Interview by Doug Henwood,
Intro by Charlie Bertsch
People who started reading
Zizek because they couldn't believe that Communist Europe could produce such a
supple thinker read him now for the simple reason that he is Zizek.
Issue #59, February 2002
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It's hard to become a
superstar in the world of scholarly publishing. Most of the people who read
its products can also write them. To stand out in a crowd this smart requires
both luck and perseverance. Slavoj Zizek has demonstrated plenty of both.
When Yugoslavia started to break up in the aftermath of the Cold War in 1990,
pristine Slovenia was the first of its republics to declare independence. We
were thrilled to be witnessing the rebirth of "nations" that had
disappeared into Germany, the Soviet Union, or, in the case of Slovenia,
first the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then Yugoslavia. .As this little-known
land's leading thinker, Zizek basked in an aura of novelty. His work,
simultaneously light-hearted and deep, invoked the dream of a post-Cold War
world in which free thinking would transcend all borders.
A decade later, we know how
quickly that hope turned to despair. But Zizek's star hasn't dimmed. If
anything, it has grown brighter. People who started reading Zizek because
they couldn't believe that Communist Europe could produce such a supple
thinker read him now for the simple reason that he is Zizek. For anyone who
has tired of the dumbing down of mainstream political discourse in the West,
who finds it hard to believe that the bone-dry American leftism of a Noam
Chomsky represents the only possibility for resistance, who wants to critique
global capitalism without falling back on faded Marxist slogans, Zizek's work
flashes the promise of something better. From his ground-breaking 1989 book The
Sublime Object of Ideology to his trenchant 1999 critique of Western
governments' intervention in the former Yugoslavia, titled NATO as the Left
Hand of God?, Zizek has never failed to stimulate thinking. And what more can
we ask of an intellectual? As Zizek himself suggests in the interview here,
philosophy helps us, not by "purifying" our thought, but by making
it more complex.
What really sets Zizek apart
from other major scholars is his willingness to take risks. If you were to
read all of his books in rapid succession, you would see that they sometimes
contradict one another. But you would also see how the tension between them
reflects Zizek's real purpose: to make us see the world with fresh eyes.
Unlike the vast majority of academic thinkers, Zizek is not worried about
being "careless." He roots around in the realm of ideas looking for
whatever will prove useful. It doesn't matter if his findings come from
different intellectual traditions, if they are, in some sense,
philosophically incompatible. Zizek's writing forces them to collaborate.
Marx, Freud, Hegel, Kant, Lacan...and Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and the
Slovenian electronic agit-prop band Laibach all come together in a delightful
mix. This delight, finally, is what seals the deal for Zizek's readers. It's
one thing to illuminate contemporary political concerns with the help of
dense philosophical points; it's another entirely to make that insight fun.
Zizek does.
Left Business Observer
editor and Wall Street author Doug Henwood talked with Zizek prior to the
September 11th terrorist attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, then
asked a few follow-up questions in its aftermath. In the days following the
attack, Zizek's take on its significance — an incredibly moving essay titled
"Welcome to the Desert of the Real" circulated on e-mail lists
worldwide. Unlike the vast majority of commentators, Zizek was not content to
express disbelief and outrage. His words offered an antidote to the mindless
drivel on the major networks, CNN, and Fox News. Reflecting on the many
"previews" of the tragedy in American movies, Zizek refused to
blunt his critical edge: "In a way, America got what it fantasized
about."
This interview is excerpted
from BS editor Joel Schalit's anthology The Anti-Capitalism Reader,
forthcoming from Akashic Books in the summer of 2002.
BS: In general, anarchism
plays a big role in American radical politics and countercultures. Do you
have any thoughts on this influence?
Zizek: I certainly can
understand where the appeal of anarchism lies. Even though I am quite aware
of the contradictory and ambiguous nature of Marx's relationship with
anarchism, Marx was right when he drew attention to how anarchists who preach
"no state no power" in order to realize their goals usually form
their own society which obeys the most authoritarian rules. My first problem
with anarchism is always, "Yeah, I agree with your goals, but tell me
how you are organized." For me, the tragedy of anarchism is that you end
up having an authoritarian secret society trying to achieve anarchist goals.
The second point is that I have problems with how anarchism is appropriate to
today's problems. I think if anything, we need more global organization. I
think that the left should disrupt this equation that more global
organization means more totalitarian control.
BS: When you speak of a
global organization, are you thinking of some kind of global state, or do you
have non-state organizations in mind?
