On Monday, Feb. 1, UFPPC's Digging Deeper will begin two sessions discussing recent works of philosopher Slavoj Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Verso, 2009) and In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2009). -- In a review three months ago the London Guardian recommended the former volume as "electrifying."[1] -- "The bottom line about Zizek is that he is revolted by a world in which the world's poor starve while banks are handed trillions," Nicholas Lezard said. -- In November, 61-year-old John N. Gray of the London School of Economics was less favorable, writing in the London Independent that Zizek is a "gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers . . . at the furthest possible remove from anything that could be described as serious politics."[2] -- For Gray, Zizek's work is "avidly consumed by young people across much of Europe and beyond" who are profoundly ignorant of history, an ignorance to which capitalism has itself contributed. -- Aaron Leonard, reviewing the volume for History News Network, was more positive, calling First as Tragedy, Then as Farce "deeply challenging."[3] -- None of these reviews have much to say about Zizek's argument. -- To get an idea of it, see this synopsis....
1.
Culture
Books
Nicholas Lezard's choice
FIRST AS TRAGEDY, THEN AS FARCE BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK
By Nicholas Lezard
** Something rotten in society? Time to revive communism **
Guardian (London)
October 24, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/24/tragedy-farce-slavoj-zizek-lezard
I remember when, in this paper's excellent Weekend magazine's Q & A, Slavoj Žižek was asked to "tell us a secret," he replied: "Communism will win." I don't think anyone familiar with Žižek's writings will think he was joking, but just in case you thought the matter needed clarification, here it is, in book form. We know something is rotten with society, as the financial crisis shows, but what to do with it? The answer, he says at the close of his book, is simple: revive communism.
Žižek makes a plea to disillusioned communists: "Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it -- time to get serious again!" (Those exclamation marks do undermine the notion of "seriousness," it has to be said.)
Reading Žižek is hard work. But it is worth it; like hacking through miles of undergrowth and jungle vegetation in order to be rewarded, every so often, with a splendid view. Here's some of the undergrowth (the ellipsis is Žižek's), coming after a rather taxing quote from the Italian radical philosopher Toni Negri: "What we find here is the standard post-Hegelian matrix of the productive flux which is always in excess with regard to the structural totality which tries to subdue and control it... But what if, in a parallax shift, we perceive the capitalist network itself as the true excess over the flow of the productive multitude?" Yes indeed -- what then?
I am perhaps not the best person, then, to explicate Žižek, for there are times when I simply do not understand what he is saying. (He would doubtless call me an idiot, a word he is fond of using, applying it liberally, if not so much in this book.) His two intellectual mentors are Hegel and Lacan -- and I have also had my problems with them, which is not, of course, to imply that either they or Žižek are charlatans. But one does sometimes yearn for a move away from impenetrability.
For when Žižek stops talking like that and actually says something directly, then he is electrifying. It is, I suggest, this tendency, and this one alone, that accounts for his popularity and presence; it's certainly why I'm recommending his book this week. Never mind the audacity or novelty value of his pro-communist proclamations, revel in the way he can zero in on the absurdities and contradictions of the modern world. His frame of reference may include Lacan and Hegel, but it also takes in dumb Hollywood films, stuff he's noticed on the telly, the kind of bullshit PR companies burp out. He quotes the information sheet from a New York hotel: "Dear Guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200."
"The beauty of this formulation, taken literally," purrs Žižek, "is that you are to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay." This is the Žižek I like, the one who lets the system show us how stupid and cynical it is. You really feel he is on to something. The malaise and meaninglessness of contemporary democracy -- in what sense, we may ask, are we living in a democracy? -- is something that has to be addressed, and addressed bravely. Pausing to take a brief, horrified look at Berlusconi (for "Italy today is effectively a kind of experimental laboratory of our future"), he notes that "his democracy is a democracy of those who, as it were, win by default, who rule through cynical demoralization." Well, there's a lot of it about. On the other hand, he notes the worldwide delight that greeted Barack Obama's election, and views it sympathetically, even though making perhaps forgivably snide remarks about him from the left is becoming increasingly fashionable.
The bottom line about Žižek is that he is revolted by a world in which the world's poor starve while banks are handed trillions. You will have to run up from time to time against the concept of Greimasian semiotic squares, of which, if you are like me, you may be pitifully ignorant; but, unlike me, you don't have to read every word. There is enough in here to keep you going.
2.
