Zizek "disrupts"
ideological structures, the underside of acceptable philosophical, religious
and political discourses.
25 Dec 2012
There are many important and
active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley
in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe
in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in
Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and
China.
None is better than the
others. All are simply different, pursue different philosophical traditions,
write in different styles and, most of all, propose different interpretations.
While all these philosophers
have become points of references within the philosophical community, few have
managed to overcome its boundaries and become public intellectuals intensely
engaged in our cultural and political life as did Hannah Arendt (with the
Eichmann trial), Jean-Paul Sartre (in the protests of May 1968) and Michel
Foucault (with the Iranian revolution).
These philosophers became
public intellectuals not simply because of their original philosophical
projects or the exceptional political events of their epochs, but rather
because their thoughts were drawn by these events. But how can an intellectual
respond to the events of his epoch in order to contribute in a productive
manner?
In order to respond, as Edward
Said once said, the intellectual has to be "an outsider, living in
self-imposed exile, and on the margins of society", that is, free from
academic, religious and political establishments; otherwise, he or she will
simply submit to the inevitability of events.
He exposes himself to
criticism
If Slavoj Zizek perfectly fits
Said's description, it is not because he is unemployed, in exile, and at the
margins of society, but rather because he writes as if he were. His theoretical
books, political positions and public appearances are a disruption not only of
the common academic style, but also of the idea of the philosopher or
intellectual as someone to be idealised and deferred to.
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Talk to Al Jazeera -
Slavoj Zizek
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A perfect example of this is
presented in a scene from a documentary where
the Slovenian philosopher brilliantly explains (while half-naked in his bed)
that philosophy "is a very modest discipline, it asks different questions
from science, for example, how does the philosopher approach the problem of
freedom? The problem is not whether we are free or not; it asks simpler
questions which we call hermeneutic questions, hence, what it means to be
free... philosophy does not ask whether there is truth, no, the question is
what do you mean when you say this is true".
The surprise from seeing a
thinker offer such a clear definition of philosophy does not come from the
casual setting; rather, we have become too accustomed to elegant intellectuals
hiding behind complicated definitions of philosophy in their university
offices. Zizek instead prefers to be honest and expose himself to criticism in
order to state clearly and dogmatically his philosophical and political
positions.
His ability to fuse together
Martin Heidegger's "fundamental ontology", Francis Fukuyama's
"end of history" and Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" in
order to undermine our liberal and tolerant democratic structures is a practice
few intellectuals are capable of.
While many believe that
globalisation made the Slovenian philosopher more popular than John Dewey,
Herbert Marcuse, or Jurgen Habermas, it was actually his ability to disrupt our
neoliberal democratic surety through the same events that characterise
it.
Zizek's disruptions begin as
soon as we watch him deliver a lecture (which always draws large crowds) where
he decomposes our sense of reality (using material as diverse as Hegel's
dialectical materialism, Lacan's psychoanalysis and David Lynch's films) in
order to reactualise the dialectical method in philosophy.
For example, against the
realist, who conceives truth as a permanent content that serves as an
infallible corrective for all our thoughts and actions, the Slovenian
philosopher indicates how this access to reality is only possible through what
remains unthought, that is, symbolisation, the parallax gap, or the struggle
for truth. The status of reality "is purely parallactic and, as such,
non-substantial: It is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible
only in the shift from the one to the other".
The aim of Zizek's philosophy
(similar to hermeneutics) is to show that not only our understanding is
dialectical but reality is as well: Every "field of 'reality' (every
'world') is always already enframed, seen through an invisible frame".
This dialectical stance allows the Slovenian thinker to call for changes
through ideological reversals; that is, he shows that in order to overcome
capitalism it is first necessary to abandon "all forms of resistance which
help the system reproduce itself by ensuring our participation in
it".
This is why events like the
Arab Spring, the OWS protests and the protests in Greece should not be read as
"part of the continuum of past and present" but rather as
"fragments of a utopian future that lies dormant in the present as its
hidden potential". This future, according to Zizek, will be
communist.
The thinker of our age
Although Zizek has become a
distinguished academic professor (in several European and American universities), the author of more than 70
books (such as The
Sublime Object of Ideology, The
Parallax View, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously), the editor of successful
series (Insurrections, Sic, Short
Circuits), a sharp cultural critic (in media
articles and documentaries such as The Pervert's Guide to
Cinema and The
Pervert's Guide to Ideology) and a courageous political activist (in
addition to having run for president in Slovenia's first democratic election in
1990 and also a supporter of Julian
Assange's WikiLeaks organisation and the Palestinian cause), he is constantly criticised either for
"endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision" or
for releasing more books "than he can read".
Predictably, most of these
criticisms are directed not against his theoretical project but his political
views, that is, communism. After all, 1989 was not only the year the Soviet
Union dissolved, but also when the Slovenian philosopher's first book in English
appeared; in other words, in the year communism ended, Zizek (and many other
philosophers) began to endorse it.
He still has not received an
international prize, but not because he is not a serious or original
philosopher, but rather because such prizes are given to the intellectuals who
follow the predominant ideology, not those who disrupt it.
Today, whether we like him or
not, Zizek is, as the Observer points out, "what Jacques Derrida was to
the 80s", that is, the thinker of our age. While Derrida's intellectual
operation focused on "deconstructing" our linguistic frames of
reference, Zizek instead "disrupts" our ideological structures, the
underside of acceptable philosophical, religious and political
discourses.
Although it's impossible to
cover all the Slovenian philosophers' meditations, which span from Schelling's idealism through Jacques
Lacan's psychoanalysis and John
Milbank's theology, it is worth venturing into the political disruptions he
has created (which I will comment upon in a later post) in order to further
understand how he has changed the role of the philosopher, a role, as he writes
in his two latest books (Less
Than Nothing and Mapping
Ideology) that must "articulate the space for a revolt"
independently because when a revolutionary movement is denounced as
ideological, "one can be sure that its inversion is no less
ideological".
Santiago Zabala is
ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. His
books include The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (2008), The Remains of Being (2009), and, most recently, Hermeneutic Communism (2011, co-authored with G
Vattimo), all published by Columbia University Press.
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