Slavoj Zizek, the Symptom Comes Alive

If you have read far enough into my new book, The Last Psychoanalyst, you will know that I accord famed Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek an important role in the history of psychoanalysis. See also my previous posts on Zizek.

On the off chance that you believe I was exaggerating about him or that I was trafficking in caricature, I draw your attention to Rebecca Schuman’s portrait of the philosopher as a clown. In fact, I might have been slightly too generous in calling him a philosopher-clown.

Schuman describes Zizek:

Slovenian critical-theory superstar Slavoj Žižek is the “Elvis of cultural theory,” one of the most famous and eminent philosophers alive and working today—second only, perhaps, to his arch-nemesis Noam Chomsky, with whom he spent the better part of 2013 in a highly publicized feud. His work is all but worshipped by his adherents. He is feted at conferences convened for no other reason than to celebrate him.

If you remove the veil, Schuman explains, you arrive at the man himself. It’s not a pretty picture:

He is also a grade-A, number-one, world-class jerk, who brings to life the worst caricature of the humanities eminence: someone who loves subjecting other people to his talks, but who loathes contact with students—who, being “like other people,” are mostly “boring idiots.”

Why are Zizek’s students “boring idiots.” Could it be because they spend their time reading people like Slavoj Zizek? Or perhaps, their idolization of Zizek may be an irrefutable proof of their idiocy.

In any case, Zizek treats them with utter contempt. Perhaps they deserve it; perhaps not. Yet, if they allow themselves to be treated this way they are telling us that they think they deserve it.

In Schuman’s words:

“If you don’t give me any of your shitty papers,” Žižek told students at The New School in New York—who may have matriculated at that institution for the sole purpose of working with Slavoj Žižek—“you get an A. If you give me a paper, I may read it and not like it, and you can get a lower grade.”

Certainly, the great Slovenian has no interest in actually talking to students:

“Here in the United States, students tend to be so open that sooner or later, if you are kind to them, they even start to ask you personal questions, [share their] private problems; could you help them, and so on. And what should I tell them? I don’t care. Kill yourself. It’s not my problem.” The Žižekophant giving the interview laughs at this, hard.

The real problem with Žižek, in any case, isn’t that he feels this way or that he says these things aloud. It’s that he does so and people think it’s hilarious.

As a footnote: I did not include pictures in my book, but Slate magazine has chosen a photo of Zizek to accompany Schuman’s article:

 

At least, now you will understand why people think that Zizek is so funny.

What is Slavoj Zizek?

When Plato declared that communities should be ruled by philosopher-kings he meant that philosophers should be made into kings or that kings should learn how to philosophize.

Today’s America has more than a few aspiring philosopher-kings, public intellectuals who want to wield political power and to exercise political influence. Some segments of the population even believe that we should place intellectuals in public office, regardless of how incompetent or unqualified they are.

Still, that is penny ante when you look at an aspiring philosopher-king like the great Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. A member of the Nazi party and a strong defender of the Third Reich Heidegger believed that Hitler could improve his policies if only he would allow Heidegger to teach him philosophy.

European philosophers and intellectuals have long been held in thrall by tyrants and despots. Utterly lacking in shame they have glommed on to Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot… whoever.

It’s a lot easier to capture the mind of a despot than to rustle up votes via retail politics or to implement real policies in the real world.

Philosophers believe in a world where their great minds can impose their great ideas on a human race that they take to be so much silly putty.

Of course, the world is not exactly awash in great philosophers these days. There is no new Sartre, no new Heidegger, no new Foucault on the horizon.

So we have reached the next stage in human intellectual evolution: the advent of the philosopher-clown.

Of course, I am referring to famed Slovenian philosopher and culture critic, Slavoj Zizek.

As self-styled post-Marxist thinker Zizek has come to embody the truth of one of Marx’s more famous dicta:

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

How else to see Zizek than as a philosopher-clown involved in an extraordinary intellectual farce.

If you will allow me to be properly Zizekian, I would also say that Zizek is a symptom of a cultural moment, a crisis of faith among hyper-educated intellectual leftists.

