Nothing is easier than to find these little inconsistencies, or passages where Žižek seems to conflate two closely-related terms. But this kind of exercise is for grade-grubbing graduate students and boring, "deadwood" academics. Žižek has already said that his heart is not really in the political writing, because leftists expect answers which he cannot give (answers no one can give).
Žižek has also already said that he is most proud of those passages in his writing in which he gives a good interpretation of Hegel. And Žižek has said that his Lacan is Miller's Lacan. He has already told anyone who was paying attention that his true focus is not on political theory but on self-reflexive negativity, on the death drive, on subjectivity as the negative universality that unites all speaking animals. Only if we focus on this negative a priori will we grasp the misguided nature of all "identity politics".
Žižek writes so much and he is always provocative. But take him at his word: "Theory matters." His philosophical anthropology might make him seem to be the new Marx, but he is definitely not the new Lenin. His most profound theoretical contribution is ontology and metapsychology, not politics.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
Justice, Equality, Envy, Evil
"What Nietzsche and Freud share is the idea that justice as equality is founded on envy--on the envy of the Other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. The demand for justice is thus ultimately the demand that the excessive enjoyment of the Other should be curtailed so that everyone's access to enjoyment is equal."
Žižek, Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 89
"An evil person is thus not an egotist, 'thinking only about his own interests.' A true egotist is too busy taking care of his own good to have time to cause misfortune to others. The primary vice of a bad person is precisely that he is more preoccupied with others than with himself."
Žižek, Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 92
"Here is why egalitarianism itself should never be accepted at its face value: the notion (and practice) of egalitarian justice, insofar as it is sustained by envy, relies on the inversion of the standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others: 'I am ready to renounce it, so that others will (also) NOT be able to have it!' Far from being opposed to the spirit of sacrifice, evil here emerges as the very spirit of sacrifice, ready to ignore one's own well being--if, through my sacrifice, I can deprive the Other of his enjoyment..."
Žižek, Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 92
Žižek, Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 89
"An evil person is thus not an egotist, 'thinking only about his own interests.' A true egotist is too busy taking care of his own good to have time to cause misfortune to others. The primary vice of a bad person is precisely that he is more preoccupied with others than with himself."
Žižek, Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 92
"Here is why egalitarianism itself should never be accepted at its face value: the notion (and practice) of egalitarian justice, insofar as it is sustained by envy, relies on the inversion of the standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others: 'I am ready to renounce it, so that others will (also) NOT be able to have it!' Far from being opposed to the spirit of sacrifice, evil here emerges as the very spirit of sacrifice, ready to ignore one's own well being--if, through my sacrifice, I can deprive the Other of his enjoyment..."
Žižek, Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 92
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Violence & the Arrogance of Anonymity
From “Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek”
Interviewer: Eric Dean Rasmussen
The interview is available online at:
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/desublimation
Rasmussen: Let's follow up on your suicide bomber reference. In both Welcome to the Desert of the Real and The Puppet and the Dwarf you seem to come close to endorsing "hysterical" violence as a preferable alternative to an "obsessional," micromanaged, life-in-death. I'm thinking of the contrast you make between the Palestinian suicide bomber, the American soldier waging war before a computer screen, and the New York yuppie jogging along the Hudson River. In the moment before the bomber kills himself and others, you suggest he is more alive than either the soldier or the yuppie. How would you defend yourself against charges that you are promoting terrorism or romanticizing revolutionary violence?
Žižek: Such charges may be a below-the-belt blow. Believe me, from my personal experience, coming from an ex-socialist country, I know very well the misery of living in a post-revolutionary society. Let me first state my basic position, which is the fundamental paradox that I repeat again and again in my works, and which is basically a paraphrase of that reversal by Jacques Lacan where he says, against Dostoevsky, that, if God doesn't exist, not everything is permitted, but everything is prohibited. Lacan was right, and the so-called fundamentalist terrorists are exactly the proof of his claim. With them, it's inverted: God exists, so everything is permitted. If you act as a divine instrument, you can kill, rape, etc., because, through all these mystical tricks, it's not me who is acting, rather it is God who is acting through me.
I was shocked recently when I read some speeches by Commandant Marcos of the Zapatistas. Behind a mask, Marcos says, "I am nobody. Through me, you have this poetic explosion. Through me, dispossessed peasants in Brazil, poor drug addicts and homeless people in New York, sweatshop workers in Indonesia, all of them speak, but I am nobody." See how ambiguous this position is? It appears modest, but this self-erasure conceals an extreme arrogance. It means all these people speak through me, so the silent conclusion is if you attack me, I am untouchable, because you attack all those others.
