Slavoj Žižek: Superstar of the Occupy movement

By Michael Posner
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/slavoj-zizek-superstar-of-the-occupy-movement/article2209984/

Thanks in part to the Occupy Wall Street movement, lefty Slovenian academic Slavoj Žižek has found his moment.

Financier George Soros has conferred his benediction. So have filmmaker Michael Moore, author Chris Hedges, actor Susan Sarandon and other luminaries. But if the burgeoning, still inchoate Occupy Wall Street movement can claim any sort of messiah, it is a bearded, slightly rotund 62-year-old Slovenian academic named Slavoj Žižek.

Never mind al-Qaeda, sovereign debt or the Russian mafia. Mr. Žižek (pronounced Zheezhek) - a veritable rock star of philosophy and cultural theory - may be the modern Western world's most dangerous adversary.

He turned up recently at the OWS epicentre in New York's Zuccotti Park, appropriately clad in a bright red T-shirt. The authorities had banned the use of microphones, lest the protest disturb the neighbourhood's peace (although as he spoke, a raucous Hispanic Day parade was snaking up Fifth Avenue). So Mr. Žižek's speech had to be declaimed, sentence by sentence, then echoed by the standing choir in cascading waves. Idea surfing in the mosh pit of lower Manhattan.

His core message, perfectly calibrated to our distressed zeitgeist, is not new. In fact, it is the same subversive sermon Mr. Žižek has been preaching for two decades, disseminated in more than 50 books, several documentary films and scores of personal appearances. Its essence is this: Global, liberal, democratic capitalism as we know it is experiencing its death spiral, choking on its own excess. The only serious question is what will ensue.

"They tell you we are dreamers," he declared in New York, reminiscent of Vladimir Lenin addressing socialist comrades in Berne, 1916. "The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. We're not destroying anything. We're watching the system destroy itself."

From dissident to superstar

What's disarming about Mr. Žižek, however, is the current of cold realism that courses through his work. He freely acknowledges that communism, wherever practised and under any name, has been a near-total disaster. He watched the train wreck unfold, growing up in Ljubljana under Kremlin rule. Identified early as a dissident, he spent several years in socialist limbo, functionally unemployed.

He knows, too, how easy it is to surrender to the euphoric esprit of revolution. "Carnivals come cheap," he told the protesters. "What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. ... There is a long road ahead. ... We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism?"

He often invokes Winston Churchill's coy aphorism, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms," yet points out that the most efficient form of capitalism is today practised by regimes that are neither liberal nor democratic - namely, China and Singapore.

Now a visiting professor at New York University and other American campuses, Mr. Žižek spends half the year at the University of Ljubljana, lectures each summer at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and is international director of the University of London's Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

As an A-list invitee to Big Think academic conferences, his life has become an intellectual concert tour, complete with autograph hounds. If he wanted, he could sell Žižek mugs and T-shirts, though it would make him complicit in buttressing the very capitalist scaffolding he reviles.

It's not hard to fathom his appeal on the academic circuit: earthy language, scatological humour, a rare ability to connect abstruse meta-theory to contemporary culture in digestible sound bites, and a subversive delight in offending everyone, even his erstwhile comrades on the left. With his dishevelled look and strictly proletarian garb, he resembles nothing more than a superannuated grad student.

Mr. Žižek is at once court jester and provocateur, entertaining crowds with clever conceits and detonating counterintuitive verbal bombs. On one occasion, he described love as evil, an act that upsets the cosmic balance.

His voluminous writings testify to the catholic range of Mr. Žižek's scholarship - dense tomes devoted to his ideological mentors, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan, as well as more accessible books on Alfred Hitchcock, fantasy, terror and a dozen other subjects. The Žižekian archive of articles is equally vast, encompassing the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, the Pope, Hollywood films, even the hit TV series 24. His latest book, Living in the End Times, devotes five pages to analyzing the animated children's film Kung Fu Panda through a Lacanian lens.