 Zizek:
I don't have any prejudices here whatever. For example, a lot of left-wingers
dismissed talk of universal human rights as just another tool of American
imperialism, to exert pressure on Third World countries or other countries
America doesn't like, so it can bomb them. But it's not that simple. As we
all know, following the same logic, Pinochet was arrested. Even if he was set
free, this provoked a tremendous psychological change in Chile. When he left
Chile, he was a universally feared, grey eminence. He returned as an old man
whom nobody was afraid of. So, instead of dismissing the rules, it's well
worth it to play the game. One should at least strategically support the idea
of some kind of international court and then try to put it to a more
progressive use.
America is already concerned
about this. A few months ago, when the Senate was still under Republican
control, it adopted a measure prohibiting any international court to have any
jurisdiction over American citizens. You know they weren't talking about some
Third World anti-imperialist court. They were talking about the Hague court,
which is dominated by Western Europeans. The same goes for many of these
international agencies. I think we should take it all. If it's outside the
domain of state power, OK. But sometimes, even if it's part of state power. I
think the left should overcome this primordial fear of state power, that
because it's some form of control, it's bad.
BS: You describe the
internal structure of anarchist groups as being authoritarian. Yet, the model
popular with younger activists today is explicitly anti-hierarchical and
consensus-oriented. Do you think there's something furtively authoritarian
about such apparently freewheeling structures?
Zizek: Absolutely. And I'm
not bluffing here; I'm talking from personal experience. Maybe my experience
is too narrow, but it's not limited to some mysterious Balkan region. I have
contacts in England, France, Germany, and more — and all the time, beneath
the mask of this consensus, there was one person accepted by some unwritten
rules as the secret master. The totalitarianism was absolute in the sense
that people pretended that they were equal, but they all obeyed him. The
catch was that it was prohibited to state clearly that he was the boss. You
had to fake some kind of equality. The real state of affairs couldn't be
articulated. Which is why I'm deeply distrustful of this "let's just
coordinate this in an egalitarian fashion." I'm more of a pessimist. In
order to safeguard this equality, you have a more sinister figure of the
master, who puts pressure on the others to safeguard the purity of the
non-hierarchic principle. This is not just theory. I would be happy to hear
of groups that are not caught in this strange dialectic.
BS: We've seen over the last
few years the growth of a broad anti-capitalist — or as we say in the U.S., anti-corporate
or anti-globalization — movement, a lot of it organized according to
anarchist principles. Do you think these demonstrations are a sign of any
left revival, a new movement?
Zizek: Mixed. Not in the
sense of being partly good and partly bad but because the situation is
undecided — maybe even undecidable. What will come out of the Seattle
movement is the terrain of the struggle. I think it is PRECISELY NOW — after
the attack on the World Trade Center — that the "Seattle" task will
regain its full urgency! After a period of enthusiasm for retaliation, there
will be a new (ideological) depression, and THAT point will be our chance!!!
BS: Much of this will depend
on progressives' ability to get the word out.
Zizek: I'm well aware of the
big media's censorship here. For example, even in the European big media,
which are supposed to be more open, you will never see a detailed examination
of the movement's agenda. You get some ominous things. There is something
dark about it. According to the normal rules of the liberal game, you would
expect some of these people to be invited on some TV talk shows, confronted
with their adversaries, placed in a vigorous polemic, but no. Their agenda is
ignored. Usually they're mocked as advocating some old-fashioned left-wing
politics or some particularism, like saving local conditions against
globalism. My conclusion is that the big powers must be at least in some kind
of a panic. This is a good sign.
BS: But lots of the movement
has no explicit agenda to offer. Why is the elite in such a panic?
Zizek: It's not like these
are some kind of old-fashioned left-wing idiots, or some kind of local
traditionalists. I am well aware that Seattle etc. is still a movement
finding its shape, but I think it has potential. (Even though) there is no
explicit agenda, there is nonetheless an outlook reproaching this
globalization for being too exclusionary, not a true globalization but only a
capitalist globalization.
BS: At the same time this
movement was growing, there was a string of electoral victories for the right
— Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia in Italy, Jorg Haider's Freedom Party in
Austria, our own Bush. What do you make of these?
Zizek: They're not to be
underestimated. I'll put it in my old-fashioned Stalinist terms: there are
two deviations to be avoided here, left and right. The right-wing deviation
is to fully endorse their liberal opponents, to say, "OK, we have our
problems with Gore or Blair but they're basically our guys, and we should support
them against the true right." We should also avoid the opposite mistake,
which is that they're all the same. It doesn't really matter if it's Gore or
Bush. From this position it's only one step to the position that says,
"so it's even better we have Bush, because then we see the true
enemy."
