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.

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)

Why is the American Left so Divided? The Academics!

In my experience as visiting instructor at universities in the U.S.A., the problem here is the result of the (often unreflective, but not always) capitalist habits and behaviours engaged in by the tenure-track and the tenured professors. They are willfully ignorant of how much of what they do and say is dictated by capital. If you are a professor and call yourself a leftist, do you have TIAA-CREF? Do you have other investments? Do you own your own home, a laptop, and expensive car? Do you want to efface the distinction between yourself and all of the adjunct instructors? Answer honestly, and you will say "No".

Adjunct instructors in America have no health benefits and no salary (they are paid by the course, and if the class does not fill up with students, they have no work). They are all paid the same (obscenely low) rate at the same college. They have no job security because they do not get a real contract, only a letter from the Dean of the department which the adjunct is compelled to honour, but which the school can ignore whenever it wants. But numerically speaking, there are more adjunct instructors. All across the U.S.A., at thousands of community colleges, and even some four-year schools, you have one or two or three full-time people and a dozen adjuncts.

For the tenure-track and the tenured professors in America (even the full-time visiting professors), life is much better than for the adjunct. Even if they call themselves "leftist" (as so many do), they would never agree to a real Union that was inclusive of adjuncts because this would threaten their own privileges and the hierarchy. The American pseudo-leftist academics are unreflectively capitalist--vain and greedy, promoting themselves and competing, focusing on the perks they get for not crossing the line (paid sabbaticals, etc.).

In short, the American pseudo-leftist academic is incapable of the true ethico-political act. Because their position in the socio-symbolic order is everything to them, they cannot even consider the symbolic suicide implied by the authentic act. So they only talk socialism--but the last thing they want is real solidarity. They have none of what Brecht describes as "love of the third thing", the shared commitment to the cause. Unfortunately, I can no longer support myself by means of my position in Kiev, so I also participate in capitalist system even while criticizing it.

ŽIŽEK Interview: The Guardian, 9 August, 2008

Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet
The full interview is available online at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/09/slavoj.zizek

What follows are some of the (complete) questions and some of the (complete) replies:

Which living person do you most admire, and why?

ŽIŽEK: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the twice-deposed president of Haiti. He is a model of what can be done for the people even in a desperate situation.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

ŽIŽEK: Indifference to the plights of others.

Aside from a property, what's the most expensive thing you've bought?

ŽIŽEK: The new German edition of the collected works of Hegel.

What is your most treasured possession?

ŽIŽEK: See the previous answer.

Who or what is the love of your life?

ŽIŽEK: Philosophy. I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

Which living person do you most despise, and why?

ŽIŽEK: Medical doctors who assist torturers.

What has been your biggest disappointment?

ŽIŽEK: What Alain Badiou calls the 'obscure disaster' of the 20th century: the catastrophic failure of communism.

Tell us a secret.

ŽIŽEK: Communism will win.

Žižek Against the True Academic Arrogance

From Žižek’s and Daly’s book Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), p. 45:

“I hate this approach of taking a little bit from Lacan, a little bit from Foucault, a little bit from Derrida. No, I don’t believe in this; I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of ‘what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis’, and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and to expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.”

Žižek against both post-politics and biopolitics

(1) From Žižek’s book Virtue and Terror: Maximilien Robespierre (Verso, 2007), p. xxxix:

“[...] what better proof of the ethico-political misery of our epoch whose ultimate mobilizing motif is the mistrust of virtue! Should we not affirm against such opportunist realism the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as was clear to Robespierre, a revolution ‘is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’, the faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre’s very last speech on the 8 Thermidor 1794, the day before his arrest and execution:

But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world’s first Republic.”

(2) From Žižek’s book Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 40:

“[...] ‘post-political’ is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and instead focus on expert management and administration, while ‘biopolitics’ designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”

(3) From Žižek’s book Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 202:

“Divine violence should thus be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will,’ but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision. It is a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one’s life) made in absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other. If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral,’ it does not give the agent license just to kill with some kind of angelic innocence. When those outside the structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting immediate justice/revenge, this is divine violence.”

(4) From Žižek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2008), pp. 460-461:

“But then how are we to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe? It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the ‘eternal Idea’ of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice. What is demanded is:

1. strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations [...]);

2. terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations on liberal ‘freedoms,’ [...]);

3. voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the ‘spontaneous’ immanent logical of capitalist development);

4. and, last but not least, all this combined with trust in the people [...] One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terrors, the ‘informer’ who denounces the culprit to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine rightly celebrated the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)

Does, then, the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to reinvent the ‘eternal Idea’ of egalitarian terror?"