There is scarcely a subject on which Mr. Žižek has no considered opinion - even if, as with James Cameron's Avatar, he has not yet seen the film. "I like what Oscar Wilde said about book reviewing," he explains. "Better to not read the book beforehand. It will only cloud your judgment."

A sit-down session with Mr. Žižek, who is functional in eight languages, is more audience than interview. Forever tugging at his beard or nose, he stirs restlessly in his chair, ideas exploding from his brain, volcanically. In a single minute, he migrates from Samuel Beckett ("my hero") to psychoanalytic theory to natural science to ideology to Wagner.

Although he once ran for president in Slovenia under a Liberal Democratic banner, he insists he was simply seeking to impede the ascent of right-wing nationalists - the very kind, he laments, who are now gaining power in several former Soviet republics.

British psychoanalyst Ian Parker, author of a key study of Mr. Žižek's writings, calls him "a radical force in the academic world, mobilizing a new generation against capitalism. For all of my criticisms, his work has been progressive and useful."

'Some of my worst enemies are also Jews'

But his critics, including American Adam Kirsch, have come close to calling Mr. Žižek an anti-Semite. The allegation infuriates him. Mr. Kirsch, he complains, had quoted selectively. "I mean, my God, if you read my book, it's unambiguously clear that I'm describing the line of argumentation of my opponent. Are people aware? They are basically accusing me of demanding another Holocaust. It's madness."

Then another joke: "I don't mean to say some of my best friends are Jews. I tell you, practically all of them are. At the same time, some of my worst enemies are also Jews." While in New York, Mr. Žižek stays with the family of Udi Aloni, the left-wing Jewish activist and filmmaker.

What people ought to be more concerned about, he says, are people like evangelical Christian broadcaster Glenn Beck and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik - both, he notes, are pro-Zionist, yet simultaneously guilty of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. "The most anti-Semitic people these days," he says in another inversion, "are Zionists."

Mr. Kirsch, reviewing two Žižek books, Violence and In Defence of Lost Causes, also labels him a not-so-crypto fascist, referencing his now infamous line that "the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough."

Again, he demurs. "I am not celebrating violence. On the contrary," Mahatma Gandhi, the maharishi of civil disobedience, was actually more violent than Adolf Hitler, he says, because his goal was to sabotage Britain's colonial state. Hitler, on the other hand, wanted to change nothing systemically. "He wanted the German state to function more efficiently. He was afraid of real change. That's the best definition of fascism."

Violence that actually kills people, he says, quoting his friend, French philosopher Alain Badiou, "is meant to keep things the way they are." The violence of the Wall Street protesters, on the other hand, is purely ideological. "We want to change the order. That is the violence I am for - real change."

Communism: A New Beginning?

Occupy political change. Report from Communism: A New Beginning? conference in NYC

BY AARON LEONARD | OCTOBER 21, 2011

Please see the full report at:

http://rabble.ca/news/2011/10/occupy-political-change-report-communism-new-beginning-conference-nyc

[....]

If it seems surreal for there to be such a symposium 20 years after the official obituary of communism was written, it has been brought back to earth by the swirl of events surrounding Occupy Wall Street, Tahir Square in Egypt, riots in London, and heroic protests in Syria. Once again, the matter of "can the world be different", is a pressing question.

The event was held in New York's Cooper Union, with the 200 available tickets selling out almost immediately. There were attendees -- and virtual participants via a live feed -- from all over the world. Most of them are avid readers of the works of conference participants, who along with Dean included; Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Morss, Frank Ruda, Étienne Balibar and Slavoj Žižek. French philosopher Alain Badiou, who was ill, was not able to attend but had his statement read to the conference.

