BOOKS AND ARTS DECEMBER 2, 2008
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In Defense of Lost Causes
by Slavoj
Žižek
(Verso, 504 pp., $34.95)
Violence
by Slavoj
Žižek
(Picador, 272 pp., $14)
I.
Last year the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj
Žižek published a piece in The New York Times deploring America's use of torture to extract a confession from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who is thought to have masterminded the attacks of September 11. The arguments that Žižek employed could have been endorsed without hesitation by any liberal-minded reader. Yes, he acknowledged, Mohammed's crimes were "clear and horrifying"; but by torturing him the United States was turning back the clock on centuries of legal and moral progress, reverting to the barbarism of the Middle Ages. We owe it to ourselves, Žižek argued, not to throw away "our civilization's greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity." For anyone who is familiar with Žižek's many books, what was striking about the piece was how un-Žižekian it was. Yes, there were the telltale marks—quotations from Hegel and Agamben kept company with a reference to the television show 24, creating the kind of high-low frisson for which Žižek is celebrated. But for the benefit of the Times readers, Žižek was writing, rather surprisingly, as if the United States was basically a decent country that had strayed into sin.
He was being dishonest. What Žižek really believes about America and torture can be seen in his new book, Violence, when he discusses the notorious torture photos from Abu Ghraib: "Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people; in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture." Torture, far from being a betrayal of American values actually offers "a direct insight into American values, into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the U.S. way of life." This, to Žižek's many admirers, is more like it.
It also provides a fine illustration of the sort of dialectical reversal that is Žižek's favorite intellectual stratagem, and which gives his writing its disorienting, counterintuitive dazzle. Torture, which appears to be un-American, is pronounced to be the thing that is most American. It follows that the legalization of torture, far from barbarizing the United States, is actually a step toward humanizing it. According to the old Marxist logic, it heightens the contradictions, bringing us closer to the day when we realize, as Žižek writes, that "universal human rights" are an ideological sham, "effectively the rights of white male property owners to exchange freely on the market and exploit workers and women."
Nor does Žižek simply condemn Al Qaeda's violence as "horrifying." Fundamentalist Islam may seem reactionary, but "in a curious inversion," he characteristically observes, "religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today's society. It has become one of the sites of resistance." And the whole premise of Violence, as of Žižek's recent work in general, is that resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence. "Everything is to be endorsed here," he writes in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, "up to and including religious 'fanaticism.'"
The curious thing about the Žižek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror—especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose "lost causes" Žižek 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, Žižek claims, "Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy"; but on the back cover of the book we are told that Žižek 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 Žižek 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."
In the same witty book Žižek laments that "this is how the establishment likes its 'subversive' theorists: harmless gadflies who sting us and thus awaken us to the inconsistencies and imperfections of our democratic enterprise—God forbid that they might take the project seriously and try to live it." How is it, then, that Slavoj Žižek, who wants not to correct democracy but to destroy it, has been turned into one of the establishment's pet subversives, who "tries to live" the revolution most completely as a jet-setting professor at the European Graduate School, a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Institute of Sociology, and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities?
A part of the answer has to do with Žižek's enthusiasm for American popular culture. Despite the best attempts of critical theory to demystify American mass entertainment, to lay bare the political subtext of our movies and pulp fiction and television shows, pop culture remains for most Americans apolitical and anti-political—a frivolous zone of entertainment and distraction. So when the theory-drenched Žižek illustrates his arcane notions with examples from Nip/ Tuck and Titanic, he seems to be signaling a suspension of earnestness. The effect is quite deliberate. In The Metastases of Enjoyment, for instance, he writes that "Jurassic Park is a chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood in the style of the early Antonioni or Bergman." Elsewhere he asks, "Is Parsifal not a model for Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, with Laurence Fishburne in the role of Gurnemanz?" Those are laugh lines, and they cunningly disarm the anxious or baffled reader with their playfulness. They relieve his reader with an expectation of comic hyperbole, and this expectation is then carried over to Žižek's political proclamations, which are certainly hyperbolic but not at all comic.
When, in 1994, during the siege of Sarajevo, Žižek wrote that "there is no difference" between life in that city and life in any American or Western European city, that "it is no longer possible to draw a clear and unambiguous line of separation between us who live in a 'true' peace and the residents of Sarajevo"—well, it was only natural for readers to think that he did not really mean it, just as he did not really mean that Jurassic Park is like a Bergman movie. This intellectual promiscuity is the privilege of the licensed jester, of the man whom The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed "the Elvis of cultural theory."
In person, too, Žižek plays the jester with practiced skill. Every journalist who sits down to interview him comes away with a smile on his face. Robert Boynton, writing in Lingua Franca in 1998, found Žižek "bearded, disheveled, and loud ... like central casting's pick for the role of Eastern European Intellectual." Boynton was amused to see the manic, ranting philosopher order mint tea and sugar cookies: "'Oh, I can't drink anything stronger than herbal tea in the afternoon,' he says meekly. 'Caffeine makes me too nervous.'" The intellectual parallel is quite clear: in life, as in his writing, Žižek is all bark and no bite. Like a naughty child who flashes an irresistible grin, it is impossible to stay angry at him for long.
I witnessed the same deception a few weeks ago, when Žižek appeared with Bernard-Henri L
évy at the New York Public Library. The two philosopher-celebrities came on stage to the theme music from Superman, and their personae were so perfectly opposed that they did indeed nudge each other into cartoonishness: Lévy was all the more Gallic and debonair next to Žižek, who seemed all the more wild-eyed and Slavic next to Lévy. Thus it was perfectly natural for the audience to erupt in laughter when Žižek, at one point in the generally unacrimonious evening, told Lévy: "Don't be afraid—when we take over you will not go to the Gulag, just two years of reeducation camp." Solzhenitsyn had died only a few weeks earlier, but it would have been a kind of betise to identify Žižek's Gulag with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. When the audience laughed, it was playing into his hands, and hewing to the standard line on Žižek, which Rebecca Mead laid down in a profile of him in The New Yorker a few years ago: "Always to take Slavoj Žižek seriously would be to make a category mistake."
II.
Whether or not it would be always a mistake to take Slavoj Žižek 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 Žižek's work as if he means it—to ask what his ideas really are, and what sort of effects they are likely to have.
Žižek is a believer in the Revolution at a time when almost nobody, not even on the left, thinks that such a cataclysm is any longer possible or even desirable. This is his big problem, and also his big opportunity. While "socialism" remains a favorite hate-word for the Republican right, the prospect of communism overthrowing capitalism is now so remote, so fantastic, that nobody feels strongly moved to oppose it, as conservatives and liberal anticommunists opposed it in the 1930s, the 1950s, and even the 1980s. When Žižek turns up speaking the classical language of Marxism-Leninism, he profits from the assumption that the return of ideas that were once the cause of tragedy can now occur only in the form of farce. In the visual arts, the denaturing of what were once passionate and dangerous icons has become commonplace, so that emblems of evil are transformed into perverse fun, harmless but very profitable statements of post-ideological camp; and there is a kind of intellectual equivalent of this development in Žižek's work. The cover of his book The Parallax View reproduces a Socialist Realist portrait of "Lenin at the Smolny Institute," in the ironically unironic fashion made familiar by the pseudo-iconoclastic work of Komar and Melamid, Cai Guo-Jiang, and other post-Soviet, post-Mao artists. He, too, expects you to be in on the joke. But there is a difference between Žižek and the other jokesters. It is that he is not really joking.
Like them, Žižek, who was born in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in 1949, spent his formative years under communism. As an undergraduate, he acquired what would become a lifelong fascination with the work of Jacques Lacan; later he went to Paris to be analyzed by Lacan's son-in-law and heir, Jacques-Alain Miller, and to this day Lacanian ideas and terms form one of the foundations of Žižek's thought. His academic career was evidently sidetracked by communist bureaucrats who believed, no doubt correctly, that his eccentric brilliance would make him politically unreliable. In the 1980s, he was involved in establishing Slovenia's opposition Liberal Democratic Party, and he even ran for office, unsuccessfully, in the newly independent country's elections in 1990. It would be interesting to know more about Žižek's activities in this period, so as to understand how this erstwhile liberal democrat emerged as an idolator of Lenin and a contemptuous foe of liberal democracy.
For if Žižek benefits, practically speaking, from the repudiation of the communist dream, it is also his central grievance. Since he mixes high theory and low culture—one of his books, Enjoy Your Symptom!, is a primer on Lacan that illustrates his theories with examples from Hollywood movies—it is tempting to classify him as another postmodernist. But Žižek is quite capable of distinguishing between pop culture, which is the air we all breathe, and postmodern relativism, which he unequivocally rejects. His recent work, in fact, is strictly conservative in its hostility to the libertarian and improvisatory aspects of contemporary Western culture. His attitude toward homosexuality, for instance, is that of a mid-century Freudian: he regards it as a symptom of debilitating narcissism. In Violence, he suggests that homosexuality is a step on the road to onanism: "first, in homosexuality, the other sex is excluded (one does it with another person of the same sex). Then, in a kind of mockingly Hegelian negation of negation, the very dimension of otherness is cancelled: one does it with oneself." Transsexuals are even more threatening: "The ultimate difference, the 'transcendental' difference that grounds human identity itself, thus turns into something open to manipulation: the ultimate plasticity of being human is asserted instead." When it comes to the brave new world of contemporary bioethics, Žižek is as hidebound as any Catholic traditionalist.
Žižek suspects all these postmodernist twenty-first-century phenomena because his political program is, as he recognizes, a throwback to the political modernism of the twentieth century, with its utopian longing for a violent, total transformation of human society. Only this kind of revolution, he believes, is real politics. More: only in the violence of revolution do we touch reality at all. "The ultimate and defining experience of the twentieth century," he declares, "was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to the everyday social reality—the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality." Žižek, too, feels this longing for the Real, and he recognizes that this puts him in opposition to his times, in which the Virtual does quite nicely. He deplores "one of the great postmodern motifs, that of the Real Thing towards which one should maintain a proper distance." He wants to close that distance, to seize the Real Thing.
It makes sense, then, that the popculture artifact that speaks most deeply to Žižek, and to which he returns again and again in his work, is The Matrix. In this film, you will remember, the hero, played by Keanu Reeves, is initiated into a terrible secret: the world as we know it does not actually exist, but is merely a vast computer simulation projected into our brains. When the hero is unplugged from this simulation, he finds that the human race has in reality been enslaved by rebellious robots, who use the Matrix to keep us docile while literally sucking the energy from our bodies. When Laurence Fishburne, Reeves's mentor, shows him the true state of the Earth, blasted by nuclear bombs, he proclaims: "Welcome to the desert of the real!"
When Žižek employed this phrase as the title of a short book about the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, he was not making an ironic pop reference. He was drawing an edifying parallel. Why is it, the communist revolutionary must inevitably reflect, that nobody wants a communist revolution? Why do people in the West seem so content in what Žižek calls "the Francis Fukuyama dream of the 'end of history'"? For most of us, this may not seem like a hard question to answer: one need only compare the experience of communist countries with the experience of democratic ones. But Žižek is not an empiricist, or a liberal, and he has another answer. It is that capitalism is the Matrix, the illusion in which we are trapped.
This, of course, is merely a flamboyant sci-fi formulation of the old Marxist concept of false consciousness. "Our 'freedoms,'" Žižek writes in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, "themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom." This is the central instance in Žižek's work of the kind of dialectical reversal, the clever anti-liberal inversion, that is the basic movement of his mind. It could hardly be otherwise, considering that his intellectual gods are Hegel and Lacan—masters of the dialectic, for whom reality never appears except in the form of the illusion or the symptom. In both their systems, the interpreter—the philosopher for Hegel, the analyst for Lacan—is granted absolute, unchallengeable authority. Most people are necessarily in thrall to appearances, and thereby to the deceptions of power; but the interpreter is somehow immune to them, and can singlehandedly recognize and expose the hidden meanings, the true processes at work in History or in the Unconscious.
This sacerdotal notion of intellectual authority makes both thinkers essentially hostile to democracy, which holds that the truth is available in principle to everyone, and that every individual must be allowed to speak for himself. Žižek, too, sees the similarity—or, as he says, "the profound solidarity"—between his favorite philosophical traditions. "Their structure," he acknowledges, "is inherently 'authoritarian': since Marx and Freud opened up a new theoretical field which sets the very criteria of veracity, their words cannot be put to the test the same way one is allowed to question the statements of their followers." Note that the term "authoritarian" is not used here pejoratively. For Žižek, it is precisely this authoritarianism that makes these perspectives appealing. Their "engaged notion of truth" makes for "struggling theories, not only theories about struggle."
But to know what is worth struggling for, you need theories about struggle. Only if you have already accepted the terms of the struggle—in Žižek's case, the class struggle—can you move on to the struggling theory that teaches you how to fight. In this sense, Žižek the dialectician is at bottom entirely undialectical. That liberalism is evil and that communism is good is not his conclusion, it is his premise; and the contortions of his thought, especially in his most political books, result from the need to reconcile that premise with a reality that seems abundantly to indicate the opposite.
Hence the necessity of the Matrix, or something like it, for Žižek's worldview. And hence his approval of anything that unplugs us from the Matrix and returns us to the desert of the real—for instance, the horrors of September 11. One of the ambiguities of Žižek's recent work lies in his attitude toward the kind of Islamic fundamentalists who perpetrated the attacks. On the one hand, they are clearly reactionary in their religious dogmatism; on the other hand, they have been far more effective than the Zapatistas or the Porto Alegre movement in discomfiting American capitalism. As Žižek observes, "while they pursue what appear to us to be evil goals with evil means, the very form of their activity meets the highest standard of the good." Yes, the good: Mohammed Atta and his comrades exemplified "good as the spirit of and actual readiness for sacrifice in the name of some higher cause." Žižek's dialectic allows him to have it all: the jihadis are not really motivated by religion, as they say they are; they are actually casualties of global capitalism, and thus "objectively" on the left. "The only way to conceive of what happened on September 11," he writes, "is to locate it in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism."
III.
'Will America finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real world"? Žižek asked in 2002. The answer was no. Even September 11 did not succeed in robbing the West of its liberal illusions. What remains, then, for the would-be communist? The truly dialectical answer, the kind of answer that Marx would have given, is that the adaptations of capitalism must themselves prove fatally maladaptive. This is the answer that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt gave in their popular neo-Marxist treatises Empire and Multitude: as global capitalism evolves into a kind of disembodied, centerless, virtual reality, it makes labor autonomous and renders capital itself unnecessary. But Žižek, in In Defense of Lost Causes, has no use for Negri's "heroic attempt to stick to fundamental Marxist coordinates." When it comes to the heart of the matter, what Žižek wants is not dialectic, but repetition: another Robespierre, another Lenin, another Mao. His "progressivism" is not linear, it is cyclical. And if objective conditions are different from what they were in 1789 or 1917, so much the worse for objective conditions. "True ideas are eternal, they are indestructible, they always return every time they are proclaimed dead," Žižek writes in his introduction. One of the sections in the book is titled "Give the dictatorship of the proletariat a chance!"
Of course, Žižek knows as well as anyone how many chances it has been given, and what the results have been. In his recent books, therefore, he has begun to articulate a new rationale for revolution, one that acknowledges its destined failure in advance. "Although, in terms of their positive content, the Communist regimes were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery," he explains, "at the same time they opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations." He adds elsewhere: "In spite of (or, rather, because of) all its horrors, the Cultural Revolution undoubtedly did contain elements of an enacted utopia." The crimes denoted not the failure of the utopian experiments, but their success. This utopian dimension is so precious that it is worth any number of human lives. To the tens of millions already lost in Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, Žižek is prepared to add however many more are required. He endorses the formula of the French radical philosopher Alain Badiou: "mieux vaut un desastre qu'un desetre," better a disaster than a lack of being.
