The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror–especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose “lost causes” Zizek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes–the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult. A glance at the blurbs on his books provides a vivid illustration of the power of repressive tolerance. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek claims, “Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy”; but on the back cover of the book we are told that Zizek is “a stimulating writer” who “will entertain and offend, but never bore.” In The Fragile Absolute, he writes that “the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred”; but this is an example of his “typical brio and boldness.” And In Defense of Lost Causes, where Zizek remarks that “Heidegger is ‘great’ not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement,” and that “crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not ‘essential’ enough”; but this book, its publisher informs us, is “a witty, adrenalinfueled manifesto for universal values.”
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Whether or not it would be always a mistake to take Slavoj Zizek seriously, surely it would not be a mistake to take him seriously just once. He is, after all, a famous and influential thinker. So it might be worthwhile to consider Zizek’s work as if he means it–to ask what his ideas really are, and what sort of effects they are likely to have.
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Zizek endorses one after another of the practices and the values of fascism, but he obstinately denies the label. Is “mass choreography displaying disciplined movements of thousands of bodies,” of the kind Leni Riefenstahl loved to photograph, fascist? No, Zizek insists, “it was Nazism that stole” such displays “from the workers’ movement, their original creator.” /…/ “To be clear and brutal to the end,” he sums up, “there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering’s reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a well-known Jew from deportation: ‘In this city, I decide who is a Jew!’… In this city, it is we who decide what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency.”
That sentence is a remarkable moment in Zizek’s writing. It stands out even among the many instances in which Zizek, before delivering himself of some monstrous sentiment, warns the reader of the need to be harsh, never to flinch before liberal pieties. In order to defend himself against the charge of proto-fascism, Zizek falls back on Goering’s joke about Jews! This is not just the “adrenalin-fueled” audacity of the bold writer who “dares the reader to disagree.” To produce this quotation in this context is a sign, I think, of something darker. It is a dare to himself to see how far he can go in the direction of indecency, of an obsession that has nothing progressive or revolutionary about it.
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“In all honesty I have to admit that every time I travel to Israel, I experience that strange thrill of entering a forbidden territory of illegitimate violence,” he declares. “Does this mean I am (not so) secretly an anti-Semite?” (Note the disarming sincerity that expects absolution, and in Zizek’s case usually receives it.) One manifestation of this illegitimate violence, he writes, is that “the Jews, the exemplary victims … are now considering a radical ‘ethnic cleansing’ (the ‘transfer’–a perfect Orwellian misnomer–of the Palestinians from the West Bank).” In fact, “the Jews” are not considering this at all; the only political party in Israel that did advocate such an obscenity, Meir Kahane’s Kach, was banned from the Knesset for exactly that reason. But such merely empirical considerations cannot be allowed to stand in the way of Zizek’s “dialectical” conclusion. As far back as World War II, he remarks, rehearsing one of the oldest and most pointless “ironies” of modern history, “the Nazis and the radical Zionists shared a common interest…. In both cases, the purpose was a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing.’”
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Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse. Is Zizek’s audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? I hope so, because the idea that they can hear him without recoiling from him is too dismal, and frightening, to contemplate.
Adam Kirsch, senior editor, v New Republic pod naslovom The Deadly Jester
Zizek ima ogromno egzibisticnega prostora po Guantamo Bay zaporih, “shock&awe” uvajanju demokracije z 2M beguncev v Iraku, financnem polomu Friedmanovega libertarizma. Obama je redek svetli svetovni dogodek po padcu Berlinskega zidu in internetu…
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He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse.”
Mislim, da bi moral možakar še enkrat prebrat knjigo Nasilje. Namreč, očitno zaslepljen jo je bral dobeseno. Vendar pa je bila napisana – vsaj v določenih delih – ironično. “Ubitih je bilo premalo židov” pač ne pomeni, da si želi, da bi jih umrlo 20 mio, temveč je to vprašanje koliko bi jih bilo moralo umreti, da Hitler ne bi bil več mistificiran od neonacistov.
“Zizek’s audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? ”
Danes govoriti o nasilju je težko. Redko se vpraša o vzrokih, v najboljšem primeru smo polni sočutja, a to je le blaženje simptomov. Žižek se je v knjigi lotil vzrokov, kar pa je boleče. Da bi bila zadeva berljiva in bi pritegnila množico, pa seveda vsebino naredi privlačno. Skratka odgovor je: smejimo se mu, a ga tudi slišimo in razumemo. Ne v takojšnem efektu, temveč kakor šalo – v določenem zamiku. Njegove misli je potrebno – tako kot šalo – dešifrirati. In ko jo dešifiraš (misel), si jo zapomneš. Za dlje časa kot suhoparen članek.
Odurna privlačnost!
Prav njegova odurna privlačnost ga naredi kredibilnega. Prav toliko je nor, da ga ne vzameš popolnoma resno. In s tem doseže namen – prisili te misliti. Saj ne verjameš vsega, ni ti mesija, temveč Mislec (torej tudi moteči se človek).
Dvomim, da se g. Kirsch zaveda svojih simptomov…
Zizek, born and raised in a city that the Holocaust left almost without Jews (today the official Jewish Community of Slovenia estimates there are four hundred to six hundred Jews in the whole country)
Mislim, da je to isti Kirsch, ki pise/je pisal za New York Sun. TNR in NY Sun.
http://www.observer.com/2007/l.....tyle-guide