The conference was illuminating and provocative, though there were parts that were challenging and even a bit dense. That is the nature of the beast. Unfortunately, too often the major questions on how to realize a radically new society resides with the intelligentsia, especially those in academia. In this, some work harder than others to make difficult stuff popular. That said to even try is commendable -- an expression of a certain commitment toward breaking through. In that respect a story Žižek -- the Slovenia philosopher who is among the most important thinkers around today -- told of how the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn once gave a talk to a group of workers. In a self-deprecating style he said, "I'm not hear to lecture, I'm here to learn from you." Žižek noted their response. "Fuck off, you are making fun of us -- you have the duty to tell us what you know!" There is a need for such intellectual work.

What is striking is how young the audience is for this thinking. While there was a sprinkling of older people, most -- a mix of men and women, though men predominated -- ranged from their 20s to their early 40s.

Why they came is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. The sense of changing terrain and perhaps opportunity is deeply felt. As the conference convened last Friday, the ongoing Occupy Wall Street actions in Lower Manhattan were threatened with eviction. When the session began Saturday morning, OWS was marching from Wall Street through Washington Square Park, with the NYPD riding them along the way. By day's end OWS had reached Time Square at which point many in the conference joined them.

As a result, on Sunday the comments and presentation were full of cross-referencing with the movement out in the street, with an emphasis on the need and role of theorists. Žižek pointedly noted that when Bill Clinton goes on television attempting to embrace such actions, watch out. "We have to learn not to dialog with some people." In his provocative style he meant people need to break away from the dominant ruling framework in forging a new path. These were similar to statements he made to the Occupy assembly in Zuccotti Park just days before.

The conference invoked the word "communism" critically -- though realizing a world held in common stood as the question seeking answer. In its (historically) short life this theory (and its multitude of interpretations) has been problematic, even horrific. Yet as speakers pointed out, that doesn't mean capitalism -- the dominant world system -- is good. Put another way just because you do not have a ready solution does not mean you don't have a problem.

Despite fantastic scenarios of a world functioning without labor it remains the case that the fruit on our tables comes from hands muddied and bloodied in the fields, the chips in our computers are powered by minerals extracted by miners toiling and dying way beyond an early age in the Congo, and the call centre operators in Bangalore are lucrative because of the unemployed multitudes in Delhi. This is a world in which the socioeconomic system has developed the ability to do great things, yet is incapable -- and violently resistant to -- do so in any manner that is not profitable, regardless of the consequences. There is a need for something else.

Coming home from the Occupy Time Square demonstration -- this reporter boarded a subway. Before the doors could close six or eight members of a brass marching band, that had also taken part in the demonstration, got on. They were fully equipped and decided to strike up the band. There was trombone, flute, flugelhorn, saxophone and drums playing an evocative mix; maybe a gypsy dance or some East European melody. The passengers, in New York this means people from everywhere, and band members were fused and elevated in the moment -- music has this effect. The episode captured something of the wild mix of the weekend's events, the actions in the street and the intellectual imagining. In the words of Badiou, "The world can be otherwise."

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Will You See This Movie? | Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Zizek Revisit “The Pervert’s Guide,” by Devin Lee Fuller

Please see the full essay at

http://www.indiewire.com/article/2011/10/21/will_you_see_this_movie_sophie_fiennes_and_slavoj_zizek_revisit_the_pervert

[....]

The theories of Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek might not be the first subject you’d think could be easily translated into a documentary, but in her 2006 film “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,” Sophie Fiennes accomplished just that. The film inserts Zizek into footage of classic movies like “The Birds,” “Blue Velvet” and “City Lights,” creating the illusion that he is speaking from within each film. With this technique, Fiennes strived to create a deeper connection between his words and cinema.

“Slavoj is kind of like a mind-altering substance,” said Fiennes. “That’s what’s exciting about it. He’s a catalyst. It’s a kind of intervention into how you see and think.”

Now, Fiennes, director of “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” and sister of actors Ralph and Joseph, is working on a follow-up titled “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.” The documentary will feature even more recreations of films including scenes from “Jaws,” “The Sound of Music” and “A Clockwork Orange.”