Books
COMMONWEALTH, BY MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI; FIRST AS TRAGEDY, THEN AS FARCE, BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK
By John Gray
** In the Bolshevik cabaret **
Independent on Sunday (London)
November 20, 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/commonwealth-by-michael-hardt-amp--antonio-negribrfirst-as-tragedy-then-as-farce-by-slavoj-zizek-1823817.html
One of history's most discredited ideologies is having a comeback -- not as a political force but as a commodity in the marketplace.
No longer confined to dingy meetings of ageing Trotskyites or the longueurs of the academic seminar, communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act. The 20th century's biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas.
Commonwealth is the last in a trilogy of books co-authored by Michael Hardt, an American professor of literature, and Antonio Negri, an Italian academic and political activist arrested in 1979 for alleged involvement in the kidnap and murder of the former prime minister of Italy, Aldo Moro. Those charges were dropped but others led to Negri spending years in exile and in jail. The first volume, Empire (2000), was something of a publishing sensation, welcomed as a radical new version of Marxian theory. In fact the book owed more to the facile theories of globalization in vogue at the time.
According to Hardt and Negri, a new international system had emerged: a borderless cosmopolis in which sovereign states were obsolete. It is a view reminiscent of Thomas Friedman's fantasy of the flat world presented in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, published in the same year as Empire. Like Friedman, Hardt and Negri equated globalisation with Americanization and never imagined that the process could stop or break down. The supra-national governance coming into being was the American Revolution writ large. A new multicultural proletariat was being formed worldwide, they argued in Multitude (2004), with the power to realize Marx's dream of communism.
Commonwealth, the last volume in the series, adds very little to the previous two. There are a couple of sections purporting to deal with the collapse of American hegemony but nothing that addresses its real impact, which is to recreate a decentered world of several great powers competing with one another much as the great powers did at the end of the 19th century.
The style remains a mix of strangulated jargon and toe-curling uplift. "The notion of social becoming," the authors inform us, "suggests the possibility of moving out of the anti-modernity of indigenism in the direction of an indigenous altermodernity." Moving from intra-academic obscurity to bad poetry, at the end of the book they write: "The process of instituting happiness will constantly be accompanied by laughter . . . While we are instituting happiness, our laughter is a pure as water."
This is radical theory in the idiom of Monty Python. The painful quandaries of politics are wiped away, and all that remains is feelgood blather dressed up as neo-Marxian analysis. It is a relief to turn from this pap to Slavoj Zizek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, a book which for all its faults makes clear that revolution necessarily involves large doses of suffering and coercion.
A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.
Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that "One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist paradigm' of centralized dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around . . . Now, more than ever, one should insist on the 'eternal Idea of Communism' -- strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people."
In other words, dictatorship is indispensable to the communist project. Mass coercion and terror are not departures from a humane vision, brought about by tyrannical leaders acting in backward conditions. Lenin and Stalin were genuine masters of revolutionary strategy, who knew that without organized terror their goals would never be achieved.
In this if in nothing else, Zizek is unquestionably right. In the real world, communist revolutions are not achieved by rhetoric; they require firing squads, secret police, and gulags. This is as near as Zizek ever gets to the realities of revolution, however. He passes over the fact that systematic terror has nowhere realized the utopian goals of communism, but instead created new and worse forms of tyranny while killing millions of people.
When applied to contemporary conditions, his much-vaunted Leninism is comical. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce differs from the pap dispensed by the authors of *Commonwealth* chiefly in virtue of the gleeful enthusiasm with which Zizek defends the necessity of terror. But no more than Hardt and Negri can Zizek identify any social force that actually wants communism. For all his insistent tough-mindedness -- "If you can get power, grab it," he declared in an interview the other day -- he is at the furthest possible remove from anything that could be described as serious politics.
The essential frivolity of this latter-day Leninism is a pointer to the true reasons for the revival of radical leftist thinking at the present time. The global financial crisis has left many people frightened and confused. Faced with the failures of capitalism, they look around for alternatives -- and here capitalism itself comes to the rescue.
A feature of the hyper-capitalism of recent years is that it abolishes historical memory. The squalor and misery of communism are now as remote to most people as life under feudalism. When Zizek and others like him defend communism -- "the communist hypothesis," as they call it -- they can pass over the fact that the hypothesis has been falsified again and again, in dozens of different countries, because their audience knows nothing of the past. Hence the appeal of Zizek's works, which are being avidly consumed by young people across much of Europe and beyond.