This ontology of revolution raises some questions. On several occasions, Žižek describes the "utopian" moment of revolution as "divine." In support of this notion he adduces Walter Benjamin on "divine violence." "The most obvious candidate for 'divine violence,'" he writes in Violence, "is the violent explosion of resentment which finds expression in a spectrum that ranges from mob lynchings to revolutionary terror." It is true that Benjamin did, in his worst moments, endorse revolutionary violence in these terms. But for Benjamin, who had a quasi-mystical temperament, the divine was at least a real metaphysical category: when he said divine, he meant divine. For Žižek, who sometimes employs religious tropes but certainly does not believe in religion, "divine" is just an honorific—a lofty way of justifying his call for human sacrifices.
"In the revolutionary explosion as an Event," Žižek explains in In Defense of Lost Causes, "another utopian dimension shines through, the dimension of universal emancipation which, precisely, is the excess betrayed by the market reality which takes over 'the day after'—as such, this excess is not simply abolished, dismissed as irrelevant, but, as it were, transposed into the virtual realm." But if utopia is destined to remain virtual—if Robespierre is always followed by Bonaparte, and Lenin by Stalin--why should actual lives be sacrificed to it? Would it not be wiser to seek this "dimension," this "divinity," bloodlessly, outside politics, by means of the imagination?
But what if it is not the utopia that appeals to Žižek, but the blood and the sacrifice? That is certainly the impression he gives with his strange misreading of Benjamin's most famous image. In Violence, Žižek cites the passage in Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" that was inspired by Paul Klee's Angelus Novus:
"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
The moral sublimity of this image, which has made it a touchstone for so many postwar thinkers, lies in Benjamin's opposition between the violence of history and the ineffectual but tireless witness of the angel. Violence lies in the nature of things, but the angel, who is the always-imminent messiah, resists this nature absolutely: his one desire is to "make whole what has been smashed." Yet here is Žižek's response to Benjamin: "And what if divine violence is the wild intervention of this angel?" What if "from time to time he strikes back to restore the balance, to enact a revenge"? Benjamin's point could not be more completely traduced: if the angel struck back, he would no longer be the angel. He would have gone over to the side of the "progress" that kills.
That is not Benjamin's side, but it is Žižek's. And in his recent writings, as the actual—or, in his Heideggerian terminology, the "ontic"—possibility of revolution recedes, its "ontological" importance has increased. No, the Revolution will not bring the millennium. As a historical science, Marxism is false. Divine violence "strikes from out of nowhere, a means without an end." And yet "one should nevertheless insist that there is no 'bad courage.'" The courage displayed in the Revolution is its own justification, it is the image of the utopia it cannot achieve. "The urge of the moment is the true utopia."
Žižek is hardly the only leftist thinker who has believed in the renovating power of violence, but it is hard to think of another one for whom the revolution itself was the acte gratuite. For the revolutionary, Žižek instructs in In Defense of Violence, violence involves "the heroic assumption of the solitude of a sovereign decision." He becomes the "master" (Žižek's Hegelian term) because "he is not afraid to die, [he] is ready to risk everything." True, "democratic materialism furiously rejects" the "infinite universal Truth" that such a figure brings, but that is because "democracy as a rule cannot reach beyond pragmatic utilitarian inertia ... a leader is necessary to trigger the enthusiasm for a Cause." In sum, "without the Hero, there is no Event"—a formula from a video game that Žižek quotes with approval. He grants that "there is definitely something terrifying about this attitude—however, this terror is nothing less than the condition of freedom."
There is a name for the politics that glorifies risk, decision, and will; that yearns for the hero, the master, and the leader; that prefers death and the infinite to democracy and the pragmatic; that finds the only true freedom in the terror of violence. Its name is not communism. Its name is fascism, and in his most recent work Žižek has inarguably revealed himself as some sort of fascist. He admits as much in Violence, where he quotes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the "re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders of academia"—"where, I guess, I belong." There is no need to guess.
Žižek 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, Žižek insists, "it was Nazism that stole" such displays "from the workers' movement, their original creator." (He is willfully blind to the old and obvious conclusion that totalitarian form accepts content from the left and the right.) Is there something fascist about what Adorno long ago called the jargon of authenticity—"the notions of decision, repetition, assuming one's destiny ... mass discipline, sacrifice of the individual for the collective, and so forth"? No, again: "there is nothing 'inherently fascist'" in all that. Is the cult of martyrdom that surrounds Che Guevara a holdover from the death worship of reactionary Latin American Catholicism, as Paul Berman has argued? Perhaps, Žižek grants, "but—so what?" "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."
IV.
That sentence is a remarkable moment in Žižek's writing. It stands out even among the many instances in which Žižek, 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, Žižek 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.
It is not surprising that it is the subject of the Jews that calls forth this impulse in Žižek, because the treatment of Jews and Judaism in his work has long been unsettling—and in a different way from his treatment of, say, the United States, which he simply denounces. Žižek's books are loosely structured and full of digressions, more like monologues than treatises, but for that very reason, his perpetual return to the subject of the Jews functions in his writing the way a similar fixation might function in an analysand's recital: as a hint of something hidden that requires critical examination.
Typically, the form that Žižek's remarks on Jews take is that of an exposition of the mentality of the anti-Semite. This is an unimpeachable and rather common forensic device, but somehow it does not quite account for the passionate detail of Žižek's explorations. Consider, for instance, the passage in The Metastases of Enjoyment in which Žižek, in order to explicate John McCumber's theory about "the logic of the signifier" in Hegel, writes: "In order to explain this 'reflexivity,' let us resort to the logic of anti-Semitism. First, the series of markers that designate real properties are abbreviated-immediated in the marker 'Jew': (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty...)—Jew. We then reverse the order and 'explicate' the marker 'Jew' with the series (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty...)—that is, this series now provides the answer to the question 'What does "Jew" mean?'" In the ensuing discussion, Žižek goes on to recite this list of "Jewish" adjectives six more times.
It is an odd way to demonstrate a point of linguistic theory. Odd, too, is the passage in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle where Žižek discusses the ideological function of Nazi anti-Semitism: "one could say that even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews had been true (that they exploited the Germans, that they seduced German girls, and so forth...) their anti-Semitism would still have been (and was) pathological, since it repressed the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position." Why this need to keep open, as if for the sake of argument, the possibility that the Jews really were guilty of all the things of which the Nazis accused them? Why, when Žižek returns to this same line of reasoning in Violence—"even if rich Jews in the Germany of the 1930s 'really' exploited German workers, seduced their daughters," and so on—are there quotation marks around "really," as though the truth or the falsehood of Jewish villainy were a question to be postponed until it can be given fuller consideration?
These moments, unpleasant as they are, are not quite expressions of anti-Semitism. But in In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek does make plain what he might call the "fantasmatic screen" through which he sees Jews. This occurs in his discussion of Man Is Wolf to Man, the Gulag memoir of a Polish Jew named Janusz Bardach. In his book, Žižek writes, Bardach relates that when he was freed from the Kolyma camp but still forced to remain in the region, he took a job in a hospital, where he worked with a doctor on "a desperate method of providing the sick and starving prisoners with some vitamins and nutritious foodstuffs. The camp hospital had too large a stock of human blood for transfusions which it was planning to discard; Bardach reprocessed it, enriched it with vitamins from local herbs, and sold it back to the hospital." Later, when the hospital objected to this technique, Bardach found a way to do the same thing with deer blood, "and soon developed a successful business." Here is Žižek's reaction to this story: "My immediate racist association was, of course: 'Typical Jews! Even in the worst gulag, the moment they are given a minimum of freedom and space for maneuver, they start trading—in human blood!'"
Now, Žižek is telling this story against himself, as an illustration of the way "racism works as a spontaneous disposition lurking beneath the surface" of all our minds. Still, there is something chilling about that "of course": his implication is that we all harbor the association of Jews with profiteering and blood-drinking, though we ought to try to suppress it. It is at such a moment that one realizes that for Žižek, 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), Jews are a mere abstraction, objects of fantasy and speculation, that can be forced to play any number of roles in his psychic economy.
In his recent writings, as his concerns have shifted more and more toward the political, the roles reserved for Jews and Judaism have become decidedly more negative. True, Žižek is less straightforwardly hostile to Israel than many European leftists. In his chapter on the subject in Violence, he writes that "everybody knows the only viable solution" to the Middle East stalemate is the two-state solution, with a Jewish state and a Palestinian state side by side. Yet Žižek's sovereign disdain for fact, along with his imaginative fixation on the Jews, ensures that his portrait of Israel is a malign fantasy.
"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 Žižek'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 Žižek'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.'"
This method of alleviating European guilt by casting "the exemplary victims" of the Holocaust as in some sense the agents of holocaust is far from unknown on the European left. But what is less common, even there, is Žižek's resurrection of some of the oldest tropes of theological and philosophical anti-Semitism. The key text here is Žižek's book The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, which appeared in 2000. It addresses "the delicate question of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity."
In Žižek's telling, that relationship is sickeningly familiar. Invoking Freud's Moses and Monotheism, Žižek asserts that Judaism harbors a "'stubborn attachment' ... to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order as its spectral supplement." Thanks to this Jewish stubbornness, he continues, "the Jews did not give up the ghost; they survived all their ordeals precisely because they refused to give up the ghost." This vision of Judaism as an undead religion, surviving zombie-like long past the date of its "natural" death, is taken over from Hegel, who writes in the Phenomenology of Mind about the "fatal unholy void" of this "most reprobate and abandoned" religion. This philosophical anti-Judaism, which appears in many modern thinkers, including Kant, is a descendant of the Christian anti-Judaism that created the figure of the Wandering Jew, who also "refused to give up the ghost."
It makes sense, then, that Žižek should finally cast his anti-Judaism in explicitly theological terms. Why is it that so many of the chief foes of totalitarianism in the second half of the twentieth century were Jews—Arendt, Berlin, Levinas? One might think it is because the Jews were the greatest victims of Nazi totalitarianism, and so had the greatest stake in ensuring that its evil was recognized. But Žižek has another explanation: the Jews are stubbornly rejecting the universal love that expresses itself in revolutionary terror, just as they rejected the love of Christ. "No wonder," he writes in the introduction to In Defense of Lost Causes, "that those who demand fidelity to the name 'Jews' are also those who warn us against the 'totalitarian' dangers of any radical emancipatory movement. Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards allembracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror."
Stalinism, in this reading, is the heir to Christianity, and yet another attempt to overcome law with love. Here Žižek is explicating the views of Badiou, to whom the book is dedicated, but it is safe to say that Žižek endorses those views, since precisely the same logic is at work in The Fragile Absolute, where he writes of "the Jewish refusal to assert love for the neighbor outside the confines of the Law," as against the Christian "endeavor to break the very vicious cycle of Law/sin." "No wonder," Žižek says, "that, for those fully identified with the Jewish 'national substance' ... the appearance of Christ was a ridiculous and/or traumatic scandal."
It does not bother Žižek that this hoary dichotomy is built on a foundation of complete ignorance of both Judaism and Christianity. Nothing could be lazier than to recycle the ancient Christian myth of Judaism as a religion of "mere law." And nothing could be more insulting to Christianity than to reduce it romantically to antinomianism, which has always been a Christian heresy. "Christianity," Žižek remarks, "is ... a form of anti-wisdom par excellence, a crazy wager on Truth." But surely it is no part of the Pascalian wager that murdering millions of people will help to win it.
And there is no doubt that this scale of killing is what Žižek looks forward to in the Revolution. "What makes Nazism repulsive," he writes, "is not the rhetoric of a final solution as such, but the concrete twist it gives to it." Perhaps there is supposed to be some reassurance for Jews in that sentence; but perhaps not. For in In Defense of Lost Causes, again paraphrasing Badiou, Žižek writes: "To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the 'Jewish question' is the 'final solution' (their annihilation), because Jews ... are the ultimate obstacle to the 'final solution' of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility." I hasten to add that Žižek dissents from Badiou's vision to this extent: he believes that Jews "resisting identification with the State of Israel," "the Jews of the Jews themselves," the "worthy successors to Spinoza," deserve to be exempted on account of their "fidelity to the Messianic impulse."
In this way, Žižek's allegedly progressive thought leads directly into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor. In his New York Times piece against torture, Žižek worried that the normalization of torture as an instrument of state was the first step in "a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone." This is a good description of Žižek's own work. 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 Žižek'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 is a senior editor at The New Republic.
This article originally ran in the December 3, 2008, issue of the magazine.
142 comments
Brilliant review, and much needed. I suspect that much of Zizek's success in certain circles is simply due to a certain conformism -- at one point, the guy was crowned the king of intellectual cool, and whoever should dare to find fault with him knows s/he will be accused of just not having the brains to understand the maestro's ingenuity.
- PetraMB
November 16, 2008 at 8:59pm
"The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror--especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, ...the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult." Surprise, surprise. I don't know what it is with Lefty fascination with these revolutionaries, why they're enamored of Che and the Palestinian revolutionaries. Must be some juvenile, knee-jerk reaction that wants to throw off the Man's power strictures. Lefties, get over yourselves.
- Marcy
November 19, 2008 at 5:57pm
People like Zizek were once liquidated by the hundreds under the very regimes which he allegedly ... hmmm...espouses? No, that isn't quite the word - spotlights rather, or, limelights so that he himself, Zizek!, in all his Zizekatude might have a proper foil from which his zany intellectualism will appear legitimate. I think we must at least be grateful to liberal democracy for making Zizek possible. But this is indeed the role of the holy fool at court, is it not? To put the regime up to a distorting mirror in order to keep it honest. This is just as Kirsch puts it: Zizkek as the court jester, which is the holy fool's western counterpart - a further dialectical stage, as Zizek might put it, on the way to our current era in which there are neither kings nor courts in which jesters may appear, but in their place stand liberal democratic monoliths upon the darkling vale of post-history. Behold! There is Zizek lampooning in the place where the jester once stood. I learned quite early that any serious intellectual romance with Zizek is doomed to end in a melodramatically tragic denoument, either by drowning (in the flood of his verbiage), or hanging (by the noose of his illogic), or gunshot (by the impact of his hyperbole). Wedded bliss notwithstanding, the man is definitely good for more than a couple one-night stands in your brain, if only to lend it some levity.
- Seraphim Winslow
November 20, 2008 at 10:24am
Where is Mark Lilla when we need him most. He would have done a proper and deserved hatchet job on Žižek. Why such a pseudo-sophisticated nutcase gets so much attention is something a good psychoanalyst might be able to figure out.
- Tibor Machan
November 25, 2008 at 8:44pm
Really excellent article, a brilliant unmasking of that disgusting man. Well done, Adam Kirsch & Leon.
-
November 28, 2008 at 7:25am
Zizek has always struck me as someone who lives in a world of words. In a world of words the words you use need only define and defend other words. Theoretically, of course, you can justify practically anything. Also, Zizek's revolutionary brio glorifies the sort of violence that makes children disappear. When he speaks of tumult and terror, what happens to the kids? to the babies and the infants? Is it just too bad they have to be maimed and murdered as well for the radical cause? On the other side, however, Zizek exposes the pain and suffering that goes on day in and day out in this global economy. Capitalism reduces just about everything to the bottom line. Those who labor for the that bottom line, however, almost never see much coming back to them. Instead, they are used and then expediently exposed of when the CFO finds someone who, in order to survive or raise a family, will work for even less. george walton
- george walton
November 29, 2008 at 1:53am
If anyone is guilty of torturing anything, it's Zizek: the man guilty of performing countless unanesthetized lobotomies on undergraduates and English departments.
- KC
November 29, 2008 at 8:58am
Stupid. These people are so stupid it is shocking. We don't need to "review" them anymore, we need to call them stupid. This is so tragic. What happened to our institutes of higher learning? We have a world-wide economic crisis and a whole moment of so called intellectuals on the left espousing the ideals of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. It is dangerous and for the "lefties" to not to see this truly underscores their stupidity.
