The Slovenian philosopher
Slavoj Žižek is famous for his provocative takes, but how should we understand
his basic ideas?
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian
philosopher, cultural critic, and Lacanian psychoanalyst. A prolific writer and
lecturer, he is best known for his seemingly endless supply of brilliant and
provocative insights into contemporary politics and culture.
From his home in Ljubljana,
Žižek was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about how we should best
understand his ideas. In the wide-ranging style that he has come to be known
for, I also learned why he cannot resist a dirty joke, why the task of
philosophy is to corrupt the youth, and why the man once dubbed “the most
dangerous philosopher in the West” is aiming at something much more modest.
Mike Bulajewski: What is the
best text to read to understand your work?
Slavoj Žižek: Although there
are a couple of candidates to understand the philosophical background, maybe
the first book of my colleague and friend Alenka Zupančič on Lacan and
Kant, Ethics of the Real, comes pretty close to the top.
But it depends which type of
writing you mean because obviously in the last decade or so I’ve written two
types of things: on the one hand, these more philosophical books, usually about
Hegel, post-Hegelian thought, Heidegger, the transcendental approach to
philosophy, brain sciences, and so on. On the other hand, more politically
engaged work. First, I think that my philosophical books are much superior. My
more political writings like The Courage of Hopelessness, Against the
Double Blackmail, and so on, these are things that I myself don’t fully trust.
I think I’m writing them just to say something that I always expect somebody
else should have said. Like, why are others who are more professional not doing
it?
Of philosophical books, I
think it’s the one that comes after Less Than Nothing: Absolute
Recoil. I think this is the ultimate statement of my philosophical position up
until now. Now I’m trying to catch up with that one because I’m always obsessed
by the idea that the essential insight skipped me, that I didn’t catch it. My
big trauma was finishing that mega book Less Than Nothing. It’s over 1,000
pages, but immediately after finishing it I was afraid I didn’t catch the
basic thought, so I tried to do it in Absolute Recoil. But it’s a more
difficult book.
What do you think is the most
misunderstood concept in your work? Do you think there’s something that we, the
readers, don’t want to understand?
It’s not so much a concept as
maybe a topic. I think that my philosophical books are not even so widely read,
and they are usually misunderstood. What I aim at is a very precise
intervention. We are in a certain very interesting philosophical moment where
the deconstructive approach, which in different versions was predominant in the
last couple of centuries, is gradually disappearing. Then we have—how should I
call it—the new positivism, brain sciences, even quantum physics—these scientific
ways to reply to philosophical questions. Stephen Hawking said in one of his
later books that today, philosophy is dead, science is approaching even basic
philosophical questions, and he was right in some sense. Today, if you ask, “Is
our universe finite or infinite? Do we have an immortal soul or not? Are we
free or not?” People look to answers for these questions in evolutionary
biology, brain sciences, quantum physics—not in philosophy.
So, between these two
extremes, is there a place for philosophy proper? Not just this
deconstructionist, historicist reflection asking, “What is the social context
or the discursive context of a work,” but also not a naïve realism, let’s look
at reality how it is, and so on. Usually this basic thrust of my work is not
understood. So, for me, it is quite comical how I am often for the same work
attacked by both sides attributing to me the opposite position. For some
Habermasian theorists of discourse, I am a naïve psychoanalytic positivist. For
brain scientists, I am a still naïve European metaphysician or whatever.
But now we come to the
interesting part. In my political writings, I noticed, the same is happening.
