– how the big hairy Marxist
would change the world
The leftwing intellectual with
rock-star popularity argues that Trump vs Clinton, and Brexit vs Remain are
mere sideshows
Friday 28 April 2017 02.30 EDT
Last modified on Friday 28 April 2017 19.10 EDT
Life is, despite all the
advances of medical science, still way too short to spend any time reading
theoretical gibberish concocted by superannuated Marxists – theory that
purports to still further stretch this ideological corpse like Procrustes
on the rack of contemporary events. Fortunate Guardian-reading bourgeois
liberals that we are, however, God – or the Self-Moving Absolute – has sent us Slavoj Žižek
instead. Žižek demands to be taken seriously: he produces thousands of wildly
and densely written pages that bear all the hallmarks of a scholar who has
ingurgitated the western canon with the sole intent of firing it at the very
bastions of power.
A political gadfly, who ran
for office in his native Slovenia, Žižek has at least leant on the barricades –
if not, so far as we know, while actually mixing a Molotov cocktail – and
believes in the idea of himself as a revolutionary activist sufficiently to
subtitle his latest book Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously, while
quoting in its pages Gandhi’s
famous maxim: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
But The Courage of
Hopelessness is also a pratfall staged at the end of Barack Obama’s
underwhelming multicultural road show; for, inasmuch as he demands to be taken
seriously, Žižek does so with his trousers down, and in the guise of
a farceur. Yes! Life’s too short to read superannuated Marxists,
especially those whose theoretical toolkit deploys the left-handed dialectical
spanner and the right-handed Freudian screwdriver (with some “Lacanian”
modifications) at one and the same time. At least it would be, if it weren’t
for the jokes – and the comic timing.
It’s surely as much for his Pervert’s
Guide to the Cinema, and his wide and eclectic cultural references – in
this new book he ranges from obscure Chinese science-fiction novels to Schubert’s Winterreise
and back again – that Žižek has become the darling of what’s left of the left
in British academia; because what he actually has to say, once the hurly-burly
of theorising (and witticising) is done, is both remarkably simple and
delightfully impractical – if, that is, you follow Papa Karl, and take
seriously the idea that the whole point of philosophy is to change the world.
Indeed, reading The Courage of Hopelessness, I was all too often reminded
of the old joke about economics: “That’s all very well in practice – but will
it work in theory?”
Following his 2013 work Less
Than Nothing, a 1,000-page-plus summation of the Žižekian worldview in the
guise of a Hegelian excursus, The Courage of Hopelessness sets out to apply his
contorted perspective in real time: this is indeed philosophising à pied: and
Žižek certainly makes like he really wants us to abandon the last vestiges of
our discredited value system, and march with him (and Bernie Sanders) towards
some yet-to-be-constructed barricades. Surveying the left’s annus horribilis of
2016, Žižek recalls the aftermath of the October revolution, and Lenin’s
gathering conviction – once it became clear a Europe-wide revolution
wouldn’t take place – that, while the idea of building socialism in one country
was “nonsense”, nevertheless: “What if the complete hopelessness of the
situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold,
offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilisation
in a different way from that of the west European countries?”
That silly old sausage Stalin’s problem was
that he hoped for too much – hence the Terror, the Gulag, and all the rest of
the murderousness; while, according to Žižek, the lesson of 20th-century
communism “is that we have to gather the strength to fully assume the
hopelessness”. I confess, I’m not sure I understand what Žižek means by this in
relation to practical contemporary politics – but my suspicion is that his
message is directed to a very small audience indeed: namely the sort of
self-hating liberal humanists who buy his books and attend his lectures. It’s
these folk, presumably, who can be expected to form the vanguard of the
knowledge-working proletariat that will enact the Žižekian revolution – it’s
these peons who find themselves trapped in the tunnel of history, and who must
be adjured by their master to accept that “the dream of an alternative is a
sign of theoretical cowardice”, while “the true courage is to admit
that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of
another train approaching”.
In this minatory respect, at
least, Žižek has strong affinities with a contemporary philosopher to whom he’s
otherwise diametrically opposed: John Gray. In a review of Less Than Nothing
for the New York Times Book Review, Gray lambasted Žižek for his obfuscation
and his sophomoric appeals to violence. According to Gray, Žižek “insists
that revolutionary violence has intrinsic value as a symbolic expression of
rebellion – a position that has no parallel in either Marx or Lenin”. Gray sees
Žižek’s intellectual forefather as being, rather, Georges Sorel, who
“argued that communism was a utopian myth – but a myth that had value in
inspiring a morally regenerative revolt against the corruption of bourgeois
society”.
It’s this revolt Žižek seems
always to be urging on his – undoubtedly for the most part corrupt and
bourgeois – readership: it’s us who feel hopeless in the face of what Žižek
identifies as the four principal “faces” of the immanent contradiction in
global capitalism: fundamentalist jihad; geopolitical tensions; the “new
radical emancipatory movements” in Greece and Spain; and the refugee crisis.
But our sense of hopelessness is purely a function of our own false
consciousness: once we accept the specious nature of the great “choices” we
were faced with in 2016 – Trump vs Clinton; Remain vs Brexit; Grexit vs the EU
bailout – we will accept Stalin’s position (in respect of “deviations” from
Bolshevism), that “they’re both worse”.
