POLITICS JANUARY 7, 2009
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I am grateful to Mr. Kirsch for the time and effort he put into running over so many of my books in order to find incriminating passages that would support his thesis on my anti-Semitic Fascism-Communism. Perhaps, however, it would have been better for him to stick to just one or two books and read them with a simple unprejudiced attention – in this way, he would have been able to avoid many unfortunate misreadings, like the one apropos Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, where Mr. Kirsch writes:
Zizek'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.”
Well … first, in my Violence, I claim that jihadis are really motivated neither by religion nor by a Leftist sense of justice, but by resentment, which in no way puts them on the Left, neither “objectively” nor “subjectively.” I simply never wrote that Islamic fundamentalists are in any sense on the Left—the whole point of my writing on this topic is that the “antagonism” between liberal tolerance and ethnic or religious fundamentalism is inherent to the universe of global capitalism: in their very opposition, they are the two faces of the same system. The true Left starts with the insight into this complicity. A good example of how religious fundamentalism is to be located “in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism” is Afghanistan. Today, when Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that, 30 years ago, it was a country with strong secular tradition, up to a strong Communist party which first took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Afghanistan became fundamentalist when it was drawn into global politics (first through the Soviet intervention).
Back to Mr. Kirsch, often it is enough to continue my quote and the meaning (opposite to the one imputed to me) becomes clear. Mr. Kirsch quotes my passage “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 is this really a call for even more killing than Hitler afforded? Here is how my text goes on: “Nazism was not radical enough, it did not dare to disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space (which is why it had to invent and focus on destroying an external enemy, Jews). This is why one should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions—but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive.”
In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic functioning of the British colonial state. Mr. Kirsch’s reasoning culminates towards the end of his text, where he “demonstrates” that I advocate the annihilation of Jews (with some minor exceptions, true):
For in In Defense of Lost Causes, again paraphrasing Badiou, Zizek 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 Zizek 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.”
I must confess this paragraph took me by surprise even after reading most of Mr. Kirsch’s text! First, as it should be clear to a minimally attentive reader, in the quoted passage about “final solution,” I do not paraphrase Badiou or his “vision”—what I do is provide a résumé of how the French Zionist critics perceive contemporary Europe. For them, the European Union is at its very core an anti-Semitic project, a continuation of Hitler’s work with other (“democratic”) means, as it is clear from the very title of Jean-Claude Milner’s book, The Criminal Tendencies of the Democratic Europe. It is thus a pure manipulation to read my praise of the “universalist” Jews as an argument for exempting them from annihilation: all I do in the passage from which Mr. Kirsch has torn out a couple of words ("fidelity to the Messianic impulse,” etc.) is to point out the debt of political and theoretical universalism (of what Kant praised as the “public use of reason”) to the Jewish experience, claiming that the conflict between the defenders of and skeptics about the State of Israel is inherent to the Jewish identity. I hope that, at this point, the reader saw why any meaningful debate between Mr. Kirsch and me is impossible: before even approaching the true issues, one would have to spend pages ands pages just stating what my position is against Mr. Kirsch’s all-pervasive manipulations and falsifications. So let the reader judge who is “despicable” in this affair—and, to conclude in a lighter vein, here is how Mr. Kirsch explains my delusions about Jews:
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), Jews are a mere abstraction, objects of fantasy and speculation, that can be forced to play any number of roles in his psychic economy.
First, it wasn’t the Holocaust which left Ljubljana, the Slovene capital, almost without Jews: Jews were expelled from Slovene territory back in 1516, by the order of the mighty Habsburg Emperor Maximilian in Vienna, endorsing the demand of local estates (who saw the opportunity to be thus rid of their debts following the model of the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492). After that fateful year, there were never more than a few hundred Jews in Slovenia. Second, Jews are to me in no way an “object of fantasy and speculation”: they are the majority of my friends and theoretical collaborators. I was pleasantly reminded of this fact in the last weeks, when all of them (plus many Jews unknown to me) contacted me, expressing their full solidarity against Mr. Kirsch’s ridiculous accusations. A proof, if one is needed, that, as Mr. Kirsch wrote, the U.S. is basically a decent country—in contrast to people like Mr. Kirsch who obviously think there are not enough real anti-Semites in our world, so we should multiply their number by imagining non-existing ones.
Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher whose books include In Defense of Lost Causes and Violence.
Click here to read Adam Kirsch's response.
By Slavoj Zizek
24 comments
You couldn't resist not replying, could you? Is your intention to give Kirsch a little more rope to hang himself with?