- cblack
November 29, 2008 at 9:32am
This Zizek is a type specimen of the kind of unworldly silliness that infects and degrades academia like a terminal drug habit. Whether or not you criticize it, this kind of attention only legitimizes it. If it were not for the unfortunate fact that this kind of bilge is represented as serious thought to our young people it would not be worth our time.
- WBannard
November 29, 2008 at 10:15am
Whoa... this is the worst review I have ever seen. It seems that the most common and probably most correct criticism of Zizek's work is that it is unintelligible to the public or at least to those that have not read much of his work. All through out this review there are glaring mis-characterizations and obvious ignorance to everything that stands behind his work. This review is just a seven page ad hominem rant, with hilarious statements such as: "Zizek, too, feels this longing for the Real." Seriously? Are you people joking, it is almost as if no one has even read to understand, only looked for phrase that are jarring and despicable to your ideological frameworks. Zizek gave an anecdote once, about how on his office door he has a picture of Stalin on it. It isn't there because he praises him like an idol (if you have read anything, you will realize that he despises Stalin, Lenin and Mao. What he admires in Lenin was his inital "spirit" of the Revolution, not what the Revolution was and what he ALWAYS advocates is constant responsibility for the actions of humanity - so because he is a Marxist and Stalin, Mao and Lenin mobilized behind that thought, he does not reject them and displace responsibility like some child, he instead radically accepts it), it is there to separate those he wants to talk to with those he doesn't want to talk to, essentially an ignorance and intelligent test that apparently the author nor any of the other commentators here would pass. There once was a time where I thought there was some divine hope within humanity, a hope which, interestingly enough, can be found very prominently within Zizek's work. A hope, that Zizek would say, for the masses to mobilize against the ideological machine that brainwashes us all. But, articles like this have only taught me one thing: ignorance and blind faith in ideological apparatuses is so strong that it will never be overcome. Hurray for the end of humanity, or at least the death of Hope. What a joke.
- I'm an idiot who doesn't read
November 29, 2008 at 10:30am
Critique Zizek's socialism and totalitarianism if you want - his "rehabilitation" of Stalin makes me sick. He undoubtedly understands himself to be providing a dialecitcal position, but it's still disgusting. However, if you're going to criticize Zizek you better have some basic grasp of his Hegelian/Lacanian lingo/oreintation, and Kirsh clearly doesn't. Throughout this review complicated ideas like the Real, pathology, and the Virtual are thoroughly trampled. (For instance, "the Real" is not Kantian noumena - things in themselves. (just as the central message of Buddhism is not 'everyman for himself.') I'm delighted to see this review here, and I love reviews of philosophical texts from people who aren't themselves philosophers, but there is a certain responsibility that comes with this - a responsibility to understand, not just react - that Kirsch doesn't measure up to. Zizek is a totalitarian but he's not a statist. He wants to politicize the economy for the proletariat - not for the dictators. To some, this is a distinction without a difference (or just a slippery slope) but a good book review presents the author fairly. Kirsch really just wants to swim against what he takes to be the fashionable left. The irony is that there is no philosopher more opposed to the fashionable left, more opposed to multiculturalism/historicism/relativism than Zizek.
- benberger
November 29, 2008 at 11:53am
Are you seriously accusing Zizek of antisemitism?
- Will Roberts
November 29, 2008 at 1:33pm
Despicable? Zizek would no doubt take that as a real compliment. Articles like these are for those looking for an excuse to avoid really having to think. Thought sounds to them too much like freedom...
- oh dear
November 29, 2008 at 1:49pm
The case of this 'deadly jester' is nothing more, or less, than another arrogant man falling victim to his own empty rhetoric. He has made a successful career out of it, but after a decade, two or three, and the coterie of eager fans hanging on one's witticisms and well placed quotes of other notable men, everybody runs out od ideas and things to say. That he can not stop is the combined matter of economics and human nature. However, what irked me personally in this review is the endless recitations about communism that display as much depth and knowledge as a schoolboy could have on the matter of women. Zizek actually grew up in a communist country, Mr. Kirsch didn't. I grew up in the same country as Mr. Zizek, although a later generation, which means that I benefited from much more prosperous environment than the post-war era when he was born. It was a decent country. Not without corruption, bad management, demagogy..- wait, why does this sound universal? What it did have over many other countries, however, is that it didn't raise its children in the shadow of a deeply hypocritical class system. And while I support denouncing nonsense, especially that of ideological and religious types, it is very disheartening to see it perpetually promoted in other forms everywhere you turn.
- Ivana
November 29, 2008 at 3:23pm
Almost fifty years ago, Walter Kaufmann identified the fundamental deficiency underlying and vitiating the basic exegetical strategy employed by Kirsch in his critical review of Zizek: Kirsch fails to recognize that "[t]he writings of Hegel and Plato [or any philosopher worthy of the title] abound in admittedly one-sided statements that are clearly meant to formulate points of view that are then shown to be inadequate and are countered by another perspective. Thus an impressive quilt quotation could be patched together to connivence gullible readers that Hegel [for instance] was--depending on the 'scholar's' plans--either emphatically for or utterly opposed to, say, 'equality.' But the understanding of Hegel [or, again, any philosopher] would be advanced ever so much more by citing one of his remarks about equality [or whatever the issue might be] in context, showing how it is a step in an argument that is designed to lead the reader to a better comprehension of equality and not to enlist his emotions either for it or against it." (From Shakespeare to Existentialism, 'The Hegel Myth and Its Method,' pg. 99) I will give one example of how Kaufmann's observations apply to Kirsch's review. At one point, near the beginning of his review, Kirsch claims that, according to Zizek, "fundamentalist Islam may seem reactionary, but 'in a curious inversion,' he characteristically observes, 'religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today's society. It has become one of the sites of resistance.'" Yes, these are Zizek's own words (from 'On Violence'), but in order for their meaning to be properly understood (which, of course, is an indispensable precondition for their being properly assessed; one is not in a position to affirm or deny a claim if he doesn't even know what it means in the first place), they must be situated within the context in which he wrote them. The point Zizek was trying to make was very specific, and not at all the sort of sweeping characterization of fundamentalism that Kirsch, through his selective quotation, misrepresents it as being: Zizek's point was not that fundamentalism in general, in all respects, has become a place "from which one can deploy critical doubts about today's societies", but that it can be viewed as such in one very particular respect. And what is that respect? Well, if you want a full understanding of it, I recommend doing what Kirsch failed to do: actually read Zizek's book (with a functioning intellect, employing basic reading comprehension skills). But, basically, it boils down to Zizek's contention that in contemporary western society, science provides people with "a refuge from uncertainties, promising--and in some measure delivering--the miracle of freedom from thought, while churches have become sanctuaries for doubt" (Zizek, quoting John Gray, pg. 81) In this respect--and only in this respect--Zizek goes on to claim that "[s]cience and religion have changed places: today, science provides the security religion once guaranteed. In a curious inversion ..." (and then the rest of the above-given quote that Kirch bastardized in his review; ibid.) Now, one may very well disagree with the premise upon which Zizek bases this claim (i.e. the "curious inversion"); perhaps Zizek is totally wrong, or perhaps (as is more likely) he is partially right and partially wrong. But my point has nothing to do with whether Zizek is right or wrong; it's simply that if one disagrees with Zizek without (a la Kirsch) keeping this premise in mind, one is not really disagreeing with Zizek himself, but a straw man version of Zizek. Again, one isn't in a position to weigh in on the veracity of a claim if he doesn't even understand what the claim means, what it contends, in the first place. This is just one example, which I have just selected for illustrative purposes, of how Kirsch repeatedly misreads Zizek in his review. Although the specifics change from case to case, Kirsch commits the same general mistake (really a sin against the act of reading itself) over and over again; almost every single one of his citations involves a passage that it patently torn out of its context. Unfortunately, it would require dozens of pages for me to demonstrate this in detail; as can be seen above, it can take multiple paragraphs to rectify just one misimpression that Kirsch can create with a single sentence. Here, we encounter a situation that bears an unfortunate resemblance to the one those on the left often find themselves facing when they debate the talking points of right wing hacks: every single one of the talking points involves a gross oversimplification of whatever the issue happens to be, and thus, in order to refute it, one must first respond by noting all of the complexities, nuances, subtleties, etc. that the hack's point has obscured. This, however, requires time, patience and effort--both on the part of the respondent and his or her audience (since its success is predicated upon their attention span extending beyond that required by a sound-bite)--whereas the hack's talking point requires none of those things. He can therefore get away with intellectual murder, since he can spout twenty talking points in the time it takes his respondent to finish taking apart a single one of them (and usually, the respondent won't even get that far, since his or her line of argument is interrupted by another one of the hack's talking points, which he or she will then need to respond to, and so on and so forth, the result of which is that he or she is unable to fully respond to any of the hack's points, thereby creating the appearance of the hack having won, since the respondent looks as if he or she was stumped by the hack's points). Ultimately, there's not much point in engaging with such a hack, since he is not interested in a genuine debate of the issues, but in scoring ideological points in front of his audience. I suppose the same goes for Kirsch and his review--especially since the latter either resulted from A.) sheer lack of intelligence and/or inability to read properly, in which case there's no point in taking his review seriously, or B.) intentional misreading and a desire to misrepresent Zizek, in which case there is also no point in taking his review seriously. Perhaps the more interesting question to ask of Kirsch's review is: what sort of ideological points was he trying to score with his review? I suspect one of the primary points is one I often observe establishment-type ("moderate") liberal intellectuals trying to make: basically, he is trying to demonstrate his establishment/"moderate" bone fides, by saying, 'look at the terrible things this extremist, who claims the mantle of my side of the ideological spectrum, says about these issues [fundamentalism, terror, Communism, etc.], and look how adamantly I'm taking him to task, look how I'm tsk tsk-ing him at every point, look how I'm calling a spade a spade in regards to the moral shortcomings of his thinking, thereby demonstrating the moral merits of my own thinking! Look at me! Look at me! Look how 'reasonable,' 'common-sensical,' 'in the mainstream,' 'measured'--in short, 'moderate'--my positions and thinking are!'" For me, that's the subtext of a piece of writing like Kirsch's review. It has nothing to do with Zizek himself or his ideas themselves; Zizek and his ideas--or really, almost effortlessly created straw men versions of them --simply provide an easy target for Kirsch, in his attempt to "prove himself." In other words, Kirsch's review is not really about Zizek; it's about Kirsch himself.
- Daniel
November 29, 2008 at 5:11pm
Re: Zizek, I am convinced Alan Sokal will soon step forward and own up to his latest hoax: hiring an escapee from a Balkan lunatic asylum to pretend to be a philosopher, the better to the expose the oceanic emptiness of today's trendy academia.
- Rictus
November 29, 2008 at 6:01pm
I guess my criticism was too raw and rude, so I will tone it down a slight bit. This review is terrible, apparently the author of this article has never read any of Zizek's work. Some examples... The discussion of the "Real" at the top of Page 3 is completely wrong. He doesn't want to "seize" the Real, he doesn't "long" for the Real. Maybe you should read his book "The Passion for the Real," about how the "longing" for the Real and the attempt at "seizing" the Real has caused pretty much EVERY ATROCITY KNOWN TO MAN. "It makes sense, then, that the popculture artifact that speaks most deeply to Zizek... is The Matrix" This is just hilarious. A short while ago there was a book with a series of articles and essays but people making philosophical sense from the Matrix. They asked Zizek to contribute to it, so he did. His contribution amounted to how stupid the Matrix is, how it failed to come even close to something worthy of praise and pretty much just mocked it at every turn. Again, please read before you make comments. I'm done, have fun with your ignorance.
- Et Cetera
November 29, 2008 at 7:58pm
With all due respect, Adam, it's pretty clear that you have read (or, at least, understood) very little, if any of Zizek's body of work. I will not engage in flame wars over your politics or your interpretations of and responses to Zizek's theories; I aim only to point out several instances in which you are quite simply wrong in your characterisation of his views. The fun begins with the very first paragraph, where you discuss Zizek's article about torture from last year. You attempt to stick Zizek with the view that torture should be legalised. This is not even remotely close to what he has advocated; in fact, when he discusses Dershowitz and other "honest opponents" of torture who say that it should be done through 'legitimate' channels, he strongly opposes this notion and says that, if and when torture is justifiable, it should still never be normalised, justified by being made 'legal.' Instead, the exceptional and horrible nature of the act must be retained by keeping it banned. That is, quite literally, the exact opposite of the position you insinuated Zizek might hold. I'm not sure where you see a contradiction between the 2007 article and his other works on torture, aside from the straw man claim you arbitrarily inserted into the former about the US being a fundamentally decent country; if you read the article, it's pretty clear that he is critical of status quo culture and ideology. Your comment about "humanizing" the US also demonstrates a lack of knowledge about Zizek, who is a devout anti-humanist. You then try to stick him with a vulgar Marxist view of trying to make contradictions _worse_ in order to expose the failures of the system. You miss Zizek's actual point about torture, which is that _these failures are already apparent_ in the contemporary debate surrounding the issue. Next comes your whopper about Al-Qaeda. The quote you provide from Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle may indeed be pretty damning.... IF IT WERE ABOUT AL-QAEDA AT ALL, as you disingenuously implied. Zizek is ACTUALLY talking on that page about a Brazilian novel. What he is endorsing is the attempt to form utopian communities outside the domain of the state. You then proceed to mash up a bunch of short, out-of-context quotes with no explanation in order to make Zizek sound even more ridiculous. I'm not going to bother hunting down every one of those quotes and explaining why your implied connotations are inaccurate, but it should go without saying that you can't accurately represent, say, Zizeks' views on Hitler in a sentence, and that _maybe_ he has a more nuanced theoretical point behind the notion of "essential" violence than "Hitler should have killed more people." If you've read any of his works discussing Nazism you already know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't then you're an idiot for trying to evaluate the legacy of one of the most prolific contemporary theorists based on a shoddy review that makes more references to other books and articles than it does to the book it's supposed to be reviewing and only actually discusses a handful of out-of-context arguments made throughout the book to use as straw men rather than attempting to trace the argument of the book as a whole or evaluate any of the headier theoretical claims. Zizek has been plenty explicit about the nature of his endorsement of things like Stalinism, Lenin's revolution, etc.; it's not a literal reproduction of the (obviously and horrifically failed) particular content of these historical events, but some formal aspect of them, some 'grain of truth' that is worth ferreting out. I thought you might be on to a valid point highlighting the tensions between Zizek's theories and his own daily life practices. This is indeed a salient question for any to ask; how practical is a radical ontology if its foremost advocate seems largely unable to put it into practice in a meaningful way? However, this extremely complex issue instead became a vehicle for you to poke fun at Zizek's use of pop culture analogies. You seem to view them solely as comic relief, which may be part of why you understood so little of Zizek's work; he makes actual, serious arguments with those examples. He picks familiar, accessible content to make his arguments easier to follow and because he enjoys pop culture, not as some sinister plot to mask his radicalism (which is fairly obvious in all of his works). I gave up trying to finish your "review" after finding so many glaring mistakes on the first page. Zizek boldly makes many sweeping, controversial claims and it would not be difficult to write a piece that thoughtfully engaged him on one or more of these issues. Trying to discredit the man's tens of thousands of pages of writings with a 7-page review consisting largely of overblown rhetoric and out-of-context quotations is not helpful to you or your audience. You might as well try to summarise modern history on a napkin. 7 pages of Adam Kirsch misinterpreting Lacanian theory (do you even know who Lacan is?) is of no value to anyone. If anyone is actually interested in knowing what Zizek does or does not believe, you should try reading some Zizek. He can be a tough read (as Adam discovered), but even if you disagree passionately with his politics, I'd wager his theoretical writings on the nature of being and subjectivity will still provide some food for thought. Anyone who takes such questions seriously should read Zizek, or another Lacanian, at some point without the hostile/ADD reading style employed by this reviewer.
- Ryan
November 29, 2008 at 8:23pm
Despicable ? Why bother despising someone who is merely laughable ?