You remember, maybe you caught an echo of the ridiculous exchange I
had a few months ago with Jordan Peterson. You know what I find so comical
there? On the one hand, politically correct, transgender, #MeToo people
attacked me for being—I don’t know—anti-politically correct, anti-gay
basically, even a Trump supporter, alt-right guy or whatever. Many of
them—especially after my criticism of some of the aspects of #MeToo and the
transgender movement—see me as an enemy. But the large majority of partisans of
Jordan Peterson who reacted to my two short texts attacked me as a pure example
of deconstructionism, cultural Marxism, and so on. What was really interesting
about their reactions to my work was how, for the same text, I am often
attacked by both sides. My old political book, Welcome to the Desert of
the Real, I find it quite funny… My Arab friends accused me of being too
sympathetic to Zionism and that I am spreading some Zionist lies there and so
on. An Egyptian friend told me there was an attack on my book in Al Achram,
the main Egyptian daily, almost two decades ago, attacking me as the most
perfidious Zionist propaganda. On the other hand, Jerusalem Post, the main
center-right daily in Israel, attacked me as the most dangerous version of new
anti-Semitism.
So, this is what I find
superficially interesting in reactions to my work. I think it is a sad proof
that people are not really reading it and following the line of argument, they
just look for some short passages and quotes which can be read in their way.
But I am not a pessimist because of this. I follow here Jean-Paul Sartre, who
said that if, for the same text, you are attacked by both sides, it’s usually
one of the few reliable signs that you are in the right.
Is there something symptomatic
about that? In the sense that between two sides, pro- and anti-Zionism, they’re
trying to reassert the parameters of the discourse or the debate. It’s O.K. to
be on either side at some level, but to occupy some kind of third position is
most destructive, or controversial, position. Are we locked in these debates?
Yes, these are false debates,
that’s my thesis. For example, look at transgender political correctness and #MeToo.
You would have thought that the only choice is either morally conservative
common-sense criticism of politically correct transgender “excesses” or fully
supporting transgenderism. My position here is, of course, not to criticize
#MeToo or the transgender position from the right-wing or conservative
attitude, but from the progressive way. My reproach to the #MeToo movement is
not that they are too crazy, too moralist—no! It is that their moral puritanism
and fanaticism is really not radical enough.
For me, advocates of political
correctness are of course basically right. Women are oppressed, there is
racism, and so on. But the way they approach it doesn’t work. I am not
advocating some third space of a compromise. I am saying the way these problems
are approached is, in its entirety, both poles, is wrong. Let me give you an
example which is often considered problematic. There is a big debate now, and
it is a totally justified debate: how do you do dating, seduction, after
#MeToo? What are the new rules? As you probably know, I’ve
written about it.
One of the rules people try to
emphasize is the right to say no at any moment. Like, let’s say you, as a
woman, you are seduced, you say yes. Then in the middle of sexual activity you
discover your partner is rough, inconsiderate, there’s something vulgar about
him or you become aware that your yes was an enforced yes. You have the right
to withdraw. But a new form of extremely humiliating violence, not physical
violence but mental violence, is opened up if we just follow this rule. Let’s
say a guy is seducing a girl. She says yes sincerely; it is not an enforced
yes. And when she gets fully excited and so on, all red in the face, the guy
says, “Sorry, I have the right to withdraw, I changed my mind.”
My point here is not that
sometimes no doesn’t mean no. It always means no. I’m just saying that
sexuality is a complex domain with implied meanings, ambiguities. You cannot
translate it into rules. And that is my basic reproach to the way I read their
proposals. The #MeToo new seduction rules precisely are under the spell of a
certain legalism. They think the solution is to explicate the rules. The
problem cannot be solved at this level. That’s all that I wanted to say.
I’m not downplaying violence.
My obsession—and I think it is a big legacy of critique of ideology of the last
centuries, is how a certain rule, slogan or practice which may appear to open
up the space for new freedom, emancipation, nonetheless can be misused or has
potentially dangerous consequences. As I said viciously at some point, I don’t
bring clear answers; I like to complicate things. Usually people say a
philosopher when you are confused should bring clarity. I say no! We think we
see things clearly in daily life; I long to confuse things.