We should steer the right
middle course: while maintaining our critical distance towards the moderate
left, one shouldn't be afraid when certain issues are at stake, to support
them. What is at stake is the following: it looked in the 1990s that after
the disintegration of socialism, the Third Way left represents the universal
interests of capital as such, to put it in the old Marxist way, and the
right-wing parties represent only particular interests. In the U.S., the Republicans
target certain types of rich people, and even certain parts of the lower
classes — flirting with the Moral Majority, for example. The problem is that
right-wing politicians such as Haider are playing the global game. Not only
do we have a Third Way left; we now have a Third Way right too, which tries
to combine unrestrained global capitalism with a more conservative cultural
politics.
Here is where I see the
long-term danger of these right wingers. I think that sooner or later the
existing power structure will be forced more and more to directly violate its
own formal democratic rules. For example, in Europe, the tendency behind all
these movements like Holocaust revisionism and so on, is an attempt to
dismantle the post-World War II ideological consensus around anti-fascism,
with a social solidarity built around the welfare state. It's an open
question as to what will replace it.
[*Ed Note: Such as the new
emergency powers granted the U.S. government for domestic surveillance
purposes following the WTC/Pentagon attacks, which suspend habeas corpus
rights for immigrants, allow security services to monitor your
telecommunications activities, and review your student and bank records
without permission from a judge]
BS: What about the
transition from Clinton to Bush? What's significant about this from your
point of view?
Zizek: The sad thing is that
Clinton left behind him a devastated, disoriented Democratic Party. There are
people who say that his departure leaves some room for a resurgence of the
party's left wing, but that will be difficult. The true problem of Clinton is
his legacy; there is none. He didn't survive as a movement, in the sense that
he left a long-term imprint. He was just an opportunist and now he's simply
out. He didn't emerge as a figure like Thatcher or Reagan who left a certain
legacy. OK, you can say that he left a legacy of compromise or triangulation,
but the big failure is at this ideological level. He didn't leave behind a
platform with which the moderate liberals could identify.
BS: A lot of readers of
American underground publications read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and the
stuff coming out of small anarchist presses. What would they get from reading
your work that they might be missing?
Zizek: Martin Heidegger said
that philosophy doesn't make things easier, it makes them harder and more
complicated. What they can learn is the ambiguity of so many situations, in
the sense that whenever we are presented by the big media with a simple
opposition, like multicultural tolerance vs. ethnic fundamentalism, the
opposition is never so clear-cut. The idea is that things are always more
complex. For example, multiculturalist tolerance, or at least a certain type
of it, generates or involves a much deeper racism. As a rule, this type of
tolerance relies on the distinction between us multiculturalists, and
intolerant ethnic others, with the paradoxical result that anti-racism itself
is used to dismiss IN A RACIST WAY the other as a racist. Not to mention the
fact that this kind of "tolerance" is as a rule patronizing. Its
respect for the other cannot but remind us of the respect for naive
children's beliefs: we leave them in their blessed ignorance so as not to
hurt them...
Or take Chomsky. There are
two problematic features in his work — though it goes without saying that I
admire him very much. One is his anti-theorism. A friend who had lunch with
him recently told me that Chomsky announced that he'd concluded that social
theory and economic theory are of no use — that things are simply evident,
like American state terror, and that all we need to know are the facts. I
disagree with this. And the second point is that with all his criticism of
the U.S., Chomsky retains a certain commitment to what is the most elemental
ingredient of American ideology, individualism, a fundamental belief that
America is the land of free individuals, and so on. So in that way he is
deeply and problematically American.
You can see some of these
problems in the famous Faurisson scandal in France. As many readers may know,
Chomsky wrote the preface for a book by Robert Faurisson, which was
threatened with being banned because it denied the reality of the Holocaust.
Chomsky claimed that though he opposes the book's content, the book should
still be published for free speech reasons. I can see the argument, but I
can't support him here. The argument is that freedom of the press is freedom
for all, even for those whom we find disgusting and totally unacceptable;
otherwise, today it is them, tomorrow it is us. It sounds logical, but I
think that it avoids the true paradox of freedom: that some limitations have
to guarantee it.
So to understand what goes
on today — to understand how we experience ourselves, to understand the
structures of social authority, to understand whether we really live in a
"permissive" society, and how prohibitions function today — for
these we need social theory. That's the difference between me and the names
you mentioned.
BS: Chomsky and people like
him seem to think that if we just got the facts out there, things would
almost take care of themselves. Why is this wrong? Why aren't "the
facts" enough?
