The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology by Slavoj Zizek

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A specter is haunting Western thought, the specter of the Cartesian subject.

The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology: A specter is haunting Western thought, the specter of the Cartesian subject. In this book Slavoj Zizek unearths a subversive core to this elusive specter, and finds within it the indispensable philosophical point of reference for any genuinely emancipatory project.

Revolution at the Gates: Zizek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings

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Lenin’s 1917 writings—Žižek asks if he can be reinvented for our era of “cultural capitalism”

The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn’t he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-century?

Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. They reveal his ability to grasp the significance of an extraordinary moment in history. Everything is here, from Lenin-the-ingenious-revolutionary-strategist to Lenin-of-the-enacted-utopia. To use Kierkegaard’s phrase, what we can glimpse in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet Lenin-the-Soviet-institution, but Lenin thrown into an open, contingent situation.

In Revolution at the Gates, Slavoj Zizek locates the 1917 writings in their historical context, while his afterword tackles the key question of whether Lenin can be reinvented in our era of “cultural capitalism.” Zizek is convinced that, whatever the discussion—the forthcoming crisis of capitalism, the possibility of a redemptive violence, the falsity of liberal tolerance—Lenin’s time has come again.

Slavoj Zizek: The Leninist Freedom

from Slavoj Zizek’s On Belief (2001)

The Leninist Freedom

How, then, do things stand with freedom? Here is how Lenin stated his position in a polemic against the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionaries’ critique of Bolshevik power in 1922:

Indeed, the sermons which ... the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries preach express their true nature: “The revolution has gone too far What you are saying now we have been saying at[ the time, permit us to say it again.” But we say in reply: “Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the white guards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious white guard elements."”

This Leninist freedom of choice — not “Life or money!” but “Life or critique!” — combined with Lenin’s dismissive attitude towards the “liberal” notion of freedom, accounts for his bad reputation among liberals. Their case largely rests upon their rejection of the standard Marxist-Leninist opposition of “formal” and “actual” freedom: as even Leftist liberals like Claude Lefort emphasize again and again, freedom is in its very notion “formal,” so that “actual freedom” equals the lack of freedom.” That is to say, with regard to freedom, Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort “Freedom yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?” — for him, in the case of the Mensheviks quoted above, their “freedom” to criticize the Bolshevik government effectively amounted to “freedom” to undermine the workers’ and peasants’ government on behalf of the counter-revolution ... Today, is it not obvious after the terrifying experience of Really Existing Socialism, where the fault of this reasoning resides? First, it reduces a historical constellation to a closed, fully contextualized, situation in which the “objective” consequences of one’s acts are fully determined (“independently of your intentions, what you are doing now objectively serves . . . “); second, the position of enunciation of such statements usurps the right to decide what your acts “objectively mean,” so that their apparent 11 objectivism” (the focus on “objective meaning”) is the form of appearance of its opposite, the thorough subjectivism: I decide what your acts objectively mean, since I define the context of a situation (say, if I conceive of my power as the immediate equivalent/expression of the power of the working class, then everyone who opposes me is “objectively” an enemy of the working class).
Against this full contextualization, one should emphasize that freedom is “actual” precisely and only as the capacity to “transcend” the coordinates of a given situation, to “posit the presuppositions” of one’s activity (as Hegel would have put it), i.e. to redefine the very situation within which one is active. Furthermore, as many a critic pointed out, the very term “Really Existing Socialism,” although it was coined in order to assert Socialism’s success, is in itself a proof of Socialism’s utter failure, i.e. of the failure of the attempt to legitimize Socialist regimes — the term “Really Existing Socialism” popped up at the historical moment when the only legitimizing reason for Socialism was a mere fact that it exists . . . “

Is this, however, the whole story? How does freedom effectively function in liberal democracies themselves? Although Clinton’s presidency epitomizes the Third Way of today’s (ex-)Left succumbing to the Rightist ideological blackmail, his health-care reform program would nonetheless amount to a kind of act, at least in today’s conditions, since it would have been based on the rejection of the hegemonic notions of the need to curtail Big State expenditure and administration — in a way, it would “do the impossible.” No wonder, then, that it failed: its failure — perhaps the only significant, although negative, event of Clinton’s presidency bears witness to the material force of the ideological notion of “free choice.” That is to say, although the large majority of the so-called “ordinary people” were not properly acquainted with the reform program, the medical lobby (twice as strong as the infamous defense lobby!) succeeded in imposing on the public the fundamental idea that, with universal health-care free choice (in matters concerning medicine) will be somehow threatened — against this purely fictional reference to “free choice”, all enumeration of “hard facts” (in Canada, health-care is less expensive and more effective, with no less free choice, etc.) proved ineffective.

Here we are at the very nerve center of the liberal ideology: freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the “psychological” subject endowed with propensities he or she strives to realize. This especially holds today, in the era of what sociologists like Ulrich Beck call “risk society,” when the ruling ideology endeavors to sell us the insecurity caused by the dismantling of the Welfare State as the opportunity for new freedoms: you have to change jobs every year, relying on short-term contracts instead of a long-term stable appointment. Why not see it as the liberation from the constraints of a fixed job, as the chance to reinvent yourself again and again, to become aware of and realize hidden potentials of your personality? You can no longer rely on the standard health insurance and retirement plan, so that you have to opt for additional coverage for which you have to pay. Why not perceive it as an additional opportunity to choose: either better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety, the postmodern or “second modernity” ideologist will immediately accuse you of being unable to assume full freedom, of the “escape from freedom,” of the immature sticking to old stable forms ... Even better, when this is inscribed into the ideology of the subject as the psychological individual pregnant with natural abilities and tendencies, then 1 as it were automatically interpret all these changes as the results of my personality, not as the result of me being thrown around by market forces.

Phenomena like these make it all the more necessary today to REASSERT the opposition of “formal” and “actual” freedom in a new, more precise, sense. What we need today, in the era of liberal hegemony, is a “Leninist” traité de la servitude libérale, a new version of la Boétie’s Traiti de la servitude volontaire that would fully justify the apparent oxymoron “liberal totalitarianism.” In experimental psychology, Jean-Léon Beauvois took the first step in this direction with his precise exploration of the paradoxes of conferring on the subject the freedom to choose. Repeated experiments established the following paradox: if, AFTER getting from two groups of volunteers the agreement to participate in an experiment, one informs them that the experiment will involve something unpleasant, against their ethics even, and if, at this point, one reminds the first group that they have the free choice to say no, and says nothing to the other group, in BOTH groups, the SAME (very high) percentage will agree to continue their participation in the experiment.

What this means is that conferring the formal freedom of choice does not make any difference: those given the freedom will do the same thing as those (implicitly) denied it. This, however, does not mean that the reminder/bestowal of the freedom of choice does not make any difference: those given the freedom to choose will not only tend to choose the same as those denied it; they will tend to “rationalize” their “free” decision to continue to participate in the experiment — unable to endure the so-called cognitive dissonance (their awareness that they FREELY acted against their interests, propensities, tastes or norms), they will tend to change their opinion about the act they were asked to accomplish.