- brucds
November 29, 2008 at 8:50pm
Poorly done review - adding some heat (in the reductio ad hitlerum vein) but not much light on the Zizek phenomenon.
- disappointed
November 29, 2008 at 9:36pm
You can tell when a reviewer like Kirsch is hopelessly out of his depth when he manages to lump Freud and Marx together into a kind of Reductio ad Hiterlum hatchet job on "the academic left" in the guise of Slavoj Zizek. The assertions about Walter Benjamin are laughable - I wonder if Kirsch has really read any of the books here, because there isn't anything resembling engagement with the ideas in them. There is something afoot with this Zizek phenomenon when he rates a review in the New Republic but other than that there is nothing to learn from this piece.
- Disappointed Reader
November 29, 2008 at 9:55pm
Why would anyone waste 7 pages on this tripe? Old Zizek has found a very nice way to make a living as he tries "tries to live the revolution most completely as a jet-setting professor at the European Graduate School, a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Institute of Sociology, and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities." Seems like a pretty good gig to me. Tune the fool out and don't waste time criticizing him....its like responding to trolls. :-) Not that anyone cares what I think.....
- toritto
November 29, 2008 at 9:57pm
Adam, the review was excellent. That the European academic community actually embraces, nevermind employs, an philosphical fraud like Zizek is an embarrassment to their institutions. His need to invoke Ernst Nolte and other such racists and anti-semites in the extreme right and left fringes, is a clear sign of how pathetic Zizek really is. Why couldn't have been born 50 years earlier so that could have enjoyed the loving embrace of Stalinism firsthand?
- Aaron Jacobs
November 30, 2008 at 12:07am
This is the best article I've read in The New Republic since Camille Paglia's hilarious review of the Presbyterian church's report on sexuality back in the 1990s. Many, many thanks.
- Frank Lee
November 30, 2008 at 12:19am
The rather different review of the same book (pasted below) may be worth considering before rendering such extreme conclusions about Zizek's works. Below, Terry Eagleton on "In Defense of Lost Causes": "The self-consciously outrageous case the book has to argue is that there is a “redemptive” moment to be plucked from such failed revolutionary ventures as Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Žižek is by no means a champion of political terror: the Mao he offers us here, for example, is the mass murderer who mused that “half of China may have to die” in the Great Leap Forward, and who remarked that though a nuclear war might blow a hole in the planet, it would leave the cosmos largely untouched. His aim is not to justify such demented views, but to make things harder for the typical liberal middle-class dismissal of them. In pursuing this goal, the book offers us a wealth of political and philosophical insight; but it is not at all clear that it validates its central thesis."
- Skeptical
November 30, 2008 at 1:49am
Hmmm. Without meaning to be too "dialectical", it is worth acknowledging where Zizek _does_ have a point. The malaise he obviously appeals to -- some anti-liberal, proto-totalitarian sentiment -- must be real, or he wouldn't be so popular. I don't know how to resolve the tension/dialectic/whatever between the local, constrained, conservative, restrained, continuous, etc. on the one hand, and the universal, radical, ruptured, total, etc. on the other. As a reformed protestant, I must admit that sometimes, I find the radical nature of Christianity disturbing (compared with, say, Judaism or even Catholicism). But I don't think the standard anti-totalitarian response to Zizek is quite enough. Somehow, we have to acknowledge the evil of revolution without simply brushing aside the desire/need for overarching meanings worth fighting for, or perhaps more importantly, dying for. Maybe the messianic impulse should be confined to and fulfilled by the religious sphere, and we shouldn't hope for redemption through politics. But that seems to be cheapen both simultaneously. Hopefully some political/philosophical genius will be able to come up with a good resolution, or already has.
- Leon Di Stefano
November 30, 2008 at 2:00am
Excellent. I would like to translate and publish this article in my own language. But how can I get in touch with the author? intellectusagens@gmail.com
- VV
November 30, 2008 at 6:48am
The notion that many young intellectuals dedicate today their undergraduate, graduate, and post graduate years to an analysis of an inconsequential buffoon is surely present in the back of their excellent minds. That they might also be the promoters of a dangerous joker is only now beginning to become clear. The fact that Zizek is a totalitarian elephant in a liberal china store was also quite obvious for a while. But that he may also be a repressed anti-semitic patient tended by a horde of Jewish academicians around the globe is a part of Kirsch’s achievement (despite of his occasional self-righteous and politically-correct tone).
- David
November 30, 2008 at 1:40pm
Perhaps we should consider the context a bit? In the name of liberal democracy, this same journal enthusiastically supported the invasion of Irak. The review's author does not seem to be aware of facts as these, or rather he ignores the context of his own review. Thrashing Zizek seems a bit easy if you take the moral high ground from the beginning. But nowadays, american liberal democracy seems to be quite a deadly cause too. Perhaps Zizek does well in taking some critical distance from liberal democracy, risking fury as expressed by this review in the process?
- Enrique
November 30, 2008 at 4:18pm
This is a well-written piece, and something like this had to be written. It makes a good, single-minded, polemical case for taking seriously the distasteful elements of Zizek's writings. The virtue of something like this is that many fans of Zizek aren't quite as radical as he is. Many people want the sophisticated ideological critique (not to mention the entertainment) without being willing to affirm the positive alternative as unashamedly (shamelessly??) as he does. Or without being willing to decide whether he should be taken seriously after all. So I will be on the lookout for responses to this piece and I hope that some of them take it as seriously as Kirsch takes Zizek. However, it would be very unfortunate if this serves as the final word for some people on Zizek. What Kirsch never ever raises (perversely) is whether there is anything at all to the psychoanalytic critique of ideology and the particular critique of capitalism. Just as fans of Zizek need to be pressed on whether the sophisticated critique leads so obviously to Zizek's normative alternatives, people frustrated by Zizek's terminology or repulsed by his indecency can't point to those features of his thought in response to the substantive aspects of his psychoanalytic critique of capitalism and popular culture. The fact is that Zizek is (if repetitive and self-indulgent) one of the few genuinely interesting people writing these days and to reduce his project to unadulterated Stalinism, academic fascism and crypto-anti-Semitism. It seems like the point here in this piece is not to raise valid claims against Zizek and the Zizekians or to open a new chapter in the debate, but rather to close the book entirely, to give people cover for dismissing outright a very creative thinker. In this regard, this piece reminds me of the 2007 Paul Berman "expose" of Tariq Ramadan in TNR: forget the books, don't read the writings, what we have here is a antiliberal, quasi-fascist anti-Semite - case closed. It's too bad, for Kirsch is a good writer and could have written a better piece. Alas, I suspect he was writing not so much for people that may have actually read Zizek (or been tempted to) but to an annoyed and perturbed non-intellectual audience.
- afm
November 30, 2008 at 4:37pm
I find it ironic that this article brings to mind the request made in a prayer repeated in my Lutheran church something along the lines of "Forgive us for sins which committed by the things that we have done and for those committed by the things that we have left undone." One can easily see mote in the eyes of the Communists and Nazis and miss the logs in our own eyes. I haver read endless essays on poverty in Cuba being the result of Communism. Even the devastation of Hurricanes have been blamed on shoddy Communist building techniques. But what of Haiti just a few miles away. No country represents the American project in South America more than Haiti. For close to two hundred years America has repeatedly, invaded occupied, defended and removed leaders in this nation. There is not an inch or a moment of Haiti that doesn't carry the mark of America. It is in Haiti where we see thousands of children starving and where tens of thousands are permanently retarded from malnutrition. A person who has never experienced poverty may really believe that there is nothing worse than death. But there truly is. The people in New Orleans weren't just poor at the moment Katrina hit. These are people who have been poor for generations. People who never saw a day without poverty and fear since their ancestors where taken from Africa. When Zizek talks about cruelty of the law I know what he is talking about. When I hear conservative Christians talk about taxes as being a form of theft and aid to the poor as being immoral, I know they are damning millions to the endless slavery of poverty. Living in New Orleans one could see the utter ridiculousness of Bill Cosby like calls to personal responsibility. There were whole neighborhoods in New Orleans where one could walk to exhaustion without seeing a place of gainful employment. Places where the police never came when called, places where murders where not investigated, bullets flew with random regularity and bodies rotted in streets unmourned and unmoved. To blame the poor residents of this earthly hell for not being able to claw their way out is its own kind of holocaust. I remember talking to a surgeon who had worked in Africa in fifties and sixties. He told me he had treated thousands upon thousands of people who he now knew had AIDS. But, because people were dying all the time of malnutrition an untold unknown diseases no one thought about the implications of these people dying. Imagine what thirty more years of research could have done, how many millions of lives could have been saved. The Utopians of turn of the century were willing to kill millions for Utopia. But we are willing to allow millions to live in earthly hell for generations, and the left Behind amongst are willing to damn the to an eternity in hell thereafter. How many would you be willing to kill to end the New Orleans and Haitis of the world? Having lived in New Orleans, I would have to say a lot- a whole lot.
- Robert Lee Hotchkiss
November 30, 2008 at 4:37pm
I find it ironic that this article brings to mind the request made in a prayer repeated in my Lutheran church something along the lines of "Forgive us for sins which committed by the things that we have done and for those committed by the things that we have left undone." One can easily see mote in the eyes of the Communists and Nazis and miss the logs in our own eyes. I haver read endless essays on poverty in Cuba being the result of Communism. Even the devastation of Hurricanes have been blamed on shoddy Communist building techniques. But what of Haiti just a few miles away. No country represents the American project in South America more than Haiti. For close to two hundred years America has repeatedly, invaded occupied, defended and removed leaders in this nation. There is not an inch or a moment of Haiti that doesn't carry the mark of America. It is in Haiti where we see thousands of children starving and where tens of thousands are permanently retarded from malnutrition. A person who has never experienced poverty may really believe that there is nothing worse than death. But there truly is. The people in New Orleans weren't just poor at the moment Katrina hit. These are people who have been poor for generations. People who never saw a day without poverty and fear since their ancestors where taken from Africa. When Zizek talks about cruelty of the law I know what he is talking about. When I hear conservative Christians talk about taxes as being a form of theft and aid to the poor as being immoral, I know they are damning millions to the endless slavery of poverty. Living in New Orleans one could see the utter ridiculousness of Bill Cosby like calls to personal responsibility. There were whole neighborhoods in New Orleans where one could walk to exhaustion without seeing a place of gainful employment. Places where the police never came when called, places where murders where not investigated, bullets flew with random regularity and bodies rotted in streets unmourned and unmoved. To blame the poor residents of this earthly hell for not being able to claw their way out is its own kind of holocaust. I remember talking to a surgeon who had worked in Africa in fifties and sixties. He told me he had treated thousands upon thousands of people who he now knew had AIDS. But, because people were dying all the time of malnutrition an untold unknown diseases no one thought about the implications of these people dying. Imagine what thirty more years of research could have done, how many millions of lives could have been saved. The Utopians of turn of the century were willing to kill millions for Utopia. But we are willing to allow millions to live in earthly hell for generations, and the Left Behind amongst are willing to damn the to an eternity in hell thereafter.
- Robert Lee Hotchkisss
November 30, 2008 at 5:54pm
It seems to me that one finally has to make a point and be willing to be criticized for it instead of retreating into whatever rhetorical device happens to be most convenient at the moment. I've read bits and pieces in articles about Zizek and I don't know that I will ever make the time to read him because life is too serious to me to spend the time it would take to master someone whose goal in life seems to be always remaining plastic and unserious.
- charlotte realist
November 30, 2008 at 6:03pm
finally--i offered similar but not nearly as detailed criticism in an essay i wrote called "slow writing" which appeared on INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION and will also appear in the JOURNAL OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING. very helpful why is it that the most totalitarian and authoritarian critics of america appeal so strongly to americans? lindsay waters
- lindsay waters
November 30, 2008 at 9:16pm
This is a rhetorically brilliant invective, no doubt about that. But also, crucially, a genuine mis-reading of Zizek at so many junctures; or deliberately so. The latter seems to be the likelier, particularly in the passage insinuating his oh-so-thinly-veiled anti-simitic tendencies. The author disavows Zizek's calls for singularity and ruthlessness of affirmative reason and action, the reversal of what exposes the author claimed here, in genuine bad taste. It seems that Zizek's intellectual project has upset the right(ies) again.
- EM
November 30, 2008 at 9:42pm
Thanks for this article. Zizek's reliance on other peoples thoughts to frame his lack of thought is numbing, and I'm willing to listen long, but I know that I fundamentally disagree. I think of him as a Revolutionary Descartes, all are expendable and a revolution is in order for his centralized view to continue because no one exists but him. Wouldn't it all be tragic if there really were other people though?
- Mr. Pyper
November 30, 2008 at 11:20pm
At last! A non-academic critique of Zizek that does not resort to accusing him of obscurantism or obfuscation but directly engages his work. I'll have to check the sources you quote from, but I am very chilled by your analysis.
- Benjamin
December 1, 2008 at 12:51am
Boring. Seriously, I'm bored. For all your thousands of words, this is still "sound-byte" journalism. You seem content to pick provocative sentences, even clauses, of a serious philosopher's work and then ridicule them as patently absurd. Sure Zizek's a bomb-thrower... but if you want to critique him, you ought to actually wrestle with the substance of his work. This just comes off as more of the same, very juvenile journalism that TNR seems to be championing lately. I know the kids don't work for much...
- Thomas
December 1, 2008 at 1:09am
Disappointing. I'm not a fan of Zizek, but was hoping for a more substantial critique than 7 pages of "Zizek means the shocking things he says, and these shocking things are so obviously wrong!" And it's stunning and pathetic that the reviewer resorts to charges of anti-semitism. Zizek is a problem, but this approach isn't helping.
- Anon
December 1, 2008 at 9:47am
God Forbid he should be critical of torture....and Jews! Speaking of which, which civilization are we clashing with anyway, Mr. Podhoretz?
- Goldstein
December 1, 2008 at 10:30am
However despicable Mr. Kirsch may find Mr. Zizek, at least Mr. Zizek carefully footnotes the references in his texts so that one may verify whether or not they correspond with the truth. Can the New Republic provide us with a proper citation for this In Defense of Violence that Mr. Kirsch refers to? Thanks.
- Luther Blissett
December 1, 2008 at 11:30am
Wow. Nice misreading, willful or otherwise, of Zizek's comments on Jews. Wow. Breathtaking.
- Kyle
December 1, 2008 at 11:52am
As the proud holder of a bachelor's degree in English, I have to marvel at some of the comments on here. Hello, English degree? How the hell are you supposed to destroy democracy and lead the world to ruin with an English degree? Now, I predate post-modernism and French intellectual silliness, but still. From where I'm sitting, it's doctrinaire free-market capitalist hacks in economics departments across the land who have landed most of the cultural kill-shots over the last three decades. And Zizek? When he can write a coherent paragraph, then I might be willing to take him seriously. Until such a time, it's an impossible undertaking.
- Flying Monkey Commander
December 1, 2008 at 12:05pm
Thanks very much for this review of Zizek's writing. Having been digging through his ouvre, along with several other modern philosophers, I've become convinced that, while Zizek believes he is conducting a necessary intervention in the face of ascendant Capitalism, he is actually reverting to a critique of society that would have been appropriate to the divine right of kings (just as Lenin and Mao saw themselves as historically delivered to a time and place they must act bloodily), especially philosopher kings, who have the intellectual insight to see the real truth to which the masses are blind. That is his most anti-democratic argument and it is the most troubling element of his philosophy, which seems to reflect the temperament of late Continental philosophy on the whole, despite all the outcry among philosophers against Zizek. Zizek's revolution could come at any price, as he repeatedly explains, which this article demonstrates is a horrible range of potential outcomes for society, because he feels it must come, as Robespierre felt he was destined to lead the cleansing of France in 1793. Messianic writers are always trouble, and it is clear that, sometimes, Zizek sees himself as Benjamin's angel, mangled though that metaphor may be. He wants to act. Nevertheless, I value Zizek, because he conducts this ongoing attack. He keeps asking Capitalism to interrogate itself, though the degree of his outlandishness makes the value of his questions ever-diminishing in the face of the desire or need for celebrity in the society he critiques. A few less books per year and a discipline of conducting thorough self-critique rather than simply exploring everything that comes to mind through published writing would be good for Zizek and good for everyone else. The pace of his output makes critical responses difficult. The fact Zizek makes of himself a moving target creates a barrier to critique that would be useful for liberals and conservatives alike, who can agree that the more vile elements of Zizek's arguments are wrong, wrong-headed or simply personal flourishes that denote nothing about the philosophical issues raised by ascendant Capitalism.