 Zizek:
Let me give you a very naive answer. I think that basically the facts are
already known. Let's take Chomsky's analyses of how the CIA intervened in
Nicaragua. OK, (he provides) a lot of details, yes, but did I learn anything
fundamentally new? It's exactly what I'd expected: the CIA was playing a very
dirty game. Of course it's more convincing if you learn the dirty details.
But I don't think that we really learned anything dramatically new there. I
don't think that merely "knowing the facts" can really change
people's perceptions.
To put it another way:
Chomsky's own position on Kosovo, on the Yugoslav war, shows some of his
limitations, because of a lack of a proper historical context. With all his
facts, he got the picture wrong. As far as I can judge, Chomsky bought a
certain narrative — that we shouldn't put all the blame on Milosevic, that
all parties were more or less to blame, and the West supported or incited
this explosion because of its own geopolitical goals. All are not the same.
I'm not saying that the Serbs are guilty. I just repeat my old point that
Yugoslavia was not over with the secession of Slovenia. It was over the
moment Milosevic took over Serbia. This triggered a totally different
dynamic. It is also not true that the disintegration of Yugoslavia was
supported by the West. On the contrary, the West exerted enormous pressure,
at least until 1991, for ethnic groups to remain in Yugoslavia. I saw [former
Secretary of State] James Baker on Yugoslav TV supporting the Yugoslav army's
attempts to prevent Slovenia's secession.
The ultimate paradox for me
is that because he lacks a theoretical framework, Chomsky even gets the facts
wrong sometimes.
BS: Years ago, you were
involved with the band Laibach and its proto-state, NSK (Neue Slovenische
Kunst). Why did you get involved with them?
Zizek: The reason I liked
them at a certain moment (which was during the last years of "really existing
socialism") was that they were a third voice, a disturbing voice, not
fitting into the opposition between the old Communists and the new liberal
democrats. For me, their message was that there were fundamental mechanisms
of power which we couldn't get rid of with the simple passage to democracy.
This was a disturbing message, which was why they got on everyone's nerves.
This was no abstract theoretical construct. In the late 1980s, people got
this message instinctively — which is why Laibach were more strongly
repressed by the new democratic, nationalist powers in Slovenia than
previously by the Communists. In the early 1980s, they had some trouble with
the Communists, but from the mid-1980s onward, they didn't have any trouble.
But they did again with the transition of power. With their mocking rituals
of totalitarian power, they transmitted a certain message about the
functioning of power that didn't fit the naive belief in liberal democracy.
The miracle was that they did it through certain stage rituals. Later, they
tried to change their image (to put it in marketing terms) and they failed.
BS: You talk and write a lot
about popular culture, particularly movies. How does your thinking about pop
culture relate to your thinking about politics?
Zizek: We can no longer, as
we did in the good old times, (if they were really good) oppose the economy
and culture. They are so intertwined not only through the commercialization
of culture but also the culturalization of the economy. Political analysis
today cannot bypass mass culture. For me, the basic ideological attitudes are
not found in big picture philosophical statements, but instead in lifeworld
practices — how do you behave, how do you react — which aren't only reflected
in mass culture, but which are, up to a point, even generated in mass
culture. Mass culture is the central ideological battlefield today.
BS: You have recently been
speaking about reviving Lenin. To a lot of politically active young people,
Lenin is a devil figure. What do you find valuable in Lenin, or the Leninist
tradition?
Zizek: I am careful to speak
about not repeating Lenin. I am not an idiot. It wouldn't mean anything to
return to the Leninist working class party today. What interests me about
Lenin is precisely that after World War I broke out in 1914, he found himself
in a total deadlock. Everything went wrong. All of the social democratic
parties outside Russia supported the war, and there was a mass outbreak of
patriotism. After this, Lenin had to think about how to reinvent a radical,
revolutionary politics in this situation of total breakdown. This is the
Lenin I like. Lenin is usually presented as a great follower of Marx, but it
is impressive how often you read in Lenin the ironic line that "about
this there isn't anything in Marx." It's this purely negative parallel.
Just as Lenin was forced to reformulate the entire socialist project, we are
in a similar situation. What Lenin did, we should do today, at an even more
radical level.
For example, at the most
elementary level, Marx's concept of exploitation presupposes a certain labor
theory of value. If you take this away from Marx, the whole edifice of his
model disintegrates. What do we do with this today, given the importance of
intellectual labor? Both standard solutions are too easy — to claim that
there is still real physical production going on in the Third World, or that
today's programmers are a new proletariat? Like Lenin, we're deadlocked. What
I like in Lenin is precisely what scares people about him — the ruthless will
to discard all prejudices. Why not violence? Horrible as it may sound, I
think it's a useful antidote to all the aseptic, frustrating, politically
correct pacifism.
