Re: Forwarded from Paul Dillon

[Gavin Walker <gmwalker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul,

*I appreciated your critical comments as thought-provoking, and started 
to write a much longer post on Badiou, pulling all the books of his I 
have off my shelves and delving in, but I think it would be better, if 
you want to continue that aspect of the discussion, to email me, and we 
can do so off-list, as it would quickly get pretty tangential to the 
immediate point. I do think there's a lot of important stuff to be 
considered in his work.*

Before I jump into this, I will say that I agree very much with Nick - 
we do indeed talk about Zizek too much. Ken has made an important point 
in this discussion, which is the real core: it can easily become a 
futile discussion, an exercise in playing the classic academic game - 
play with the concepts, and ensure that you'll never "contact the 
masses!" That said though, because Zizek rests on the barrier between 
academic and popular work, I don't think it's *entirely* a waste of 
time to form a solid Marxist critique of his thinking.

Although your points are addressed to both Louis and I, and although I 
do agree with what Louis has had to say on these questions, I'll stick 
to addressing those points of your mail clearly aimed at me only.

P: I have read the three posts and the two short pieces that Louis 
wrote and it
is clear to me that neither of you is addressing Zizek in a critical or
consistent way. Gavin starts this with his discussion of Zizek's 
relation
to Alain Badiou and the role of the notion of the Event in Badiou. But 
it
is clear to me that rather than understand, Gavin has parodied Zizek. 
I'm
wondering if either of you can describe the ideological process, as 
Zizek
theorized it, without reformulating that analysis so as to make it 
easier to
attack.

G: Forgive me if I find this a bit of a patronizing way of putting your 
point. Instead of proposing a litmus test for me - "can you describe 
the ideological process?" - why not just put your reading forward 
yourself? It is in the interest of exchange to demonstrate accurately 
and coherently where precisely it is that you find fault with my 
understanding (plebeian though it may be) of the concept of the Event. 
To put it another way - I'd be interested in seeing you explain how the 
notion of the Event through Badiou and Zizek has any relation 
whatsoever to a Marxist understanding of the revolutionary process. I'm 
not saying this to be snippy: if it could be demonstrated that there is 
more to the way this is worked out than I'm seeing from my reading, I'd 
like to know how one would go about thinking it.

P: Why not take on Zizek's analysis of fascism which is one of
the major targets in his appropriation of Badiou. the framework that
Badiou's theory provides for formulating an ethics that can accomodate
revolution. And what about Zizek's use of this theory precisely to
distinguish Stalin from Hitler?? This in itself could be of value to the
movement as a whole insofar as it brings people to recognize that the 
two
cannot be equated as they are in the logic of the current hegemonic 
ideas.

G: The reason I wouldn't address this and extend it to the task of 
"distinguishing Stalin from Hitler" is that the point is a truism on 
this list: while in some rightist journalistic space the two may be 
equated, on a list where one is ostensibly addressing other Marxists, 
there's no need to make such an obvious point. Without getting into any 
Stalin/Trotsky territory, I'll only say that not everyone on this list 
is caught up in the "Stalin as bogeyman" trope, either.

P: And yes, in a certain way, the Bolsheviks, (5% of the government 
after March 1917???),
not just Lenin, brought about a socialist revolution in a situation 
where Marxism
predicted only a bourgeois revolution, because they did seize the time 
and
understood the pulse of that part of the society that was moving towsard
social transformation (likewise a small minority in Russia at the time).

G: Your point about the composition of the Soviet leadership after 1917 
is to me strange for one extremely important reason - it reproduces 
exactly what I was arguing against in Zizek - the Bolsheviks as a group 
did NOT "bring about" the revolution any more than Lenin alone did: the 
people and the people alone, the peasants and workers, made the 
revolution by rising up collectively and seizing state power. The 
Bolsheviks provided impetus and direction by harnessing that energy, 
knowing how to work within it, and how to *learn from it*, but the key 
point is that the masses make history, not political parties.

However, the larger point I was trying to make is that in Zizek's 
appropriation of the notion of the Event, there is no room for social 
practice - the revolution, the Event, emerges from *nowhere,* 
predicated on grace. This to me is the serious reactionary kernel of 
what's going on in his recent material, and it's a totally anti-Marxist 
standpoint. As Marx states in the _Grundrisse_: "It must be kept in 
mind that the new forces of production and relations of production do 
not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of 
the self-positing Idea..." (_Marx/Engels Collected Works_, vol. 28) 
Chairman Mao further emphasizes this: "Where do correct ideas come 
from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. 
They come from social practice, and from it alone." (“Where Do Correct 
Ideas Come From?” in _Draft Decision of the Central Committee of the 
Chinese Communist Party on Certain Problems in Our Present Rural Work_, 
Selected Works, vol. 9.)

P: Zizek's materialism integrates the symbolic and fantasy dimensions 
of human
experience within a framework where it is possible to analyze the 
processes
of social reproduction in new and, IMHO, important way.

G: While I of course acknowledge the importance of frames of analysis 
that incorporate the "symbolic and fantasy dimensions of human 
experience" in relation to social reproduction, I just don't think that 
Zizek does it very well. The work of Ernst Bloch, especially _The 
Principle of Hope_ represents a much more serious and *resolutely 
Marxist* attempt to do just this.

P: He isn't an economist or a political scientist or a sociologist but 
a psychologist
(practicing psychoanalyst--and yes psychoanalysis does "cure" although 
not
autism) so why is he being blamed for it.

G: He's being "blamed for it" because whether or not he's a 
psychoanalyst (I wasn't aware that he actually practiced), an 
economist, or a zoologist, he is a public intellectual who has chosen 
to start making a variety of wacky and wrong-headed statements about 
the practice of revolutionary politics, making him fair game. If he 
stuck to humorous attempts to read Lacan through Hitchcock and bad 
jokes, he wouldn't be an issue worth debating within a Marxist 
framework.

Again, I think Louis has made the basic point that animates my thinking 
about Zizek as well: "Frankly, I generally don't view his impact as 
negative as other Lacanians since he is so idiosyncratic that it is 
unlikely that he will ever spawn a current based on his ideas. The 
stuff he writes about popular culture I find easy to ignore as well. My 
only complaint is when he meddles into areas that he knows little 
about, like the revolutionary movement."

Really, this where my problem with Zizek lies as well - if he had never 
picked up on this absurd line about Lenin, I wouldn't be writing 
anything about him, both because I wouldn't care and because I don't 
know Lacan well enough - he'd be another hopelessly academic liberal to 
me. Instead, he's become a hopelessly academic 
liberal-leaning-to-neocon with a Lenin fetish and a pretension to 
formulate ways forward for the revolutionary Left.

Lenin's preface to _Materialism and Empiriocriticism_ seems uncannily 
apt as a closing comment about investigating the tortured twists and 
turns of Zizek's thought, wherein he states that his task "...is to 
find out what was the stumbling block to these people who under the 
guise of Marxism are offering something incredibly muddled, confused 
and reactionary." (_Materialism and Empiriocriticism_, International 
Publishers 1972).

- Gavin