Interviewer: Eric Dean Rasmussen
The interview is available online at:
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/desublimation
Rasmussen: Let's follow up on your suicide bomber reference. In both Welcome to the Desert of the Real and The Puppet and the Dwarf you seem to come close to endorsing "hysterical" violence as a preferable alternative to an "obsessional," micromanaged, life-in-death. I'm thinking of the contrast you make between the Palestinian suicide bomber, the American soldier waging war before a computer screen, and the New York yuppie jogging along the Hudson River. In the moment before the bomber kills himself and others, you suggest he is more alive than either the soldier or the yuppie. How would you defend yourself against charges that you are promoting terrorism or romanticizing revolutionary violence?
Žižek: Such charges may be a below-the-belt blow. Believe me, from my personal experience, coming from an ex-socialist country, I know very well the misery of living in a post-revolutionary society. Let me first state my basic position, which is the fundamental paradox that I repeat again and again in my works, and which is basically a paraphrase of that reversal by Jacques Lacan where he says, against Dostoevsky, that, if God doesn't exist, not everything is permitted, but everything is prohibited. Lacan was right, and the so-called fundamentalist terrorists are exactly the proof of his claim. With them, it's inverted: God exists, so everything is permitted. If you act as a divine instrument, you can kill, rape, etc., because, through all these mystical tricks, it's not me who is acting, rather it is God who is acting through me.
I was shocked recently when I read some speeches by Commandant Marcos of the Zapatistas. Behind a mask, Marcos says, "I am nobody. Through me, you have this poetic explosion. Through me, dispossessed peasants in Brazil, poor drug addicts and homeless people in New York, sweatshop workers in Indonesia, all of them speak, but I am nobody." See how ambiguous this position is? It appears modest, but this self-erasure conceals an extreme arrogance. It means all these people speak through me, so the silent conclusion is if you attack me, I am untouchable, because you attack all those others.
Monday, February 2, 2009
The “Che-ification” of Christ
JESUS AGAINST CAPITALISM
1 Timothy 6:10
For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.
Matthew 6:19-21;24
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Matthew 10:9
Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts.
Matthew 21:12-13
12 Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. 13"It is written," he said to them," 'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it a 'den of robbers.'"
Matthew 23:16-17
16 Woe to you, blind guides! You say, 'If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.' 17 You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred?
Luke 18: 22-25
22 "There is still one thing you lack," Jesus said. "Sell all you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
23 But when the man heard this, he became sad because he was very rich.
24 Jesus watched him go and then said to his disciples, "How hard it is for rich people to get into the Kingdom of God!
25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!"
From BBC - Religion and Ethics
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/history/whokilledjesus_1.shtml
Jesus threatened the Temple's income:
The Temple apparatus brought in huge revenues for simple matters like purification and the forgiveness of sins. Archaeologists have discovered 150 mikvehs around the Temple. Mikvehs are ritual baths which Jews use in order to purify themselves before any act of worship.
Jewish people could only enter the Temple if they were ritually pure and almost everyone arriving in Jerusalem for Passover was deemed ritually unclean. They had to use a mikveh before they could fulfil their religious obligations. The priests controlled the mikvehs and charged people to use them.
There were so many regulations requiring ritual purification that control of the mikvehs was a way of making money.
Jesus thought the whole thing was rubbish. He taught that the elaborate purity rituals were unnecessary - the Kingdom of God was available to everyone and they didn't have to go through these rituals or pay the money in order to get there.
From Jesus Against The Church--Part III--Chapter 9
http://portlandporcupine.com/jac/chap09.html
And what would be the priority rating of home ownership to followers of the Son of Man who had no place to lay his head (Matthew 8: 20) and Whose followers sometimes had to live "in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground" (Hebrews 11: 38). The point is not that owning a home is some evil to be avoided, it is that our homes more often own us than the other way around.
1 Timothy 6:10
For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.
Matthew 6:19-21;24
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Matthew 10:9
Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts.
Matthew 21:12-13
12 Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. 13"It is written," he said to them," 'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it a 'den of robbers.'"
Matthew 23:16-17
16 Woe to you, blind guides! You say, 'If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.' 17 You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred?
Luke 18: 22-25
22 "There is still one thing you lack," Jesus said. "Sell all you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
23 But when the man heard this, he became sad because he was very rich.
24 Jesus watched him go and then said to his disciples, "How hard it is for rich people to get into the Kingdom of God!
25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!"
From BBC - Religion and Ethics
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/history/whokilledjesus_1.shtml
Jesus threatened the Temple's income:
The Temple apparatus brought in huge revenues for simple matters like purification and the forgiveness of sins. Archaeologists have discovered 150 mikvehs around the Temple. Mikvehs are ritual baths which Jews use in order to purify themselves before any act of worship.
