This Monday and last Monday (Feb. 1 & 8) UFPPC's Monday evening book discussion group, Digging Deeper, is examining two recent books by philospher Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2008) and First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Verso, 2009). -- The French translation of the latter was reviewed last week in Le Monde (Paris); Jean Birnbaum's mixed review is translated below.[1] ...
1.
[Translated from Le Monde (Paris)]
SLAVOJ ZIZEK AND THE POLITICS OF INCANTATION
By Jean Birnbaum
Le Monde (Paris)
February 4, 2010
[Review of Après la tragédie, la farce, ou Comment l'histoire se répète (English title: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce), translated from the English by Daniel Bismuth. Flammarion, 'Bibliothèque des savoirs,' 252 pp., 20 euros.]
http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2010/02/04/slavoj-zizek-et-la-politique-de-l-incantation_1300958_3260.html
Slavoj Zizek has a repetition compulsion. From book to book, this king of cut-and-paste reproduces the same sentences, the same pages. In a 2006 interview someone pointed this out to him. The Slovenian philosopher replied in this way: "Yes, I'm well aware of it. But I think that real change is not saying something new, it's repeating oneself by introducing small but crucial variants. That's why there's a sort of madness in my writing."
This mania often inspires fascination. All over the world, Zizek says in all seriousness. Mixing Lacanian references, Hollywood references, and scatalogical jokes, his essays keep a hold on one's drifting attention. Sort of the way a student listens to the madman muttering across the table in a library: he lends an ear, because at every moment blinding insights may flash out.
Read in this way, the latest Zizek is edifying. In it you'll find reflections about this or that animated film: the author sketches, for example, a portrait of Berlusconi as Kung-fu Panda. For the rest, he proclaims his fidelity to the abstract "Idea" of communism. This doesn't mean reviving revolutionary hope by effecting a critical return to the past. It means, rather, defying the powers that be in a boastful tone: "Enough of moralizing democratic liberal blackmail. On our side, we no longer have to make excuses, whereas on theirs they'd be well advised not to delay," he writes. So there!
Like all regressive movements, this incantatory politics doesn't hold out any hope for a glorious future. On the contrary, it's attached to a pessimistic vision of human destiny, in which activists will only find the announcement of a disaster; "I state here that the communist Idea persists," says Zizek. "It survives the failure of its realization like a ghost coming back again and again, with an endless persistence best expressed by Beckett in Worstward Ho: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Thus he resorts to a sort of Coué method for despairing Marxists. To his companions in misfortune, Zizek proposes repeating this motto of Mao's: "Everything beneath the sky is in total chaos; the situation is excellent."
--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98407-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Web page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail:
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