Whether as Hardt and Negri's embarrassing rhetoric or Zizek's parodic Leninism, the intellectual revival of communism is best understood in terms of capitalism's ability to produce compensatory spectacles.
The media-confected communism of the present time has as little connection with everyday life as does reality television -- possibly even less. But precisely because of its unreality, the neo-Bolshevik spectacle has a definite function in contemporary society. The clowning cabaret of 21st-century communism does what entertainment has always been meant to do. It distracts those who watch it from thinking about their problems, which secretly they suspect may be insoluble.
--John Gray's most recent book is Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (Allen Lane) .
3.
REVIEW OF SLAVOJ ZIZEK'S FIRST AS TRAGEDY, THEN AS FARCE
By Aaron Leonard
History News Network
November 21, 2009
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/120329.html
One of the more interesting books published to coincide with the anniversary of the coming down of the Berlin Wall is Slavoj Zizek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.
The title comes from Karl Marx’s "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” and its excavation of the farce of the rule of Louis Napoléon, last monarch of France and nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte.
Zizek tells us straight away that if you think he is writing a polemic against communism, “I sincerely advise you to stop here . . . Indeed the book should be forcibly confiscated from you.” He is referring to two other events; 9/11 and the financial meltdown of 2008.
For the uninitiated, this is a solid introduction to Slavoj Zizek. Zizek -- in certain intellectual circles -- is something of a rock star. He has made movies, written numerous books, and is widely seen as one of the most important philosophers living today. When he spoke at New York’s Cooper Union recently the 900 seat auditorium was sold out well in advance.
And he is a certain kind of philosopher. In that regard another quote from Marx springs to mind, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” That Zizek has written a book defending the idea of communism ought to make anyone concerned about the future sit up and take notice.
The book is divided into two sections. The first deals with ideology, where he engages in a sharp critique of the current order and its thinking. The second examines the “communist hypothesis.”
There is something deeply challenging here. Take, for example, the gauntlet he lays down to those putting forward the idea that the world as it currently exists is the quintessence of what humanity can achieve. “Enemy propaganda against radical emancipatory politics is by definition cynical -- not in the simple sense of not believing its own words, but at a much more basic level: it is cynical precisely insofar as it does believe its own words, since its message is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad, such that radical change will only make things worse.” Agree or not this is not easily dismissed.
Of the current capitalist order he has quite a bit to say -- not much of it good. For example, he tells us of the recent state of emergency enacted in Italy -- part of a trend toward "states of emergency" that is best exemplified in the post 9/11 repressive atmosphere in the U.S.
In Italy the target has been immigrants from Africa. As part of this state of emergency seven Tunisian fisherman were put on trial in Sicily in 2007, charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigrants. Their aiding and abetting came about after the fisherman, anchored and asleep, were awakened by screams. They in turn came to the rescue of a sinking rubber boat crammed with people; among them two children and 11 women, two of them pregnant. The actions of these fishermen stood in contrast to another incident in which fisherman had beaten the immigrants with sticks to keep them from boarding -- thus leaving them to drown. The latter case is what the authorities would see as legal and legitimate. That such circumstances exist, or that torture is no longer beyond the pale -- but is something up for debate -- is something Zizek sees as emblematic of the troubling state of things.
At the same time he is a sharp critic of what he calls the “Really Existing Socialism” that manifested itself in the twentieth century, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Some will find Zizek hard to follow at times -- and that is largely a result of a thinking style that pushes at the edges. This is not academic writing, nor is it common sense. And what other student of the French psychoanalyst Lacan do you know invoking “Kung Fu Panda” to elaborate a point?
While the core of his ethical and philosophical arguments are sound -- and in many ways you get the sense he wants these things to just be considered -- it is frustrating this is not fleshed out more. While upholding the communist Idea one does get much sense of how this would be realized -- or how ‘things would be different next time.’
That said this is all on a much different plane than popular received wisdom. It is interesting to contrast Zizek’s skew on things with that of the Wall Street Journal. In their recent editorial commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall they quote George Orwell, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." The paper was referring to the failed utopia of the communist system. Of course the unintended irony is this is fully applicable today. In that regard we are fortunate to have Slavoj Zizek pointing that out.
--Aaron Leonard is a freelance journalist. His columns and interviews span the gamut from geopolitics to economics to religion. He is a regular contributor to the History New Network and other publications. His writings can be found at www.aaronleonard.net.
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