- Mitch Ratcliffe
December 1, 2008 at 2:03pm
A bitter academic, resentful of being marginalized by the currents of history, tries to create an audience for himself through sensationalism and by rehabilitating the most revolting and discredited ideas in human history. He gussies up his own native antisemitism in fancy, pseudointellectual garb, but guarantees himself the built-in audience antisemites who will always exist, in greater or lesser numbers. And he falls for the juvenile but dangerous romanticism of violence and purity. What a simple, simple mind, so desirous of the infantile gratification of publicity.
- Claskov
December 1, 2008 at 2:38pm
This article needed to be written; but its author is so busy running through zizek's books for fascist or antisemitic soundbytes that he completely fails to engage the philosopher's ideas seriously. Not to mention a two paragraph interpretation of Walter Benjamin that frames him as an enlightenment progressivist? Are you serious? Have you ever read his work? There is a much more interesting phenomenon left unexplored in these 7 pages of neoliberal invective: why is it that this anti-postmodern/liberal/relativist strain of critique is so captivating to the intellectual left? A missed opportunity.
- Nathan G.
December 1, 2008 at 3:12pm
Posted by Thomas "Boring. Seriously, I'm bored." You are a bore, thomas. You wrestle with the Jew haters work. Have fun.
- To: Boring thomas
December 1, 2008 at 3:17pm
Posted by Will Roberts "Are you seriously accusing Zizek of antisemitism?" Yes?
- Goldstein
December 1, 2008 at 3:34pm
Posted by Goldstein "God Forbid he should be critical of torture....and Jews! Speaking of which, which civilization are we clashing with anyway, Mr. Podhoretz?" No, Goldstein's civilization. With Zizek as comandant all the Goldsteins will vanish.
- Christian
December 1, 2008 at 3:36pm
"Can the New Republic provide us with a proper citation for this In Defense of Violence that Mr. Kirsch refers to? Thanks." Luther Blissett No Luther get a copy and read it for yourself, cheapskate.
- Adolphus
December 1, 2008 at 3:38pm
What a profoundly dishonest article. Nearly every quote is only one sentence (sometimes less!) and out of context. I've read many things by Mr. Zizek, and I have plenty of points to disagree with him on. For instance, his notion of justifiable "violence" is often metaphorical and needs a better unpacking. However, his denunciation of Stalinism and the Gulag is UNAMBIGUOUS. His denunciation of the Cultural Revolution as a failure is unambiguous. However, these historical instances of radical praxis are worthy of study because they are just that: radical praxis. Unlike the gentle, cowering, "postmodern", identity-politics-obsessed academic Left, Zizek fully accepts responsibility for this brutal legacy, not as a champion nor an apologist, but to learn something and encourage further thought. In today's world it is the "end of history" crowd that looks antiquated. In recent years there has indeed been more urgency in Zizek's books. This is because even amid crisis and looming ecological catastrophe, even in this time of historical opening when the voting populations of the First World demand something bold, the world's liberal capitalist democracies cannot even confront the question of uniting to tackle our most serious problems. How long will they delay a global financial regulatory framework? How long will they put off the question of Western Corporations employing Third World slave labor at the expense of everyone's security - both economic and environmental? Perhaps they see a slippery slope toward a more radical democracy? Authoritarian Capitalism is ascendant, and it is cynically tolerated by the West because it is the model they're moving toward (see: America). Zizek defends the idea that we can be liberated from this. Thank goodness he is more widely read than Mr. Kirsch will ever be.
- Coleman
December 1, 2008 at 3:54pm
"Why is it that so many of the chief foes of totalitarianism in the second half of the twentieth century were Jews--Arendt, Berlin, Levinas? One might think it is because the Jews were the greatest victims of Nazi totalitarianism, and so had the greatest stake in ensuring that its evil was recognized. But Zizek has another explanation: the Jews are stubbornly rejecting the universal love that expresses itself in revolutionary terror, just as they rejected the love of Christ. "No wonder," he writes in the introduction to In Defense of Lost Causes, "that those who demand fidelity to the name 'Jews' are also those who warn us against the 'totalitarian' dangers of any radical emancipatory movement. Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards allembracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror." Do you have an answer to this question, Thomas?
- Zazou
December 1, 2008 at 4:37pm
Nathan G. there is a complete exposition of Zizek's views even if someone like you can't understand that. I see that neocon has become the new synonym for Jew on this forum. You are a dishonest and cowardly poster.
- Robbins
December 1, 2008 at 5:24pm
Actually, I have read quite a lot of Zizek, and I think Kirsch diagnoses him brilliantly. I didn't at all get the sense that the review was written for anti-intellectuals, as someone here claimed.
- David
December 1, 2008 at 5:32pm
Adolphus, my problem in tracking down "In Defense of Violence" is not monetary, it's that Amazon doesn't carry it, and the only reference to it on Google is to this article.
- Luther Blissett
December 1, 2008 at 5:52pm
Godwin's Law.
- Timothy G.
December 1, 2008 at 6:05pm
Taking Jokes Seriously: There is a more generous, even a utopian reading of Zizek's writing on Jews and anti-Semitism, and his traffic with anti-Semitic humor, than the one Mr. Kirsch gives here. My sense is that Zizek has diagnosed "Jew" as a kind of enduring fetish object for global culture--both for Jews and non-Jews, the indicator "Jew" has an uncanny degree of power that does not seem to track on any other ethnic/religious/political relationships, and thus presents a certain fascination for the generalizing theorist whose job it is to try to capture how things are in general. Zizek has assumed the burden of working through this fetish in public. It is an ongoing analysis, because the fetish maintains its power. I think that we would be less well off if we did not have thinkers making this approach. Is it possible for a "real" anti-semite to reflect on anti-Semitism as an historical phenomenon? That seems to be the case Mr. Kirsch is committed to making, and it would be interesting to hear him elaborate on this point more, as it would seem to lead to a fundamental distrust of the relationship between thinking and freedom. Several commentators here have written accusing Kirsch of having misrepresented Zizek's actual writing, or indeed of having read very little of it at all. I think the bigger picture is actually much more important: the place of psychoanalysis in American culture is radically different than it is in Europe. Americans do not understand that the term "psychoanalysis" indicates a kind of systematic peaceful eruption of the private sphere into the public sphere, and that what counts as serious and what counts as trivial in psychoanalysis are quite different than what we look for in the public sphere. The relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy is a complex one, but again for Americans I think the most important thing to understand is that, unlike (many) philosophers, people engaged in the work of psychoanalysis view theory as the servant of practice--at its most basic, working with neurotics, psychotics and perverts to help them either reclaim their desire and/or learn to function within the limitations imposed by their psyche (a difference of emphasis.) In philosophy theory has often been developed apart from and then imposed on practice as a secondary measure--arguably this is the prevalent story about the relationship between Marxism and Stalinism told in the U.S. today. Zizek's great enduring subject--but one can't even properly speak of it as a subject--is the Obscene. What place does the obscene have in public discourse? What place, indeed, does the obscene have in psychoanalysis? The psychoanalytic stance that Zizek has been advocating, and which makes a lot of sense to those of us who admire him as a thinker, that in our historical situation, the Obscene desperately needs to be taken seriously as a category of our experience, because the pressure of the culture we have is to insist that the Obscene no longer exists, that it is being cleansed out of the system of our pleasures so we do not have to endure such filth while we are enjoying ourselves. Mr. Kirsch would do well to look through one of the books Freud wrote after publishing his seminal Interpretation of Dreams, a book called Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Freud argues that jokes can be interpreted using the same basic tools he developed to analyze dreams, and that they form a legitimate arena in which to contest the meaning of fantasies and wishes and the structures of representation that make these undercurrents of meaning available to interpretation. What is so remarkable about this book is that, unlike dreams, which are typically only communicated within the time and space set aside for the psychoanalytic session (or in literature), jokes form an undercurrent not only to our public life here in the West, but that jokes and humor appear in virtually all human cultures (as anthropologists like Mary Douglas have demonstrated). The utopian dreams of the philosophers, from Plato on through the semi-conscious metaphysical desiring in Hegel and the approach to the Real in Marx, culminated in Fascism and Communism--this is the undergirding of the theory-into-practice story, seen from the psychoanalytic point of view. The displacement of energy from one realm into another always already implies the movement of desire. Philosophical dreaming is now bankrupt--possibly. Zizek has turned to humor and joking as an under-explored terrain. The field he is opening up with his wild reasoning will continue to bear fruit.
- Joshua Platt
December 1, 2008 at 7:52pm
Whatever happened to the New Criterion? Wasn't that the place for crap like this?
- the return
December 1, 2008 at 7:53pm
Submitted a longer comment a minute ago but not sure if the website is working. Basically I just think that by deciding what "taking something seriously" means without engaging with psychoanalytic concepts, Mr. Kirsch has done himself and his readers a disservice. Psychoanalysis has a very different cultural aspect in North America than it has in the rest of the world. Psychoanalysis in Europe has been and continues to be a cultural phenomenon. By deciding that Zizek's "seriousness" consists of what bullet-point political views and prejudices he can be shown to have voiced is an incredible repression. After his seminal book On the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote a book arguing that Jokes could be interpreted using precisely the same basic set of rhetorical tools that he developed for dreams, and that despite the fact that dreams are some of our most private experiences and jokes form a part of the public life of every human culture, they can both be taken seriously from the stand-point of psychoanalysis. I think Zizek has simply been the first major thinker to take that premise of Freud's seriously--not as an irrelevant abstraction but as a kind of hint toward what kind of serious philosophical practice can be developed at the Fukuyamist "end of history," when the translation of the philosopher's dream into historical reality can only mean evil to us. I think Zizek is a work in progress, and that is his value.
- Josh P
December 1, 2008 at 8:04pm
Despite the ever lurking trolls and flamers, Talkback has served its purpose. I came out of this review thinking "could this guy really be this horrible?" and numerous well written posts took on Kirsch (without the benefit of 7 pages) and marshalled a collective argument which - while not offering a mindlessly positive view of Zizek, does offer strong evidence to the effect that Kirsch doesn't seem to have read Zizek thoroughly, Kirsch has pulled lots of quotes out of context, and he misunderstands basic terms and concepts used by Zizek.
- In praise of Talkback
December 1, 2008 at 11:32pm
A hatchet job on Zizek in TNR? You don't say. For all this vapid bluster, it remains true that Zizek will and should continue to be read long after this article and these responses have been incinerated in the torture factory of history. Pat yourselves on the backs, gents. You're preaching to the perverted.
- echo chamber
December 2, 2008 at 1:31am
Dear readers, The hyperbole is intentional, Zizek aims to disgust; just pay him a visit and you'll be greeted by a portrait of Stalin. What is the point of defending Lenin, Stalin, and Mao? He clearly states he has no interest in reviving the old party, that would be a failure from the start. Zizek is a Hegelian Lacanian, being misunderstood will be his legacy,his contribution is to put an impossible demand on readers to consider and understand something holy other than themselves. You will kick and you will rear but if you finish the book, his hope isn't to persuade you, but to get you to think for yourself, to further history. You can hate the book, but the impossibilities it presents are aimed to be assimilated by the very reaction against it. Hegel called this the cunning of reason, history's peculiar way of getting the last laugh.
- Bisbee Finks
December 2, 2008 at 5:19am
As has been mentioned, this article represents a blatant misreading of Zizek's work. Kirsch fails to mention that Zizek's thirst for revolutionary violence includes references in his work to Ghandi and MLK as strong examples of violence--violence to the smooth functioning of oppressive structures. Get it? Then in an hysterical jeepers creepers move, Kirsch labels Badiou and Zizek anti-Semites because they dare to actually look at the structures of thought in Judaism and Christianity. C'mon, maybe all the dopey grad school kids that everyone thinks are easy targets might actually be good readers...
- Paul
December 2, 2008 at 10:01am
This whole accusation of anti-semitism on Zizek's part is outrageous. Seriously laughable. I am laughing. I get that Jews have reasons to be sensitive, but this is just BEYOND anything. All those comments were taken utterly out of context. Jesus. "Oh no, this crazy bearded Slovenian communist is out to get us Jews, and he's gaining influence!" Paranoid much? (oh..oh.. let me add that I have lots of Jewish friends!.. haha...) If you want to engage Zizek's ideas, read the books. Don't listen to ad hominem attacks by the magazine who, in their liberal wisdom, strongly supported an invasion that led to the deaths of maybe hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. But oh, right, Zizek is the dangerous one...
- Kyle
December 2, 2008 at 10:52am
First, "desert of the real" comes from "Simulacra and Simulations" by Baudrillard which was published in the early 1980s, I believe. Baudrillard also wrote an essay in "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," but who does research anyway. Baudrillard is a post-marxist. He and Zizek get along pretty well. It is a shame that that did not fall into your rant. To understand Zizek you need to read a good many of his works. For example, "A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism" would be a great counter to almost all of your arguments. The title is a joke, as we know Zizek loves. In the piece Zizek talks about a need for return to democracy, he postulates that political theory depoliticizes politics. That games of you vs me, with us or against us, among others are utilized in the election dialectic which depolitize the people the demos. He calls for a return. The ghosts are also an important idea in philosophy. See Jacques Derrida's (a Jew) "Specters of Marx" and the relationship with ghosts. I don't want to go into details, but you need to read it with read to ghosts of revolution going into the present and how this destroys potentiality etc, Zizek uses it a good bit. The cover of Parallax View is a sophisticated reference to the idea of a Parallax. The empty chair, the void framing what isn't there. Lenin as a psychoanalyst... Overall, a terrible gloss and topographical summary. Read the books next time and not just the titles.
- M DeWitt
December 2, 2008 at 11:23am
Joshua Platt you can write as many words defending Zizek as you like, but anyone who thinks that both "Jews" and antisemites see Jews in the same is someone who himself has a problem with Jews.
- Arnon Robbins
December 2, 2008 at 12:16pm
"In praise of Talkback" praises talk back while flaming the author of the well written and excellent critique of the article. I have studied Zizek and I can say that none of the attacks on Kirch are credible.
- Zazou
December 2, 2008 at 1:00pm
No one reads Zizek looking for absolute answers. He addresses areas of dialogue that have been amputated from American thought. I think criticism of him is fair, but when it uses references to his popularity or celebrity, the critic shows an empirical blindness to the role or influence of philosophy in this world that discredits him completely. Zizek is not dangerous. Writers that are not honest about the marginalization of philosophy in American culture are.
- John Harp
December 2, 2008 at 1:46pm
Funny reading all the acolytes rushing to the defense of their master. You can engage in whatever apologetic contortions you like, you faithful; it won't change the fact that you worship at the altar of an aging provocateur who clearly hasn't accepted the diminution in his influence that has accompanied history's unanimous judgement against the philosophy he espouses. Popularity with undergraduates, who will eventually outgrow their idolatry, is all he has. His ideas aren't not taken seriously outside the cloistered confines of the academy, and frankly, can't surive outside that overheated, hothouse environment. Besides which, flirtation with racism, under the guise of being radical-which is the lustre that is always put on it-is the mark of someone truly dead inside, with no genuine human attachments of his own, only resentments.