Disaffected intellectuals the world over have become flotsam and jetsam, scattered over the ocean, the detritus remaining after the sinking of the good ship Communism.

Now that Communism has definitively failed what will become of the graduate students, the deconstructionists, the critical theorists, the Occupiers.

What will become of their grand ideas, their visions and their dreams? Now that they have no more gods to worship are they destined to become capitalist entrepreneurs?

Their gods have failed them, but they have taken consolation through the erudite entertainment offered by Slavoj Zizek. Or better, he has found them.

A consummate intellectual entrepreneur Zizek has succeeded in exploiting their credulity and ignorance of the disaffected left by selling them tome after tome of barely intelligible verbiage.

They were looking for a new master and a new way to be duped. Zizek has obliged.

Only a Neo-Communist, i.e., a Neo-com, like Zizek could be such a perfect capitalist. He has found a way to exploit and monetize the ignorance of leftist intellectuals. He has found a way to feed their pretensions. He has found a niche market and has flooded it with goods and goodies.

Zizek’s writings do not instruct; they do not engage in the hard labor of ratiocination. Proud of their intrinsic illogic, they are a rhetorical performance. They shock; they awe; they entertain. They produce emotion, not thought.

Disaffected leftists can read Zizek, not understand a word of it, but still feel that they belong to something, to a cause perhaps, but, more likely to a virtual community of great minds that modern capitalism has left behind.

Of course, there’s method to Zizek’s self-proclaimed madness. Marx failed, Zizek tells us, because it tried to mold the real world. There was nothing wrong with Marx’s Hegelian theories except that he chose to address practical problems.

It was a fatal error. So, Zizek, if I may paraphrase, wants to offer membership in a giant virtual community of minds, thereby creating a group of cult followers who have no idea what they think and no real engagement with reality.

Zizek is happy to tell them what they want to hear. Disaffected post-Marxists and Neo-Communists want to hear about the failure of capitalism. Green to the gills, they want to hear that capitalism is destroying the planet, that it is an offense against the natural order.

If these ideas do not correlate with reality, so much the better. That makes them more pure.

Perhaps you have to live on the European continent to appreciate it. When British philosopher John Gray took to reading some of Zizek’s latest tomes—surely to save the rest of us from having to do so— he dared to follow the tradition of good British empiricism and to evaluate Zizek’s claims against the facts:

With its sweeping claims and magniloquent rhetoric, this passage is typical of much in Žižek’s work. What he describes as the premise of the book is simple only because it passes over historical facts. Reading it, no one would suspect that, putting aside the killings of many millions for ideological reasons, some of the last century’s worst ecological disasters—the destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union and the devastation of the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for example—occurred in centrally planned economies. Ecological devastation is not a result only of the economic system that exists in much of the world at the present time; while it may be true that the prevailing version of capitalism is unsustainable in environmental terms, there is nothing in the history of the past century that suggests the environment will be better protected if a socialist system is installed.

Gray is writing in The New York Review of Books. He is not a fan of global capitalism. He is surely as green as Zizek.

Yet, he sees that Zizek is courting danger by making outrageous claims in the interest of titillating the masses of disaffected intellectuals.

Zizek would reply that he does not want to put his ideas into practice. He has no interest in logic or in common sense. When he talks about violence he does not mean it as the way the language prescribes.

Zizek said:

It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

Of course, this is gibberish. Zizek is trying to shock people. And yet, what happens when someone goes out to kill a few Jews because, after all, such actions are less violent than what Gandhi did?

Zizek celebrates violence and terrorism because it will alienate people from reality. It will lead them to live within a virtual community of true believers and cult followers. Gray explains:

…though Žižek accepts that violence has failed to achieve its communist goals and has no prospect of doing so, he insists that revolutionary violence has intrinsic value as a symbolic expression of rebellion…

Rather than denounce the great mass murderers of the last century Zizek declares that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were not violent enough!

If they had taken the next Hegelian step and destroyed the apparatus of state power, they would have liberated the World Spirit and ushered in a new world of great minds.

For Zizek, that would be the true 1%. Interviewed by the Guardian Zizek recently declared that 99% of the human race counts as: “boring idiots.”

