Slavoj Žižek

As I write this, Hamas is lobbing rockets into Israel and Israel is returning with air strikes and a ground offensive. As I write this the Ukranian government is trying desperately to reclaim sovereignty over the East which is increasingly controlled by pro-Russian militants. Somehow during this outbreak of violence, a passenger jet was shot down killing 298 passengers and crew. Violence is alive and well in our world.

For Žižek, this explosive "subjective" violence is only the violence we show more see on the surface. Below the subjective violence is objective violence, the violence inherent in language which influences our thoughts and attitudes. Also below subjective violence is systemic violence—the effect of living in our modern economic and political systems. Any understanding of what's happening in the world today must take into account all the causes of violence.

Žižek (as you might expect) has many profound things to say about the subject, complete with regular references to Marx, Hegel, and Lacan. He wanders through many diverse cultural and political landscapes. He tackles the problem in the Middle East with an accusing look at the Germans (who, in his mind, offered restitution to the Jews by giving away someone else's land). He looks at the uproar over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. He delves into Alfred Hitchkcock's films. He even considers the shaming of prisoners in Abu Ghraib This is one of the joys of Žižek—you never know where he's going next.

My difficulty with this book was that Žižek almost always takes a contrarian view. After a while it feels like he plays devil's advocate just for the sake of being different—as if it was a game. He takes a radically counter-intuitive idea then tries to argue for it. His arguments are inventive and brilliant, but they're far from infallible. Take for example, the prisoner abuse photos that came from Abu Ghraib. For Žižek, this obscene act of shaming was more like an initiation ritual into American culture. It was a hazing.

Žižek's Violence is an intellectual, political, and cultural look at the violence that permeates our world. You can agree or disagree with him, but you can't stay neutral. show less

[T]he way to rid ourselves of our masters is not for humankind itself to become a collective master over nature, but to recognize the imposture in the very notion of the Master.

Inexplicably the last week has been one of Žižek. I struggled, slipped and regrouped to push through Living in the End Times. I find it increasingly interesting that the Slovene so often adopts theological motifs especially towards a Marxist Future: one can almost sense a crescendo of trumpets. I'm not sure of much, show more but this is exhilarating reading except when broaching the nuances of either Lacan or Marx; it then becomes rather numbing. This intimidating tome borrows the cycle of grief from Kubler-Ross (denial/anger/bargaining/depression/acceptance)and thusly explores the banking crisis, the viability of multiculturalism, the ethics of Hollywood, the threat of both a virtual post-humanity as well as the bio-genetic organic possibility: architecture and film receive even treatments and there's even an examination of Joself Fritzl through a parsing of Sound of Music. What, you say? The Austrian who abducted, raped and impregnated his daughter and then kept the brood underground for years, that guy? Yep. It isn't pretty. I think the postmodern possibilities where everything is plastic and differences become relative is a threatening soil. Irony can be ignored and the glib becomes noisome. show less

Another reason to feel old: reading Looking Awray: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan and a Plea for Intolerance somewhere in 2002. Slavoj Žižek is somewhat of a rockstar among philosophers, but that should not detract from what he has to say – nor should his incessant referring to Jacques Lacan, Marx and Hegel. When I heard him exclaim “the true dreamers are those who think the things can go on indefinitely the way they are” on YouTube in October 2011, I’ve always thought of him as show more someone that is able to pull away the curtain on certain things.

It has been over 20 years since I read something of the man, and this title caught my eye – especially after I read The Deluge. 2024 promises to be something of a year celebrating the existential crisis, so in search of denouement, I turned to Žižek again.

Too Late To Awaken has 163 pages, subdivided in 17 short chapters. It was written around the one year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The bulk of the book – the first 100 pages – mainly deal with Žižek’s thoughts on what this invasion means for global politics. The picture ain’t pretty: maybe we should stop worrying about the coming calamity, and admit we are already knee-deep in it. That future dystopia we all fear is already happening, right now. We might be well aware of that, but we choose to ignore it.

Žižek offers some thoughts on the culture wars as well, and his analysis is not that original, if well put: both sides of that war ignore economic foundations. Are we even aware how thoroughly our lives have changed the last few decades? Referring to Alenka Zupančič and Yanis Varoufakis, he ends with a chapter warning about the current form of neo-feudalism, as our most important commons today are privately owned.

He ends with the notion that markets move too slowly to solve the current environmental and political crisis. Remarkably, the book is a call to arms to switch to some kind of war economy, one that bypasses our failing democracies. “Our [only] hope today is the crisis.”

Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It show less

I keep returning to Brecht
who made you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back
a door can have diverse meanings
I stand outside your door
the odd thing is, you stand outside your door too
— Anne Carson, Antigonick (2012)

On the Uninhabitable

In her translation of The Oresteia (2009) Anne Carson remarks, "it is a truism of ancient stagecraft that the one who controls the doorway controls the tragedy." (We remind ourselves of Clytemnestra rolling out the red carpet for Agamemnon.) show more One wonders, then, about Antigone's relation to Control in the Brechtian staging of the play with that door strapped to her back. (It seems to be an error that Carson omits this connection in Antigonick.) The possession of a door in the closest possible proximity (and yet inaccessible) seems to be a metaphor for how Žižek reads Antigone in his introduction to this text (via Judith Butler), "Antigone undermines the existing symbolic order [. . .] she publicly assumes an uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the public space – not a priori, but only with regard to the way this space is structured now, in the historically contingent and specific conditions” (23).

At this point, Žižek also references that other "uninhabitable position" i.e. Kierkegaard's Abraham who cannot communicate the meaning of the divine subpoena because, though he might say it all plainly, the decision comes from a place which can't be understood. "[Antigone's] deadlock is that she is prevented from sharing this accursed knowledge (like Abraham, who also could not communicate to others the divine injunction to sacrifice his son)" (14). Žižek is playing an interesting shell-game here: Kierkegaard's redemption "by virtue of the absurd" (which is "Real" in the sense that biblical story is "True") is likened to Antigone's "uninhabitable position" of non-relation to the "big Other" ("but only with regard to historically contingent and specific conditions"), the solution for which is the "[Agambenian] violent [reassertion of] the ‘revolutionary’ Messianic dimension of politics" (24). In short, what this means (without so many parentheticals) is that the Kierkegaardian "paradox of faith" is proposed as a kind of way to do politics. By an interesting transitive property, Žižek shows that Antigone's position isn't "uninhabitable" so long as we can inhabit the position which brings about its condition of possibility. (Notably, the way Žižek uses Fear and Trembling (1843) as a political workhorse re-doubles the "uninhabitable" position of what Kierkegaard calls, "Religiousness B.")

Messianism as a political ethos seems to be the necessary response to anxiety about "Closure;" i.e. that feeling that comes from reading too much Agamben. Though one wonders whether this is a proper Socialist impulse. In The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012) Žižek notes how liberals, after viewing Triumph of the Will (1935), often remark how they finally understand the appeal of 1930's German fascism. The response, of course, is that all the "volkish" appeal of that propaganda piece was appropriated from the left-wing Workers Movement. By the same token we might remark that "Messianism" is not the characteristic ethos of left-wing movements (contra what Walter Benjamin might say), but that Messianism has been appropriated from its origin in the diverse paleo-political movements whose common characteristic is that they're "always-already a failure." We recall here the consequence for the actor who plays Antigone in the Brechtian staging always on the threshold: "Let’s return to Brecht, maybe he got you best / to carry one’s own door will make a person / clumsy, tired and strange” (Carson, Antigonick).

It isn't clear how close Žižek comes to accomplishing his object in his construction of this text: "My retelling is consciously anachronistic – It doesn’t pretend to be a work of art but an ethico-political exercise" (25). To the extent that we are reading an "ethico-political exercise," the project seems to be haunted by a special anxiety: how does Žižek understands his task as translator/playwright. (It is a remarkable elision for a text with such a long introduction to leave this unaddressed. For the sake of comparison, Anne Carson says: "I take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams” (Carson, Antigonick).) Perhaps Kierkegaard would be able to name Žižek's anxiety here. The characteristic pivot to political "Messianism" as an escape from hypostatized "closure" suggests "the despair of willing to be other-than-oneself," (from The Concept of Anxiety, (1844)). What's remarkable in this is that while Žižek uses Kierkegaard as a case study, the process also appears to be working in reverse. The forces of revolution, as Žižek imagines them, seem to be drawn, ineluctably, toward Kierkegaard's subsequent category of "Demonic dread," that is, "willing, in despair, to be oneself." This quality of Presumption appears to be what our violent revolutionary forces, internet forum partisans, and translators-who-yet-do-not-intend-to-write-good-verse have in common. At the limit of the-end-of-civilization, male "virtue" approximates, once again, that uninhabitable position which was, for the Greeks, female iniquity: total presumption.

EPITAPH FOR ARCHEDIKE, DAUGHTHER OF HIPPIAS
(Last tyrant of Athens)

"Of a man who himself was best in Greece of the men of his day:
Hippias’ daughter Archedike this dust hides,
She of a father, of a husband, of brothers, of children all tyrants
being.
Nor did she push her mind up into presumption”
— Simonides (trans. Anne Carson)

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