- Claskov
December 2, 2008 at 4:39pm
This is sloppy stuff Mr Kirsch: a Chinese whisper from an apparent cuture despiser. It would seem Comrade Zizek has negated your determination to write a decent article. One could certainly symathise with your predicament, were you not hell bent on presenting the good doctor as a gulag loving Nazi neo-Thomist with a penchant for sci-fi. Are we really so paranoid as to assume that that anything complex is radically evil (and I use evil here in it's everyday sense). I'll only correct one point, given that plenty above have highlighted your very limited consciousnes. You move from a discussion of gender and sexual difference directly into this claim: "When it comes to the brave new world of contemporary bioethics, Zizek is as hidebound as any Catholic traditionalist." Zizek is not traditionalist with regard to the major questions concerning bio-ethics. Notably he is outspoken in his rejection of Habermas' plea to grant religious communities a veto power in such debates. He questions why human freedom should be seen as connected to our mere factical existence, to "lazy existence" as Hegel would have it. To discover this you didn't even have to pretend to open a book, simply go to youtube and look at one of his lectures. As regards Zizek's choice of peppermint tea, it reminds me of the punchline to the old anarchist joke: "all proper tea is theft."
- ATK SMITH
December 2, 2008 at 4:50pm
Arnon Robbins: I am a self-hating Jew. A proud one. Deal with it.
- Joshua Platt
December 2, 2008 at 5:38pm
The accusations of anti-semitism are completely ridiculous and offensive and, in my opinion, warrant AN OFFICIAL APOLOGY FROM THE TNR EDITORS. I expect this kind of anti-intellectualist straw-man hatchet job from the far right, but not from TNR.
- Nathaniel
December 2, 2008 at 5:56pm
I think Leon W has long since stopped seeing his position as one with primarily intellectual possibilities and responsibilities. Sad and disappointing. On the other hand, one does wonder what the mag would look like with a different editor-in-chief.
- afm
December 3, 2008 at 12:25pm
I'm thankful for this article, even if it's problematic, and agree with others who've suggested it is "needed." Hopefully, Zizek will respond and others, too, who understand his work better, pushing this debate and Zizek himself, like Benjamin's Angel, closer to the impossible truth. As I understand it, Zizek is not in any way against Jews, but is specifically against the contradiction inherent to Jewish Nationalism (in setting up a Jewish State escaping the Nazi's ethnic cleansing, they not only performed their own ethnic cleansing on the Palestinians, they also did exactly what the Nazi's wanted: got rid of themselves) and more generally against Jewishness as a false concept, a mask, a mental construct made from language that keeps people from the material truth: that we are all human beings Being. It is from this Being that Zizek asks if it is not somtimes necessary to resist through an Act; for example, for the Jews to resist performing the Nazi's desires as stated above. The sacrifice he calls for is one of personal sacrifice: one must be willing to go to one's own death rather than be the genetic-inheritor of evil who will pass it on down the chain until someone resists at any cost.
- Steven
December 3, 2008 at 1:47pm
i can't help but leave a comment here to support all those decrying the author's accusations of antisemitism. mr. kirsch's criticisms of zizek had only just begun gaining traction--then he went the way of the LIRR and derailed. delays until next tuesday.
- matt
December 3, 2008 at 4:31pm
I was really hoping for an intelligent critique of the overrated Zizek, but instead we have this review. The deceptive quotations (easily discovered through Google Books) render the entire piece without evidential merit, leaving only empty hyperbolic provocations such as playing the 'Nazi card'.
- Robert N.
December 3, 2008 at 4:37pm
To the Zizek-defenders: 1) Thanks for the comedy. You are parodies of yourselves. 2) Welcome to the DESSERT of the real.
- Manny K
December 3, 2008 at 5:24pm
Nathaniel, Zizek is antisemite and I find it offensive that you think that accusing someone of antisemitism is more offensive than being one. You owe me and every other Jewish reader an apology for being a thick headed Zizek sycophant and groupie.
- Arnon Robbins
December 3, 2008 at 5:47pm
Joshua Platt: :Arnon Robbins: I am a self-hating Jew. A proud one." You can hate yourself as much as you want. If you decide to actively hate me than I will take action. "Deal with it." I will when I see you in person. Here you are just a lying and ignorant BIG MOUTH and Zizek groupie.
- Arnon Robbins
December 3, 2008 at 5:50pm
Great post, Claskov. I feel as you do about the matter.
- Robbins
December 3, 2008 at 5:51pm
"He questions why human freedom should be seen as connected to our mere factical existence, to "lazy existence" as Hegel would have it." ATK Smith A good example of sophmoric double talk. Smith shows that he can quote a Heideggerian notion like facticity. But, can he deliver a Nazi like salute like the master did? Lazy existence is what college students live every day and call it arbeit. Zizek would be proud of you Smith. He might even let you kiss his derriere. Now there is an example of both facticity and lazy existence.
- Christian
December 3, 2008 at 5:56pm
QUOTE: "In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek claims, 'Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy.'" IN CONTEXT: "This is how one should understand Alain Badiou's mieux vaut un desastre qu'un desetre, so shocking for the liberal sensitivity: Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy." (Search Google Books and you too can do the research the editors failed to do.) This is the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty.
- Drew Beck
December 3, 2008 at 6:19pm
Adam Kirsch does a wonderful job at stating the obvious, but with the nice peppering of liberal-democratic outrage (an outrage that looks quite like good-old twentieth-century red-bating). In short, he is knocking on a door that is wide open. Anyone who has read Zizek’s work–even in a cursory manner–can discern his Marxian project. Ever since the _Sublime Object’s_ (1989) awkward embrace of democracy, a position Zizek has subsequently denounced, Zizek has developed a concerted and much-needed re-conception of political ontology—one that not only re-formulates the Lacanian notion of the Real (as the “parallax real”), but also the notion of violence and utopian possibilities. But what is even more troubling about Kirsch’s piece is the way he brazenly (one hopes it’s intentional) misreads Zizek’s work. I invite anyone to revisit Zizek’s writing on the film _the Matrix_ or his comments on 9/11 in _Welcome to the Desert_ . For such texts undoubtedly complicate Kirsch’s claim that Zizek is a purveyor of “the old Marxist concept of false consciousness.” Such simplified and grossly de-contextualized assessments plague Kirsch’s reading in almost every section of his diatribe. Indeed, this is no laughing matter. But the motley may be on your head, Mr. Kirsch.
- Jonah Bigs
December 3, 2008 at 6:40pm
Hmmm...it sounds as if you might have been capped with such a dunce hat once before. So, yes, brilliant review! We'll bolster your bruised intellectual ego PetraMB and ignore Kirsch's egregious misreadings and sophomoric political posturing. Encore!
- motley revidius
December 3, 2008 at 6:51pm
Yes, brilliant "unmasking." Are you serious? UNMASKING?!
- Rich Sublime
December 3, 2008 at 6:55pm
"Stupid is as stupid does." Yes, cblack, you might learn from our friend Mr. Gump. In fact, Adam Kirsch's version of Zizek's ouvre is something like a Forest Gumpian presentation of American history: a few snap shots, some bad acting, and a whole lot of laughs.
-
December 3, 2008 at 7:01pm
This review is very simple and I understand why: I commend Adam Kirsch for his cursory glance at book covers and introductions (it must have taken some time), but perhaps he should have read "In Defense of Lost Causes." But what can you expect from a third rate poet and contributor to the New York Sun. Kirsch should either stick with Auden's poems or learn the philosophical history necessary to understand Zizek (note, I said understand not appreciate).
- Joel
December 3, 2008 at 9:09pm
Well said, oh dear.
- William
December 4, 2008 at 12:25am
The worst excuse for a discussion of Zizek I have ever read. A perfect combination of narrow-minded moralistic defensiveness and slipshop reading (And THAT is the real offense here -- this guy refuses to actually READ what Zizek has written).
- William McJunkin
December 4, 2008 at 12:29am
This is THE BEST reply-post on this board. Here here!
- KUDOZzzz
December 4, 2008 at 2:35am
To my amazement, the author seems not to even be aware of The Sublime Object of Ideology, which contains some of the most thorough and powerful denunciations of anti-Semitism -- which is posited as a kind of paradigm of ideology at work -- that you will ever read. Again, slipshod argumentation on Mr. Kirch's part. I echo Nathaniel above concerning straw-man hatchet jobs being the trademark of the right and suprising when found in the TNR.
- William
December 4, 2008 at 8:39am
Where is my reply? Please post the replies.
- Robbins
December 4, 2008 at 10:24am
Steven, The Jews of Europe spent nearly two-thousand years trying to assimilate--to become members in good standing of the societies to which they belonged, or, as you might put it--HUMAN BEINGS, not just members of an individual sect. For the first seventeen hundred years, they were confined to ghettos, and forbidden from practicing any profession save banking, as well from owning property. For the next three hundred or so years, they did their damndest just to fit in, changed their names to European sounding ones, gave up their religion and assumed that of the majority, and became, for the most part conservative devotees of that majority society, no more so than in Germany. Where do you think names like Morgenstern and Goldberg come from? Not the Holy Land, kid. We're still trying to do this, for better or worse. Look at the high rate of intermarriage. And where did that overwhelming historical drive to integrate get them? To an unprecedented horror, in which their murderers sought out any incriminating trace of their Jewish heritage as a basis for sending them back to the ghetto and slaughtering them, en masse. Damned if they didn't join the group, damned if they did; hence the need to found a state where they were the majority group. No group has struggled harder than Jews to shed their identity, but the joke was on us, because, if anything, the results were more calamitous than the consequences of independence. Zizek knows this, of course, which is what makes him such a pestilential liar, and his "provocations" nothing more than an incitement to the old rages. He wants the pogroms again, because he HATES. The jokiness and smiles are just a cover for this. His Jews are straw man, made to conform to his stereotype, the same as the antisemites diagnosis and purports to condemn. Why pick on Jewish nationalism, after all? Is any nationalism an obstruction to the path to universal fellowship? Do you think Islam will happily renounce its spiritual and temporal claims? Will the Vatican declare Catholicism null? What's the difference? Certainly, these allegiances will be an obstacle to total reconciliation around the world--to the great worldwide melting pot. The irony of course, is that there is one country in the world where, if we don't renounce our identities, we moderate them, for the sake of the entire body politic--America of course, for all its faults, the closest approximation to this ideal brother and sisterhood of man that exists on this planet. Zizek also knows this of course, but his deficit of moral character would keep him from admitting as much. His "principles" Steven, are just his own prejudices, which, in true Nietzschean fashion, he is trying to frame as ultimate foundations for morality and politics. In fact, they're just nativist, widely shared for a long time in his part of the world. He is a bitter guy, and I suspect, also harbors a grudge against some particular Jew, an animous that has prompted him to target the entire group. Scratch an antisemite, and as often as not, you'll find someone who thinks a Jew derailed his career, stole his girlfriend, didn't give him tenure, etc.... This is not a man who is worthy of respect.
- Claskov
December 4, 2008 at 11:50am
William you keep saying the same thing under different names. Is that what zizek taught you to do? Zizek is an antisemite. Live with it.
- Robbins
December 4, 2008 at 3:21pm
Joel care to offer some meaningful quotes that support your assertion that Zizek is actually defending Jews? I'd bet you could also find quotes in Mein Kampf defenfing Jews!
- David S.
December 4, 2008 at 3:23pm
To support the protestations of comments here denouncing Kirsch's accusations of Zizek's anti-Semitism I have transcribed a quote from one of Zizek's lectures which clearly states his position on the matter. This is from a lecture given at Boston University, on November 26th, 2007 entitled "Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself: Antinomies of Tolerant Reason." Towards the end of the lecture Zizek states the following: "Let me make my position very clear here: Of course I totally reject those leftists who think that, because of the international situation, all the suffering of the Palestinians, and so on, that one should make compromises and tolerate a little bit of anti-Semitism, one should understand them, you know— No. I think that anti-Semitism is for me the zero-level ideology, you don't make compromises there— to put it quite metaphysically: it's always bad." Kirsch's claims are simply unfounded; for Zizek, anti-Semitism "IS ALWAYS BAD." You an criticize Zizek for anything else: charlatanism, anti-humanist coldness, unrealistic revolutionary delusions— But labeling him as anti-Semitic is simply a dastardly smear job. I'll repeat my opinion here that the TNR Editors owe Zizek an apology for such unwarranted attacks.
- Nathaniel Davis
December 4, 2008 at 3:47pm
zizek is great because he pursues philosophical ideas without the pretension of thinking, "will this idea lead me to an acceptable statement? will i find myself on ground that could be construed as racist, or anti israeli, or condoning totalitarianism? zizek simply thinks, and speaks, and speaks well, no matter where it leads him--but we love him because his own ethical nature will lead him back to morality; he ponders dark possibilities, and then makes philosophical recommendations for the good of mankind. That is why kirsch's attacks are way off base, why his understanding of zizek is incorrect, and why i have a feeling that slavov has more moral fiber in his shit than Adam Kirsch would ever be capable of feeling.
- you guys are idiots
December 4, 2008 at 4:02pm
Robbins: "William you keep saying the same thing under different names. Is that what Zizek taught you to do?" Yeah, and each time I hear the voice there's also this horrible sound of dogs barking, telling me to say and do these awful things. Must be I've foreclosed the nom du pere and I'm reeling in a psychotic vortex or images. "Zizek is an antisemite. Live with it." So are you from the committee that dispenses these judgments? Do they have interships there or some way I can apply for a student loan? I'd love to be so well connected.
- William
December 4, 2008 at 4:52pm
Nathaniel Davis says that Zizek rejects antisemitism the childish poster “you guys are idiots” says that Zizek “thinks, and speaks, and speaks well, no matter where it leads him…” and then contradicts himself by asserting that his dark thoughts will ultimately leading back to “morality” (Eichmann believed that “the final solution” was a moral enterprise) so I am not sanguine by the reassurance “you guys are idiots” makes. His chosen name alone disqualifies him from being taken seriously. Davis’ quote is interesting, but I need more of a context. One quote from one lecture doesn’t reassure that Zizek is not an antisemite. (The guy could be bi-polar for all I know.) The fact that all the people supporting Zizek resort to childish invective and insult means that they have lost the argument hands down.
- Christian
December 4, 2008 at 5:31pm
William writes: "To my amazement, the author seems not to even be aware of The Sublime Object of Ideology, which contains some of the most thorough and powerful denunciations of anti-Semitism" Oh, nothing of the kind. It is rather like a stirring lecture at an Anti-Semites Anonymous meeting: "Let is examine anti-Semitism. It is not enough to say that we must liberate ourselves of so-called ‘anti-Semitic prejudices’ and learn to see Jews as they really are – in this way we will certainly remain victims of these so-called prejudices. We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the ‘Jew’ is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock of our desire. "Let us suppose, for example, that an objective look would confirm – why not? – that Jews really do financially exploit the rest of the population, that they do sometimes seduce our young daughters, that some of them do not wash regularly. Is it not clear that this has nothing to do with the real roots of our anti-Semitism? … "Let us ask ourselves a simple question; In the Germany of the late 1930s, what would be the reslt of such a non-ideological, objective approach? Probably something like: ‘The Nazis are condemning the Jews too hastily, without proper argument, so let is take a cool, sober look and see if they are really guilty or not; lets see if there is some truth in the accusations against them.’ Is it really necessary to add that such an approach would merely confirm our so-called ‘unconscious prejudices’ with additional rationalizations? The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not ‘Jews are really not like that’ but ‘the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistence of our own ideological system.’" So that Zizek is an anti-Semite is scarcely a revelation – he openly writes as an anti-Semite addressing other anti-Semites, giving advice on trying to stay off the sauce (which evidently he can’t do without this constant self-examination, public confession, giggling bursts of naughtiness, and reminders such as “Who today remembers the kibbutz, the greatest proof that Jews are not by nature financial middlemen?” Lucky we have this proof.) Only other anti-Semites are really equipped to judge whether Zizek’s psychoanalysis of their condition hits the mark and helps them or not.