Zizek does not fault the Nazis for their violence or for the holocaust. He objects to Hitler on more philosophical grounds:

In Zizek’s words:

The true problem of Nazism is not that it “went too far” in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised.

This suggests that if Nazism had created a new social order then there would have been ample justification for the methods it used.

As Gray says, this is utterly "repugnant and grotesque." In his words:

Describing mass murder in this way as an exercise in hermeneutics is repugnant and grotesque; it is also characteristic of Žižek’s work. He criticizes Stalin’s policy of collectivization, but not on account of the millions of human lives that were violently truncated or broken in its course. What Žižek criticizes is Stalin’s lingering attachment (however inconsistent or hypocritical) to “‘scientific’ Marxist terms.” Relying on “objective social analysis” for guidance in revolutionary situations is an error: “at some point, the process has to be cut short with a massive and brutal intervention of subjectivity: class belonging is never a purely objective social fact, but is always also the result of struggle and social engagement.” Rather than Stalin’s relentless use of torture and lethal force, it is the fact that he tried to justify the systematic use of violence by reference to Marxian theory that Žižek condemns.

 Zizek would not be bothered by the contradiction. His post-Cartesian slogan might be: I contradict myself, therefore I am.

Zizek on Violence, Part 2

On August 5 I wrote a long post on the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. For those who wish to read a more complete debunking of his horrific thought, I highly recommend Adam Kirsch's synoptic review in "The New Republic." Link here.

Kirsch has written a truly great article, going much further than I did in revealing the depravity of Zizek's thought. For those who think this is trivial, I would recall that Zizek is something of a cult figure, taken very seriously by academics. Perhaps now they will think twice before forcing their gullible students to accept Zizek as a great thinker worthy of respect... but I have my doubts.

Zizek on Violence

The prolific Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, has just published yet another of his meditations, this time on violence. Zizek is constantly churning out these volumes, chapbooks of advanced free association mixed with self-deprecating humor and fuzzy thinking.

Zizek has gained his measure of fame by being one of the few serious thinkers who is still proud to be a Marxist and a Communist. Surely, it takes a peculiar warp of mind to persist in defending political systems whose only distinction lay in their extraordinary capacity to destroy human life.

But Zizek is not merely a retrograde Marxist apologist. He is an academic whose elucubrations address the concerns of post-Marxist intellectuals. He appeals to the reactionary left, to people who learned critical theory because they believed it would undermine capitalism, and who have had their hopes dashed by, among other things, the emergence of China as a twenty-first century beacon of capitalism.

Keep in mind that French thinkers of Zizek's generation pledged their youthful allegiance to Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a last ditch effort to destroy the remnants of capitalism, by marginalizing and disempowering "capitalist roaders" like Deng Xiaoping.

When Deng was rehabilitated after the death of Mao, when he had the infamous Gang of Four arrested, and when he launched China's great leap into capitalism... the junior French intellectuals who had supported Mao were bereft and forlorn. Where could they go for solace? In fact, they went into psychoanalysis. Many even became psychoanalysts.

American critical thinkers faced a similar problem, though later. What were they to do with their training after the fall of Communism? How do you undertake your intellectual labor when facts on the ground have rendered it empty and useless? What if it is all you know how to do? What if you are getting paid to do it?

One thing that they did not do was heed the advice of John Maynard Keynes: "When the fact change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Instead, this merry band of outmoded thinkers has lifted its heads from a landscape littered with the corpses produced by modern communist practice and decided to follow Zizek's advice: keep on criticizing.

For those who are impelled toward political action, who are impatient to overthrow imperialism and liberal democracy, Zizek counsels them to: Do nothing. Why waste you time trying to change the world when the theories you have expounded have become historical detritus.

Unfortunately, you do not become a great thinker by beating a dead theory. And Zizek, dare I say, is a master at beating dead theories. He does it with verve and panache, with energy and boundless enthusiasm. He embellishes his books with a flood of cultural references and cherry picked historical details. Surely, he is more mythmaker than analyst.