Let us say that an individual is first asked to participate in an experiment that concerns changing eating habits in order to fight against famine; then, after agreeing to do it, at the first encounter in the laboratory, he will be asked to swallow a living worm, with the explicit reminder that, if he finds this act repulsive, he can, of course, say no, since he has the complete freedom to choose. In most cases, he will do it, and then rationalize it by way of saying to himself something like: “What I am asked to do IS disgusting, but I am not a coward, 1 should display some courage and self-control, otherwise scientists will perceive me as a weak person who pulls out at the first minor obstacle! Furthermore, a worm does have a lot of proteins and it could effectively be used to feed the poor who am 1 to hinder such an important experiment because of my petty sensitivity? And, finally, maybe my disgust of worms is just a prejudice, maybe a worm is not so bad — and would tasting it not be a new and daring experience? What if it will enable me to discover an unexpected, slightly perverse, dimension of myself that 1 was hitherto unaware of?”

Beauvois enumerates three modes of what brings people to accomplish such an act which runs against their perceived propensities and/or interests: authoritarian (the pure command “You should do it because I say so, without questioning it!”, sustained by the reward if the subject does it and the punishment if he does not do it), totalitarian (the reference to some higher Cause or common Good which is larger than the subject’s perceived interest: “You should do it because, even if it is unpleasant, it serves our Nation, Party, Humanity!”), and liberal (the reference to the subject’s inner nature itself. “What is asked of you may appear repulsive, but look deep into yourself and you will discover that it’s in your true nature to do it, you will find it attractive, you will become aware of new, unexpected, dimensions of your personality!”).

At this point, Beauvois should be corrected: a direct authoritarianism is practically nonexistent — even the most oppressive regime publicly legitimizes its reign with the reference to some Higher Good, and the fact that, ultimately, “you have to obey because I say so” reverberates only as its obscene supplement discernible between the lines. It is rather the specificity of the standard authoritarianism to refer to some higher Good (“whatever your inclinations are, you have to follow my order for the sake of the higher Good!”), while totalitarianism, like liberalism, interpellates the subject on behalf of HIS OWN good (“what may appear to you as an external pressure, is really the expression of your objective interests, of what you REALLY WANT without being aware of it! “). The difference between the two resides elsewhere: totalitarianism” imposes on the subject his or her own good, even if it is against his or her will — recall King Charles’ (in)famous statement: “If any shall be so foolishly unnatural s to oppose their king, their country and their own good, we will make them happy, by God’s blessing — even against their wills. “ (Charles I to the Earl of Essex, 6 August 1 644. ) Here we encounter the later Jacobin theme of happiness as a political factor, as well as the Saint-Justian idea of forcing people to be happy ... Liberalism tries to avoid (or, rather, cover up) this paradox by way of clinging to the end to the fiction of the subject’s immediate free self-perception (“I don’t claim to know better than you what you want — just look deep into yourself and decide freely what you want!”).

The reason for this fault in Beauvois’s line of argumentation is that he fails to recognize how the abyssal tautological authority (“It is so because 1 say so!” of the Master) does not work only because of the sanctions (punishment/reward) it implicitly or explicitly evokes. That is to say, what, effectively, makes a subject freely choose what is imposed on him against his interests and/or propensities? Here, the empirical inquiry into “pathological” (in the Kantian sense of the term) motivations is not sufficient: the enunciation of an injunction that imposes on its addressee a symbolic engagement/ commitment evinces an inherent force of its own, so that what seduces us into obeying it is the very feature that may appear to be an obstacle — the absence of a “why.” Here, Lacan can be of some help: the Lacanian “Master-Signifier” designates precisely this hypnotic force of the symbolic injunction which relies only on its own act of enunciation — it is here that we encounter “symbolic efficiency” at its purest. The three ways of legitimizing the exercise of authority (“authoritarian,” “totalitarian,” “liberal”) are nothing but three ways of covering up, of blinding us to the seductive power of the abyss of this empty call. In a way, liberalism is here even the worst of the three, since it NATURALIZES the reasons for obedience into the subject’s internal psychological structure. So the paradox is that “liberal” subjects are in a way those least free: they change the very opinion/perception of themselves, accepting what was IMPOSED on them as originating in their “nature” — they are even no longer AWARE of their subordination.

Let us take the situation in the Eastern European countries around 1990, when Really Existing Socialism was falling apart: all of a sudden, people were thrown into a situation of the “freedom of political choice” — however, were they REALLY at any point asked the fundamental question of what kind of new order they actually wanted? Is it not that they found themselves in the exact situation of the subject-victim of a Beauvois experiment? They were first told that they were entering the promised land of political freedom; then, soon afterwards, they were informed that this freedom involved wild privatization, the dismantling of the system of social security, etc. etc. — they still have the freedom to choose, so if they want, they can step out; but, no, our heroic Eastern Europeans didn’t want to disappoint their Western mentors, they stoically persisted in the choice they never made, convincing themselves that they should behave as mature subjects who are aware that freedom has its price ... This is why the notion of the psychological subject endowed with natural propensities, who has to realize its true Self and its potentials, and who is, consequently, ultimately responsible for his failure or success, is the key ingredient of liberal freedom. And here one should risk reintroducing the Leninist opposition of “formal” and “actual” freedom: in an act of actual freedom, one dares precisely to BREAK the seductive power of symbolic efficiency. Therein resides the moment of truth of Lenin’s acerbic retort to his Menshevik critics: the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself The catch of the “transition” from Really Existing Socialism to capitalism was that people never had the chance to choose the ad quem of this transition — all of a sudden, they were (almost literally) “thrown” into a new situation in which they were presented with a new set of given choices (pure liberalism, nationalist conservatism ... ). What this means is that the “actual freedom” as the act of consciously changing this set occurs only when, in the situation of a forced choice, one ACTS AS IF THE CHOICE IS NOT FORCED and “chooses the impossible.”

This is what Lenin’s obsessive tirades against “formal” freedom are about, therein resides their “rational kernel” which is worth saving today: when he emphasizes that there is no “pure” democracy, that we should always ask who does a freedom under consideration serve, which is its role in the class struggle, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of the TRUE radical choice.
This is what the distinction between “formal” and “actual” freedom ultimately amounts to: “formal” freedom is the freedom of choice WITHIN the coordinates of the existing power relations, while “actual” freedom designates the site of an intervention which undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s point is not to limit freedom of choice, but to maintain the fundamental Choice — when Lenin asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: “Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?”

