On Australian Radio

Today we need thinking more than ever

Acclaimed Intellectual Slavoj Žižek Waxes Philosophical About God

by Trevor Laurence Jockims

Posted Thursday, May 24, 2012 5:57 PM

God In Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse

Slavoj Žižek, Boris Gunjevic (authors)

Seven Stories Press

http://highbrowmagazine.com/1185-acclaimed-intellectual-slavoj-zizek-waxes-philosophical-about-god

Slavoj Žižek has earned himself a reputation as something of a philosophical wild man, an epithet derived at least as much from the way he inhabits a room as it is from the content of his books. When I heard him speak, a few years back at a lecture he gave during the Sarajevo Film Festival, he was in true oracular form, a kind of mangy apostle of sharp, caustic philosophical insight. The threadbare brown T-shirt he wore—for those of the correct age, think early Seattle grunge—darkened steadily with rings of sweat that moved out in widening crescents from each armpit, eventually meeting in the middle. His hair was fully adrift. Eyes wild. Arms swinging beneath an enormous screen that projected clips of the films he was “reading” — themselves a delightful mix, running through classic Hitchcock, Stalinist propaganda films, They Live (starring Rowdy Roddy Piper), Schindler’s List, andJurassic Park. About those final two Žižek memorably, and rightly, quipped:  Schindler’s List is a remake of Jurassic Park. . And Jurassic Park is the better film.

The four of us who saw the lecture went out afterwards for coffee. We were divided over what we’d heard in pretty much the way critics remain divided about Žižek. One of us thought he was brilliant, one of us wasn’t so sure, one thought he was a total huckster, the other just enjoyed the show.  The next day my friend who hadn’t been sure (a journalist in Sarajevo), was assigned to interview Žižek. He arrived at 10 a.m. at Žižek’s hotel, as instructed. Žižek emerged in the courtyard wearing the same brown T-shirt, sat down rapidly, and declared that he had very little time, really just a minute or two. Two-and-a-half hours later, my friend’s recorder long since dead, Žižek was soaked in sweat, swinging his arms, still filling my friend’s ear. 

Following this session, my not-sure-about- Žižek friend was now my very-sure-about- Žižek friend.

In reading Zizek’s new book, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse, written with Boris Gunjevic, I feel like I get close to the euphoria my friend witnessed while talking to—well, really, listening to— Žižek up close. The book is written in a very direct manner, and if Žižek can sometimes suffer from being a paradoxicalist, he (usually) means what he says. In God in Pain he is also able to say what he means (usually). 

The crux of the book is a good one, and although tempting to see it as a corrective to Hitchens and Dawkins-esque writings on atheism, the latter group is so thoroughly outweighed by the sheer force of Žižek’s brain—I’m reminded of a comment made by another politician when Žižek ran for the presidency of Slovenia: Look, we all know you’re the smartest one in the room—that the comparison is sort of pointless.  Still, Žižek is running in the same milieu, and his response to the wild rush of atheism, especially in the more privileged regions of the West, is to say, Not so fast:

“If, once upon a time, we publicly pretended to believe while privately we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs, today we publicly tend to profess out skeptical, hedonistic, relaxed attitude while we privately remain haunted by beliefs and severe prohibitions.”

For Žižek, the fundamentalist and the cynic both drink from the same well. It’s a compelling argument, and Žižek is particularly apt in discussing a timely issue without falling into t clichés: He has no interest in any so-called war on religion (from either “side), and he has no interest in the virtues or vices of atheism (again, from either “side”). What he is interested in doing—and this is more or less Žižek’s bread and butter as a thinker—is to think clearlythrough  a topic that is so pervasively thought about and discussed as to be nearly unthought. Said another way, everyone is able to take a position on the God question; Žižek isn’t so much interested in taking a position as he is in pointing out what the positions are — and aren’t.

The entire book might be reduced to Žižek’s reading of the aphorism, (mistakenly) first attributed to Doestoevsky by Sartre, that “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” Žižek works with this phrase, turning it into the opposite assertion Lacan saw in it — If God is dead, everything is prohibited.” This, argues Žižek, is the real dilemma faced by the death of God.

