Re: Zizek and Critics

[Gavin Walker <gmwalker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think that Louis has in his last message, and in his articles and other response to the twists and turns of Zizek over the past few years on the list, done a serious and important service to a revolutionary Marxist understanding of contemporary intellectual forces. Zizek, for better or worse (and I would say worse), has a level of impact on the current academic climate that is far out of proportion to the quality of his work. While his books are far from the most cited, I have noticed in recent years with some trepidation that virtually every graduate student that I know has at least one Zizek book on their personal shelves. Like it or not, Zizek's output has to be reckoned with simply because in the academic world, it's everywhere. 

And yet, I think Louis makes a truly important point when he says that these debates "exist in a parallel universe to revolutionary Marxism," for as long as they remain only expressions of conversations taking place within the tower, they don't effect the struggle for socialism and justice taking place in the streets.

That said, I must admit that when, a few years ago, Zizek started rattling on about Lenin, I held out some hope that he had moved his thinking in a more progressive direction - unfortunately, it seems clear to me that if anything, his use of Lenin has actually taken on the role of a veil for a reactionary and idealist position. Much of his interest in Lenin seems traceable to me from Zizek's recent adoration for Alain Badiou and his absurd Lacan/Freud, St. Paul/Christ nonsense. Badiou's recent (in English, at least) book on _Ethics_ (Verso) has some decent stuff in it on the bankruptcy of so-called "identity politics" as a substitute for progressive analysis, but it's all mediated by a hardcore voluntarism that takes the form of the vocabulary of the "Event." 

This notion in Badiou (which is much more serious than the way in which Zizek uses it, though still basically nuts) is shot through with a completely unexamined and absurd theology, which at core, in a political sense, owes much more to a sort of Heideggerian mysticism than to the concrete revolutionary standpoint of Lenin and the Marxist tradition. Zizek lays these points out most clearly in his chapter on Badiou in _The Ticklish Subject_ (Verso), "The Politics of Truth, or Alain Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul," and again in _The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?_ (Verso), which is itself highly based on Badiou's book _St. Paul, ou la fondation de l'universalisme_, and his short book _On Belief_ (Routledge). 

At the very outset of _The Fragile Absolute_, Zizek states, "There is no Christ outside St. Paul; in exactly the same way, there is no 'authentic Marx' that can be approached directly, bypassing Lenin." (p. 4) On the face of it, it doesn't seem a terrible point - that the political practice and example of Lenin is an inherent part of the Marxist whole. But unfortunately, this isn't really where Zizek is going with this point. What he sets up around this matrix is a theology, that Lenin put Marx into practice, but one could search Zizek's writings in vain for the notion that anyone else did as well - there is no mention of the Chinese revolutionary example (except the occasional rightist snipe at the "totalitarian Maoists"), no mention of the heroic example of the Cuban revolution, in fact, no mention of Marxist political practice at all except for the example of Lenin and Lenin alone. Zizek does this because what interests him is not the fact that Lenin was an extraordinary Marxist thinker and leader (amongst many others) who understood both Marxian theory and practice as well as the concrete situation of Russia at the time, but because Lenin represents an "Event." Reading Zizek, one is constantly thrown back on the totally ahistorical reading he sets up, wherein the example of 1917 doesn't depend on the workers and peasants seizing state power with the help of the revolutionary forces, but rather just depends on the sole figure of Lenin, who is the herald of the mystical Event. 

It's a shameful reading which both elevates Lenin into a space that is completely anti-materialist, and at the same time serves to denigrate the actual legacy of Lenin, which is based on Lenin's extraordinary perception and response to actually existing and shifting conditions on the ground, not his intuitive sense of the Coming Event. The whole vocabulary of the Event serves to convince people of a bourgeois fiction, namely that revolutions stem from single top-down individuals, rather than from the political practice of the masses. Thus we see Zizek basically reproducing the worst anti-Marxist journalistic line: the Russian people didn't seize power, Lenin did; the Chinese people didn't smash imperialist conquest and seize power, Mao did; the Cuban people didn't seize power, Castro did. It's fictions like these that every Marxist knows to be false, but Zizek reproduces the same reactionary logic in how he examines these revolutionary examples.

Louis stated in his last mail on Zizek to the list that "I am afraid that Derrida's interest in Marx is like Zizek's in Lenin. It is a way to affect some kind of "street cred"." This is the real kernel of Zizek's interest in Lenin - it's a tool for him to remain "contrarian" (a term which should remind us all of the recent example of Hitchens), to continue to piss off the academic world by using ever-more outlandish figures. This is of course, a totally reactionary line, which really only speaks one thing at its center - that Lenin is the scary, nasty, totalitarian meanie that right-wing forces always wanted to label him as - and now they have a friend in Zizek, who in "paying homage" to Lenin, reproduces the same logic as the most die-hard anti-commie. 

What is truly reactionary in Zizek's work is its deep connection to the "Christian legacy" he has so much fun defending with "help" from Lenin - that the Event is predicated on "grace," that it comes into a situation from the outside, from *somewhere else,* that revolution is not immanent to the situation at hand based on the struggle of the people to improve their immediate conditions. For Zizek, revolution and the revolutionary impulse are exercises in accepting grace, in letting the situation be diffused by something granted from the exterior of the circumstances in play. It is an anti-materialist position par excellence, and one that has allowed him to "play with fire," to play with Lenin and 1917, while refusing to see that 1917 isn't just an historical "Event", it's an example of political practice which has a direct relation to the struggles for socialism occurring all over the planet. Thus Zizek has set up a framework in which he can be a "Leninist" with out being a Marxist, in which he can do what Benjamin warned against doing - Zizek aestheticizes the political to give himself a thing to play with, a thing to wield against academic wishy-washiness, but what this actually does is let him close off the revolutionary example of Lenin, and just play with the name while remaining completely wedded to the closed academic culture he claims to be reacting against. 

Zizek has set up the most recent example of the "jargon of authenticity," a way of speaking and writing that uses figures, tropes, and circumstances pulled out of their historical context to create an oppositional mood or feeling without any concrete analysis. See for example his statement, "a Leninist, like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice." (_On Belief_, p. 4) Essentially, all Zizek is interested in is the notion of the passage à l'acte, irrespective of who is acting or even what the act itself is - a notion shared with the whole "conservative revolutionary" impulse in pre-Nazi intellectual culture (Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Spengler, etc). In another place and time, we might find Slavoj in knickers, off in the woods with Martin singing the Horst Wessel waiting for grace to suffuse the situation with the conditions for the "authentic" Event. 

It's clear why this is so popular - one gets to be a "Leninist" and shock one's friends and professors with acts of homage, but in the end, one doesn't really have to say anything. Zizek's work has been a constant push to eradicate real historical materialist analysis and theory, and his latest interest in Lenin is an homage that should be refused and refuted from all corners by the revolutionary Left. There is a lot more to be written about Zizek's other latest reactionary move, his interest in a "progressive Eurocentrism," (which can be related to his insane love of Hardt/Negri) and his basically racist reproduction of a whole swath of clichés and idiocies about East Asia. One could also write a whole bunch about his not-so secret love for Fukuyama (see _On Belief_, p. 111) and connect this to a reading of Zizek in the context of neo-con thought, which directly relates to his Eurocentric babble.