Žižek the Deadly Jester
November 3rd, 2009The New Republic’s Adam Kirsch in “The Deadly Jester”, takes apart Zizek’s pseudo-radical ideology. There is a reply by the Jester himself on the same website called : “Who do you qualify as antisemite?”.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere Zizek is now praising Postone. Another Zizek twist.
We are grateful to the review L’AUTRE COTE (Paris based) for bringing this anti-Zizek article to our attention. We have some disagreements with L’AUTRE COTE however, especially their plugging of Ted Kacynski’s views on technology.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Here’s the link to Kirsch’s review:
www.tnr.com/article/books/the-deadly-jester
Here’s Zizek’s response:
www.tnr.com/article/politics/disputations-who-are-you-calling-anti-semitic
Here’s Kirsch’s response to that:
www.tnr.com/article/politics/disputations-still-the-most-dangerous-philosopher-the-west
November 4th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
“Elsewhere in the blogosphere Zizek is now praising Postone. Another Zizek twist.”
So why not provide the quote?
www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/10/today-interview-capitalism
“NS: So we have lost the political economy in Marx?
SZ: There are some marginal good signs - Moishe Postone is one of the few people who really asks the question, what to do with Marx’s political economy today? ….. If you read the predominant cultural left, you’d have thought that Marx’s Capital is some kind of treatise on commodity fetishism and other cultural phenomena. Sorry, but Marx meant it as a critical theory of society, giving a diagnosis and so on. I think things today call for analysis “
November 6th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
For the record, Zizek openly endorsed some of the points put forward by, among others, Postone already a year ago, at a lecture in London. Most likely he knew Postone’s work half a decade before that (when PD didn’t exist yet). Incidentally, it’s at the same lecture that Zizek wonders out loud if he should dignify Adam Kirsch’s hitjob with a response: www.youtube.com/watch?v=voZQEslcY84
November 13th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Supporting TNR and Kirsch on this is sloppy. For all of Zizek’s lousy politics, he is far from this mish-mash. Forget some obscure defense of Zizek or people saying “you have to read x, y, z to understand him.” I’ve read a very large quantity of Zizek and one thing he isn’t is an anti-Semite. Is he flashy trash? Yeah. Does he have an amazing capacity to recycle the same arguments over and over? Yeah. Does he say some monumentally stupid things, especially in political matters? Oh yeah.
Despite this, and his ridiculous ball fondling of Douche Bag Badiou, he engages intellectually at a level that is rare and as a public intellectual in a way that seemed largely dead.
For example, the following is a perfectly good attack onthose who want to present Hitler as radical and bad:
“Nazism was not radical enough, it did not dare to disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space (which is why it had to invent and focus on destroying an external enemy, Jews). This is why one should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions–but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive.”
Zizek’s point is that Hitler actually did no violence to capitalist society at all, that despite the tremendous violence he committed, it was entirely to preserve capitalism. I take his view of Islamism to be largely the same. It is an ideology and movement fueled by the resentement of the little man, just as the Christian Right in the United States is also motivated by such things.
Also, there is nothing wrong with his criticism that these right-wing populisms are just the other side of liberalism. I applaud Zizek’s attacks on liberalism, on the talk of “human rights” and “tolerance”.
The bigger problem is in Zizek’s limitations in dealing with revolution. He imagines some Badiou-Heidegger “Event”. He has a spectacular notion of revolution, hence his fetishizing of Lenin and even worse, Mao, and a fetishizing of violence. If one wanted to critique his use of violence vis-a-vis Hitler and Gandhi, Zizek should then say that Gandhi was as violent as Mao and Lenin, all of them agents of capital, extending and deepening it globally over vast masses of land and numbers of people. None of them did violence to capitalism either, though they did at times do violence to particular constellations of capitalist power (British colonialism, trans-European imperialism.)
November 18th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
In Zizek’s new book he hardly endorses Postone:
“However, it would be totally wrong to draw from this the conclusion that the most can do is hope and the crisis will be limited, and that capitalism will continue to guarantee a relatively high standard of living for a growing number of people - a strange radical politics whose main hope is that circumstances will continue to render it inoperative and marginal… This seems to be the conclusion drawn by some Leftists such as Moishe Postone and his colleauges: since every crisis which opens up a space for the radical Left also gives rise to anti-Semitism, it is better for us to support successful capitalism and hope there will be no crisis. Taken to its logical conclusion, this reasoning implies that, ultimately, anti-capitalism is, as such, anti-Semitic.”
(p. 75, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce)
December 1st, 2009 at 12:37 am
Latest Zizek waffle: we need to keep a catalogue of these, they are akin to the great Colemanballs in Private Eye:
“When you are asked to choose between liberal democracy and fundamentalism, it is not only that one term is obviously preferred – what is more important, the true injunction, is to see this as the true alternative, to ignore third options.”
From a recent article on the films of John Carpenter