Comments on Zizek

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Comments on selected passages from Slavoj Zizek's review of "Lenin" by 
Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. The full article is at: 
http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,761903,00.html

ZIZEK:
The kernel of the Leninist 'utopia' - the radical imperative to smash the 
bourgeois state and invent a new communal social form without a standing 
army, police force or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the 
administration of social matters - arises directly from the ashes of 1914. 
It wasn't a theoretical project for some distant future: in October 1917, 
Lenin claimed that "we can at once set in motion a state apparatus 
consisting of 10 if not 20 million people." What we should recognise is the 
'madness' (in the Kierkegaardian sense) of this utopia - in this context, 
Stalinism stands for a return to 'common sense'. The explosive potential of 
The State and Revolution can't be overestimated: in its pages, as Neil 
Harding wrote in Leninism (1996), "the vocabulary and grammar of the 
Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with."

COMMENT:
This is confused beyond belief. Lenin never thought in terms of "utopian" 
projects. The whole point of State and Revolution was to demonstrate the 
need for the working class to create its own state--with its own standing 
army, police force and bureaucracy--until it achieved hegemony worldwide 
and could proceed rapidly toward the construction of communism. Indeed, the 
state apparatus that Lenin refers to above involves an army, police force 
and bureaucracy. One might expect a sensible person to try to explain this 
inconsistency but the postmodernist Zizek appears content to allow such 
glaring contradictions to stand on their own merit, like a billfold photo 
of an extremely ugly child shown off by a proud but unsuspecting parent.

ZIZEK:
What followed can be called, borrowing the title of Althusser's text on 
Machiavelli, la solitude de Lenine: a time when he stood alone, struggling 
against the current in his own party. When, in his April Theses of 1917, 
Lenin identified the Augenblick, the unique chance for a revolution, the 
initial response on the part of a large majority of his party colleagues 
was either stupor or contempt. No prominent Bolshevik leader supported his 
call to revolution, and the editorial board of Pravda took the 
extraordinary step of dissociating themselves and the Party from Lenin's 
proposals. Bogdanov characterised the April Theses as "the delirium of a 
madman"; Nadezhda Krupskaya concluded: "I am afraid it looks as if Lenin 
has gone crazy."

COMMENT:
Since Zizek's intellectual milieu is Freudian psychoanalysis and the movies 
of people like David Lynch, no wonder he characterizes the showdown between 
Lenin and the Bolshevik central committee as a scene out of "Blue Velvet". 
Instead of nitrous oxide, Lenin is equipped with the April Theses. Lenin 
and his comrades were at odds over political and theoretical questions, not 
over his aberrant behavior. All major Russian Marxists, except Trotsky, 
believed that the coming revolution in Russia would be bourgeois in 
character while the April Theses called for the immediate overthrow of 
capitalism so naturally there would be a fight.

ZIZEK:
In his writings of 1917, Lenin saves his most acerbic irony for those who 
engage in a vain search for some kind of guarantee for the revolution, 
either in the guise of a reified notion of social necessity ("it's too 
early for the socialist revolution, the working class isn't yet mature"), 
or of a normative, democratic legitimacy ("the majority of the population 
isn't on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic"). It 
is as if the revolutionary agent requires the permission of some 
representative of the Other before he risks seizing state power. For Lenin, 
as for Lacan, the revolution 'ne s'autorise que d'elle-même'.

COMMENT: Anybody who links Lenin with Lacan should be taken out and 
horsewhipped.

ZIZEK:
How, then, does Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's new study stand in the light of 
all this? Her basic approach is that, now communism is over, it is time for 
an objective assessment of Lenin's contribution. Within these co-ordinates, 
the book tries to give Lenin his due. Carrère d'Encausse makes it clear 
that the Stalinist state apparatus grew out of the NEP compromise.

COMMENT:
No, the "Stalinist" state apparatus was a function of the fact that the 
most dedicated, revolutionary-minded workers and revolutionaries had lost 
their lives in the civil war that was forced on the infant Soviet republic. 
It forced the Soviet state to draw upon ex-civil servants of the Czarist 
state in much the same manner that the FSLN had to rely on North American 
volunteers to staff their computer centers after the middle-class fled to 
Miami. If Trotsky had succeeded Lenin, he would have been forced to contend 
with the same issues and make the same compromises.