(5) From Žižek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2008), p. 212:

“Gastev ran the Institute of Labor, which carried out experiments to train workers to act like machines. He saw the mechanization of man as the next step in evolution [...]. Is not this dream the first radical formulation of what, today, one usually calls biopolitics? Counterintuitive as this may sound, one can argue that this vision, had it really been imposed, would have been much more terrifying than Stalinism actually was. It was against this threat of full-scale modernist mechanization that Stalinist cultural politics reacted; it not only demanded a return to artistic forms that would be attractive to large crowds, but also—although it may appear cynical—the return to elementary traditional forms of morality. In the Stalinist show trials, the victims were held responsible for certain acts, forced to confess...in short, though it may appear obscene (and it was), they were treated as autonomous ethical subjects, not as objects of biopolitics.”

(6) From Žižek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2008), p. 358:

“What is not in Marx, what Negri projects onto Marx’s ‘general intellect,’ is his own central notion of ‘biopolitics’ as the direct production of life itself in its social dimension. [...] This is why, in this Marxian vision, the objects of the production process are precisely not social relations themselves: the ‘administration of things’ (control of and domination over nature) is here separated from the relations between people, it constitutes a domain of the ‘administration of things’ which no longer has to rely on the domination over people.”

One way to summarize the insight that unifies all of these quotations from Žižek is to say that Capital today functions as the Real which informs--but is not visible from within--the imaginary-symbolic “reality” addressed by both post-politics and biopolitics. When those who are excluded from, and made abject by, this hegemonic “reality” wrest control away from the capitalists in an ethico-political act, this act (as well as the subsequent institutions that prevent the resurgence of capitalism) is neither post-politics nor biopolitics. Only such an act realizes what Žižek has recently referred to in his lectures as a “politics between fear and trembling.”

Žižek’s Re-inscription of Hegel (2)

From The Metastases of Enjoyment (pp. 188-189)

"One naive yet difficult-to-answer objection to Hegel is : What 'sets in motion' the dialectical process? Why does the 'thesis' not simply persist in its positive self-identity? Why does it dissolve its self-complacent identity, and expose itself to the dangers of negativity and mediation? In short, is not Hegel caught in a vicious circle here; does he not succeed in dissolving every positive identity only because he conceives of it in advance as something mediated by negativity?

What is wrong here is the implicit presupposition of this objection: that there is something akin to the full immediacy of the 'thesis'. Hegel's point, on the contrary, is that there is no 'thesis' (in the sense of the full self-identity and organic unity of a starting point). That is to say: one of the illusions that characterize the standard reading of Hegel concerns the notion that the dialectical process somehow progresses from what is immediately given, from its fullness, to its mediation--say, from the naive, non-reflected consciousness that is aware only of the object opposed to it, to self-consciousness that comprises the awareness of its own activity as opposed to the object.

Hegelian 'reflection', however, does not mean that consciousness is followed by self-consciousness--that at a certain point consciousness magically turns its gaze inward, towards itself, making itself its own object, and thus introduces a reflective distance, a splitting, into the former immediate unity. Hegel's point is, again, that consciousness always-already is self-consciousness: there is no consciousness without a minimal reflective self-relating of the subject. Here Hegel turns against Fichte and Schelling and, in a sense, goes back to Kant, for whom the transcendental apperception of the I is an inherent condition of the I's being conscious of an object.

The passage of consciousness to self-consciousness thus involves a kind of failed encounter: at the very moment when consciousness endeavors to establish itself as 'full' consciousness of its object, when it endeavors to pass from the confused foreboding of its content to its clear representation, it suddenly finds itself within self-consciousness--that is to say, it finds itself compelled to perform an act of reflection, and to take note of its own activity as opposed to the object. Therein resides the paradox of the couple 'in-itself' and 'for-itself': we are dealing here with the passage from 'not yet' to 'always-already'. In 'in-itself', the consciousness (of an object) is not yet fully realized, it remains a confused anticipation of itself; whereas in 'for-itself' consciousness is in a way already passed over, the full comprehension of the object is again blurred by the awareness of the subject's own activity that simultaneously renders possible and prevents access to the object. In short, consciousness is like the tortoise in Lacan's reading of the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise--Achilles can easily outrun the tortoise, yet he cannot catch up with her.

Another way to make the same point is to emphasize that the passage from consciousness to self-consciousness always involves an experience of failure, of impotence--consciousness turns its gaze inside, towards itself, it becomes aware of its own activity, only when the direct, unproblematic grasp of its object fails. Suffice it to recall the process of knowledge: the object's resistance to the grasp of knowledge forces the subject to admit the 'illusory' nature of his knowledge--what he mistook for the object's In-itself are actually his constructions."

The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994)