The film examines what movies say about ideology and how it influences present day life.

“Ideology is really a kind of agreement, sometimes consciously complicit, but a lot of times unconsciously we’re complicit in living and breathing in ideological narratives,” said Fiennes. “It’s not just Islamic fundamentalists, not just these extremists. We’re all participating in it in our daily lives.”

Fiennes chose to feature films that are reflective of Zizek’s theories and also strike a chord with audiences.

“The familiarity of the films is an immediate gateway into people’s consciousness because they’ve lived and breathed emotionally in the way the film manipulates us,” Fiennes said. “It’s quite intimate really when you take these scenes apart because people have quite strong attachments to them already.”

In order to recreate the scenes, Fiennes both traveled to original locations and recreated sets in Ardmore Studios in Ireland. She likened the experience to “an archaeology of film.”

“What’s funny is seeing six movie sets in one room,” said Fiennes. “Here’s a fragment from ‘The Dark Knight’ opposite a fragment from the Mother Superior’s office in ‘The Sound of Music.’ And then obviously that is the toilets from ‘Full Metal Jacket.’ So it’s a very absorbing world, Slavoj’s world.”

Zizek himself has been in the news recently, having appeared at Occupy Wall Street in New York on October 9.

“Funny enough I recognized a lot of the material from the finale from the film,” said Fiennes abut Zizek’s involvement in the movement. “This film is more about the present moment than the last film in a way. It’s hard for [Zizek] not to respond to that because as he would say, ‘we’re living in apocalyptic times.’”

The film was co-financed by the BFI (British Film Institute) Film Fund, Film4, Channel 4, Irish Film Board, and a new London-based financier/producer called Rooks Nest, although Fiennes admits it was originally difficult to get funding.

“We’ve been trying to make this film for five years, and it was really hard to get the finance together because people always stumbled on the word ‘ideology’ like it was something that no one knew what it meant,” said Fiennes. “But I think the events in the world in the last five years are such that the financiers realized there’d been a change in the world where the word ‘ideology’ was something that people would want to explore.”

Fiennes says she is used to working 24/7 on her projects, but has to take more time now that she has a 14-month-old child. She hopes to be finished with the film around September 2012.

“[The film] is an opportunity to really stretch your thinking,” said Fiennes. “It’s like a kind of ‘mind gym.’ I hope that people will come away seeing things in a completely altered way. I hope they come out in an altered state.”

“The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”

Director/Writer: Sophie Fiennes (“Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow”)
Producers: James Wilson (“Attack the Block”), Martin Rosenbaum (“The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”), Katie Holly (“One Hundred Mornings”), Sophie Fiennes
Executive Producers: Shani Hinton, Katherine Butler (Film4), Tabitha Jackson (Channel 4), Michael Sackler, Julia Godzinskaya (Rooks Nest Entertainment)
Director of Photography: Remko Schnorr (“Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow”)
Editor: Ethel Shepherd
Cast: Slavoj Zizek (“The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”)

US Supreme Court "Justices"

“Contemplating the Supremes”

Oct. 17, 2011 By Tom Degan

Please see the full article at:

http://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-the-justice-system/contemplating-the-supremes/

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” –Louis Brandeis

Justice Brandeis was a pretty astute guy from everything I’ve been able to discern. He understood – in a way that five present-day members of the Supreme Court do not – the dangers connected with the concentration of wealth. The Democrats have been falling over each other in recent weeks, desperate to come up with reasons why the American people should send President Obama back to the White house next year. Incredibly, they have ignored the most blatantly obvious one. It’s time we have a serious discussion regarding the ramifications of a Republican victory in 2012 – and what it would mean for the future of this Republic if even one more right wing extremist is appointed to sit on that court.

