Slavoj Žižek

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Review of On Belief, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, and Welcome to the Desert of the Real

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SOURCE: Hook, Derek. Review of On Belief, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, and Welcome to the Desert of the Real, by Slavoj Žižek. Theoria, no. 101 (June 2003): 148-52.

[In the following review, Hook discusses several of Žižek's recent publications—including On Belief, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, and Welcome to the Desert of the Real—noting that all three texts explore similar subject material.]

In three titles, published over a short period of time, Slavoj Žižek has spread out the arguments and concerns of a single book, not to mention a series of similar examples and, in fact, similar tracts of text. One wonders whether this is the first sign of the dissipation of Žižek's intellectual aura, an indication, through repetition and overlap, that the popular theorist has started spreading himself too thin. There are a series of recurring themes across the titles, amongst which include the U.S. political crisis after September 11, the worldwide threat of supposed ‘Fundamentalism’, the continual juxtaposition of irrational religious belief with technologized, consumerist atheism, the growing threat of the new European Right-wing, the Palestinian question, and the ongoing persistence of Holocaust debates.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real is the most recent of the titles, a modest Verso paperback that reworks and expands a series of September 11 arguments that Žižek has replayed in various forums since the attacks. On Belief, the first of the three to be published, likewise bears the impression of a quickly-written book, one hastily prepared at the publisher's behest. It rehearses a fundamental Žižekian concern, far better explored in his earlier Enjoy Your Symptom!—how fantasmatic supports (here of a pseudo-religious sort) structure our daily existence and reality, despite our insistence to the contrary. The most prominent of the three publications is Revolution at the Gates, an edited collection of Lenin's 1917 writings, bracketed with a vitriolic introduction and a book-length commentary. It best epitomizes the joint concerns of these titles, and its themes are cross-referenced in each. And it is Lenin, perhaps even more than Žižek's favoured theorists (Freud, Lacan, Hegel, Adorno, Badiou) that proves to be the recurring figure.

In this respect, Žižek has picked his ideologue well; the very unthinkability of Lenin as a model for political action today, or such is Žižek's intimation, tells us something. Lenin, as both historical monument and collection of ideas, stands for a kind of despotic modernism, for centralization, for an unrepentant and uncompromising politics, for revolutionary commitment to universal truth, for hard Marxism, for deliberate action that takes on its own responsibility, for the possibility of universal social transformation. The current neo-liberal-democratic order stands, by contrast—at least according to Žižek—for a middling doxa of compromise, for discursive multiplicity and multiculturalism, for the non-partisan, for the post-Marxian abandonment of revolutionary politics, for postmodern shifting identities/subjectivities. More than this—and here Žižek is at his most scathing—such a ‘liberal-parliamentary consensus’ represents an apolitics of ‘the interpassivity of doing things in order to really prevent something happening’ (170).

Within the frame of this greater theoretical argument, Žižek cuts a swathe across common causes in apparently ‘critical’ thought or politics. Nothing, he claims, is easier than securing international funding on projects that seek to fight new forms of ethnic, religious or gender discrimination. Each of these fragmented topics treads fearfully away from engaging any totalizing project; even more so, they show not the slightest signs of seriously challenging the existing order. To cut to the point: these ‘fights’ seem to short-circuit any real radicalism, any real prospect of setting in motion a properly unearthing structural change; each such cause finds it difficult to fathom the notion of revolution. And each finds its feet, its motivation, and its overall plan of action quite comfortably within the contemporary climate of globalized capital.

We return here to Žižek's recurring preoccupation: the insidious functioning, whether in psyche or culture—or here, in a ‘politics of inactivity’—of ideology. Here, as in all of his writing, Žižek is reluctant to allow us to forget the lesson of hegemony. This is a formula he detects in virtually all his readings of popular culture and politics. His constant recourse to ‘Hegelese’, to Lacanian psychoanalysis and a myriad other theoretical figures, aims exactly at unfolding this formula, and doing so precisely when it appears to have been most effectively dispelled. It is in this vein that he argues that official ideology has come to represent itself as its own greatest transgression. This, however, is a lesson which should come as no surprise given that the normal functioning of capitalism, like that of modern power more generally, involves some kind of disavowal of the basic principle of its functioning.

As part of the general trajectory of this argument, Žižek takes issue with the ‘right to narrate’ argument so popular in the field of postcolonial studies, and proposes instead ‘the right to truth’ argument. It should be obvious, he insists in Revolution at the Gates, that any kind of adequate politics—that is to say, a politics of transformation, of forceful and material intent—needs ground itself in a truth, and more than just this, a universal truth. The only real universality, he proclaims, is the political one, ‘the universal link binding together all who experience a fundamental solidarity, all those who become aware that their struggles are part of the very struggle which cuts across the entire social edifice’ (177); hence, contra the compromise politics of today's left, and contra notions of discursive multiplicity/relativism, the Leninist argument for the importance of both universal truth and partisanship. Despite the apparent contradiction between the two, ‘the universal truth of a concrete situation can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position; truth is, by definition, one-sided’ (177).

