He writes book after book with
capitalist work ethos. And he's constantly messing with his own left
community. Now, the man who looks so peaceful with his beard, 70 years
old. A tribute to the anarcho-Marxist Slavoj Žižek!
René Scheu
21.3.2019, 05:30 clock
[TRANSLATED BY A STUPID
COMPUTER]
Is Slavoj Žižek, who is
considered by some to be the most dangerous philosopher of the West, actually a
staunch communist, as he claims? Let's ask Radio Yerevan, the fake
broadcaster, who answered fictional questions of listeners under the Communist
Soviet regime.
Here comes the answer: In
principle yes, but of course Žižek condemns the atrocities of Lenin and Stalin
at every opportunity. Communism is for him something that is yet to
come. And nobody knows better than Žižek that Marx harbored great sympathy
for capitalism. In it he recognized the innovation-driven prosperity
machinery, which makes the coming proletarian revolution possible in the first
place. In short, Žižek is of course a tough Communist, because only the
Communist can appreciate capitalism in all its glory.
Is Žižek a
crypto-capitalist? That would be too high a poker, even if his work ethic
certainly reminds of the ambitions of the most blatant capitalists. But he
undoubtedly loves working off the contradictions of capitalism. If there
was no capitalism, Slavoj Žižek would not be happy in his life. He once
called himself open and honest in an interview: an «admirer». In doing so,
he sees the system enemy as Marx described it: as a fascination that transforms
everything that is foreign to it. If communism is a distant specter, then
capitalism can only be a near monster.
The coming revolution
Žižek gained notoriety in the
1990s, when he was able to make fruitful the elusive ideas of the slightly
snooped psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan using obscene jokes, pop phenomenon and
Hitchcock films. Suddenly one understood how human beings in their hearts
are nostalgic and can only desire what they have already lost: if it has lost
it, it must have existed. How man must presuppose a great other, which
does not exist, if he does not want to get lost in this chaotic world.
Žižek received his PhD in
philosophy from Lacan's son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller as a doctor of
philosophy in psychoanalysis. But Žižek's "Return to Lacan,"
which claimed to return to Freud, was, in truth, from the beginning a
"return to Marx." Marx, in contrast to his followers, was
fascinated by the "highly revolutionary role" of the bourgeoisie, as
the Communist Manifesto states. This is exactly the big issue of Žižek,
born in 1949 in Ljubljana: the revolution. Or closer: the absence of the
revolution.
Only a political act can
undermine after him the prevailing neo-liberal order in which we live. However,
those who live in the middle of the monster can imagine, in a purely logical
way, no other side of the monster. In Žižek's diction: "How the hell
should I know what we should do?", Or free after Martin Heidegger (and
Alain Badiou): Only a revolutionary God can save us. And because God's
intervention is not coming any longer, Žižek is capricious to what he does
best: to break the ruling order.
If you cannot act, you have to
think. The Slovenian philosopher does this so masterfully that in the course
of his career he has attracted the spell of almost all political groups, the
left even more than the conservative, the feminists even more than the
macho. You have to do that as a left-radical theoretician.
The fluid subject
Capital is the "social
power". What people invent to facilitate the exchange of goods
becomes the primary agent of the human world. Henceforth, people are at
the service of the reproduction of capital.
This idea captivates the
dialectician Žižek, because two opposing determinations interchange their
roles: The most fictitious thing - capital, ie money in the long run, ie paper
or Bites - dictates the course of the real, namely the human destiny, that is,
the social, political and economic life. Yet for Zizek - again free after
Marx - there are capitalists and proletarians, those who primarily profit from
it, and those who primarily suffer from it; those who have and those who
toil. He takes the double standard of profiteers on the grain.
If he has a mission, it is to
be the sting in the flesh of the saturated elite.
"Everything that is
estranged and standing" evaporates, "states the manifesto" or at
the height of time: the fluid subject is the capitalist subject par
excellence. Not only does it have to constantly reinvent its own CV, but
also its identity. The "Be free!" Turns freedom into its
opposite - hard-hitting compulsion.
For Žižek this is not
progressive, but regressive and not without risks. It would be an irony of
capitalism, of all things, that the identity politics that accompany the
liquefaction of all conditions, and that sort people again by ethnicity, gender
and sexual orientation, would lead to a new class society with a hierarchical
structure.
Žižek also regularly takes a
look at multiculturalism, for him theideology of capitalism. Behind
the attitude of equating all cultures is nothing other than the assertion of
one's own superiority: it is the gaze of the colonial gentleman who looks down
on other cultures and keeps the closed societies at a distance while pretending
to respect them. Let them do what they want, as long as it does not affect
me!
But as soon as the
multiculturalists have something to do with foreigners claiming the recognition
of their cultural practices from the majority society, tolerance for intolerance
tilts - and the attitude of cultural apartheid shows its true ugly face.
There is, of course, the
political correctness, which Žižek calls a "revolution without
revolution" and can not stand: the cultivated contemporary acts as if one
could eliminate discrimination by means of speech prohibitions - only to be
able to continue practicing them with a clear conscience.
Or take his criticism of
mainstream feminism. Their representatives have not realized that they
have fallen for their male whisperers: Anyone who suspects patriarchal thinking
raises men to perpetrators - and degrades women to victims of the
circumstances. Even with his constant criticism of eco-fundamentalism
Žižek has made unpopular. For him, the Greens today manage the phantasm of
a harmonious original state, in which the perfect natural balance prevailed -
and to which the world has to find its way back. But after Žižek, who,
like Marx, dreams of a new social dynamic, this would be a reactionary agenda.
A free society
Yes, Žižek is the ricochet
among leftist theoreticians. All the more so as he does not simply vote
for an expansion of the state to improve conditions, as socialists usually do
reflexively. Although he shares Marx's view that the state "manages
the common business of the entire bourgeois class" - at the same time he
points out that the big government at the same time the new digital big
business makes its own: The state apparatus works with the digital giant to his
own Bothering citizens better.
In this respect, Žižek is
indeed a consistent follower of the anarchic Marx: in the end, the state has to
die and leave a free society. Or in the words of the
"manifesto": an "association in which the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all".
As strong as Žižek is as a
critic of the ruling order, so vague is his positive vision of
communism. His most recent remarks on the subject seem modest: people
around the world would discover the importance of commons for the development
of humanity, the commons of intellectual property, the commons of the outer
nature whose livelihoods are at stake, and the commons the inner nature, the
biogenetic heritage of humanity. Everything belongs to everyone: this
awareness, which makes us all proletarians, has only just begun, and it could
change the world. Is this the revolutionary event that Zizek dreams of?
That sounds almost too little
in the end. May Slavoj Žižek, who is celebrating his 70th birthday today,
not be mild-mannered. If he has a mission, it is to be the sting in the
flesh of the saturated elite. Long live Žižek, the tireless, the
uncomfortable, the indestructible!
[New from Slavoj Žižek have
appeared: "Like a thief in daylight: Power in the age of posthuman
capitalism" (Fischer-Verlag 2019), - "Disparities" (Scientific
Book Society 2018) and "The courage of hopelessness" (Fischer-Verlag
2018)]
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