You mentioned Jordan Peterson,
and he is influenced by Carl Jung. Do you have any comments about
psychoanalysis in general? Because at least in the United States, we probably
are primarily influenced from Anna Freud’s ego psychology? Carl Jung is influential
in some ways, partly through the New Age movement…
Don’t underestimate Jung’s
influence. In most countries, Freud is seriously debated, but more in literary
criticism, maybe in psychology, philosophy, and theoretical circles. But Jung’s
work is much more popular. His books are best sellers. For example, after the
fall of communism in Russia, ex-Soviet Union, forget about Freud, I was told
that Jung was selling hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies, and so
on. And of course, here, O.K., we don’t have time to go into detail, but I
claim here I am an old-fashioned Stalinist. Jung is a wrong way. Jung is a New
Age obscurantist reinscription of Freud. But, you know, in my debate with
Jordan Peterson, I totally ignored the Jungian aspect.
Where I see red (as they say)
is how Peterson makes a sudden jump from criticism of #MeToo and of transgender
politics to his obsession with the terror of cultural Marxism in a totally
illegitimate way. All of a sudden he mobilizes one of the basic ideological motifs
of new conservatives in Europe, which is that after the fall of Stalin, after
the revolution failed in Western Europe in 1920s, some mysterious Communist
center decided we cannot destroy the West directly, we must first destroy it
morally, its Christian ethical foundations, so through the Frankfurt School and
so on, they mobilized the cultural Left. And they see all these
phenomena—radical feminism, transgenderism, and so on—as the final outcomes of
so-called cultural Marxism and its bent to destroy the West. Now, I consider
this a total nonsense which is even factually inaccurate.
It is interesting to reread
texts by Horkheimer, Adorno, and other great names of the Frankfurt School. For
example, one should reread today Horkheimer’s text from late 30s “Authority and
Family,” where Horkheimer does not simply condemn the patriarchal family, but
emphasizes how in today’s capitalist society, patriarchal society is very
ambiguous. Yes, it is the model of oppression and so on, but at the same time
without paternal authority, a child cannot develop an autonomous moral stance
which would enable him to gain some kind of ethical autonomy to critically
oppose society. So, for Horkheimer and later Adorno, things are clear. A
society without paternal authority is a society of youth gangs, of young people
who elevate peer values, who are not able to take a critical stance toward
society, and so on. It’s ridiculous how inaccurate this image is that paints
the terror of cultural Marxism.
My view here is exactly
the opposite. What people like Jordan Peterson call cultural Marxism is
precisely, as I put it a little bit aggressively, one of the last bourgeois
defenses against Marxism. It is falsely radical. I’m not saying that Bernie
Sanders is a Marxist. He is just a relative moderate measured by the standards
of half a century ago, but he is maybe the first serious American social
democrat in the last decades. But did you notice how there were immediate
clashes between him and transgender and #MeToo people? Once
he said in a famous statement—that’s why I like Bernie Sanders—that it’s
not enough for a woman to say, “I’m a Latina, vote for me.” We should also ask,
“O.K., nice, but what’s your program?” Just for saying that he was attacked for
white supremacism. This is why I think that this so-called cultural Left is one
of the main culprits for democratic defeat, the price left-liberals paid for
their obsession with these cultural issues. My god, you remember a year and a
half ago, if you opened up the New York Times, you’d have thought the main
problem is what type of toilet we should have. Then you get Trump!
Can you comment on your style?
From various things I’ve heard you say, you’re uncomfortable being treated as
an intellectual authority, as a type of a father figure. There’s the dirty
jokes, you’ve said you don’t like the formal titles of “Professor Žižek?”
But I take my work seriously.
I don’t want to be treated with respect because I think there is always a
hidden aggression with respect. At least in my universe, and maybe I live in a
wrong universe, this type of respect always subtly implies that you don’t take
someone’s work totally seriously. I don’t want to be respected as a person. I
don’t care how you call me, Slavoj or an idiot, whatever. I want you to focus
on my work.