- randomvariable
January 7, 2009 at 10:33am
My impression is that Zizek is merely a very glib, facile idiot. Philosophy of any kind requires some coherence, and he runs off in every extreme direction. Dangerous? Perhaps, if he has a serious following. But in what direction would they follow. In short, he has a hustle and he's sticking to it.
- Pete Beck
January 7, 2009 at 10:38am
TNR should stop giving a podium to a racist, anti-semite like Slavoj Zizek. Let him spew his idiocy elsewhere.
- 3MJesus
January 7, 2009 at 11:33am
I was sad to read the charges leveled against Mr. Zizek by Mr. Kirsch in his review and continued in his wholly inadequate reply to Zizek's response. The problem, it seems to me, is a certain incommensurability between the conceptual ranges in which the two authors think and write. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Zizek (and who has not decided ex ante to find in him an anti-Semite, advocate of totalitarianism, or some other such monster) will recognize that much of the beauty, insight, and (I dare say) liberating power of his work is grounded in his ability to make connections between various levels of human thought and experience, to move from (apparently) mundane cultural artifacts to realms of abstraction founded on Lacanian ideas about the structure of language, thought, and the real. I believe that it is his ability to circulate between what I will call these various "registers" of thought and experience that makes him so important (though it is always easy to blame the popularity of a thinker one neither appreciates nor understands on 'fashion' and 'conformism' among intellectuals). One important step in attempting to understand Zizek (or any philosopher, I suppose) is to recognize the "register" in which he is operating. In some of his work, for example, he writes about "the Jew" as a concept that plays a role within a certain (conceptual) economy, and the attributes of that conceptual or symbolic "Jew." It is a mistake (and one so obvious that it would almost suggest an intentional misreading) to interpret this discussion, which takes place in the realm of abstraction, extrapolation, meta-whatever, as a discussion of the mundane, everyday, "real" world, so that the attributes and conceptual functions of the abstract Jew are imputed to actual individuals on the basis of their Jewish heritage or religious belief. In other words, to conflate the abstract/conceptual with the physical. Yet this is exactly what Kirsch seems determined to do in his reply, where he is incredulous that Zizek could describe Gandhi as more violent than Hitler. Obviously the violence that Zizek describes is not a physical violence but a sort of meta-violence against the state of things. Zizek has written about this elsewhere: the logic of Nazism was that of purification – the fundamentals of a strong and just order were in place, all that was needed was the elimination of an exogenous element, foreign to the system, in order to perfect it. Nazism was "less violent" than Gandhi's movement because it was violence against other humans in order to preserve and protect a pre-existing conceptual state of things, while Gandhi, foregoing violence against people, sought to destroy and remake the conceptual framework of society itself. The difference is one of registers, to which Kirsch is apparently tone-deaf. Nothing in his text authorizes the interpretation that Zizek minimizes or approves of genocide. The most salient symptom of Kirsch's failure to appreciate the register in which Zizek operates is his accusation that "for Zizek, Jews are a mere abstraction, objects of fantasy and speculation, that can be forced to play any number of roles in his psychic economy." Kirsch (basely in my opinion) links this to the absence of Jews in Zizek's personal life, or at least his hometown. But the crucial point is that it is precisely within the "psychic economy" that Zizek so adeptly and fruitfully explores (as opposed to the actual, material world) that "the Jew" functions as this "abstraction" and "object of fantasy." Recognizing this is precisely the key to understanding why the conceptual Jew of anti-Semitism has nothing at all to do with any actual Jewish person! Why anti-Semitism is founded in a psychic economy that requires no actual Jewish person at all to perpetuate itself. Why, to give a real-life example, people in countries with negligible Jewish populations can be persuaded that their lives and problems are caused by secret cabals of Jews running the country from behind the scenes. I am acutely aware of anti-Semitism and oppose it in all its forms, especially when it appears from the left, which I consider my ideological 'home'. But to call Zizek an anti-Semite is at best to misread his work. Properly understood it is, if anything, a critique that devastates anti-Semitism and other totalitarianisms as well because it exposes the non-identity between the symbolic, the conceptual stand-ins that function in the psychic economies that shape culture and society, and its putative actual manifestation in the real world.
- JRL
January 7, 2009 at 12:27pm
Zizek flirts with anti-semitism, which gives him a built-in audience, and then complains when he's called on it. So common, and always the same. "What me, antisemitic? Some of my closest friends should be gassed."
