this kind of thing to the limit...

...Its high theory and low sensibility are important in the mass media, the arts, and the academy and in what we might call graduate-popular-culture...

...He writes: “[O]ne should thus posit a double equation: divine violence = inhuman terror = dictatorship of the proletariat...

...He finds death much more interesting, authentic, heroic, and meaningful than (mere bourgeois) life...

...Their goal was the realization of the promise of those revolutions for everyone, even “the poorest he,” as the Leveller Colonel Rainsborough put it in 1647...

...What he does not say is that when Kant realized that the revolutionary terror had killed some thousands he amended his position...

...As for Camus’s wonderful aphorism, “It is no sin to prefer happiness,” Zizek is not a fan...

...With Badiou, Zizek indicts an atonal world lost in jouissance and the pursuit of happiness...

...In this spirit, Zizek praises Kant’s initial reaction to the French Revolution—that its crimes did not matter compared to the enthusiastic response its Idea was generating all over Europe...

...The social democrat sang that democratic internationalism would “unite the human race...

...We read of Jews “smashed into bloody pulp,” and that “all good films about the Holocaust are also comedies...

...Soon enough they were in prison or exile...

...and scurvy racked corpses in log-cabin, dugout morgues...

...Even the Maoist Cultural Revolution—which killed between four hundred thousand and one million people, according to Jung Chang’s and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story—is redeemed because it “sustained revolutionary enthusiasm,” being “‘the last big installment in the life of this Idea...

...it drips with a vicarious fascination with violence and death...

...Apparently, Zizek was a dissident in his native Slovenia under the old Communist Party dictatorship...

...It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand...

...izek even calls for “the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terrors, the ‘informer’ who denounces the culprits to the authorities...

...But whatever critical distance one takes from Marxism, Karl Marx made an enormous contribution to the democratic breakthrough of the nineteenth century precisely because his socialism was a kind of democratic extremism, aiming to extend to all the promise of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century...

...Trotsky, he claimed, “went as far as proposing global militarisation … I am ready to assert the Trotsky of the universal militarisation of life….That is the good Trotsky for me...

...Some reasons suggest themselves...

...Even in the worst Gulag, the moment they are given a minimum of freedom and space for manoeuvre, they start trading—in human blood...

...That’s because the so-called democratic subject is nothing but a “violent abstraction...

...In fact, as Adam Kirsch noted in the New Republic, “the louder [Zizek] applauds violence and terror— especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin and Mao...

...Adam Kirsch has pointed to the sheer weight and the troubling texture of imagery and example in Zizek’s writings concerning “the Jews...

...He is the founder and editor of Democratiya, and the editor of Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews (The Foreign Policy Centre, 2007...

...We could decide to prefer Hal Draper’s Marx: [For Marx] . . . the rights and privileges of the individual must not be subordinated to the glorification of state or communal collectivity, or to the maximization of its power, but, exactly to the contrary . . . the authority and rights of the organized collectivity or state are justified only insofar as they contribute to the full development of every individual’s potentialities as a human being...

...Of course, Badiou’s totalitarian political category/fantasy of “The People” has nothing to do with actual people...

...He had sneered at “democratic deadlock...

...First, mixing up the people with “The People” allows Zizek to bracket reality...

...foreign to and incompatible with enjoyment,” while democracy itself is nothing but an “empty place...

...The initially pro-Nazi philosopher Heidegger is praised for rejecting liberal democracy as inauthentic...

...Third, the Zizekian style of “leftism” is perfectly suited to our times...

...izek likes to play the tough...

...Could he be any clearer...

...Comically, to my mind, Zizek invites his affluent and tenured readers to adopt the “proper attitude of a warrior towards death...

...My enemy’s enemy is my friend...

...izek is the flag bearer for a new, openly antidemocratic and reactionary “leftism...

...It is a fundamentally adolescent discourse...

...This “preemptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living” is not fascistic militarism...

...What the antitotalitarian thinkers really objected to was not social and ethical criticism of the liberal democracies but rather what the great Russian writer Vasily Grossman described in Forever Flowing: the “crazed eyes...

...Stalinist Theory and the New Style in “Leftism” Well, Zizek has now written up these thoughts into a 500-page book...

...So what explains the Left’s affaire de coeur...

...We should learn from Robespierre that “just and severe punishment of the enemies is the highest form of clemency” and that “rigor and charity coincide in terror...

...They insisted, whether they were revolutionaries or reformists, that the promises be extended to the economic and social spheres at home, to groups (“and she...

...Over there, the mass of ordinary human beings, socialized by the existing totality...

...When Zizek urges the revolutionary Left to ignore liberal qualms about terror he offers this exemplar: “To be clear and brutal to the end, there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering’s reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a wellknown Jew from deportation: ‘In this city, I decide who is a Jew!’ . . . In this city we decide what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency...

...Jean-Paul Sartre famously refused to tell the French factory workers the truth about the Gulag for fear of “demoralizing” them...

...Repeatedly, his gaze falls lovingly on death...

...izek’s lost cause should remain buried in the snows of Kolyma, that pole of cold and cruelty, along with the dead...