Here, I am a little bit
divided. You know where maybe you can catch me? On the one hand I say that I
want you to focus on my work. But in my work and maybe even more so in my
speech, there is obviously some kind of compulsion to be amusing and to attract
attention. So yes, I have a problem. This is why I more and more like writing and
not public speeches and talking. Because in writing, you can focus on what it
is all about. And I will tell you something that will surprise you. The best
lesson that I had in the last decades is how my philosophical books, which are
considered unreadable, too long, too difficult, often sell better than my
political books. Isn’t this wonderful?
The lesson is we shouldn’t
underestimate the public. It’s not true what some pessimists say, that people
are idiots, you should write short books, just reporting or giving practical
advice—no. There still is a serious intellectual public around. That’s what
gives me hope.
We often expect intellectuals
to conform to a certain image of seriousness when they appear in public, and
obviously you don’t do those kinds of things, and maybe you even undermine this
image. Does that limit your influence?
Yes, I agree with you. It’s a
very nice insight. You can say up to a point that what some people take my
so-called popularity as basically a subtle argument against me. People say,
“He’s funny, go listen to him, but don’t take him too seriously.” And this
sometimes hurts me a little bit because people really often ignore what I want
to say. For example, the point of madness was reached here—maybe you read
it—John Gray’s review of Less Than Nothing in the New York
Review of Books. It’s a complex book on Hegel. I made this test with my friends
who had only read Gray’s review. I asked them what was their impression of the
book? What do I claim in the book? They didn’t have any idea. The review just
focuses on some details which are politically problematic, excesses, and so on.
But my God, I wrote a book on Hegel. What do I say in it? It is totally
ignored. But on the other hand, I think I shouldn’t complain too much here,
because, you know, this happens to philosophers. It is happening with
Heidegger, with the Frankfurt School, with Lacan, and so on. One simply has to
resign to it and accept it. Philosophers are here mostly to be misunderstood.
Does the darkness of your work
come through more in your movies, the Pervert’s Guide to…?
I never thought about it, but
can I tell you another secret here? Sophie Fiennes was very friendly with me
and we did the two movies together, but do you know that I hated making them?
It is so traumatic for me to perform in front of a camera, especially to be
treated as an actor. Like once I was improvising something for 20 minutes, and
then Sophie Fiennes told me, “It was excellent, Slavoj, but there was some
problem with the sound. Could you do it again?” She is my friend but at that
point I was ready to kill her! You know, who cares about the fucking sound, my
God. I was successfully developing a line of thought; I was improvising; I
wasn’t acting in the sense of following a script, and now let’s go back and do
it again? It was a nightmare.
But the tone comes through.
The movies have a certain ominous quality.
You are right here, and you
know what is important here? This is maybe one of the existential wagers of my
work, to use this fashionable term. To be a radical leftist, you don’t have to
be some kind of a stupid optimist, where you believe that, if not for
capitalism and oppression, people would be happy, and we are building a new
society, and so on. No! In my last theoretical book, Incontinence of the Void,
I go openly into how, at a different level, if there will be something like
communism, maybe people will be much unhappier. Life will be much more tragic.
I don’t think we should confuse happiness and these psychological categories
with progressive politics.
Bottom of Form
I wrote something published
in The
Philosophical Salon attacking happiness studies, and I go to the end
there. I claim that happiness is not an ethical category; it is a category of
compromise. To be happy, you have to be hypocritical and stupid. I’m getting
more and more dark here. I think that—if I may use this bombastic
category—creativity is something that does not make you happy. It is something
very traumatic and painful. It is the same with love: There is no happy love,
not in the sense that it always goes wrong, but if you remember how it is being
really passionately in love, my God! Your peace of life is ruined; everything
is thrown out of balance, and this intensity is what matters. There is nothing
happy about it.
You write in Incontinence
of the Void: “Only hysteria produces new knowledge, in contrast to the
University discourse, which simply reproduces it.” How should we think about
this statement in relation to what you are trying to achieve with your work?