ZIZEK:
Carrère d'Encausse also foregrounds how, in the struggle to succeed Lenin, 
Trotsky, Bukharin and the rest had nothing but contempt for Stalin's new 
administrative role as general secretary, dismissing him as a mere manager: 
they failed to appreciate the power that went with the post. When, in 1922, 
Lenin submitted to Pravda the article Better Fewer, but Better, which was 
directed against Stalin's authoritarianism, Bukharin, the editor-in-chief, 
saw no reason to publish it; one member of the Politburo suggested that 
they print a single copy of the paper containing the text, and give it to 
Lenin.

COMMENT:
Sheer, howling ignorance. If "Better Fewer, but Better" is directed at 
Stalin, it is only in the most indirect sense since his name is not 
mentioned at all. In 1922, the main problem that preoccupied Lenin was the 
survival of the USSR. This article stressed the need for a go-slow policy 
that conceivably could have been directed against Trotsky's tendency to 
overproject. If anything, despite the reference to Bukharin above, it 
foreshadows the NEP period, which is obviously associated with Bukharin's 
strand of Marxism. In this article Lenin said: "What elements have we for 
building this apparatus? Only two. First, the workers who are absorbed in 
the struggle of socialism. These elements are not sufficient educated. They 
would like to build a better apparatus for us, but they do not know how. 
They cannot build one. They have not yet developed the culture required for 
this; and it is culture that is required. Nothing will be achieved in this 
by doing things in a rush, by assault, by vim or vigour, or in general, by 
any of the best human qualities. Secondly, we have elements of knowledge, 
education and training, but they are ridiculously inadequate compared with 
all other countries." Clearly, this is a call for a more measured pace not 
a defiant cry to fight "authoritarianism". Lenin was too much of a 
materialist to issue such calls, since they would be almost pointless in a 
society that lay in ruins.

ZIZEK:
On the national question, Carrère d'Encausse writes that Lenin 
unconditionally opposed the nationalism of large countries and endorsed the 
right to sovereignty of small nations, independently of who was in control 
of them. For Russia itself, he advocated a policy that would favour the 
oppressed small nations - "a sort of affirmative action before the fact". 
Today, this stance is more resonant than ever. It is no surprise that 
anti-Americanism in Europe is most clearly discernible in the 'big' 
nations. The complaint is often made that globalisation threatens the 
sovereignty of nation states; but it is not the small states so much as the 
second-rank (ex-)world powers - countries like the UK, Germany and France - 
which fear that, once fully immersed in the newly emerging global empire, 
they will be reduced to the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium or even 
Luxembourg. The hostility to Americanisation in France, expressed by both 
leftists and right-wing nationalists, is ultimately a refusal to accept the 
fact that France is losing its hegemonic role in Europe.

COMMENT:
Total and utter nonsense. Lenin's concern was with the misery of people 
like the Kurds or the Palestinians, not that the UK, Germany or France 
might suffer an inferiority complex due to a rapid influx of MacDonalds, 
Blockbusters and Starbucks.

ZIZEK:
Nowhere in his work is there any trace of what Lacan called the "narcissism 
of the lost cause" . . .

As Alain Badiou has said?

Recalling the trenches of the first world war, Ernst Jünger celebrated 
face-to-face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: 
authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression, whether in the 
form of an encounter with the Lacanian real - the thing Antigone confronts 
when she violates the order of the city - or of Bataillean excess. In the 
domain of sexuality, the icon of this passion of the real is Oshima's Ai No 
Corrida, in which the couple's love is radicalised into mutual torture and 
eventually death - a clear echo of Bataille's Story of the Eye. Another 
example would be the hardcore websites that allow you to observe the inside 
of a vagina from the vantage point of a tiny camera at the tip of a 
penetrating dildo. When one gets too close to the desired object, erotic 
fascination turns into disgust at the real of the bare flesh.

COMMENT:
Et cetera, ad nauseum. Zizek should stick to the insides of vaginas rather 
than socialist revolution.. At least, this is something he presumably 
understands from first-hand experience.



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