It’s because of our
“misperception of radical politics” that we get caught on the horns of
dilemmas – burkini or bared breasts? Assad or Isis? – that are really
pseudo-conflicts. Presumably, once we’ve finished The Courage of Hopelessness
this misperception will be dispelled, and we will join in fully
radicalising the as yet “gentle” Syriza, Bernie Sanders’s disappointed
followers and, who knows, possibly the rump of the Labour Party remaining under
Jeremy Corbyn, although Žižek has little to say about Britain as a distinct
political culture.
Which surprises me. I said
above that it was probably his humour (he can be a very witty writer indeed)
that had gained Žižek such a following in the English-speaking world, this,
together with his obvious erudition, and application of various Marxian and
Freudian heuristics, which, let’s face it, are always good for a laugh. But in
truth, for all his huffing and puffing here and elsewhere about the US, Žižek’s
ideas have far less traction there than they do in Britain, while his media
presence is marginal at best. It’s the same in continental Europe – an
International Journal of Žižek Studies exists, but its luminaries seem to be
principally British. Indeed, it’s only in British academia, so far as I’m
aware, that scholars still range themselves beneath standards bearing the names
of the generation of French theorists whose ideas form the obfuscatory seedbed
of Žižek’s lively imagination; thus we have Althusserians,
Derrideans, Deleuzians and, gulp, Lacanians – while to the French themselves
such affiliations are at best ridiculous.
For my own part, while having
a vague sense of him looming on the cultural margins, it wasn’t until Žižek
came to speak at the university where I teach that I fully appreciated
what an intellectual rock star he is: there was no lecture room big enough
to contain those who wanted to hear him, so the event was held in the sports
hall, with the seats arranged horizontally along the 10 lanes of the 100-metre
running track. They were all filled – that’s a kilometre of Lacanians! All of
whom remained rapt while Žižek spoke – a word stream at once turbulent and
turgid, from which I managed to extract the following key points: 1. I’m a big
hairy Marxist-Leninist; 2. I believe in the emancipatory force of revolutionary
violence; and 3. I really do.
At the time (five years ago) I
was a little flummoxed as to what the audience was getting out of this, beyond
the slightly dirty thrill of being in the presence of a real, live communist
revolutionary. My colleagues are just as hamstrung by the privatisation of
higher education as the rest of British academia, busily cutting their ragged
cloth to fit the neoliberal paradigm, and looking for the most part about
as revolutionary as the Net-a-Porter shoppers we undoubtedly are.
Still, now as much as then, we
must be set to rights: and once the neurofibrillary tangle of Žižek’s
dialectics is cleared away there is a viable critique of the left-liberal
response to our current situation discernible in The Courage
of Hopelessness. Žižek paints a portrait of pampered, self-indulgent
bleeding-hearts, who dither over what is to be done while indulging in febrile
clicktivism and agonising over the provision of gender-neutral toilets. His
discussion of LGBT+ and the spell cast by identitarian politics on the left
generally amounts to this coarse – yet amusing – summation: we’re fiddling with
ourselves while Rome burns. And Žižek cares about Rome, cares about the western
logos in all its self-moving absolutism: he’s dismissive of postcolonial
perspectives, and semi-develops arguments about the emergent “creative commons”
and the internet of things that suggest he sees in the web-world itself the
emergence of new – hence revolutionary – means of production.
In his essay, Gray is roundly
dismissive of Žižek’s philosophic credentials – both as a Marxist, and as an
epistemologist. But I do discern the lineaments of a viable theory connecting
what we may know to what we can do in Žižek’s thought. The only problem is
that the “revolution” remains a completely void category: a mere repository for
many millions of individual actes gratuits. Gray further suggests that the
entire Žižek phenomenon is a function of a late capitalism that thrives on
novelty – in theory as much as consumer goods; and that therefore Žižek’s high
profile is entirely down to the system he himself excoriates. Gray also implicitly
tasks Žižek with a sort of criminal irresponsibility: inciting his jaded
readers and listeners to a senseless violence they’ve only ever witnessed in
HBO miniseries. For Gray, Žižek – because of, not despite, all his frenzied
attempts to distance himself from us Guardian-reading bourgeois liberals –
represents just another iteration of the post-Enlightenment delusion of
“scientifically” political “progress”. Yet what these two representative
thinkers of our era really share is a deep and abiding pessimism – some might
say nihilism.
I said above that Žižek can be
a very witty writer indeed – but, as a good Freudian (or Lacanian), he knows
well there really are no such things as jokes. I’m meant to be in conversation
with Žižek at a suitably
large venue in London soon, and the nice man who is organising the
gig, when he learned I would be reviewing The Courage
of Hopelessness, emailed me rather timorously hoping I wouldn’t be too
negative about the book.
Many of Žižek’s jokes aren’t
really his own, but rather those told by the victims of various nasty regimes –
in The Courage of Hopelessness he retells one that was current during the
Soviet era, concerning a Russian peasant under the Mongol occupation, who’s
forced to hold his overlord’s testicles aloft while the warrior rapes the
peasant’s wife, but seditiously allows them to drag in the dust. The peasant
then accords this a great victory – while his violated wife sobs. The joke is
meant to illustrate the impotence of Soviet dissidents, who merely “dusted
Stalin’s balls” – and by extension the impotence of late night TV satirists who
are merely dusting Trump’s balls; and by further extension impotent
Guardian-reading liberals such as ourselves. Well, I wonder if Žižek is
humorous enough to come and debate the revolutionary potency of hopelessness
with me – or if he’s only seriously interested in having his testicles held
aloft by the hands that otherwise feed him.
• To order The Courage of
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