The most popular TV show of the fall of 2000 in France, with the viewer rating two times higher than that of the notorious “Big Brother” reality soaps, was “C'est mon choix” (“It is my choice”) on France 3, the talk show whose guest is an ordinary (or, exceptionally, a well-known) person who made a peculiar choice which determined his or her entire life-style: one of them decided never to wear underwear, another tries to find a more appropriate sexual partner for his father and mother — extravagance is allowed, solicited even, but with the explicit exclusion of the choices which may disturb the public (for example, a person whose choice is to be and act as a racist, is a priori excluded). Can one imagine a better predicament of what the “freedom of choice” effectively amounts to in our liberal societies? We can go on making our small choices, “reinvesting ourselves” thoroughly, on condition that these choices do not seriously disturb the social and ideological balance. For “C'est mon choix,” the truly radical thing would have been to focus precisely on the “disturbing” choices: to invite as guests people like dedicated racists, i.e. people whose choice (whose difference) DOES make a difference. This, also, is the reason why, today, “democracy” is more and more a false issue, a notion so discredited by its predominant use that, perhaps, one should take the risk of abandoning it to the enemy. Where, how, by whom are the key decisions concerning global social issues made? Are they made in the public space, through the engaged participation of the majority? If the answer is yes, it is of secondary importance if the state has a one-party system, etc. If the answer is no, it is of secondary importance if we have parliamentary democracy and freedom of individual choice.

Did something homologous to the invention of the liberal psychological individual not take place in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s? The Russian avant-garde art of the early 1920s (futurism, constructivism) not only zealously endorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial man — no longer the old man of sentimental passions and roots in traditions, but the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial Machine. As such, it was subversive in its very “ultra-orthodoxy,” i.e. in its over-identification with the core of the official ideology: the image of man that we get in Eisenstein, Meyerhold, constructivist paintings, etc., emphasizes the beauty of his/her mechanical movements, his/her thorough depsychologization. What was perceived in the West as the ultimate nightmare of liberal individualism, as the ideological counterpoint to “Taylorization,” to Fordist ribbon-work, was in Russia hailed as the utopian prospect of liberation: recall how Meyerhold violently asserted the “behaviorist” approach to acting — no longer emphatic familiarization with the person the actor is playing, but ruthless bodily training aimed at cold bodily discipline, at the ability of the actor to perform a series of mechanized movements . . .” THIS is what was unbearable to AND IN the official Stalinist ideology, so that the Stalinist “socialist realism” effectively WAS an attempt to reassert a “Socialism with a human face,” i.e. to reinscribe the process of industrialization within the constraints of the traditional psychological individual: in the Socialist Realist texts, paintings and films, individuals are no longer rendered as parts of the global Machine, but as warm, passionate persons.

The obvious reproach that imposes itself here is, of course: is the basic characteristic of today’s “postmodern” subject not the exact opposite of the free subject who experienced himself as ultimately responsible for his fate, namely the subject who grounds the authority of his speech on his status of a victim of circumstances beyond his control? Every contact with another human being is experienced as a potential threat — if the other smokes, if he casts a covetous glance at me, he already hurts me; this logic of victimization is today universalized, reaching well beyond the standard cases of sexual or racist harassment — recall the growing financial industry of paying damage claims, from the tobacco industry deal in the USA and the financial claims of the Holocaust victims and forced laborers in Nazi Germany, and the idea that the USA should pay the African-Americans hundreds of billions of dollars for all they were deprived of due to their past slavery ... This notion of the subject as an irresponsible victim involves the extreme Narcissistic perspective from which every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject’s precarious imaginary balance; as such, it is not the opposite, but, rather, the inherent supplement of the liberal free subject: in today’s predominant form of individuality, the self-centered assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances.

pp 113 to 124 reproduced from On Belief.

The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Zizek

Buy The Sublime Object of Ideology here.

Exploring the ideologies fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.

Slavoj Zizek, the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books, acclaimed as the “Elvis of cultural theory”, and today's most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes—all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema and Zizek! reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator. Now Verso is making his classic titles, each of which stand as a core of his ever-expanding life's work, available as new editions. Each is beautifully re-packaged, including new introductions from Zizek himself. Simply put, they are the essential texts for understanding Zizek's thought and thus cornerstones of contemporary philosophy.

The Sublime Object of Ideology: Slavoj Zizek's first book is a provocative and original work looking at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. In a thrilling tour de force that made his name, he explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.

Cynicism as a Form of Ideology

Cynicism as a Form of Ideology by Slavoj Zizek

Cynicism as a Form of Ideology
Slavoj Zizek.
The Sublime Object of Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 28-30.

The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx's Capital: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es" ("they do not know it, but they are doing it"). The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it. That is why such a 'naive consciousness' can be submitted to a critical-ideological procedure. The aim of this procedure is to lead the naïve ideological consciousness to a point at which it can recognize its own effective conditions, the social reality that it is distorting, and through this very act dissolve itself. In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology -that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example — it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are', of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence.

We find, then, the paradox of a being which can reproduce itself only in so far as it is misrecognized and overlooked: the moment we see it 'as it really is', this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid the simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality. We can see why Lacan, in his Seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, distances himself from the liberating gesture of saying finally that "the emperor has no clothes". The point is, as Lacan puts it, that the emperor is naked only beneath his clothes, so if there is an unmasking gesture of psychoanalysis, it is closer to Alphonse Allais's well-known joke, quoted by Lacan: somebody points at a woman and utters a horrified cry, "Look at her, what a shame, under her clothes, she is totally naked" (Lacan, 1986, p.231).

But all this is already well known: it is the classic concept of ideology as 'false consciousness', misrecognition of the social reality which is part of this reality itself. Our question is: Does this concept of ideology as a naive consciousness still apply to today's world? Is it still operating today? In the Critique of Cynical Reason, a great bestseller in Germany (Sloterdijk, 1983), Peter Sloterdijk puts forward the thesis that ideology's dominant mode of functioning is cynical, which renders impossible- or, more precisely, vain — the classic critical-ideological procedure. The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: "they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it". Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it.

We must distinguish this cynical position strictly from what Sloterdijk calls kynicism. Kynicism represents the popular, plebeian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm: the classical kynical procedure is to confront the pathetic phrases of the ruling official ideology — its solemn, grave tonality — with everyday banality and to hold them up to ridicule, thus exposing behind the sublime noblesse of the ideological phrases the egotistical interests, the violence, the brutal claims to power. This procedure, then, is more pragmatic than argumentative: it subverts the official proposition by confronting it with the situation of its enunciation; it proceeds ad hominem (for example when a politician preaches the duty of patriotic sacrifice, kynicism exposes the personal gain he is making from the sacrifice of others).

Cynicism is the answer of the ruling culture to this kynical subversion: it recognizes, it takes into account, the particular interest behind the ideological universality, the distance between the ideological mask and the reality, but it still finds reasons to retain the mask. This cynicism is not a direct position of immorality, it is more like morality itself put in the service of immorality — the model of cynical wisdom is to conceive probity, integrity, as a supreme form of dishonesty, and morals as a supreme form of profligacy, the truth as the most effective form of a lie. This cynicism is therefore a kind of perverted 'negation of the negation' of the official ideology: confronted with illegal enrichment, with robbery, the cynical reaction consists in saying that legal enrichment is a lot more effective and, moreover, protected by the law. As Bertolt Brecht puts it in his Threepenny Opera: "what is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?"