First things first: The Roberts Court sucks. I’m not giving away any state secrets by saying this. Corporations are people? Money is free speech? This is the worst collection of guys on that bench (I exclude the women for obvious reasons) since the bunch that gave up Plessy vs. Ferguson – or even the Dred Scott decision of 1856. And I tell you this with no small amount of embarrassment. Incredibly, the Chief Justice who wrote that despicable ruling, Roger Brooke Taney, is an ancestor of mine. I’ll be honest with you, this is not a fact we do much bragging about within my family. What a jerk!

There are four whores for the plutocracy who now reside on the Supreme Court (all appointees of either Reagan or the two Bushes). You know who I’m talking about – John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Uncle Thomas. Then there is the “swing vote”, Anthony Kennedy, who far too often sides with the extremists on the far right. Some of them, like uber-brute Scalia, are not unknown for their political activism. William O. Douglas was a Roosevelt appointee and the most liberal justice in the history of that court. He served as a judge from 1939 to 1975. After reading in the papers about the latest progressive crusade, he would wistfully tell his clerks, “Oh, if I could only get involved with this one.” But he knew that to do so – while it may not have been illegal – it would have been most decidedly unethical.

In his lifetime Judge Douglas was also viewed as the most controversial Supreme Court justice in history. There was even an attempt made to impeach him that was led by then Congressman Gerald R. Ford. Say what you wand about the guy, he had class.

And then there is the justice who is in a class by himself: Uncle Thomas. My knowledge of the history of the Supreme Court is not quite as detailed as I would like it to be (I’m working on that). But from what I do know, Clarence Thomas is the most overtly corrupt member of that body in its two hundred-plus-year history. He has been caught red-handed receiving certain “gifts” from certain billionaires seeking influence. I imagine influencing Clarence Thomas is not that difficult a thing to do. In addition to that, he has so many close ties with with conservative groups and causes that it is difficult to catalog them all.

His wife Ginny makes her living and her name as an advocate for a group called “Liberty Central”. Her half-witted hubby can always be counted on to vote on cases – no matter how insignificant – in a matter that appeases the Mrs. In an article from almost a year ago that appeared on the Huffington Post, Jacob Heilbrunn perceptively wrote:

“For the other members of the Court, however, it must be painful to watch the shenanigans of his wife, who is either witless or gratuitously nasty, or, more likely, both, tarnish the institution, which is already becoming dangerously politicized by its right-wing members, who appear to shrink at nothing when it comes to engaging in judicial activism, as long as it fits their own political predilections.”

[….]

OWS Strategy: Don't alienate Tea Party

In Berlin

Multitude Ruling Itself?

“Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism:
on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,” by Slavoj Žižek

Please see the full essay at:

http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm

What makes Empire and Multitude such a refreshing reading (clearly the definitive exercises in Deleuzian politics) is that we are dealing with books which refer to and function as the moment of theoretical reflection of-one is almost tempted to say: are embedded in-an actual global movement of anti-capitalist resistance: one can sense, behind the written lines, the smells and sounds of Seattle, Genoa and Zapatistas. So their theoretical limitation is simultaneously the limitation of the actual movement.

Hardt's and Negri's basic move, an act which is by no means ideologically neutral (and, incidentally, which is totally foreign to their philosophical paradigm, Deleuze!), is to identify (to name) "democracy" as the common denominator of all today's emancipatory movements: "The common currency that runs throughout so many struggles and movements for liberation across the world today - at local, regional, and global levels - is the desire for democracy." 1 Far from standing for a utopian dream, democracy is "the only answer to the vexing questions of our day, /.../ the only way out of our state of perpetual conflict and war." 2 Not only is democracy inscribed into the present antagonisms as an immanent telos of their resolution; even more, today, the rise of the multitude in the heart of capitalism "makes democracy possible for the first time" 3 Till now, democracy was constrained by the form of the One, of the sovereign state power; "absolute democracy" ("the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or buts," 4 only becomes possible when "the multitude is finally able to rule itself." 5