- factchecker
December 4, 2008 at 10:28pm
Really? This is your review? The person who brought up Kaufmann's "The Hegel Myth and Its Method" is right on. Except there is more madness to Kirsch's method.
- JDB
December 4, 2008 at 11:49pm
It is unfortunate that the antisemitism "charge" is distracting from the other, much more important critique Kirsch has offered. Sometimes a joke is just a joke, and everyone with a bit of heart knows it is would be more charitable to discount his fixation on "the Jews" as a relatively innocent eccentricity. In this case however, it's not quite that simple. Nathaniel Davis, thanks for your contribution, but your conclusion still misses the point: Yes, Zizek considers antisemitism to be categorically bad, but he also acknowledges that he is to some extent an antisemite. That's what ideology does: it has us believe what we would rather not so as to have us act on its behalf. The important distinction here is that Zizek admits to harboring some racist sentiment, but in so doing he proves that he is not a bigot. Bigotry would have others believe it is not prejudiced. But psychoanalysis reveals the extent to which we are all prejudiced, along lines racial and otherwsie. Kirsch should have been more generous in his reading of Zizek's antisemitic remarks, and in failing to do so he unfortunately alienated a great many of those who are most in need of a fresh perspective. I find Kirsch spot on as regards Zizek's intellectual authoritarian disdain for democracy and democratic process. Zizek occasionally relates Stalin's joke about the people's demand for regime change: change the government? rather change the people! The dictatorship of the proletariat that Zizek claims to espouse is rather that of a proletariat radically or "dialectically" transformed by dictatorship itself. The reason Zizek thinks psychoanalysis and Marxism go so well together is because the dictator/fuhrer has the inherent tranferential function of standing in as the subject supposed to know. What is needed is pychoanalysis on a mass or universal scale. Zizek is proposing a variety of dictatorship akin to the function of the analyst. Kirsch may be quite correct in highlighting the resentment, violence and human sacrifices necessary to realize those conditions necessary to reconstruct the proletarian psyche on a grand scale. And students of Zizek ought to take this matter seriously and devote themselves to evaluating it. Just to get a dig in at Zizek's many acolytes who here so earnestly defend him: what's particularly interesting about the piece is really found in those comments. Not only do these defenses manage almost uniformly to amplify the charge that Zizek's influence has contributed much to enfeebling the mind of the academic left, they exemplify the extent to which Zizek has assumed the position of the master subject presumed to know. That dynamic may be of some use in analysis, but it is certainly a far from advantageous spirit with which to approach philosophy.
- Chris Sartison
December 5, 2008 at 9:01am
It is unfortunate that the antisemitism "charge" is distracting from the other, much more important critique Kirsch has offered. Sometimes a joke is just a joke, and everyone with a bit of heart knows it is would be more charitable to discount his fixation on "the Jews" as a relatively innocent eccentricity. In this case however, it's not quite that simple. Nathaniel Davis, thanks for your contribution, but your conclusion still misses the point: Yes, Zizek considers antisemitism to be categorically bad, but he also acknowledges that he is to some extent an antisemite. That's what ideology does: it has us believe what we would rather not so as to have us act on its behalf. The important distinction here is that Zizek admits to harboring some racist sentiment, but in so doing he proves that he is not a bigot. Bigotry would have others believe it is not prejudiced. But psychoanalysis reveals the extent to which we are all prejudiced, along lines racial and otherwsie. Kirsch should have been more generous in his reading of Zizek's antisemitic remarks, and in failing to do so he unfortunately alienated a great many of those who are most in need of a fresh perspective. I find Kirsch spot on as regards Zizek's intellectual authoritarian disdain for democracy and democratic process. Zizek occasionally relates Stalin's joke about the people's demand for regime change: change the government? rather change the people! The dictatorship of the proletariat that Zizek claims to espouse is rather that of a proletariat radically or "dialectically" transformed by dictatorship itself. The reason Zizek thinks psychoanalysis and Marxism go so well together is because the dictator/fuhrer has the inherent tranferential function of standing in as the subject supposed to know. What is needed is pychoanalysis on a mass or universal scale. Zizek is proposing a variety of dictatorship akin to the function of the analyst. Kirsch may be quite correct in highlighting the resentment, violence and human sacrifices necessary to realize those conditions necessary to reconstruct the proletarian psyche on a grand scale. And students of Zizek ought to take this matter seriously and devote themselves to evaluating it. Just to get a dig in at Zizek's many acolytes who here so earnestly defend him: what's particularly interesting about the piece is really found in those comments. Not only do these defenses manage almost uniformly to amplify the charge that Zizek's influence has contributed much to enfeebling the mind of the academic left, they exemplify the extent to which Zizek has assumed the position of the master subject presumed to know. That dynamic may be of some use in analysis, but it is certainly a far from advantageous spirit with which to approach philosophy.
- Chris Sartison
December 5, 2008 at 9:01am
JDB "Really? This is your review?" And your point? Kirsch's critique of Zizek was balanced as a skeptical reader of Ziziek I can tell you that Zizek is a pretentious ass as well as a bigot.
- Adolphus
December 5, 2008 at 11:58am
Great post, factchecker, short and to the point.
- Robbins
December 5, 2008 at 12:00pm
William “Zizek is an antisemite. Live with it." So are you from the committee that dispenses these judgments?” Yea. I am also on the committee that out fools likes you, William. You might profit from switching majors since you ability to read critically seems to be impaired.
- Robbins
December 5, 2008 at 12:04pm
Robbins was right: I just can't help myself. I have to keep chiming in here. To factchecker: I see what you are saying. I just think we have fundamentally different views of what anti-Semitism is and about the socially constructed nature of ideology. As to your observation about Zizek sounding a bit like a lecture at an Anti-Semites Anonymous meeting, there's some truth to that, but only if we remember that we all belong in those ASA meetings -- and I mean ALL, Jews and non-Jews alike -- because, as I believe Zizek successfully shows, Anti-Semitism is a case of social and political ideology par excellence and is thus part of an ongoing battle against something that is fundamental to human culture itself. But, of course, if you reject Zizek's contention as to this larger structural dimension of ideology and racism and insist rather on a primarily psychological understanding that is rooted in the individual psyche or in local conditions, then naturally you'll find his argumentation hard to accept, to say the least. Part of the problem, though, with this psychological understanding of racism -- which is precisely what Zizek's arguments are meant in large part to critique -- is that it lends itself to the common liberal temptation to view racism as rooted in the individual and which can thus simply be eradicated as if treating a cancer. The probelm with this is that it leads to a self-righteous blindness which eventually sees the evil in others but not as something I might be party to or tainted by myself. And to Chris Sartison: I agree with you until you start critiquing those who defend Zizek here. As it happens, I hardly consider myself an 'acolyte' of Zizek and have lots of concerns about his positions, and you have nicely expressed one of them in alluding to the question of authoritarianism. But you're missing the point to assume that those of us who defend him against shaky accusations such as Mr. Kirsch's are by definition following him blindly. Some of us, like Zizek, are actually just passionately interested in these issues and don't want to see the debate prematurely shut down by charges that are ultimately based in moralism and amount to no more than: 'I'm right in my feelings. Don't challenge me.' We've seen what 8 years of leadership that approaches moral issues in this way has looked like. The liberal version of this is no less unappealing.
- William
December 5, 2008 at 12:18pm
This ant-semitism charge against Zizek looks to me like the Islamist misreading of Rushdies Satanic Verses. Zizek often talks in his books from different point of views- the quotes here presented are all statements made from different point of views and speaking positions. Readers who are too lazy to figure out the respective multilayered speaking positions in zizeks text are simply not qualified enough to judge on the Zizeks texts. unfortunately that is also the case with this humorless piece by Kirsch.
- Rogi
December 5, 2008 at 12:41pm
"Let us suppose, for example, that an objective look would confirm - why not? - that Jews really do financially exploit the rest of the population, that they do sometimes seduce our young daughters, that some of them do not wash regularly. Is it not clear that this has nothing to do with the real roots of our anti-Semitism?” This assertion itself no matter the context is one of the most mind numbingly simplistic comments about German Nazi antisemitism ever written. This alone should have disqualified him from being allowed to lecture at any decent university. We know that universities today are not decent, but that’s another story. Imagine someone sixty years after the Holocaust after the German Nazis annihilated the Jews of Europe as well as went after the Gypsies, after they devastated (raped) Russia, Poland and many other countries someone worried about whether German Jews has sex with non Jewish women in Germany! This price idiocy as well as antisemitic driven bullshit, William; you defenders of Zizek are all a prime example of what is wrong with the Universities today.
- Christian
December 5, 2008 at 12:44pm
This hatchet job is so predictable, I was hardly surprised to find out the author came by the way of The New York Sun. That paper sold less copies than even Zizek's books, in spite of the half-decent sports page.
- Rocco S.
December 5, 2008 at 3:05pm
Posted by William "Robbins was right: I just can't help myself. I have to keep chiming in here. To factchecker: I see what you are saying. I just think we have fundamentally different views of what anti-Semitism is and about the socially constructed nature of ideology." William antisemitism is an ideology that has cost the lives of millions of people. It's not a game one plays at your graduate Zizek seminar courses. btw: Not just ideology are social constructs, so are all human and inhuman acts. Calling something a "social construct" doesn't cure the disease it merely names it. In any case, I have read Zizek and the guy has a real problem with Jews like me.
- Robbins
December 5, 2008 at 5:47pm
Rocco S. "This hatchet job is so predictable, I was hardly surprised to find out the author came by the way of The New York Sun." You have said this already under another name. Adam Kirsch has written more than a half dozen books, how many have you written. Among his recent books are: Invasions: New Poems, 2008, Benjamin Disraeli, (Schocken,) 2008 which has gotten excellent reviews and The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry.
-
December 5, 2008 at 5:52pm
Before confirming the accuracy of this review, please have carefully read: The Sublime Object of Ideology The Ticklish Subject The Parallax View In Defence of Lost Causes AT THE VERY LEAST Then please back up each argument with quotations from at least two separate texts so as to avoid the possibility of misrepresentation. If you are unwilling to do this, we can only assume that, like this reviewer, you lack the intellectual integrity to engage with Zizek Although strategic alliances are sometimes necessary to fight the Right, Zizek has often made it clear that he considers liberals to be enemies. It is only necessary to point out the review's cretinous misrepresentations for the benefit of those readers who have not read Zizek, and are therefore misled into thinking that this review has some intellectual integrity.
- oh dear
December 5, 2008 at 6:07pm
"I mean ALL, Jews and non-Jews alike " Speak for yourself, William. It may make you feel less horrible about your own uncontrollable thoughts to assume they are shared by everyone, but if you want to make that charge persuasive, I am afraid you will have to prove it. Zizek likes to project - on others, on Jews of course, and especially on Palestinians - his own extreme baroque anti-Semitism, a sort common in Slovenia (where 65% of the public polled _identified themselves_ as racists, hating Roma most and Jews next, and where Zizek's party the LDS carried out an ethnic cleansing in the 90s, which Zizek "fully supported") but almost unknown outside Slovenia and Croatia. You may share this impulse, and may resort to the self-appointed authority of the psychoanalyst to attempt to convince others of your superior knowledge of them than they possess themselves, but unless you have some means other than insistence to enforce these views, there will always be those who reject the diagnosis with the laughter and scorn it deserves. Part of the problem with psychoanalysis is it's a pseudoscience; part of the problem with applying psychoanalysis, which is ahistorical as well as unscientific, to anything other than an individual human psyche (to ideology, for example) is it’s a pathetic power play on the part of the critic, reaching for the authority of the analyst and implicitly placing all who are not persuaded in the role of patient and analysand, by definition deprived of self knowledge and clarity. It would be truly amusing if Zizek has managed to manoeuvre his defenders into proclaiming "we are all anti-Semites!" in order to excuse his eccentricities, if it were not that he has somehow become associated (undeservedly, and due solely to his own self characterisation) with sincere and committed leftists, anti-racists and anti-imperialists, who are NOT anti-Semites, who are already required to fend off the tireless and cynical attempts by US apologists, from ultra right to liberal centre, to smear all opposition to US imperial policy and that of its clients (among them Israel) as anti-Semitic.
- factchecker
December 5, 2008 at 6:10pm
Rocco S. “I was hardly surprised to find out the author came by the way of The New York Sun.” Adam has written a hald dozen books or so: “The Thousand Wells, 2002 The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, 2008 The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath) 2005 Invasions: New Poems, 2008 Benjamin Disraeli, (Schocken,) 2008” what have you written Rocco S.?
- Robbins
December 5, 2008 at 6:38pm
This is simply uninformed slander. Read Zizek's works, even if you don't agree with him: don't listen to this hack.
- Mike Johnduff
December 5, 2008 at 9:18pm
This review turns on a series of clumsy misconstruals of Zizek's arguments. Kirsch's quotations are merely tactical severances of a few bombastic-sounding quotes from their quite reasonable grounding. Often, the quotes are actually places where Zizek is purposefully contorting some argument to make another point.
- Zach
December 5, 2008 at 10:31pm
This is excellent, a kind of eulogy for the absurd hard-left sillinesses that have depended on the very bubbles which won't support him and them anymore. In other words, he has no material, and it is fitting that this would appear a few months after Lehman, when he can say nothing whatever worth hearing. He needs a bailout himself. And you are giving him what he needs, which is to say, a eulogy. This excites me, because I had associated with many Zizekians,including Jodi Dean, of the blog icite and publisher of books on Zizek as well as a blind disciple. About 2 months in from Lehman and the hugest burst of financial panic, or roughly mid-october to mid-november, all the vague smutty 'philosophy', a rip-off from Jean Baudrillard's hyperreal, began to finally dissipate. It looks, as of today, that the Big 3 will have some kind of bailout to prevent massive failures and job losses. But Zizek, as you point out in other examples, would love this. What he loves is failure, and he is more of a cloddish sort of failure despite the appearance of success he seems to have among his followers. He is much less like the 'celebrity intellectuals' Hitchens or Chomsky, or even Susan Sontag. But rather more like Werner Erhart, founder of the New Age 'est training' and 'forum', and who depended on the same sheepish following. He is more well-read, but no more principled. This was nicely placed, and should help to continue the curious but obviously rapid disappearance of Slavoj Zizek. I disagree only that he is 'dangerous', he is not really powerful at all, and none of the Zizekians amount to a hill of beans. There are simpleminded and mediocre, and are thoroughly incapable of anything much beyond navel-gazing. It is interesting that he became so popular, because he hasn't really anything but a lot of clownish tricks, he's not even suave, etc., not that that's the point. I've just never seen the appeal, he reminds me of the Wizard of Oz upon discovery by Dorothy.
- Patrick J. Mullins
December 6, 2008 at 12:37am
Christian, The 'indecency' is your discomfort at seeing those words in print, a discomfort you should perhaps take a closer look at. You should also, if you want to be considered someone with any intellecutal integrity whatsoever, include the passage that follows this from the Sublime Object of Ideology, where Zizek outlines a conception of anti-semitism infinitely more powerful, not to mention politically effective, than almost anything you are likely to read outside psychoanalysis. Let's also not forget that psychoanalysis was invented by a Jew, and hated by the Nazis. I wonder if Christian is your name, or rather designates an ideological position? Be careful of the company you keep.
- oh dear
December 6, 2008 at 10:23am
So this hatchet job makes me feel pissy. I never thought I would feel like defending Zizek, someone whose thought I disagree with for a number of reasons, but really you have to engage with that thought, not just put him before HUAC. Making Zizek a stand in for the Academic left is absurd, he's far more popular outside the academy than within it, where he is debated. He wouldn't be a celebrity figure if only specialists read him. But its a lot easier to act like all that crazy stuff you haven't taken the time to understand is crypto-fascism. Nothing like falling back on the old, Stalin Bad, therefore Capitalism Good, demented logic of anti-intellectualism. Books are just bed-time stories that help us sleep at night, right?