It is clear, therefore, that confronted with such cynical reason, the traditional critique of ideology no longer works. We can no longer subject the ideological text to 'symptomatic reading', confronting it with its blank spots, with what it must repress to organize itself, to preserve its consistency — cynical reason takes this distance into account in advance. Is then the only issue left to us to affirm that, with the reign of cynical reason, we find ourselves in the so-called post-ideological world? Even Adorno came to this conclusion, starting from the premiss that ideology is, strictly speaking, only a system which makes a claim to the truth — that is, which is not simply a lie but a lie experienced as truth, a lie which pretends to be taken seriously. Totalitarian ideology no longer has this pretension. It is no longer meant, even by its authors, to be taken seriously — its status is just that of a means of manipulation, purely external and instrumental; its rule is secured not by its truth-value but by simple extra-ideological violence and promise of gain.

It is here, at this point, that the distinction between symptom and fantasy must be introduced in order to show how the idea that we live in a post-ideological society proceeds a little too quickly: cynical reason, with all its ironic detachment, leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures the social reality itself.

From: Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 28-30.
Available: http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/cynzizek.html

The Year of Dreaming Dangerously by Slavoj Zizek

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Call it the year of dreaming dangerously: 2011 caught the world off guard with a series of shattering events. While protesters in New York, Cairo, London, and Athens took to the streets in pursuit of emancipation, obscure destructive fantasies inspired the world’s racist populists in places as far apart as Hungary and Arizona, achieving a horrific consummation in the actions of mass murderer Anders Breivik.

The subterranean work of dissatisfaction continues. Rage is building, and a new wave of revolts and disturbances will follow. Why? Because the events of 2011 augur a new political reality. These are limited, distorted—sometimes even perverted—fragments of a utopian future lying dormant in the present.

The Year of Dreaming Dangerously - Final chapter

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek discusses his new book, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (Verso), with Columbia professors Stathis Gourgouris (Classics), Lydia Liu (East Asian Languages and Cultures), and Bruce Robbins (English and Comparative Literature).

Slavoj Zizek: The Year of Dreaming Dangerously - Final chapter

So where do we stand now, in 2012? 2011 was the year of dreaming dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory politics all around the world. Now, a year later, every day brings new proofs of how fragile and inconsistent the awakening was, with all of its many facets displaying the same signs of exhaustion: the enthusiasm of the Arab Spring is mired in compromises and religious fundamentalism; the OWS is losing momentum to such an extent that, in a nice case of the “cunning of reason,” the police cleansing of Zuchotti Park and other sites of the OWS protests cannot but appear as a blessing in disguise, covering up the immanent loss of momentum. And the same story goes on all around the world: the Maoists in Nepal seem outmaneuvered by the reactionary royalist forces; Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” experiment more and more regressing into a caudillo-run populism… What are we to do in such depressive times when dreams seem to fade away? Is the only choice we have the one between nostalgic-narcissistic remembrance of the sublime enthusiastic moments, and the cynically-realist explanation of why the attempts to really change the situation had to fail?

The first thing to state is that the subterranean work of dissatisfaction is going on: rage is accumulating and a new wave of revolts will follow. The weird and unnatural relative calm of the Spring of 2012 is more and more perforated by the growing subterranean tensions announcing new explosions; what makes the situation so ominous is the all-pervasive sense of blockage: there no clear way out, the ruling elite is clearly losing its ability to rule. What makes the situation even more disturbing is the obvious fact that democracy doesn’t work: after elections in Greece and in Spain, the same frustrations remain. How should we read the signs of this rage? In his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes the French historian André Monglond: “The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly.”[1] Events like the OWS protests, the Arab Spring, demonstrations in Greece and Spain, etc., have to be read as such signs from the future. In other words, we should turn around the usual historicist perspective of understanding an event out of its context and genesis. Radical emancipatory outburst cannot be understood in this way: instead of analyzing them as a part of the continuum of past/present, we should bring in the perspective of the future, i.e., we should analyze them as limited, distorted (sometimes even perverted) fragments of a utopian future which lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential. According to Deleuze, in Proust, “people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one that they have in space”[2]: the notorious madeleine is here in place, but this is not its true time.[3] In a similar way, one should learn the art to recognize, from an engaged subjective position, elements which are here, in our space, but whose time is the emancipated future, the future of the Communist Idea.

However, while one should learn to watch for such signs from the future, we should also be aware that what we are doing now will only become readable once the future will be here, so we should not put too much hopes into the desperate search for the “germs of Communism” in today’s society. One should thus strive for a delicate balance between reading signs from the (hypothetic Communist) future and maintaining the radical openness of the future: openness alone ends up in decisionist nihilism which constrains us to leaps into the void, while full reliance on the signs from the future can succumb to determinist planning (we know what the future should look like and, from a position of meta-language, somehow exempted from history, we just have to enact it). However, the balance one should strive for has nothing to do with some kind of wise “middle road” avoiding both extremes (“we know in a general sense the shape of the future we are moving towards, but we should simultaneously remain open to unpredictable contingencies”). Signs from the future are not constitutive but regulative in the Kantian sense; their status is subjectively mediated, i.e., they are not discernible from any neutral “objective” study of history, but only from an engaged position—following them remains an existential wager in Pascal’s sense. We are dealing here with the circular structure best exemplified by a science-fiction story set a couple of hundred years ahead of our time when time travel was already possible, about an art critic who gets so fascinated by the works of a New York painter from our era that he travels back in time to meet him; he discovers that the painter is a worthless drunk who even steals from him the time machine and escapes to the future; alone in today’s world, the art critic paints all the paintings that fascinated him in the future and made him travel into the past. In a homologous way, the Communist signs from the future are signs from a possible future which will become actual only if we follow these signs—in other words, they are signs which paradoxically precede that of which they are signs. Recall the Pascalean topic of deus absconditus, of a “hidden god” discernible only to those who search for him, who are engaged in the path of this search:

“God has willed to redeem men and to open salvation to those who seek it. But men render themselves so unworthy of it that it is right that God should refuse to some, because of their obduracy, what He grants others from a compassion which is not due to them. If He had willed to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, He could have done so by revealing Himself so manifestly to them that they could not have doubted of the truth of His essence; as it will appear at the last day, with such thunders and such a convulsion of nature that the dead will rise again, and the blindest will see Him. It is not in this manner that He has willed to appear in His advent of mercy, because, as so many make themselves unworthy of His mercy, He has willed to leave them in the loss of the good which they do not want. It was not, then, right that He should appear in a manner manifestly divine, and completely capable of convincing all men; but it was also not right that He should come in so hidden a manner that He could not be known by those who should sincerely seek Him. He has willed to make himself quite recognizable by those; and thus, willing to appear openly to those who seek Him with all their heart, and to be hidden from those who flee from Him with all their heart. He so regulates the knowledge of Himself that He has given signs of Himself, visible to those who seek Him, and not to those who seek Him not. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.”[4]