For Marx, highly organized corporate capitalism already was "socialism within capitalism" (a kind of socialization of capitalism, with the absent owners becoming more and more superfluous), so that one only needs to cut the nominal head off and we get socialism. For Negri and Hardt, however, the limitation of Marx was that he was historically constrained to the centralized and hierarchically organized machinical automatized industrial labor, which is why their vision of "general intellect" was that of a central planning agency; it is only today, with the rise of the "immaterial labor" to the hegemonic role, that the revolutionary reversal becomes "objectively possible." This immaterial labor extends between the two poles of intellectual (symbolic) labor (production of ideas, codes, texts, programs, figures: writers, programmers...) and affective labor (those who deal with our bodily affects: from doctors to baby-sitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labor is "hegemonic" in the precise sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th century capitalism, large industrial production is hegemonic as the specific color giving its tone to the totality - not quantitatively, but playing the key, emblematic structural role: "What the multitude produces is not just goods or services; the multitude also and most importantly produces cooperation, communication, forms of life, and social relationships." 6 What thereby emerges is a new vast domain the "common": shared knowledge, forms of cooperation and communication, etc., which can no longer be contained by the form of private property. This, then, far from posing a mortal threat to democracy (as conservative cultural critics want us to believe), opens up a unique chance of "absolute democracy". Why? In immaterial production, the products are no longer material objects, but new social (interpersonal) relations themselves - in short, immaterial production is directly biopolitical, the production of social life. It was already Marx who emphasized how material production is always also the (re)production of the social relations within which it occurs; with today's capitalism, however, the production of social relations is the immediate end/goal of production: "Such new forms of labor /.../ present new possibilities for economic self-management, since the mechanisms of cooperation necessary for production are contained in the labor itself." 7 The wager of Hardt and Negri is that this directly socialized, immaterial production not only renders owners progressively superfluous (who needs them when production is directly social, formally and as to its content?); the producers also master the regulation of social space, since social relations (politics) IS the stuff of their work: economic production directly becomes political production, the production of society itself. The way is thus open for "absolute democracy," for the producers directly regulating their social relations without even the detour of democratic representation.

There is a whole series of concrete questions that this vision gives rise to. Can one really interpret this move towards the hegemonic role of immaterial labor as the move from production to communication, to social interaction (in Aristotelian terms, from techne as poiesis to praxis: as the overcoming of the Arendtian distinction between production and vis activa, or of the Habermasian distinction between instrumental and communicational reason)? How does this "politicization" of production, where production directly produces (new) social relations, affect the very notion of politics? Is such an "administration of people" (subordinated to the logic of profit) still politics, or is it the most radical sort of depoliticization, the entry into "post-politics?" And, last but not least, is democracy by necessity, with regard to its very notion, non-absolute? There is no democracy without a hidden, presupposed elitism. Democracy is, by definition, not "global"; it HAS to be based on values and/or truths which one cannot select "democratically." In democracy, one can fight for truth, but not decide what IS truth. As Claude Lefort and others amply demonstrated, democracy is never simply representative in the sense of adequately re-presenting (expressing) a pre-existing set of interests, opinions, etc., since these interests and opinions are constituted only through such representation. In other words, the democratic articulation of an interest is always minimally performative: through their democratic representatives, people establish what their interests and opinions are. As Hegel already knew, "absolute democracy" could only actualize itself in the guise of its "oppositional determination," as terror. There is, thus, a choice to be made here: do we accept democracy's structural, not just accidental, imperfection, or do we also endorse its terrorist dimension? However, much more pertinent is another critical point which concerns Negri and Hardt's neglect of the FORM in the strict dialectical sense of the term.

[….]

