d21 > Books > Scattergun Zizek
Scattergun Zizek
Added on 06/03/2008
Chris Wright reads Violence…
Slavoj Zizek is fond of telling the story of a letter Marx sent to Engels in 1870. At the time, it seemed as though a revolution was on Europe’s doorstep. Marx complained that the revolution can’t be happening - because he hadn’t finished writing Das Kapital. Stories and jokes are all part of Zizek’s extremely stylized philosophising. His charismatic appearances on YouTube have won him many fans, and it would be easy enough to dismiss this sort of populism as superficial entertainment. But Zizek has not only attained popular appeal; he has become an influential thinker in anthropology, sociology and literary theory. And he is no lightweight when it comes to academic debate: as Jacques Lacan Professor at the European Graduate School, he clashes with several other contemporary figures – as can also be witnessed on YouTube.
At the same time, money and ego are not negligible reasons to be suspicious of popular intellectuals, and Zizek’s latest offering - Violence - should be viewed in that light. The book’s scattergun approach is exhilarating, but might disguise a sleight of hand too quick for mere mortals to notice.
Sympathetic moneys
The centre of the book is a study of ‘liberal communism’ – this is essentially the idea that problems of inequality can be addressed within a free market system. Zizek grew up in Soviet Slovenia and his cultural criticism is, broadly speaking, Marxist and Lacanian. Just about everyone who isn’t Zizek approaches political problems by trying to solve them. His approach, by contrast, is to be suspicious of anything that happens in the public sphere, which is admirable so long as we take it with a pinch of salt and recognise that decisions have to be made by someone. Regardless of his failure to provide any clear political alternative, his analyses often ring true: “What increasingly emerges as the central human right in late-capitalist society is the right not to be harassed, which is a right to remain at a safe distance from others.” How do we place ethics and shame in a world where the basic economic imperative runs contrary to human sympathy? Can the world’s problems really be concretized and dealt with by governments, NGOs and Bob Geldof?
Exclusionary ethics
Zizek’s argument against a pragmatic resignation to capitalism, which is often balanced by a fair and reasonable critique of the atrocities done in the name of socialism (for related points just look here), is that ethics as an impartial commitment is always a lie: “Is even the most universal ethics not obliged to draw a line and ignore some sort of suffering?” We might condemn the horrors of Stalinism, but most of us duck our eyes when a homeless person asks us for change, ignore the bloody war in the Congo that is exacerbated by our love of Playstations, and write off general feelings of guilt by wearing charity wrist-bands produced in sweatshops.
Or, as Zizek asks in more theoretical terminology: “What if such an exclusion of some form of otherness from the scope of our ethical concerns is consubstantial with the very founding gesture of ethical universality, so that the more universal our explicit ethic is, the more brutal the underling exclusion is?”
Learn Learn Learn!
Lenin’s slogan, which Zizek grew up with in Soviet Slovenia and loves to quote, was Learn Learn Learn! On the surface at least, this book exhibits the results. In a witty, aphoristic style, Zizek gives readings of religious fundamentalism, Alfonzo Cuáron’s Children of Men, the events in New Orleans, The Iliad, the Paris riots, Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, laws against Holocaust denial, the EU’s new border police force, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and much more. I wouldn’t take it as a manifesto, but it is entertaining and informative, which can’t often be said of popular philosophy.
'Violence' is published in paperback by Profile books, retail price £12.99.
Chris Wright
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Comments for "Scattergun Zizek"
Get Involved!
14/03/2008 16:43
14/03/2008 14:39
I'll have to ask my analyst.
12/03/2008 13:43
12/03/2008 04:53
"I wouldn’t take it as a manifesto, but it is entertaining and informative, which can’t often be said of popular philosophy."
Zizek's own politics in practice (he was very nearly elected as president of Slovenia in their first democratic election as a candidate for the liberal democratic party) were very much of the third way, Cameronite, Blairite, Rawlsian, post-ideological, etc.
Perhaps you will suspect that if elected he would have set to work on Communism and initiated a few gulags, but I think in fact the ideas you call idiotic are about understanding capitalism, not enacting a utopian alternative.
The point of this whinging is to make people think (since when was philosophy pragmatic?). Yes, he uses shock tactics: if you'd got to the point in the documentary where he explains how he uses his Stalin poster to scare certain kinds of people away who he can't be bothered talking to, and that he's writen more about Stalinist atrocities than any liberal he knows, etc. - then you might not be inlined to call him idiotic.
I don't really see how you can call dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis bollocks, unless you are really really sure that your own epistemological foundations are fairly solid. Any views, Donnchadh?
I think what really comes through here is not a disagreement with a certain kind of answer, but a disagreement with a certain kind of question.
But let me ask you a hypothetical practical question. Let us say we discover that because of climate change the end is nigh (remember this is hypothetical before you accuse me of theology) - the only way to stop this will be something genuinely radical. Can you conceive that it might be a sensible judgement to fundamentally re-order our global economic system? Do you know that this would be practically imossible? Isn't it worth keeping the thought alive - just in case? I don't see Zizek's views threatening to displace TGA's for influence on any government policy - where's the harm?