- Pleeeze
January 7, 2009 at 5:26pm
Dear Mr. Zizek, Thank you for responding to this article. I enjoy TNR for its political commentary, but get goaded by my leftist friends for reading it (the point being that if I read, I must agree with it). Well, I agree with and find entertaining some of the writers, and I don't think of TNR as homogenous. But then when I read Kirsch's review, I wince, and think, what am I doing? I can see my friends' point. I feel complicit in the idea that neo-liberalism is an entirely neutral ideology. I know that such a thing as a neutral ideology is impossible. I'm thankful for TNR for posting your response. I have read Violence and about half of In Defense of Lost Causes (and a number of earlier books), and found Kirsch's article to be utterly misleading. The Jewish question example jumped out at me especially, since there would be no such thing as a "Jewish Question" outside of an anti-semitic context.
- What'sSoFunny?
January 7, 2009 at 5:50pm
I want to thank JRL for posting that lengthy defense of Zizek because it clarified something for me which is how philosophers like Zizek often abstract themselves into absurdity and sometimes tragically into evil. So we are told that Zizek is not an antisemite it is just that he uses the abstract concept of Jew to explain things. It is not that Gandhi was actually more violent than Hitler it is just when dealing at the level of systems of power Gandhi was more total in his challenge and so more 'violent' It is from such sloppy uses of definitions and meanings that great tragedies are born. I would urge Zizek to learn the art of precision over the poetry of verbal flight. Like Nietzsche you are leaving yourself open for wild interpretation.
- Northern Observer
January 7, 2009 at 9:42pm
The original review was ridiculous (bordering on moronic), as any even occasional reader of Zizek would recognize. Subtlety and originality of thought make demands upon readers, some of whom will not be capable of or amenable to taxing their preconceptions and taking their fingers off their hair-triggers. Such was the half-witted hackery of Kirsch. Searching zealously for something, he flattered himself that he had found it. Sadly, he then proferred this manifest failure of analysis for public consumption. Even at this late date, some people can read Nietzsche and convince themselves that they've found a raving anti-semite. Of course, their inability to comprehend thought and writing that isn't simplified to the level that someone like Kirsch requires doesn't make the caricature accurate. Responsible and ethical readers can assess Heidegger (e.g.) and make an honest argument, while still relying on the actual (i.e., not distorted or caricatured) text & the principle of hermeneutic charity, pointing out the ways in which even Heidegger's more recondite thought does indeed have certain affinities with some aspects of the Nazi myths and anti-semitic lies. A pity that TNR couldn't find someone of that caliber to critique Zizek responsibly and honestly.
- Pierce Inverarity
January 7, 2009 at 10:06pm
mr. cisek ought to know that afghanistan was thrown into turmoil by zigniev brezinski's proud destabilization, so as to draw in the russians, a huge crime isn't it to ruin a country of 25 million people, with consequences still with us 40 years afterward. and the u.s. creation of the mujahadeeem. it really is not too surprising that a people then revert to pre-modern fundamentalism if "modernism" provides chiefly warfare, deceit. it's more than sheer resentment, it's vengefulness; the world remains too old for its own good. as to mr. kirsch, i recall a piece of his on theodor adorno in the n.y. sun, he didn't understad beans of that philosopher. ziggy claimed to be pr
- michael roloff
January 8, 2009 at 9:38am
It is a very stupid spectacle to read all these comments. And is very sad to see, today, a lot of stupid people trying to destroy a philosopher, when probably they never made nothing against the worst political administration in their country. We are now in front a wall of new paranoids, the speech of terror. It is horrible that people spent their time writing stupid comments. Please, people, read!!! you are the same people who sent Socrates to death.
- Luis Guerra
January 8, 2009 at 11:30am
Northern Observer seems to be arguing that our vocabularies are completely self-evident and thus contain no bias. Zizek acknowledges and explores the dominant Western view of violence - subjective violence - in the book with that title. You can't critique Badiou or Zizek's arguments about terms like "violence", "human rights", "ethics" or "ethical consensus", etc., without understanding how they are using these terms. It is true that they aren't using the terms in a completely established way, because they are attempting to effect change in thought. They are leftists, after all. The meaning of a word like "violence" is not completely self-evident, and it is part of Zizek's work to explore that. In addition, Zizek is absolutely no defender of Islamic terrorism. He also frequently exhorts his readers and listeners to reject anti-semitism, specifically in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
- What'sSoFunny?
January 8, 2009 at 11:43am
To understand Zizek at the very least one must have understood Hegel, Schelling, Marx, and Lacan. Lacking that one's reading will be out of context. The critique printed in TNR is completely without merit. Sadly serious thinkers get boiled down to such cozy misreadings. It is a shame Zizek had to waste time to reply. But a greater shame perhaps is his failure to respond to serious critiques of his work. In this he is typical of Lacanians who can't be bothered to talk with anyone who disagrees with them. Lacan is a major figure but this attitude is a sad defense mechanism. It is a shame that Zizek--who blurbs anything favorable to him or his lacanian colleagues--refuses to attend to a serious critique of his work. The critique I refer to occupies a chapter in one of my books. A book sent to S.Z. at 3 different addresses, all in use. Yes indeed readers you can dismiss this as sour grapes. For what it's worth I think Zizek is one of the most important thinkers today. And so the sadness of his silence.