Nonetheless, there is something ultimately futile about the exercise. Point that I believe Zizek knows only too well. Fortunately, he has been sufficiently influenced by certain currents in French philosophy to find a redeeming social value in futility.

Meantime, Zizek's new book begins with a distinction he borrowed from the French Marxist Etienne Balibar. He divides violence into the subjective and the objective. Perversely, he calls real acts of violence "subjective," and declares that the violence perpetrated on the human species by capitalistic exploitation constitutes "objective" violence.

Like any good Marxist Zizek believes that the latter is the cause of the former, thereby allowing us to excuse most acts of terrorism as dialectical inevitabilities. In his more impish moments Zizek labels terrorism an act of love.

Thus, the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center was "subjective" violence, while the people who were working in the building would be considered by Zizek: "agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for the explosion of subjective violence."

As I said, Zizek does not counsel resistance or rebellion. That course might be good for those who are dispossessed or dislocated in society. For the rest of us Zizek's advice is to do nothing. Literally. "Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts the ultimate function of which is to make the system run more smoothly."

Disregarding the clunky syntax, this advice is vapid and useless. At best, it will produce more depression, and more prescriptions for Prozac. Fortunately, Zizek's persona of class clown makes it that no one takes what he says as rules to live by.

Obviously, the use of terms like "subjective" and "objective" in a way that defies their normal meaning is intentional. But don't imagine that this transformation makes you some kind of cultural revolutionary. The fact is, these terms are being used as shibboleths: they identify the user as a member of an outlaw gang. Nothing more, nothing less.

Zizek's larger argument begins with the proposition that all human groups have been founded on violence. This echoes Freud's notion that civilization was founded on the repression of human libido.

Zizek presents it as an axiomatic truth. It is not. It does, however, serve a purpose. If all groups have been founded in violence, we cannot condemn anyone's violent acts. The world, as Zizek notes, is divided between those who commit violence and those who want to commit violence. Again, this is reheated Freudian theory.

If all human societies are founded in acts of violence, this also implies that they were not founded on free choice or the free consent of their members. This means that when Marxists dream of a world in which people are deprived of their free choice, they are thinking that they are helping disabuse the masses of the illusion of freedom.

Hopefully, no one needs a reminder that the radical left has no use for freedom. It has no use for an economic system like capitalism that runs on billions of decisions made by millions of individuals in the marketplace.

The great thinkers on the left (and right) believe that they should do the thinking for everyone. Like their favorite modern philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who wanted to serve the Third Reich as Hitler's philosopher-king, they dream of becoming court philosophers to despots and tyrants.

Then their minds will rule the world without their having to dirty themselves with practical politics. Where previous great thinkers like Michel Foucault and Juliette Binoche have heaped praise on the despotic Ayatollahs in Iran, Zizek has expressed great fondness for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

But there is a therapeutic side to Zizek's project. It is not for nothing that he is constantly offering snippets of psychoanalytic theory. The psychological issue is this: Should the thinkers who supported Lenin, Stalin, and Mao feel guilty for the carnage that they produced? Should they feel anxious that they will be punished for having promoted these Communist horrors?

If that is their problem, then Zizek tries to show them how to manage their guilt. If, as he says, all human societies are predicated on violence, then guilt puts you in closer touch with the truth, especially compared with those deluded souls who refuse to accept that their capitalistic system is dialectically responsible for all the terror that was committed by those trying to overthrow it. All the violence perpetrated in the name of Marx was the proper reaction to the monstrous hegemony of capitalism. Doesn't that make you feel better?

Another way to manage guilt is to shift the blame. In a silly example of dialectical unreason, Zizek denounced hedge fund operator and philanthropist George Soros: "The same Soros who funds education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and is so doing has created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces."

Whether it is coming from Zizek or from Bill O'Reilly blaming the world's ills on speculators is surely in mode. Remember when the speculators were being blamed for the high price of oil. Now, of course, the same speculators are causing its rapid descent.

Be that as it may, the important point in Zizek's statement is the number: "thousands of lives" have been ruined by George Soros.

This from someone who supports a political philosophy whose practical application has murdered tens of millions and ruined the lives of hundreds of millions more. Oh, the irony of it all!