What is often so thrilling about Žižek is also that which causes the most consternation. The characteristic conjunctions of intricate theoretical arguments, spread liberally across these three books, the pairings of Adorno with Lacan, Arendt with Badiou, the conversions of theoretical positions across Benjamin, Butler, Hegel, Freud and others, are indisputably stimulating, but they are also worrying. At times one cannot help but wonder whether the subtleties of certain of the arguments replayed end up slipping between the cracks, falling beneath the vociferous polemic. Žižek certainly deserves far more sustained critical and scholarly attention in this regard, although it should be admitted that his skills of paraphrase—like the virtuosity of his intellectual mix-and-match—are not best attacked as a case of simple misreading. Having said that, one does feel that Žižek's work at present occupies a kind of ‘state of grace’, as if the current intellectual climate has not quite yet caught up with him, that the Left has not as yet properly assimilated his charge on its accepted wisdom, or formulated a critique robust enough to adequately respond.

If Žižek's theoretical extrapolations do not lose the gist of their often opaque antecedents, and if the ultimate critiques he thus patches together are frequently trenchant, his ‘playings out’ of theory do at times risk a certain banality. So, in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he quotes a verse from a song featured in the animated children's series The Land Before Time as means of illustrating the shortcomings of a particular brand of liberal multiculturalism. The point, basically, is that the happy ‘collaboration-in-difference’ message of the celebrate-diversity discourse is ideology at its finest. Why? Because it insulates against the development of ‘vertical’ antagonisms that should cut through society. Put differently: limp multiculturalism short-circuits the development of (kinds of) class-struggle. Or, in even more forceful terms (and here the unison of the argument shared by all three books really comes to the fore) ‘democracy is today's political fetish—the disavowal of social antagonism’. Hence, adapting Horkheimer's injunction: ‘[i]f you don't want to talk about capitalism, then you should keep silent about Fascism’, Žižek's argument in Revolution at the Gates is that if one is unwilling to subject liberal democracy and the flaws of multiculturalist tolerance to critical analysis, then one should keep silent about the new Rightist violence and intolerance’ (168).

Now, as sharp an argument against the shortcomings of multiculturalism and neo-liberal democracy as this might be, one cannot help but wonder if it does not lose some of its force through the very inanity of the above example with which Žižek chooses to dramatize it. Popular culture references such as this run the risk of rendering theory banal because there seems so little about them which affords genuinely interesting points of purchase; they risk reducing away the complexities of theory and hence ‘lower the pitch’ of the intellectual engagement to a point where the application becomes dull and uninspired. Such a set of often inane popular cultural references begs the question of selection, and one is tempted to venture that what is constant here is in fact the pure arbitrariness of such examples. In fact, one sometimes gets the impression that whatever catches Žižek's eye on television over breakfast in the morning has a chance of gaining a starring role in whatever he is writing at the time. Although, in contrast, at other times one wonders whether these allusions to cinema, television and the passing news headlines are the real characters, the real focuses of his books, and whether the theoretical motifs are not orchestrated around them, rather than the other way around. (And here I admit, I am borrowing an argument Žižek himself makes in reference to Hitchcock). Nonetheless, the joke may well be on us; the illustration may not be that of theory by means of the flotsam and jetsam of throwaway newsmedia culture, but that of popular newsmedia culture by means of theory. And this is the point: what Žižek appears to lack in these three books is exactly what made his earlier texts so compelling. Whereas the earlier texts made use of multiple theoretical combinations to mount fundamentally interesting forms of critique, to re-think the objects of critique, and around which to arrange a set of exemplars drawn from the cultural field, here one gets something of a sense of complacency, of the props preceding the substance of the argument. It is as if a series of attention-grabbing contemporary concerns and interests (not all of which are political) are the points of structure, and that slightly routine and over-rehearsed theoretical impressions are now brought out to animate them. So On Belief's discussion of Tibet, for example, seems a little tired, uncharacteristically unprovocative; as if the theoretical ‘takes’ on the topic never really rise above the level of the counterintuitive.

This is also the problem with what appears to be the critical endpoint of each of the books. If Žižek's objective is to return us to re-enthused Marxian and even Leninist forms of analysis, then he seems, quite simply, to be right. But do we not here risk the old fallacy of the metanarrative? Are all our political ills, our wars, our sympathetic (or engaged) struggles over territory, representational value, ideology, and so on, reducible, once again, to the old enemy of Capitalism? Whereas the earlier books, notably The Sublime Object of Ideology, excelled in the eclectic metatheoretical combinations which allowed real conceptual depth in thinking of the object of critique—that is, the complex inter-weavings of psychical and ideological power—Žižek here seems a little too easily reductive in what he takes to be the object of critique. This, perhaps, is a result of what seems to be his knee-jerk reaction against neo-liberal postmodernism. Whatever it may be, one suspects that Žižek is not stretching his conceptual abilities to the point he could. What one fears, and what one gets in patches in these three titles, is Žižek cobbling together a set of familiar themes that are worked through in less interesting variations of his earlier work. In this connection, one hopes that what lies ahead is more than Žižek pastiching Žižek.

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