Negri and Hardt are right in rendering problematic the standard Leftist revolutionary notion of "taking power": such a strategy accepts the formal frame of the power structure and aims merely at replacing one bearer of power ("them") with another ("us"). As it was fully clear to Lenin in his State and Revolution, the true revolutionary aim is not to "take power," but to undermine, disintegrate, the very apparatuses of state power. Therein resides the ambiguity of the "postmodern" Leftist calls to abandon the program of "taking power": do they imply that one should ignore the existing power structure, or, rather, limit oneself to resisting it by way of constructing alternative spaces outside the state power network (the Zapatista strategy in Mexico); or do they imply that one should disintegrate, pull the ground of, the state power, so that the state power will simply collapse, implode? In the second case, the poetic formulas about the multitude immediately ruling itself do not suffice.

Hardt and Negri conform here a sort of triad whose other two terms are Ernesto Laclau and Giorgio Agamben. The ultimate difference between Laclau and Agamben concerns the structural inconsistency of power: while they both insist on this inconsistency, their position towards it is exactly opposite. Agamben's focusing on the vicious circle of the link between legal power (the rule of Law) and violence is sustained by the messianic utopian hope that it is possible to radically break this circle and step out of it (in an act of the Benjaminian "divine violence"). In The Coming Community, he refers to Saint Thomas's answer to the difficult theological question: What happens to the souls of unbaptized babies who have died in ignorance of both sin and God? They committed no sin, so their punishment

cannot be an afflictive punishment, like that of hell, but only a punishment of privation that consists in the perpetual lack of the vision of God. The inhabitants of limbo, in contrast to the damned, do not feel pain from this lack: /.../ they do not know that they are deprived of the supreme good. /.../ The greatest punishment - the lack of the vision of God - thus turns into a natural joy: irremediably lost, they persist without pain in divine abandon. 13

Their fate is for Agamben the model of redemption: they "have left the world of guilt and justice behind them: the light that rains down on them is that irreparable light of the dawn following the novissima dies of judgment. But the life that begins on earth after the last day is simply human life." 14 (One cannot but recall here the crowd of humans who remain on stage at the end of Wagner's Twilight of Gods, silently witnessing the self-destruction of gods - what if they are the happy ones?) And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for Negri and Hardt who perceive resistance to power as preparing the ground for a miraculous LEAP into "absolute democracy" in which multitude will directly rule itself - at this point, the tension will be resolved, freedom will explodes into eternal self-proliferation. The difference between Agamben and Negri and Hardt could be best apprehended by means of the good old Hegelian distinction between abstract and determinate negation: although Negri and Hardt are even more anti-Hegelian than Agamben, their revolutionary LEAP remains an act of "determinate negation," the gesture of formal reversal, of merely setting free the potentials developed in global capitalism which already is a kind of "Communism-in-itself"; in contrast to them, Agamben - and, again, paradoxically, in spite of his animosity to Adorno - outlines the contours of something which is much closer to the utopian longing for the ganz Andere (wholly Other) in late Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, to a redemptive leap into a non-mediated Otherness.

Laclau and Mouffe, on the contrary, propose a new version of the old Edouard Bernstein's arch-revisionist motto "goal is nothing, movement is all": the true danger, the temptation to be resisted, is the very notion of a radical cut by means of which the basic social antagonism will be dissolved and the new era of a self-transparent non-alienated society will arrive. For Laclau and Mouffe, such a notion disavows not only the Political as such, the space of antagonisms and struggle for hegemony, but the fundamental ontological finitude of the human condition as such - which is why, any attempt to actualize such a leap has to end up in a totalitarian disaster. What this means is that the only way to elaborate and practice livable particular political solutions is to admit the global a priori deadlock: we can only solve particular problems against the background of the irreducible global deadlock. Of course, this is no way entails that political agents should limit themselves to solving particular problems, abandoning the topic of universality: for Laclau and Mouffe, universality is impossible and at the same time necessary, i.e., there is no direct "true" universality, every universality is always-already caught into the hegemonic struggle, it is an empty form hegemonized (filled in) by some particular content which, at a given moment and in a given conjuncture, functions as its stand-in.