As is the usual case in Žižek and, really, most insightful thinkers, not only are the widely accepted positions wrong — they’re actual veils preventing any possibility of insight. Morality, for instance, has nothing to do with the loss of God. God never made anyone good. (But that’s too easy, and it isn’t really Žižek’s point). At best, under God the good stay good. (Also, too easy). The bad also stay bad. (Too easy, still).

In the Shadow of Hegel: How Does Thought Arise out of Matter?

http://bigthink.com/postcards-from-zizek/less-than-nothing-2

What's the Big Idea?

Before neuroscience and quantum physics, there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The 19th century German idealist revolutionized Western thought, and every great thinker since has been working in his shadow, says Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic.

[…]

Often seen as a precursor to Marxists and existentialists, Hegel believed that knowledge is not static, but dynamic. In the Hegelian framework, history is a process in which many paradoxes interact and are then synthesized into a unified whole. Reality is mind, and the universe is spirit objectified. It's one analysis of existence and being.

But what does it mean in a world where cognitive scientists can see brain function on an fMRI scan, capture the visual data, and reassemble it into videos using quantitative modeling? Now that physicists have the god-like power to accelerate tiny particles of matter and throw them at each other just to see what happens, is metaphysical philosophy dead?

What's the Significance? 

Reductionists like Stephen Hawking may give the impression that contemporary science is uniquely capable of answering the big questions, like Does the world have an end? or Where does thought come from? but that's not the case, says Žižek. Our deep empirical understanding of the material world hasn't displaced the study of philosophy. It's made it more relevant.

Which is why he's calling for the rehabilitation of classical philosophy: for contemporary philosophers to engage with the work of scientists and vice versa. "What is happening, for example, in quantum physics, in the last 100 of years, these things which are so daring, incredible, that we cannot include into our conscious view of reality -- Hegel's philosophy, with all it’s dialectical paradoxes, can be of some help." 

What does philosophy teach us that empirical science does not? The things we know without knowing it, says Žižek, the silent presuppositions that constantly shape and inform our perception. It's important to be able to observe our surroundings and act on them, but we also need to understand what we're seeing and why we're seeing it. "The danger today is precisely a kind of a bland, pragmatic activism. You know, like when people tell you, oh my God, children in Africa are starving and you have time for your stupid philosophical debates. Let’s do something.  I always hear in this call there are people starving. I always discern in this a more ominous injunction. Do it and don't think too much. Today, we need thinking."   

[…]

Less Than Nothing

http://bigthink.com/book-of-the-month/less-than-nothing

[…]

Slavoj Žižek has been called "the most dangerous philosopher in the West" for his analysis of the worldwide ecological crisis, the biogenetic revolution, and apocalyptic economic imbalances. But the whole time he was writing about political theory, his heart was with Friedrich Hegel -- a 19th century German idealist philosopher who revolutionized the Western understanding of the mind. (Sartre and Dewey were fans, as is Fukuyama.)

In a recent interview, Žižek told Big Think, "For a long time, I behaved as if I was still young, like the future was ahead of me. I was never a so-called mature normal person. All of a sudden [I went] from pretending to be young to discovering, oh my God, I’m in late 50s... I hate this. I’m now like the proverbial woman who celebrates her 39th birthday five times in a row. I realized I cannot pretend that I will have time to do the big work. If I don't do it now, what I really want to do, I will never do it." That big work is Less Than Nothing.

Here's Verso's blurb:

For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, whose influence each new thinker tries in vain to escape... Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new transition. In Less Than Nothing, the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj Žižek argues that it is imperative that we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought-Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.

[…]

This bears repeating

Žižek at OWS (approximately as delivered)

http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/2011/10/11/zizek-in-wall-street-transcript/#more-4415

We are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.

We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath this ground. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, “Hey, look down!”

In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter.

Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the rule is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless, moral protest. A decaffienated process. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of a world where, to recycle Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes to third world starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after marriage agencies are now outsourcing our love life, we can see that for a long time, we allow our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.

We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, “Impossible, this means totalitarian state.” There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we need to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standard of living. We want a better standard of living. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here. But the conservatives fundamentalists who claim they really are American have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostaligically remembering “What a nice time we had here.” Promise yourselves that this will not be the case. We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much.