I’m not new here. I’m
repeating Lacan here, Freud already. The target there, if you remember
correctly, is perversion. My old animosity to May ‘68, where the idea is
perverts are radical. They even quote Freud, who wrote that hysterics are
ambiguous, since they just provoke the master with a secret call for a new,
more authentic master, while perverts go to the end. And here I think we should
totally change the coordinates. No! Perverts are constitutive of power. Every
power needs a secret
pervert underground, backside.
But now we have Trump, and
Trump is on the side of perversion, no? He seems to revel in transgressing norms.
Up to a point, yes. Who for me
is the symptom of Trump? Steve Bannon. If you look at his economic proposals,
he says something that is usually attributed to the Left and that no social
democracy today dares to do: raise the taxes to 50% for the rich, big public
works, and so on. And that’s the general tragedy of our time, that Left
moderates have become the cultural Left and the new populist Right is taking
over even many of the old social democratic motifs. Social democracy in Europe,
even more than in the U.S., is disappearing. That’s why I think people like
Bernie Sanders are important.
As some intelligent observers
wrote, Sanders succeeded in mobilizing for the Left many people who would have
otherwise voted for Trump. But on the other hand, when you ask about Trump as
perversion, yes, I agree with you, especially in this sense—here I am a
classical moralist. For me the new motto of the Left should be, “We are the
Moral Majority.” What I mean is this: Look at Trump’s speech and how the level
of public discourse has degraded. Things he says publicly were unthinkable two,
three decades ago. And it’s not just the United States. We in Europe are no
better. I really think we live in a time of let’s call it ideological
regression. History is not necessarily progressive. This is what Hitler did
with fascism. Things that were already part of public life but strictly limited
to crazy conversation in some small cafeteria where you talk all the
obscenities becomes part of public speech. Again, it is happening also in
Europe.
O.K., going back to “Only
hysteria produces new knowledge…”
Remember what hysteria is? To
simplify it, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, society confers on you a certain
identity. You are a teacher, professor, woman, mother, feminist, whatever. The
basic hysterical gesture is to raise a question and doubt your identity.
“You’re saying I’m this, but why am I this? What makes me this?” Feminism
begins with this hysterical question. Male patriarchal ideology constrains
women to a certain position and identity, and you begin to ask, “But am I
really that?” Or to use the old Juliet question from Romeo and Juliet, “Am I
that name?” Like, “Why am I that?” So
hysteria is this basic doubting of your identity.
People often identified me as
a hysteric with my outbursts. O.K., why not? I am hysterical. But you know what
gave me hope? Lacan beautifully designated Hegel as “le plus sublime des
hysteriques,” the most sublime of all hysterics, because dialectics is precisely
this reflexive self-questioning, questioning of every position. That’s why
Hegel was aware of the feminine dimension. In his reading of Antigone, he
said that woman is the eternal irony of human history, precisely through these
ironic questions. I experienced this a couple of times—this is primitive sexual
difference, but I think there is a moment of truth here—that when I am talking
with a woman, sometimes I get engaged into my reflections and, all of a sudden,
I get caught into my own game of taking myself too seriously. And then I see in
the woman, my partner in conversation, a kind of a silent mocking gaze—like,
“What, are you bullshitting me?” No direct brutal irony, just a silent gaze
which destroys you.
Your work has sometimes been
criticized as not systematic. Is that intentional? You mentioned previously
that, as a philosopher, what you’re trying to do is not to clarify, so much as
to problematize.
At the same time, I must say
that although I like to use jokes and stories, I do try to put things clearly.
But I am here in good company. Take Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, maybe
the greatest philosophical work of all time. It was often reproached for the
same reason: that it is not clear what Hegel’s position is, that he just seems
to jump from one position to another, ironically subverting it, and so on. In a
way, from the very beginning, from Socratic questioning, philosophy is this.