- walter a davis
January 8, 2009 at 12:21pm
You don't have to like Zizek's work much to have seen that Kirsh's original review was a masterpiecce of misconstruction and misquotation, a massive own goal for the author and TNR.
- simon smith
January 8, 2009 at 2:13pm
Zizek uses hard cases to dramatize the limits of his principles. Kirsch deploys pieties. Greater engagement wouldn't make much difference because their important disagreements are axiomatic, beyond the scope of instrumental reason. The good news is that it's better to show this than summarize it. For that, thank you, TNR.
- MN8
January 8, 2009 at 4:21pm
I never would have read anything on this "TNR" (since it is mainly the propaganda of the enemy) if not for the absurd claims put to Zizek's work, but it has been an interesting trip. Sometimes it is nice to go to a foreign land (ideologically) where everyone else has got it all wrong and you can chuckle about it with your friends upon returning home. Thanks “TNR”
- Jimmy Zamora
January 8, 2009 at 5:55pm
Basically, Kirsch took you apart, to the extent that someone can even make sense of your ramblings. You have responded here with.. .what exactly? A strawman here and there, an irrelevant "some of my best friends are Jewish" dodge, and an unsubstantiated dismissal of the rest of the criticism on the grounds that he doesnt understand you. You simply ignore anything else that was discussed in the article, and do not address the actual points made by Kirsch. You argue like a sophomore philosophy student, and an obnoxious one at that.
- krayman
January 9, 2009 at 12:39am
Posted by 3MJesus 3 of 16 | warn tnr | respond 'TNR should stop giving a podium to a racist, anti-semite like Slavoj Zizek. Let him spew his idiocy elsewhere.' -Is this the level of intelligence that TNR attracts?
- U.H dematagoda
January 13, 2009 at 5:29pm
The freedom to be racist. Is it possible?
- Joan
January 16, 2009 at 9:03pm
Looking at some of the responses above, in which vociferousness vies with incoherence -- see "krayman" for perhaps the best example -- it becomes clear that Zizek is not only right to say that meaningful debate is impossible between him and Kirsch but we can also conclude it's imposible between serious readers and those who are incapable of engaging with thought at its most rigorous and daring level. That includes anyone who jumps to dismiss Slavoj Zizek of "spewing hate", of being "anti-semitic", etc. In any case, I appreciate and enjoyed Zizek's taking time to address this rather ridiculous, and frankly downright frivolous excuse for an argument. I personally come away from this non-debate with my respect and admiration for Zizek's thought fully intact, but I also have to say I come away from it a little suprised frankly at the lower intellectual level of some of the readership of TNR, whose level of debate - here at least - appears not to be any higher than what you'd expect in the comments section of the local newspaper. I thought TNR's readership was of a higher level than that across the board. Guess I was wrong.
- WillM
January 18, 2009 at 11:04am
This statement: "In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler" Is stunningly disgusting.
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January 19, 2009 at 10:14pm
No, it's not.
- Nicko Hendo
January 20, 2009 at 8:52pm
This debate makes me anti-semitic.
- Nicko Hendo
January 20, 2009 at 8:54pm
The above 'reading' of the statement is stunningly myopic. To begin with, think about how the term "in this precise sense" functions in Zizek's overall argument and how words such as "violence" have more than one meaning. I recommend a decent graduate seminar on social theory for all those folks who blindly reach for the tired and dangerous fantasy that language is a neutral mirror of reality.
- pablo K
January 27, 2009 at 1:21pm
its amazing how people can jump to conclusions about a man who can say more of substance in a ten minute chat than mr Kirsch can in tens-hundreds of pages. every one loves the nazis in the sense that one can end any argument my mere mention. if you want to know of his real views read some of his work on the anti-zionist jew being the real subject of antisemitism of the day and how the state of israel has always been the dream of the anti-semite. at least those not willing to go to the "final solution"."that the jew should be force to become a nation and work the land so that they stop exploiting labor" p.s im a jew who lived in israel for 2 years my father was born in vienna and most of his family was killed in the holocaust. i wish nothing but pain and suffering on those who would exploit the concept of antisemitism to justify wars of choice meant to enrich the very people who when things finally fall apart will be the first in line to blame the jew.
- paul bass
April 4, 2009 at 10:30am