- hmmm
December 6, 2008 at 6:31pm
Don't forget to post weekend responses.
- Robbins
December 8, 2008 at 10:36am
Why am I not surprised that people who defend Zizek come up with name like "oh dear," and "hmmmmmm?" Your choice of appelation says it all. You take for granted that you right which is a sign of a true believer mentality.
- Robbins
December 8, 2008 at 11:05am
I second Robbins comment and hope you'll post the comments in real time. Thanks!
- Christian
December 8, 2008 at 12:56pm
Most of the defenders of Zisek have shown themselves to be pretty childish.
- alain
December 8, 2008 at 6:58pm
I've read a fair bit of Zizek, consider myself a fan, and I was honestly horrified by Kirsch's analysis of his 'antisemitism'...I use quotes because I don't think it's well founded. The picture of Stalin in his office is important to understand what he's up to in many ways as a thinker and a writer: its a deliberately ironic, displacing gesture: let those without irony abandon hope, ye who enter here. I think his comment about the "Man is Wolf To Man" anecdote, which threw me when I first read it, as well as his point about the Nazis needing to create sinister mythology about the traits of Jews to justify their rise to power is merely remarking on the subliminal effects of propaganda. Watch "Triumph Of The Will", even as a film scholar, and I'm sure that shit will pop up at the oddest times. That's the point of propaganda, right? He's not a Stalinist, that's an unfortunate misunderstanding brought on by his self-consciousness and self- deprecation as a thinker with a radical position (which, as it seems everyone agrees these days, are just the name of the game). His acceptance of responsibility and rejection of the brutality of various ostensibly Marxist regimes (Stalin, Mao, etc) is pretty plainly stated- to the extent he says anything plainly. Zizek is, I think, doing a classic Socratic ironic reversal of conventional attitudes and judgments...he's taking the centered approaches, the a priori judgments which are the standard interpretation, and flipping them on their heads, to see things anew. The people who have commented that it takes deeper, more complex readings of his work to understand this are, I think, correct. Zizek, in deconstructing, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Beethoven's 9th, the Iraq War or The Matrix or whatever is challenging his readers to read better, closer, more ironically, with more wit (albeit of a rather dark variety) and therefore challenge them to create a new capacity for progress and revolutionary conceptions. He's a utopian thinker who is at the end of a long history of utopias, knowing full well what they sound like in today's day and age. He's not so much a revolutionary terrorist, he just plays one on tv! Kirsch's relentless focus on his alleged antisemitism neglects the forest for the trees, in that it neglects a larger philosophical program for an almost willfully single-minded attachment to a perceived literalism and outright brutishness Zizek doesn't intend. He's an old-fashioned Leftist at heart who is frustrated by its limitations and living in a postmodern age where those ideals aren't as easily maintained and thus is intentionally pushing the rhetorical strategies and theoretical positions to some admittedly far-out places...but isn't that makes philosophy important in the first place?
- fakeswede
December 9, 2008 at 4:02am
Hatred is only one possible reaction to the unmasked 'cloddishness' you construct, PJM. Aside from Zizek, do you always despise anything less than 'suave'? Isn't this close to despising the clumsy humanity of humanity? And are you really so complete?
- flllt
December 9, 2008 at 1:32pm
BRILLIANT ARTICLE, MANY MANY THANKS, ADAM!!!
- renata lemos
December 10, 2008 at 2:46pm
I would also like to publish this article in Portuguese, for publication in Brazil, where there is a strong "cult" of Zizek. Please let me know how to get in touch with Adam. renata.lemoz@gmail.com
- renata lemos
December 10, 2008 at 2:50pm
any journal of opinion which would publish an article so filled with out-of-context quotations and baseless accusations doesn't deserve serious consideration or response. zizek may tell a few jokes, but he's absolutely not a jew-basher or any kind of fascist. kirsh's claim that "there is no doubt that this scale of killing is what Zizek looks forward to", if not retracted as soon as possible, should result in his immediate firing. i disagree with zizek on many counts, but pieces like this are an insult to thinking readers and an obstacle to intelligent discussion of today's political questions. if this is the kind of tripe we can expect from the new republic, then we won't have to turn to zizek to find a farce.
- kevin sanchez
December 10, 2008 at 6:24pm
I think that Mr. Kirsch did not realise that Slovenians also read foreign newspapers. I would not write this letter just for his inconsistancy and the fact that he did not read a lot of Žižek's work, however I have to show you one of the mistakes Kirsch does and on that mistake he gradually makes Žižek an anti-semite, which he is so clearly not. Holocaust is a terrible thing that happened in Europe and it must always remind us, how things can go from bad to even worse. However it did not happen in a big extent in Slovenia as the Jewish community is not a big one. Let me tell you why (and by that, tell you that the facts Kirsch is leaning on are not true). In 15th century (1496) all Jews were banished out of Slovenian countries by the orders of Maximilian. Later on, only few returned in the middle of 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th. Statistics of that time show, that there were less than 200 Jews in the biggest Slovenian city (Ljubljana). So the community was not as big as one would suppose through this few sentences: "It is at such a moment that one realizes that for 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." Before the author gives such a statement, he should look up, how many Jews there were before the Holocaust. That is demagogy in its pureness. As a researcher of anti-semitism in Slovenian literature I strictly oppose the accussations about Slavoj Žižek being an anti-semite. In fact, he was the first one to point out the anti-semitic stereotypes in the works of Ivan Cankar (supposed to be the greatest Slovenian writer), where no other would dare to say such a thing.
- Luka Zibelnik
December 11, 2008 at 10:37am
To factchecker: 'It may make you feel less horrible about your own uncontrollable thoughts to assume they are shared by everyone, but if you want to make that charge persuasive, I am afraid you will have to prove it.' Again, you may be right about it making me feel better, but that's not really the point. How we feel about it is ultimately less important than the 'structures' (to use that word again) that insist on reproducing themselves again and again among humans (the fallacy you're falling into here is well known from 1968 -- see Lacan's notable response to the assertion that 'structures don't march in the streets', e.g.). I could sympathise with your hostility better if for example I had tried to argue against or deny the existence of or the importance of anti-semitism or something similarly outrageous. What I've done is simply assert that if you're going to accuse Zizek of this particular offense, you're going to have to do more than just say -- as Kirsch's argument boils down to -- "don't challenge me", e.g. by arguing that maybe anti-semitism is more than just a black and white matter of either 'ye got it or ye don't'. As for 'uncontrollable thoughts', it's funny you presume to know something about my thoughts, factchecker. I thought you and your compadres here were against the supposedly arrogant presumption of priestly psychoanalytic mandarin theorists to speak for others. But since you mention it, maybe you've got uncontrollable thoughts of your own on your mind which you haven't entirely owned up to yet. What do you think? And finally, as to your mention of me having to bear some 'burden of proof', you're misguided. The burden is on Mr. Kirsch (and of course to some extent on Zizek himself as well, as evidenced by the fact that he is subjected to challenges such as Mr. Kirsch's) to prove that there's something untoward about Zizek, which in my view he fails to do. There is no such burden on me. I'm a reader who is reading and considering - and ultimately rejecting - Kirsch's argument as unsatisfactory. So I will go back to reading Zizek unconvinced of the need to change how I feel about him.
- William
December 11, 2008 at 12:26pm
I'm glad you understand that Zizek is in fact a marxist and communist, but painting him as an anti-semite must be a form of self-parody. Few have written with more deeply understood moral outrage at the horrors of the holocaust than Zizek, to the point where I wonder if it is a failing of your own moral universe to properly address the holocaust that makes you envy Zizek's?
- Miles Jacob
December 12, 2008 at 1:22am
William: "'uncontrollable thoughts', it's funny you presume to know something about my thoughts, factchecker"--- only what you tell me, and what you've told me is that you see everyone, including yourself, in Zizek's description of the reader of _Man is Wolf to Man_ who couldn't help but think of the blood libel and the Jewish instinct to profiteer.--- You wrote: "but only if we remember that we all belong in those ASA meetings -- and I mean ALL, Jews and non-Jews alike…. " So okay, if you say so, why should I doubt you? But I’m just pointing out that you're in a tiny tiny minority. ---- Anyway, you seem like a cool guy, and I bet you really don’t have those kinds of thoughts that Zizek has about the Joooz. I bet – though I don’t claim to know - you found that reaction to Man is Wolf to Man as off the wall and creepy (and also kind of hilarious) as I do. And I bet you don’t really see any thoroughness or any denouncing in Zizek’s superficial, trite, salesmanlike movie review style reading of anti-Semitism either. And I sympathise with your disgust with Kirsch very much. I wonder what this neocon rag is doing even taking notice of this recycled garbage of Zizek's; the motive is no doubt unsavory. But Kirsch is just the reviewer Zizek deserves, Zizek the incorrigible serial liar, who has denounced Laclau and the Latin American social movements as "proto fascists", who has attacked the left in Slovenia who opposed his party's ethnic cleansing, Roma persecuting, and privatisations as "fascists", who has retailed an ancient, sleazy slander of Noam Chomsky [“As many readers may know, Chomsky wrote the preface for a book by Robert Faurisson, which was threatened with being banned because it denied the reality of the Holocaust. Chomsky claimed that though he opposes the book's content, the book should still be published for free speech reasons.” SZ repeats this constantly though he knows it’s groundless slander.], who disseminates the idiotic trope of "Islamofascism", who has slandered Jean Betrand Aristide accusing him of inciting gang murders in Haiti while pretending to ‘praise’ him for it, who has slandered the leftist and social democrat opposition to the neoliberal EU constitutional treaty repeatedly as "fascists" and invented out of whole cloth a lie about the voters motivated by "fascist" and "protofascist" opposition to Turkish membership to oppose the EU treaty, [““The French-Dutch no thus presents us with the latest adventure in the story of populism. … insofar as, in its very notion, [populism] displaces the immanent social antagonism into the antagonism between the unified people and its external enemy, it harbors in the last instance a long-term protofascist tendency.” ….“According to most of the polls, the main reason of those who voted “no” at the last referendums in France and Netherlands was their opposition to Turkish membership.” (A sheer outrageous lie he has repeated dozens of times despite being repeatedly corrected.)] who has compared those who oppose his Aryanist Eurosupremacism to Joseph Goebbels, who sees fascism everywhere there is opposition to US imperial policy and whose latest interventions involve equating Noam Chomsky with Henry Kissinger as a "cynical realist" and heretic from the cult of the miraculous Obama and urging Americans faced with the Paulson swindle to "Obey!" because Kant would have recommended that. And so on and so on. Zizek calls everyone on earth "fascists" (except of course Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and friends, whom he defends, at times passionately, from the charge, and whose _certain innocence_ of ordering torture he was _the first_ to announce, with no grounds whatever, after the Abu Ghraib photos were released) and diagnoses billions of strangers as secret anti-Semites. And suddenly when he's included as one of this vast fascist anti-Semitic humankind, for belonging to which he himself has denounced every leftist, social democrat and socialist living, as soon as he is identified as a fascist and anti-Semite – which he is very evidently willing to be if it pays off - by someone actually reading what the sentences say, his slavish followers get squeamish and act all aghast. Such harsh words! You didn’t think so evidently when they appeared dozens of times in Zizek’s work smearing altermondialists, Ernesto Laclau, the Bolivarian movement, the landless peasants of Brazil, the coca growers in Bolivia, Fanmi Lavalas, social democrats and socialists opposed to the neoliberal plunder of the EU, I wonder why you find these terms so uncouth now when they are applied to someone who finds them marvellously handy in defences of monstrous policies like the neoliberal schemes for the European Union, the bombings of Yugoslavia and Lebanon, and the persecution of Slovenia’s “non Aryan” minorities? Kirsch is a neocon kook, clearly less than sincere, and it is only fitting then that he should be given the task of dosing the neoliberal clown – who may not be a true-believer anti-Semite himself but who certainly is not above the frequent appeal to the anti-Semitism of others (George Soros, “the enemy” is “a lie embodied”?) - with a greatly watered down spoonful of his own unpalatable medicine.
- factchecker
December 12, 2008 at 3:40am
Thanks for your response, factchecker, though I have to admit to having some trouble following you. I admit to not being very well-versed in some of these incidents you're referring to, but still I can't help wondering whether there's been a huge misunderstanding here and that in fact we're talking about two different intellectual here? Are you sure you're talking about Slavoj Zizek here the Slovenian Hegelian-Lacanian theorist and author of In Defense of Lost Causes? Because when you say things like ...'Zizek calls everyone on earth "fascists" (except of course Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and friends, whom he defends, at times passionately, from the charge ... I seriously start wondering whether you have our Zizek confused with someone else, such as Christopher Hitchens (before his recent return to Left-wing causes, that is). If this is what you think Zizek thinks of Bush, Rumsfeld, et al, then you clearly have not read "The Broken Kettle", for example.
- William
December 13, 2008 at 2:44pm
This review is a joke right?
- Dai
December 17, 2008 at 10:51am
i personally don't agree with zizek's views but i agree with several other commenters that as a critique of zizek this article had a lot of potential that was left unused. this piece was well-written in the sense that it was entertaining and fascinating but the author took the easy way out by quoting small lines out of context and pointing out things that would provoke the most shock and outrage. i would have liked to have seen more examination of zizek's views of capitalism and how the academic/leftist community responds two him, two issues to which the author dedicated only a few lines. as i said before, the author is clearly intelligent and a talented writer but definitely (and disappointingly)took the easy way out in his approach to zizek.
- j
December 18, 2008 at 10:58pm
'Torture, which appears to be un-American, is pronounced to be the thing that is most American.' Who does it appear that way to, Mr. Kirsch? To me the idea doesn't even qualify as one of Zizek's trademark counter-intuitive reversals. I lived in America as a boy and an irrationally punitive antagonism with a barely dormant potential for torture rarely seemed far away. Think violent fraternity hazing rituals, coaches and parents screaming at pre-pubescent little league players to 'kill' their opponents, bestial high-school jocks holding nerds in headlocks, forcing them to designate themselves 'faggots'. I don't know whether you're aware of this, but this kind of crypto-fascist psychosis isn't normal abroad the way it is in the States. Perhaps you've lived around it so long, you've become inured to it. I've also read several of Zizek's books, including some of those to which you refer. I find it impossible to see how you could draw the conclusions you do from the remarks you quote out of context without a) having failed to read further, b) deciding to deliberately misrepresent them, or c) being stupid. I'll do you the favour of assuming it's not (c).
- John Moseley
January 11, 2009 at 8:24am
Hi everyone. You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in. I am from Barbados and too poorly know English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: "Do you fear rejection? Well, he can say no to you, that is for sure, but think a little." With respect :-(, Ainsley.
- Ainsley
February 22, 2009 at 11:44pm
This article, and the many idiotic misrepresentations of Žižek in it and the comments, is a tragic proof of the necessity of so many of his critiques of ideology.
- takers
April 9, 2009 at 9:43am
great job, Mr. Kirsh! howewer its a shame that part on antisemitism overshadowed everything else.
- benny
April 20, 2009 at 12:44am
Dreadful article. Kirsch rips Zizek's ideas out of their context to construct a schoolboy synecdoche. I encounter writing like Kirsch's frequently, and I am now convinced the Western liberal-capitalism is a busted flush. In his essay 'Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil', Alain Badiou explains why: all it has left as a symbolic strategy is to portray quite relentlessly any politicised form of collectivism as 'absolute evil', the 'measure beyond measure', thus repressing that which could divert us from the 'accumulation of little evils' currently corrupting and corroding the system from the inside. Squealing 'totalitarian', anti-Semite' etc. at anyone who dares to think outside of liberal-capitalism's little box is the leitmotif of the unthinking acolyte.
- Dr Hall
May 30, 2009 at 5:29pm
This is the most hilariously willful misapprehension of Žižek I've read in a long time. Thanks Kirsch! Priceless entertainment.
- Jeremy Steinberg
June 6, 2009 at 11:30pm