Without this hysterical questioning of authority, there is no philosophy, which
is why, as my friend Alain Badiou recently put it, it is not an accident that
Socrates was condemned to death for corrupting the youth. Philosophy has done
this from the very beginning. The best definition of philosophy is “corrupting
the young,” in the sense of awakening them from an existing dogmatic worldview.
This corrupting is more complex today, because constant self-doubt,
questioning, and irony is the predominant attitude. Today, official ideology is
not telling you, “Be a faithful Christian,” but some sort of post-modernist ideal,
“Be true to yourself, change yourself, renovate yourself, doubt everything.” So
now the way we corrupt young people is getting more complex.
You are often described as a
very provocative thinker, but this seems overstated to me. Do you think you are
in fact not provocative at all?
That’s a really nice insight.
I really like it. I’m always telling people who claim, “You know you are
talking madness, you cannot mean it seriously.” Whenever they say something
like that, I immediately explain it in a way which makes it almost common
sense, and I’m not saying anything big or revolutionary. I’m saying that today
we need a little bit more radical politics, but like, social democracy. I’m
very much against all this Nietzschean “against good and evil” ideas. I’m for
kind of a common morality. There are no big provocations here.
Even in philosophy, I’m not
claiming I’m bringing out something radically new. I’m just trying to explain
what I see already there in Hegel. But I will tell you something else I liked
in what you said, and that’s my maybe silent hope. Do you know that all big
ruptures, or most of them, in the history of thought, occurred as a return to
some origins? I always quote Martin Luther. His aim was not to be a
revolutionary; his aim was to return to the true Christian message, against the
Pope and so on. In this way, he did perform one of the greatest intellectual
revolutions where everything changed and so on. I think it is a necessary
illusion, paradoxically. To do something really new, maybe the illusion is
necessary that you are really just returning to some more authentic past. It
must be misperceived as being already there. And I will take the ultimate
example here: As many people noticed, it is clear that when Jacques Lacan talks
about the return to Freud, well, this Freud is to a large extent something that
he rediscovered in Freud, but it is more that he filled in Freud’s gaps and so
on. We should never forget that Lacan, who confused everything and brought a
revolution to psychoanalysis, perceived himself just as someone who returned to
Freud. That’s why I like this idea. For me, true revolutionaries always had a
conservative side.
I will give you another
example which maybe you will like. At the beginning of modernity, all those
apparent radicals, empiricists, whatever, they really didn’t get it. One of the
guys who really got what modernity is about is Blaise Pascal. But his problem
was not, “Let’s break with the past,” but precisely how to remain orthodox
Christian in the new conditions of science and modernity. As such, he
understood much better what was emerging with modern science than all those
scientific empiricist enthusiasts or whatever. What may appear as a
conservative move is something that enables you to see things that others may not
see.
Another example which has
always fascinated me: the passage from silent to sound cinema. Those who
resisted it spontaneously—from the Russian avant garde up to Charlie
Chaplin—they perceived much more clearly the uncanny dimensions of what was
happening there. As I developed in my books, for almost 10 years Chaplin
resisted making a full sound movie, no? An early movie to use sound, City
Lights, just uses music. Then in Modern Times, you hear sounds and human
speech, but it is always sound which is part of the narrative. For example, you
hear human speech if it is the voice of a radio shown in the movie. Only
with The Great Dictator do you have speaking actors. But who is the
agent of sound? Hitler, with this wild shouting. So Chaplin as a conservative
saw this threatening, living-dead, destabilizing dimension of the voice, while
those idiotic proponents of sound cinema perceived the situation in stupid
realist terms, “Fine, now that we have also sound, we can reproduce reality in
a more realist convincing way.”
That’s why I don’t like a guy
like Ray Kurzweil. In his idea of Singularity, he misses something. It’s so
simple, like, yes, we will all become part of the singularity. He doesn’t even
address the key questions: How will this change our identity? He kids there. He
thinks all these great things will happen, but we will somehow remain the same
human beings, just with additional abilities.
No comments:
Post a Comment