God gives these signs in the guise of miracles, and this is why the same mixture of light and obscurity characterizes miracles: miracles are not visible as such to everyone, but only to believers—skeptical non-believers (to whom Pascal refers as “libertins,” in a typical 17th century way, as opposed to the 18th century predominant meaning of debauchery) can easily dismiss them as natural phenomena, and those who believe in them as victims of superstition. Pascal thus openly admits a kind of hermeneutic circle in the guise of the mutual interdependence of miracles and “doctrine” (the church teaching): “Rule: we must judge of doctrine by miracles; we must judge of miracles by doctrine. All this is true, but contains no contradiction.” Perhaps, one can apply here Kant’s formula of the relationship between reason and (sensuous) intuition: doctrine without miracles is sterile and impotent, miracles without doctrine are blind and meaningless. Their mutual independence is thus not symmetrical: “Miracles are for doctrine, and not doctrine for miracles.” In Badiou’s terms, miracle is Pascal’s name for an Event, an intrusion of the impossible-Real into our ordinary reality which momentarily suspends its causal nexus; however, it is only an engaged subjective position, a subject who “desires to see,” which can truly identify a miracle.[5]

Many perspicuous Marxists noted long ago how this Pascal’s topic, far from standing for a regression to obscurantist theology, points forward towards the Marxist notion of a revolutionary theory whose truth is discernible only from an engaged class position. And are we today not in exactly the same situation with regard to Communism? The times of “revealed Communism” are over: we cannot any longer pretend (or act as if) the Communist truth is simply here for everyone to see, accessible to neutral rational historical analysis; there is no Communist “big Other,” no higher historical necessity or teleology to guide and legitimize our acts. In such a situation, today’s libertins (postmodern historicist skeptics) thrive, and the only way to counter them, i.e., to assert the dimension of Event (of eternal Truth) in our epoch of contingency, is to practice a kind of Communism absconditus: what defines today’s Communist is the “doctrine” (theory) which enables him to discern in (the contemporary version of) a “miracle”—say, an unexpected social explosion like the crowd persisting on Tahrir Square—its Communist nature, to read it is a sign from the (Communist) future. (For a libertin, of course, such an event remains a confused outcome of social frustrations and illusions, an outburst which will probably lead to an even worst situation than the one to which it reacted.) And, again, this future is not “objective,” it will come to be only through the subjective engagement which sustains it.

Perhaps, we should turn the usual reproach about what we want and what we don’t want around: it is basically clear what we want (in the long term, at least); but do we really know what we don’t want, i.e., what we are ready to renounce of our present “freedoms”?) Or, to go back to our Ninotchka joke: we want coffee, but do we want it without milk or without cream? (Without state? Without private property? Etc.) It is here that we should remain resolutely Hegelian—Hegel’s opening towards the future is a negative one: it is articulated in his negative/limiting statements like the famous “one cannot jump ahead of one’s time” from his Philosophy of Right. The impossibility to directly borrow from the future is grounded in the very fact of retroactivity which makes future a priori unpredictable: we cannot jump onto our shoulders and see ourselves “objectively,” the way we fit into the texture of history, because this texture is again and again retroactively rearranged. In theology, Kart Barth extended this unpredictability to the Last Judgment itself, emphasizing how the final revelation of God will be totally incommensurable with our expectations:

“God is not hidden to us; He is revealed. But what and how we shall be in Christ, and what and how the World will be in Christ at the end of God’s road, at the breaking in of redemption and completion, that is not revealed to us; that is hidden. Let us be honest: we do not know what we are saying when we speak of Jesús Christ’s coming again in judgment, and of the resurrection of the dead, of eternal life and eternal death. That with all these there will be bound up a piercing revelation—a seeing, compared to which all our present vision will have been blindness—is too often testified in Scripture for us to feel we ought to prepare ourselves for it. For we do not know what will be revealed when the last covering is removed from our eyes, from all eyes: how we shall behold one another and what we shall be to one another —men of today and men of past centurias and millenia, ancestors and descendants, husbands and wives, wise and foolish, oppressors and oppressed, traitors and betrayed, murderers and murdered, West and East, Germans and others, Christians, Jews, and heathen, orthodox and heretics, Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Reformed; upon what divisions and unions, what confrontations and cross-connections the seals of all books will be opened; how much will seem small and unimportant to us then, how much will only then appear great and important; for what surprises of all kinds we must prepare ourselves. We also do not know what Nature, as the cosmos in which we have lived and still live here and now, will be for us then; what the constellations, the sea, the broad valleys and heights, which we see and know now, will say and mean then.”[6]

From this insight, it becomes clear how false, how “all too human,” the fear is that the guilty will not be properly punished—here, especially, we must abandon our expectations: “Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might some day prove to be empty!”[7] And the same uncertainty holds for the Church itself—it possesses no superior knowledge, it is like a postman who delivers mail with no idea what it says: “The Church can only deliver it the way a postman delivers his mail; the Church is not asked what it thinks it is thereby starting, or what it makes of the message. The less it makes of it and the less it leaves on it its own fingerprints, the more it simple hands it on as it has received it—and so much the better.”[8]

No wonder Hegel formulated this same limitation apropos politics: especially as Communists, we should abstain from any positive imagining of the future Communist society. Recall Christ’s sceptical words against the prophets of doom from Mark 13: “If anyone tells you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ don’t believe it. For there will arise false Christs and false prophets, and will show signs and wonders, that they may lead astray, if possible, even the chosen ones. But you watch.”[9] Watch for the signs of the apocalypse, bearing in mind the open meaning of this term in Greek: apokálypsis (“lifting of the veil” or “revelation”) is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception. On account of this radical heterogeneity of the New, its arrival has to cause terror and confusion—recall Heiner Müller’s famous motto: “the first appearance of the new is the dread.” Or, as Seneca put it almost two thousand years ago: “Et ipse miror vixque iam facto malo / potuisse fieri credo. /Although the evil is already done, we still find it hard to believe it is possible.”(Medea 883-4) This is how we react to radical Evil: it is real, but still perceived as impossible. But does the same not hold for everything that is really New?

So what about apocalyptic tones we often hear, especially after a catastrophe occurs? The ultimate paradox here is that the very excessive catastrophism (»the end of the world is near« mantra) is a defense, a way to obfuscate the true dangers, not to take them really seriously. This is why the only appropriate reply to an ecologist who tries to convince us of the impending threat is that the true target of his desperate arguing is HIS OWN non belief—consequently, our answer to him should be something like »Don’t worry, the catastrophe will come for sure!«… And the catastrophe is coming, the impossible is happening all around us—but watch patiently, don’t get caught in precipitous extrapolations, don’t let yourself go to the properly perverse pleasure of: “This is it! The dreaded moment has arrived!” In ecology, such apocalyptic fascination arrives in many diverse forms: global warming will drawn us all in a couple of decades; biogenetics will bring the end of human ethics and responsibility; bees will disappear soon and unimaginable starvation will follow… Take all these treats seriously, but don’t be seduced by them and enjoy too much the false sense of guilt and justice (“We offended Mother Earth, so we are getting what we deserve!”). Instead, keep your head cool and—”but you watch”:

“But you watch, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.”(Mark 13)
Stay wake and watch for what? As we have already seen, the Left entered a period of profound crisis—the shadow of the XXth century still hangs over it, and the full scope of the defeat is not yet admitted. In the years of prospering capitalism, it was easy for the Left to play a Cassandra, warning that the prosperity is based on illusions and prophesizing catastrophes to come. Now the economic downturn and social disintegration the Left was waiting for is here, protests and revolts are popping up all around the globe—but what is conspicuously absent is any consistent Leftist reply to these events, any project of how to transpose islands of chaotic resistance into a positive program of social change: “When and if a national economy enters into crisis in the present interlocking global order, what has anyone to say— in any non-laughable detail—about ‘socialism in one country’ or even ‘partly detached pseudo-nation-state non-finance-capital-driven capitalism’?”[10] T.J. Clark sees the reason for this inability to act in the Left’s “futuralism,” in its orientation towards a future of radical emancipation; due to this fixation, the Left is immobilized “by the idea that it should spend its time turning over the entrails of the present for the signs of catastrophe and salvation,” i.e., it continues to be premised “on some terracotta multitude waiting to march out of the emperor’s tomb.”[11]

We have to admit the grain of truth in this simplified bleak vision which seems to sap the very possibility of a proper political Event: perhaps, we should effectively renounce the myth of a Great Awakening—the moment when (if not the old working class then) a new alliance of the dispossessed, multitude or whatever, will gather its forces and master a decisive intervention. The entire history of the (radical) Left, up to Hardt and Negri, is colored by this stance of awaiting the Moment. After describing multiple forms of resistance to the Empire, Hardt and Negri’s Multitude ends with a messianic note pointing towards the great Rupture, the moment of Decision when the movement of multitudes will be transubstantiated the sudden birth of a new world: “After this long season of violence and contradictions, global civil war, corruption of imperial biopower, and infinite toil of the biopolitical multitudes, the extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectional demand.”[12] However, at this point when one expects a minimum theoretical determination of this rupture, what we get is again withdrawal into philosophy: “A philosophical book like this, however, is not the place for us to evaluate whether the time for revolutionary political decision is imminent.”[13] Hardt and Negri perform here an all to quick jump: of course one cannot ask them to provide a detailed empirical description of the Decision, of the passage to the globalized “absolute democracy,” to the multitude that rules itself; however, what if this a justified refusal to engage in pseudo-concrete futuristic predictions masks an inherent notional deadlock/impossibility? That is to say, what one does and should expect is a description of the notional structure of this qualitative jump, of the passage from the multitudes resisting the One of sovereign Power to the multitudes directly ruling themselves.

So what happens if we radically renounce this stance of eschatological expectation? Clark concludes that one has to admit the tragic vision of (social) life: there is no (great bright) future, the “tiger” of suffering, evil, and violence is here to stay, and, in such circumstances, the only reasonable politics is the politics of moderation which tries to contain the monster: “a politics actually directed, step by step, failure by failure, to preventing the tiger from charging out would be the most moderate and revolutionary there has ever been.”[14] Practicing such a politics would provoke a brutal reply of those in power and dissolve the “boundaries between political organizing and armed resistance.”[15] Again, the grain of truth in this proposal is that, often, a strategically well-placed precise “moderate” demand can trigger a global transformation—recall Gorbachov’s “moderate” attempt to reform the Soviet Union which resulted in its disintegration. But is this all one should say (and do)?

There are in French two words for “future” which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already here, while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present—avenir is what is to come /a venir/, not just what will be. Say, in today’s apocalyptic global situation, the ultimate horizon of the “future” is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of the ecological breakdown, of global economic and social chaos—even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our reality, left to itself, tends. The way to combat the catastrophy is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic “fixed point” and take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness “to come.” We can see here how ambiguous the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it does not designate the closure, the impossibility of change, but what we should be striving for—to break the hold of the catastrophic “future” over up and thereby open up the space for something New “to come.”

Based on this distinction, we can see what was the problem with Marx (as well as with the XXth century Left): it was not that Marx was too utopian in his Communist dreams, but that his Communism was too “futural.” What Marx wrote about Plato (Plato’s Republic was not a utopia, but an idealized image of the existing Ancient Greek society), holds for Marx himself: what Marx conceived as Communism remained an idealized image of capitalism, capitalism without capitalism, i.e., expanded self-reproduction without profit and exploitation. This is why we should return from Marx to Hegel, to Hegel’s “tragic” vision of the social process where no hidden teleology is guiding us, where every intervention is a jump into the unknown, where the result always thwarts our expectations. All we can be certain of is that the existing system cannot reproduce itself indefinitely: whatever will come after will not be “our future.” A new Middle East war or an economic chaos or an unheard-of environmental catastrophe can swiftly change the basic coordinates of our predicament. We should fully assume this openness, guiding ourselves on nothing more than ambiguous signs from the future.

[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999.p. 482.
[2] Gilles Deleuze: Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press 1989, p. 39.
[3] With all respect for Marcel Proust’s genius, when one reads about his way of life – spending most of the day in half-darkened room, sleeping long, depending on his servant – it is difficult to resist the pleasure of imagining him being condemned by a workers’ regime to a years or so of re-education camp, where he would be forced to get up at 5 AM, wash in cold water, and then, after a meager breakfast, work most of the day digging up and transporting earth, with the evenings filled up with singing political sings and writing confessions…
[4] All quotes from Pascal are from the online version of Pensees.
[5] As to the relevance of Pascal’s deus absconditus for the notion of transference in psychoanalysis, see Guy Le Gaufey, L’objet a, Paris: EPEL 2012.
[6] Karl Barth, God Here and Now, New York: Routledge 2003, p. 45-46.
[7] Op.cit., p. 42.
[8] Op.cit., p. 49.
[9] Also translated as: “/But/ be on your guard!”
[10] T.J.Clark, “For a Left with No Future,” New Left Review 74 (March/April 2012), p. 55.
[11] Op.cit., p. 54.
[12] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, New York: The Penguin Press 2004, p. 358.
[13] Op.cit., p. 357.
[14] Clark, op.cit., p. 67.
[15] Op.cit., p. 74.

Source: Slavoj Zizek: The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2012)

Buy Slavoj Zizek: The Year of Dreaming Dangerously here.

Violence: Six Sideways Reflections by Slavoj Zizek

Buy Violence: Six Sideways Reflections here.

Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Slavoj Žižek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in our world.

Using history, philosophy, books, movies, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Žižek examines the ways we perceive and misperceive violence. Drawing from his unique cultural vision, Žižek brings new light to the Paris riots of 2005; he questions the permissiveness of violence in philanthropy; in daring terms, he reflects on the powerful image and determination of contemporary terrorists.

Violence, Žižek states, takes three forms--subjective (crime, terror), objective (racism, hate-speech, discrimination), and systemic (the catastrophic effects of economic and political systems)--and often one form of violence blunts our ability to see the others, raising complicated questions.

Does the advent of capitalism and, indeed, civilization cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of "the neighbour"? And could the appropriate form of action against violence today simply be to contemplate, to think?

Beginning with these and other equally contemplative questions, Žižek discusses the inherent violence of globalization, capitalism, fundamentalism, and language, in a work that will confirm his standing as one of our most erudite and incendiary modern thinkers.

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism by Slavoj Zizek

Buy Less Than Nothing: Hegel And The Shadow Of Dialectical Materialism here.

Slavoj Žižek's masterwork on the Hegelian Legacy

For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel's absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities.

Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition. In Less Than Nothing, the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author, Slavoj Žižek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought—Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.

Slavoj Zizek - Let Us Be Realists And Demand The Impossible: Communism

In the late 90s, political theorists, economists and politicians were talking confidently about the “end of history” and the undisputed triumph of liberal "democratic" capitalism. Communism was written off as dead and buried.

But after 9/11, the GFC, the Arab Spring, and the protests spreading over Europe, the ideological gloss of capitalism may be beginning to fade. If the alternative is Putin's muscular Tsarism or China's authoritarian capitalism, then renovating the idea of communism may matter profoundly. For philosophical rock star and brilliant iconoclast Slavoj Zizek, it is something that we should demand, no matter how impossible it seems. The only true utopia today is that things can go on indefinitely the way they are.

In a star turn at the 2011 Festival of Dangerous Ideas to a packed house at the Sydney Opera House, Zizek kept going until there was no time left for questions. His talk was titled “Let us be realists and demand the impossible: Communism”. It was chaired by festival co-curator Ann Mossop.

Demanding the Impossible by Slavoj Zizek

Buy Demanding the Impossible here.

Where are we today and what is to be done? Slavoj Zizek ponders these questions in this unique and timely book. Based on live interviews, the book captures Zizek at his irrepressible best, elucidating such topics as the uprisings of the Arab Spring, the global financial crisis, populism in Latin America, the rise of China and even the riddle of North Korea. Zizek dazzles readers with his analyses of Hollywood films, Venezuelan police reports, Swedish crime fiction and much else. Wherever the conversation turns, his energetic mind illuminates unexpected horizons.

While analyzing our present predicaments, Zizek also explores possibilities for change. What sort of society is worth striving for? Why is it difficult to imagine alternative social and political arrangements? What are the bases for hope? A key obligation in our troubled times, argues Zizek, is to dare to ask fundamental questions: we must reflect and theorize anew, and always be prepared to rethink and redefine the limits of the possible.

These original and compelling conversations offer an engaging and accessible introduction to one of the most important thinkers of our time.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
1) Politics and Responsibility
2) Obsession for Harmony / Compulsion to Identify
3) Politicization of Ethics
4) Means Without End: Political Phronesis
5) “May you live in interesting times”
6) Communism The Ethico-political Fiasco
7) Who is Afraid of a Failed Revolution?
8) Another World is Possible
9) For They Know Not What They Do
10) Parallax View on Post-modern Globalization
11) The Public Use of the Scandal
12) The Screen of Politeness / Empty Gestures and Performatives
13) Deadlock of Totalitarian Communism
14) The Subversive Use of Theory
15) Becoming Proletarian Position
16) New Forms of Apartheid
17) Intrusion of the Excluded into the Socio-Political Space
18) Rage Capital and Risk-Taking Revolutionary Changes
19) Café Revolution
20) To Begin from the Beginning
21) The Fear of Real Love
22) Dialectic of Liberal Superiority
23) The Day After
24) The Universality of Political Miracles
25) Messianism, Multitude, and Wishful Thinking
26) Politicization of Favelas
27) Bolivarianism, the Populist Temptation
28) Violent Civil Disobedience
29) Legitimacy of Symbolic Violence
30) Gandhi, Aristide, and Divine Violence
31) No Moralization But Egotism
32) Possibility of Concrete Universality
33) Common Struggle for Freedom
34) The Impossible Happens

Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine

Buy Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine here.

Since its launch in late 2000, Cabinet magazine has become a touchstone for a certain approach to understanding culture, one that shuns orthodox distinctions--high/low, serious/humorous, professional/amateur--in favor of a commitment to the idea that all objects, practices and discourses can, if read against the grain, teach us something important about the world. Its hybrid sensibility merges the visually engaging style of an arts periodical, the exuberance of a fanzine and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal to create a sourcebook of ideas for an international audience of readers, from artists and designers to scientists, philosophers and historians. Using essays, interviews and artist projects to present a variety of topics in language accessible to the non-specialist, Cabinet has aimed to encourage a new culture of curiosity. This anthology brings together some of the most interesting successes, and a few instructive failures, published in the first 40 issues of Cabinet, virtually all of which are sold out, along with essays specially commissioned for the volume.

It includes contributions by more than a hundred writers and artists, including Jonathan Ames, Alain Badiou, Daniel Birnbaum, Matthew Buckingham, D. Graham Burnett, Paul Collins, Simon Critchley, Lorraine Daston, Mark Dery, Brian Dillon, Jeff Dolven, Spencer Finch, Joshua Foer, Leon Golub, Douglas Gordon, Anthony Grafton, Joseph Grigely, Shelley Jackson, Denis Johnson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Jonathan Lethem, Josiah McElheny, Helen Mirra, Albert Mobilio, Alexander Nagel, Francine Prose, Matthew Ritchie, Daniel Rosenberg, Luc Sante, Christopher Turner, Tom Vanderbilt, Marina Warner, Slavoj Zizek and many others.

The Idea of Communism in South Korea: Zizek Speaks!

Back in the autumn of last year, Platoon Kunsthalle Seoul built on the success of previous conferences in London, Berlin and New York on The Idea of Communism to present the 4th Idea of Communism Conference. The meeting gathered some of the most prominent theorists and philosophers of the contemporary left, including Verso authors Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.

You can now view a recording of the entirety of Zizek’s fascinating talk on Youtube, as featured below. In the talk he delves into ideas expressed in both volumes of The Idea of Communism.



With contributions from Jodi Dean, Antonio Negri and Terry Eagleton, the Idea of Communism volumes offer a lively and thought-provoking overview of the ideas and debates provoking communist theory today.

To read more about the conference, including a mission statement from the organizers and the full list of speakers, click here.