12/03/2008 03:30
Unless I've completely misunderstood this (my Spanish is less than non-existent), Zizek is arguing here that tolerance and the welfare state shouldn't necessarily be considered supreme values. But without tolerance and a benevolent government, what exactly is his solution to his whinges about ethics? Something he incidentally berates Timothy Garton Ash for doing in the review Chris links to, which was a mistake because it makes him look idiotic. So he writes things like this, on Vaclav Havel:
"His heroic insistence on doing the impossible (opposing the seemingly invincible Communist regime) has ended up serving those who ‘realistically’ argue that any real change in today’s world is impossible."
I disagree that there isn't an element of moral equivalence in the comparison between Stalinism and capitalism, beggars etc; this sentence seems to me to show that Zizek is quite happy to use this argument. I do agree about wondering why we are getting het up about a man who is very good at grumbling and spouting bollocks under the guise of being a "dialectical-materialist philosopher and psychoanalyst" but who never actually seems to have any answers.
12/03/2008 00:48
come on, play nice - in the article Chris said 'exacerbated', not 'caused'. And I genuinely didn't get any suggestion of a moral equivalence between Stalinism and the problems subsequently mentioned.
What's a bit worrying about this book, as presented here, is not that it treats everything as being on a moral par, or even that it offers no positive solutions, but the hints that no positive solutions are possible. It's that 'someone must always be excluded' stuff which I have doubts about.
10/03/2008 19:25
10/03/2008 14:57
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=P91azQ9ofGI
And, Zaki, somehwere along the line in this documentary he shows us his poster of Stalin, which I'm sure you'd enjoy!
10/03/2008 07:46
Interesting you pick out the homelessness example ("the best you can come up with"), and not the millions dead in the Congo, which is not far off the death-count of the Holocaust you invoke on the other thread.
Donnchadh,
I hope I didn't give the impression that Zizek is just a sloppy thinker who doesn't have time for analytic precision - he has written a fair amount of denser, less political, material. I'm pretty sure he'd be familiar enough with the distinction between, as it were, the ethics of a society in practice and the 'ideal' of an ethical theory. Let's not get started on the 'glossing over nuances for a popular audience' vs. 'making mistakes' question!
But, yes, it's easy to be lazy and make gurus out of people (and I do include myself in this, even if you don't) - even though I can't help thinking that Zizek makes a much more fun guru than the local priest...
10/03/2008 07:44
It's that old moral equivalence again! This is a ridiculous sentence if you think about it for more than a second (and it doesn't stop being ridiculous). Zizek is right in claiming that universal ethics have to draw a line somewhere, but if critics of Marxism can draw upon millions of deaths and the best you can come up with is not buying the Big Issue and taking insufficient if well-meaning action against poverty (and I don't see the government of North Korea concerning itself that much with the starvation of much of its population) then you have to agree this sort of argument isn't worth anything.
08/03/2008 20:41
It does somewhat gall me though that Zizek and other charismatic figures are highly-regarded by people who have never heard of more sober thinkers guilty only of not being sexy or well-publicised enough. Not that people shouldn't read Zizek - they should just be a little slower to accept him as some kind of guru (I don't have you in mind when I say that, Chris).
08/03/2008 12:36
maybe these crazy critical types don't pay attention to such 'niggling', but maybe they should. There is a genuinely important difference between ignoring someone's suffering because it would be inconvenient for you to do anything about it (this is something most people are guilty of, to a greater or lesser degree), and ignoring someone's suffering because your ethical system excludes them in principle as unworthy of your attention. To my mind, the first is a better situation than the second, because it at least opens the possiblty that people will be argued or shamed into doing something. (An example here might be the way that Christian arguments played an important role in bringing about the abolition of slavery.)
This doesn't refute Zizek's point as such, but it does put a large qualification on it. Universalist ethics are open, in that, no matter how shabbily they are applied, they admit of internal reform. A closed ethical system such as racism cannot, in principle, admit of this. The limitations of any purportedly universal ethical system should be acknowledged, but so should this strength.
08/03/2008 12:26
What he's really saying is something about the dynamics of culture - that within the ideology of universal equality, fairness, tolerance, etc, there is a complete inability to live up to the standard we set ourselves because of the massive economic inequalities, so we are 'obliged' to simply ignore completely, for instance, the millions who have died in the Congo. That's the brutal exclusion which we woulnd't be obliged to carry out if, say, we were all racists. This is where the 'must' comes in - it is not just a description of what's happening, but an analysis of why.
08/03/2008 03:09
nothing wrong with a bit of literalism in the right place. Even if you define ethics the way he does, what he goes on to say about it still sounds far too strong (I'm not denying that what he says does happen, but that it must happen).
And someone giving out about our love of Playstations can hardly call anyone else a killjoy... :)
07/03/2008 20:50
You really are a killjoy, and I'm wearing my keyboard out typing your name...
He means by 'ethics' the lived morality of a culture, and the lip-service we pay to what is fair and just. He's suggesting that the more soft-hearted modern societies become the more they have to lie to themselves about the suffering they overlook.
(You are starting to look like a bit of a literalist yourself.)
07/03/2008 20:13
The examples that follow this quote obvviously don't support it, they are instances of personal failures rather than failings of any ethical theory. (I'm not saying that personal failings aren't important in ethics, just that nothing about ethical universality follows from them.)
07/03/2008 17:27