Are, however, these two approaches really as radically opposed as it may appear? Does Laclau and Mouffe's edifice not also imply its own utopian point: the point at which political battles would be fought without remainders of "essentialism," all sides fully accepting the radically contingent character of their endeavors and the irreducible character of social antagonisms. On the other hand, Agamben's position is also not without its secret advantages: since, with today's biopolitics, the space of political struggle is closed and any democratic-emancipatory movements are meaningless, we cannot do anything but comfortably wait for the miraculous explosion of the "divine violence." As for Negri and Hardt, they bring us back to the Marxist confidence that "history is on our side," that historical development is already generating the form of the Communist future.

If anything, the problem with Negri and Hardt is that they are TOO MUCH Marxists, taking over the underlying Marxist scheme of historical progress: like Marx, they celebrate the "deterritorializing" revolutionary potential of capitalism; like Marx, they locate the contradiction within capitalism, in the gap between this potential and the form of the capital, of the private-property appropriation of the surplus. In short, they rehabilitate the old Marxist notion of the tension between productive forces and the relations of production: capitalism already generates the "germs of the future new form of life," it incessantly produces the new "common," so that, in a revolutionary explosion, this New should just be liberated from the old social form. However, precisely as Marxists, on behalf of our fidelity to Marx's work, we should discern the mistake of Marx: he perceived how capitalism unleashed the breath-taking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity - see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, "all things solid melt into thin air," of how capitalism is the greatest revolutionizer in the entire history of humanity; on the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism - the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling productivity) is the Capital itself, i.e. the capitalist incessant development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight forward to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction... Marx's fundamental mistake was to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle ("contradiction"), is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises. In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the "condition of impossibility" of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its "condition of possibility": if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism - if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates... (Therein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance). So the critics of Communism were in a way right when they claimed that the Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy - what they did not perceive is that the Marxian Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent transgression at its purest, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust to productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the "obstacles" and antagonisms that were - as the sad experience of the "really existing capitalism" demonstrates - the only possible framework of the effective material existence of a society of permanent self-enhancing productivity.

So where, precisely, did Marx go wrong with regard to the surplus-value? One is tempted to search for an answer in the key Lacanian distinction between the object of desire and the surplus-enjoyment as its cause. Recall the curl of the blond hair, this fatal detail of Madeleine in Hitchcock's Vertigo. When, in the love scene in the barn towards the end of the film, Scottie passionately embraces Judy refashioned into the dead Madeleine, during their famous 360-degree kiss, he stops kissing her and withdraws just long enough to steal a look at her newly blond hair, as if to reassure himself that the particular feature which makes her into the object of desire is still there... So there is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable. And, back to Marx: what if his mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (the unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when deprived of the cause that propels it (the surplus-value)? The same holds even more for Deleuze, since he develops his theory of desire in direct opposition to the Lacanian one. Deleuze asserts the priority of desire over its objects: desire is a positive productive force which exceeds its objects, a living flow proliferating through the multitude of objects, penetrating them and passing through them, in no need of any fundamental lack or "castration" that would serve as its foundation. For Lacan, however, desire has to be sustained by an object-cause: not some primordial incestuous Lost Object on which desire remains forever transfixed and whose unsatisfying substitutes all other objects are, but a purely formal object which causes us to desire objects that we encounter in reality. This object-cause of desire is thus not transcendent, the inaccessible excess forever eluding our grasp, but behind the subject's back, something that from within directs desiring. And, as is the case with Marx, it is Deleuze's failure to take into account this object-cause that sustains the illusory vision of unconstrained productivity of desire - or, in the case of Hardt and Negri, the illusory vision of multitude ruling itself, no longer constrained by any totalizing One. We can observe here the catastrophic political consequences of the failure to develop what may appear a purely academic, "philosophical," notional distinction.

[….]