Let's take the campaign
against smoking in the U.S. I think this is a much more suspicious phenomenon
than it appears to be. First, deeply inscribed into it is an idea of absolute
narcissism, that whenever you are in contact with another person, somehow he
or she can infect you. Second, there is an envy of the intense enjoyment of
smoking. There is a certain vision of subjectivity, a certain falseness in
liberalism, that comes down to "I want to be left alone by others; I
don't want to get too close to the others." Also, in this fight against
the tobacco companies, you have a certain kind of politically correct yuppie
who is doing very well financially, but who wants to retain a certain
anti-capitalist aura. What better way to focus on the obvious bad guy, Big
Tobacco? It functions as an ersatz enemy. You can still claim your stock
market gains, but you can say, "I'm against tobacco companies." Now
I should make it clear that I don't smoke. And I don't like tobacco
companies. But this obsession with the danger of smoking isn't as simple as
it might appear.
BS: You've also left some of
your readers scratching their heads over the positive things you've been
writing about Christianity lately. What is it in Christianity you find
worthy?
Zizek: I'm tempted to say,
"The Leninist part." I am a fighting atheist. My leanings are
almost Maoist ones. Churches should be turned into grain silos or palaces of
culture. What Christianity did, in a religiously mystified version, is give
us the idea of rebirth. Against the pagan notion of destiny, Christianity
offered the possibility of a radical opening, that we can find a zero point
and clear the table. It introduced a new kind of ethics: not that each of us
should do our duty according to our place in society — a good King should be
a good King, a good servant a good servant — but instead that irrespective of
who I am, I have direct access to universality. This is explosive. What
interests me is only this dimension. Of course it was later taken over by
secular philosophers and progressive thinkers. I am not in any way defending the
Church as an institution, not even in a minimal way.
For an example, let's take
Judith Butler, and her thesis that our sexual identity isn't part of our
nature but is socially constructed. Such a statement, such a feminist
position, could only occur against a background of a Christian space.
BS: Several times you've
used the word "universalism." For trafficking in such concepts,
people you'd identify as forces of political correctness have indicted you
for Eurocentrism. You've even written a radical leftist plea for
Eurocentrism. How do you respond to the PC camp's charges against you?
Zizek: I think that we
should accept that universalism is a Eurocentrist notion. This may sound
racist, but I don't think it is. Even when Third World countries appeal to freedom
and democracy, when they formulate their struggle against European
imperialism, they are at a more radical level endorsing the European premise
of universalism. You may remember that in the struggle against apartheid in
South Africa, the ANC always appealed to universal Enlightenment values, and
it was Buthelezi, the regime's black supporter in the pay of the CIA, who
appealed to special African values.
My opponent here is the
widely accepted position that we should leave behind the quest for universal
truth — that what we have instead are just different narratives about who we
are, the stories we tell about ourselves. So, in that view, the highest
ethical injunction is to respect the other story. All the stories should be told,
each ethnic, political, or sexual group should be given the right to tell its
story, as if this kind of tolerance towards the plurality of stories with no
universal truth value is the ultimate ethical horizon.
I oppose this radically.
This ethics of storytelling is usually accompanied by a right to narrate, as
if the highest act you can do today is to narrate your own story, as if only
a black lesbian mother can know what it's like to be a black lesbian mother,
and so on. Now this may sound very emancipatory. But the moment we accept
this logic, we enter a kind of apartheid. In a situation of social
domination, all narratives are not the same. For example, in Germany in the
1930s, the narrative of the Jews wasn't just one among many. This was the narrative
that explained the truth about the entire situation. Or today, take the gay
struggle. It's not enough for gays to say, "we want our story to be
heard." No, the gay narrative must contain a universal dimension, in the
sense that their implicit claim must be that what happens to us is not
something that concerns only us. What is happening to us is a symptom or
signal that tells us something about what's wrong with the entirety of
society today. We have to insist on this universal dimension.
Slavoj Zizek, philosopher
and psychoanalyst, is currently Senior Researcher at Kulturwissenschaftliches
Institut, in Essen, Germany. His latest publications are On Belief,
(Routledge, 2001) and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (Verso, 2001).
Doug Henwood is the editor of the Left Business Observer and
author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), and the
forthcoming A New Economy? He was once a
teenage reactionary, but outgrew it.
Charlie Bertsch is a member of the
Bad Subjects Production Team and an assistant professor of English at the
University of Arizona.
Copyright © 2002 by Charlie
Bertsch, Doug Henwood and Slavoj Zizek. All rights reserved.
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