Slavoj Zizek: The Year of Dreaming Dangerously - Quotes

“In contrast to the situation in 1945, the world does not need the US; it is the US that needs the rest of the world”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“In other words, who dares to strike today,when having the security of a permanent job is itself becoming a privilege?”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“There is a wonderful expression in Persian, war nam nihadan, which means "to murder somebody, bury his body, then grow flowers over the body to conceal it”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“أول درس يجب تعلمه هو عدم لوم الأفراد ومواقفهم، المشكلة ليست فساد الفرد وجشعه، ولكن النظام الذي يشجعه على الفساد. الحل ليس شعار "في الشوارع الرئيسية وليس وول ستريت"، ولكن في تغيير النظام الذي يجعل الشوارع الرئيسية معتمدة على وول ستريت.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“هل المتظاهرون عنيفون؟ حقيقي أن لغتهم ربما تبدو محاربة "احتلوا! وهكذا.." ولكنهم عنيفون فقط بطريقة المهاتما غاندي نفسها، إنهم عنيفون بالقدر الذي يريدون فيه أن يضعوا عائقا في الطريق الذي تمضي عليه اﻷشياء.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“We do not get to vote on who owns what, or on relations in factory and so on, for all this is deemed beyond the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one can actually change things by "extending" democracy to ple's control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal "rights", etcetera: no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, unless this is understood, the solution sought will involve applying democratic mechanisms (which, of course, can have a positive role to play)- mechanisms, one should never forget, which are themselves part of the apparatus of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou hit the mark with his apparently wired claim that "Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." it is the "democratic illusion" the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any radical transformation of capitalist relations.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“... لقد خلق المتظاهرون فراغا – فراغا في حق الأيدولوجيا المهيمنة، وهناك حاجة إلى الوقت لملء مساحة هذه الموضة الإيجابية. هذا هو سبب أننا لسنا بحاجة لأن نقلق كثيرا من الهجمات الموجهة لـ "احتلوا وول ستريت"، فانتقادات المحافظين المتوقعة سهلة بما يكفي للرد عليها؛ هل المتظاهرون معادون لأمريكا؟ عندما يزعم الأصوليون المحافظون بأن أمريكا دولة مسيحية، فعلينا أن نذكر ما هي المسيحية في الحقيقة: الروح القدس، مجتمع المؤمنين الحر المتساوي المتحد بالحب. إنهم المتظاهرون هم من يمثلون الروح القدس، في حين أن وول ستريت الوثنية مستمرة في عبادة أصنام زائفة (مجسدة في تمثال الثور )، هل المتظاهرون عنيفين؟ حقيقي أن لغتهم ربما تبدو محاربة (احتلوا! وهكذا) ولكنهم عنيفون فقط بطريقة عنف المهاتما غاندي نفسها، إنهم عنيفون بالقدر الذي يريدون فيه أن يضعوا عائقا في الطريق الذي تمضي عليه الأشياء – ولكن كيف يقارن هذا بالعنف المحتاج للحفاظ على التوظيف السهل للنظام الرأسمالي العالمي؟ يقال عنهم فاشلون – ولكن ألم يكن الفاشلون الحقيقيون هم هؤلاء الذين تطلًّب إنقاذهم مئات المليارات من الدولارات في وول ستريت؟ يقال عنهم اشتراكيون – ولكن هناك في الولايات المتحدة اشتراكية بالفعل للأغنياء، هم متهمون بعدم احترام الملكية الخاصة – ولكن تكهنات وول ستريت التي أدت للانهيار في 2008 أفنت من الملكيات الخاصة التي اكتسبها أصحابها بكل صعوبة أكثر من أبعد ما يستطيع المتظاهرون الوصول إليه".”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“المتظاهرون ببساطة يدعون من هم في السلطة للنظر إلى أسفل، إلى الهاوية المفتوحة تحت أقدامهم”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“بزوغ حركة تظاهر دولية بدون برنامج متماسك هي بالتالي ليست مصادفة، إنها تعكس أزمة أعمق، أزمة بدون حل واضح. الديمقراطية مؤسسة على حكم القانون. الديمقراطية تعمل فحسب داخل حدود واضحة وبين أناس يشعرون بأنفسهم كجزء من الدولة نفسها. "مجتمع دولي" ﻻ يمكن أن تطلب الوفاء بمحفظة وقائية عالمية من مليار دوﻻر، بقياداتها المحتمين بملاذ من الضرائب وموظفيها المتناثرين حول العالم.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“كيف نستطيع مأسسة صناعة القرار الجمعي فيما وراء إطار عمل النظام متعدد اﻷحزاب الديمقراطي؟ أو لنقل ذلك بشكل فظ: من يعلم ما ينبغي فعله اليوم؟ ﻻ توجد ذات تعرف، ﻻ في شكل المثقفين وﻻ الناس العاديين. هل هناك مأذق إذن، حالة اﻷعمى الذي يقود أعمى، أو بدقة أكبر، أعمى يقود أعمى في حين أن كلا منهما يفترض أن اﻵخر بإمكانه الرؤية؟ ﻻ، ﻷن الجهل المزدوج ليس سيمتريا. إنهم الناس الذين يملكون الإجابات، إنهم فقط ﻻ يعرفون اﻷسئلة التي يملكون -أو باﻷحرى هم- إجاباتها.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously


“الفساد بين السياسيين ورجال اﻷعمال والبنكيون يتركنا بﻻ حيلة”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously

Buy The Year of Dreaming Dangerously by Slavoj Zizek here.

Slavoj Zizek: In Defense of Lost Causes - Quotes

“Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his cellphone (which, to add insult to injury, was mine -- I had lent it to him) all of a sudden started to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently interrupted me and asked me if I could talk more softly, so that he could hear his interlocutor more clearly . . . If this was not an act of true friendship, I do not know what friendship is. So, this book is dedicated to Alain Badiou.”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes


“Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "doing something"; academics participate in meaningless "debates," etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even "critical" participation or a critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a "dialogue" ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The "Bartlebian act" I propose is violent precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity-in it, violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), likewise activity and inactivity (the most radical thing is to do nothing).”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes


“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology… we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes


“The “pursuit of happiness” is such a key element of the “American (ideological) dream” that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: “We holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Where did the somewhat awkward “pursuit of happiness” come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property— the latter was replaced by “the pursuit of happiness” during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves’ right to property.”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes


“In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outside disturbs the subject’s homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act “beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superego injunction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes


“But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This “absurdity” is simply the price of freedom—freedom is not free, as they put it in the film [300]. Freedom is not something given, it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. Spartan ruthless military discipline is not simply the opposite of Athenian “liberal democracy,” it is its inherent condition, it lays the foundation for it: the free subject of Reason can only emerge through ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake and a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity, one makes a truly free choice when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence—one does it because one simply “cannot do otherwise.” When one’s country is under foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not “you are free to choose,” but: “Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes


“If the secret core of potlatch is the reciprocity of exchange, why is this reciprocity not asserted directly, why does it assume the “mystified” form of two consecutive acts each of which is staged as a free voluntary display of generosity? Here we encounter the paradoxes of forced choice, of freedom to do what is necessary, at its most elementary: I have to do freely what I am expected to do. (If, upon receiving a gift, I immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the other’s gifts — recall those embarrassing moments when elderly people forget and give us last year’s present once again … )

…the reciprocity of exchange is in itself thoroughly ambiguous; at its most fundamental, it is destructive of the social bond, it is the logic of revenge, tit for tat. To cover this aspect of exchange, to make it benevolent and pacific, one has to pretend that each person’s gift is free and stands on its own. This brings us to potlatch as the “pre-economy of the economy,” its zero-level, that is, exchange as the reciprocal relation of two non-productive expenditures. If the gift belongs to Master and exchange to the Servant, potlatch is the paradoxical exchange between Masters. Potlach is simultaneously the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely.”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes


“Recall Marx’s fundamental insight about the “bourgeois” limitation of the logic of equality: capitalist inequalities (“exploitation”) are not the “unprincipled violations of the principle of equality,” but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consistent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the wearisome old motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact in the market; the crucial moment of Marx’s critique of “bourgeois” socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of “unequal” exchange between the worker and the capitalist—this exchange is fully equal and “just,” ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labor-power). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to counteract it is through a direct “terroristic imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal access to health services…), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments for the underprivileged). In short, the axiom of equality” means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce “terroristic” equality)— it is a formalistic notion in a strict dialectical sense, that is, its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form.”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes

Buy In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek here.