Jewish people could only enter the Temple if they were ritually pure and almost everyone arriving in Jerusalem for Passover was deemed ritually unclean. They had to use a mikveh before they could fulfil their religious obligations. The priests controlled the mikvehs and charged people to use them.
There were so many regulations requiring ritual purification that control of the mikvehs was a way of making money.
Jesus thought the whole thing was rubbish. He taught that the elaborate purity rituals were unnecessary - the Kingdom of God was available to everyone and they didn't have to go through these rituals or pay the money in order to get there.
From Jesus Against The Church--Part III--Chapter 9
http://portlandporcupine.com/jac/chap09.html
And what would be the priority rating of home ownership to followers of the Son of Man who had no place to lay his head (Matthew 8: 20) and Whose followers sometimes had to live "in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground" (Hebrews 11: 38). The point is not that owning a home is some evil to be avoided, it is that our homes more often own us than the other way around.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
On the Difficulty of the Ethico-Political Act
From Žižek’s and Daly’s book Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 71-72:
“The result of all this is that, for Lacan, the Real is not impossible in the sense that it can never happen—a traumatic kernel which forever eludes our grasp. No, the problem with the Real is that it happens and that’s the trauma. The point is not that the Real is impossible but rather that the impossible is Real. A trauma, or an act, is simply the point when the Real happens, and this is difficult to accept. Lacan is not a poet telling us how we always fail the Real—it’s always the opposite with the late Lacan. The point is that you can encounter the Real, and that is what is so difficult to accept.”
“The result of all this is that, for Lacan, the Real is not impossible in the sense that it can never happen—a traumatic kernel which forever eludes our grasp. No, the problem with the Real is that it happens and that’s the trauma. The point is not that the Real is impossible but rather that the impossible is Real. A trauma, or an act, is simply the point when the Real happens, and this is difficult to accept. Lacan is not a poet telling us how we always fail the Real—it’s always the opposite with the late Lacan. The point is that you can encounter the Real, and that is what is so difficult to accept.”
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Marxism is not simply a "Worldview"
From Žižek's Tarrying with the Negative:
"[...] the proletariat becomes an actual revolutionary subject by way of integrating the knowledge of its historical role: historical materialism is not a neutral 'objective knowledge' of historical development, since it is an act of self-knowledge of a historical subject; as such, it implies the proletarian subjective position. In other words, the 'knowledge' proper to historical materialism is self-referential, it changes its 'object.' It is only via the act of knowledge that the object becomes what it truly 'is.' So, the rise of 'class consciousness' produces the effect in the existence of its 'object' (proletariat) by way of changing it into an actual revolutionary subject."
(TWTN, p. 144-145)
I would just like to add to Žižek's (and Lacan's) insight here by means of a reference to the question as to why the left in the USA is so divided. In American corporate academia, our new sophists (all of the capitalist flunkies, including the all-too-many pseudoleftists who pose as revolutionary "Beautiful Souls") are incapable of becoming true leftists because they simply are not in the proletarian subjective position. In short, the truth of an entire situation is only disclosed through the subjective position of the abject, excluded other. Only by occupying THIS position will American so-called "intellectuals" grasp the truth of Žižek's politics. --V.M.
"[...] the proletariat becomes an actual revolutionary subject by way of integrating the knowledge of its historical role: historical materialism is not a neutral 'objective knowledge' of historical development, since it is an act of self-knowledge of a historical subject; as such, it implies the proletarian subjective position. In other words, the 'knowledge' proper to historical materialism is self-referential, it changes its 'object.' It is only via the act of knowledge that the object becomes what it truly 'is.' So, the rise of 'class consciousness' produces the effect in the existence of its 'object' (proletariat) by way of changing it into an actual revolutionary subject."
(TWTN, p. 144-145)
I would just like to add to Žižek's (and Lacan's) insight here by means of a reference to the question as to why the left in the USA is so divided. In American corporate academia, our new sophists (all of the capitalist flunkies, including the all-too-many pseudoleftists who pose as revolutionary "Beautiful Souls") are incapable of becoming true leftists because they simply are not in the proletarian subjective position. In short, the truth of an entire situation is only disclosed through the subjective position of the abject, excluded other. Only by occupying THIS position will American so-called "intellectuals" grasp the truth of Žižek's politics. --V.M.
Nationalism as Enjoyment
[...] the ideal levelling of all social differences, the production of the citizen, the subject of democracy, is possible only through an allegiance to some particular national Cause. If we apprehend this Cause as the Freudian Thing (das Ding), materialized enjoyment, it becomes clear why it is precisely “nationalism” that is the privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field: the national Cause is ultimately the way subjects of a given nation organize their collective enjoyment through national myths. What is at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing: the “other” wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our “way of life”) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment.
(Looking Awry, p. 165)
(Looking Awry, p. 165)
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