currently slavoj zizek is the rockstar in academia. while i am a bit out of touch from academia, i find it a bit disturbing that many of my idealistic colleagues and cohorts still praise zizek for various articles and statements.
i plan on making this short. so let me get to the point: we shouldn’t praise or hold zizek in such high esteem. in some sense, it’s good for one to adopt radical positions — we can learn from that. but radicality can spiral in a dialectic as one switches different basis.
for example,
1. academia is a tool of the status quo as public funding needs to (con)serve monetary infrastructures which support them. this monetary tie often forces institutions to adopt only modest changes while maintaining the superstructures which support them. nonetheless, zizek’s success in academia (and beyond) ties heartily in with supporting the status quo. how radical can zizek be while remaining entrenched in academia?
this seems contrary with the second reason:
2. the zizek of the last 10 years has enjoyed a terrible amount of success. his political position has changed somewhat — his attempts to continually focus on radical positions pushes him to adopt more and more conservative positions as he continually steps against the general positions of his liberal academic base. this seems good in light of the first position, except that by stepping against the first, zizek ends up back in the arms of the status quo in the name of being radical.
the last ties the first two nicely,
3. both marx and lacan, zizek’s two philosophical fathers have a common ancestor in hegel. hegel’s absolute system was created for two purposes — the first was to tie noumenon with phenomenon — the second was to nail absolute truth down in an increasingly cosmopolitan world. hegel’s system works by weaving all the different phenomenon of life together in a super-structure that is not of any particular phenomenon. absolute truth is achieved by finding it everywhere and nowhere at once. this absolutism does not care if one is radical or one is conservative. the system works by discarding difference to find principle relations which structure those differences. such structures are often ontologically conservative as linguistically constructed relations are, as a rule of thumb, established and integrated rather than radical and novel.
in other words, as a hegelian zizek does not care if he supports the status quo or if he supports a liberal agenda. either agenda will ultimately support the dialectical synthesis which must occur in order to step us closer to the heart of the empty Notion. in fact, in order to introduce new material for a synthesis (and to keep things interesting) zizek must continually provide new angles on old material.
it is in this adherence to a Notion that traps his philosophical framework within the established parameters (be it) capitalism, classism and/or psychoanalysis… while simultaneously giving excuse to everything under the sun. certainly powers of explanation are desirable to remove the unknown in phenomenon, so that phenomenon is just phenomenon. but moving towards the Notion is a different movement than moving back away from it.
it is as dostoyevsky’s character ivan expressed; under God everything is allowed. under the hegelian notion — all things are equal — without responsibility. also, there is little movement within hegel to achieve a difference or an aesthetics to be. hegel works by subsuming things into its own immanence. so with this in mind, zizek’s authoritarian politics takes on a nefarious tone. while zizek is perhaps not completely speaking out and writing against current events today, he is edging towards becoming a spokesperson for the status quo while clothed in the sheep of radical intellectualism. beware — reading and sharing zizek as a conservative inevitably leads to positions of “obey” and “follow” rather than “question” and “learn”, something all too available to for those who are in positions of popularity mistaken for authority.
this comes to light especially in some of the recent articles he has written. take a look at this gem: in which zizek accuses lesbians of being unable to love. or perhaps zizek’s rant on the recent riots on the u.k.. these two pieces aren’t the only articles of course, zizek is famously prolific. in some sense, it doesn’t really matter whether this famous speaker becomes a spokes person for the status quo or not. he’s just one man, and his betrayal of his fan bases’ sensibilities will only hurt him in the end. certainly as intelligent as he is, he won’t be the first celebrity to succumb to stardom by become a parody of himself.
nonetheless, while i don’t fully agree with the analysis of zizek in either article, i do believe it to be important for us to really understand not just what he says but where he is coming from. zizek by aesthetic and philosophical choice can only really promote what is conservative as he is bound by a conservative philosopher.
when trying to understand a philosopher, we must first understand what problems he wishes to solve before we can fully understand what his philosophy is all about. being taken in by soundbites or clips, be it a paragraph from an article or an entire book in a collection work won’t give us the full picture of what the philosophy is all about.
the best hint of zizek’s agenda comes from his own mouth in astra taylor’s zizek! in which zizek professes that he wishes to merge marx and lacan. his later talks have tended to view totalitarianism as the best way to find both the sublime and authenticity as an ethical subject. in the latter, totalitarianism acts as a bulwark by which individuals can be perverse, ethical singularities. i believe it is only the desire for a bulwark which serves for zizek to recommend authoritarianism as the quickest route to subjecthood. without that bulwark, there can be no ethical subjectivity, only a mess of pre-subjective desires. in that sense, zizek would not embrace permissive post-modernism and apparently, that includes the snippet above about lesbian love.
while zizek is undoubtably creative theoretically, it behooves us to ask if zizek’s position on subjectivity is what is best for society or even an individual. it probably does not serve us all to be perverse subjects, to take ethical stances in the form of unyielding drives, nor would it be in our best interest as a group of people who need to live among one another for us each to embrace totalitarianism just to cast it aside.
to me, zizek remains an interesting spectacle, but one who is so theoretically entangled in his musings that he seems to believe that if he is hysterical enough, everything he says will come to be… that people are synonymous with subjectivity and that the theoretical edifices he lays out will become absolutely true. if anything, he remains fully trapped by the dichotomies and gremasian squares he continually lays out for his readers.
so the question remains. do we need this roundabout philosopher to tell us what the most conservative of political groups already say?
7:40 pm, September 27, 2011Eli Rosenthal /
Žižek is actually not a teaching professor in academia, he is onto affiliated with a few universities and gives a lot of lectures; he actually isn’t a huge “rockstar” in a lot of academic circles, especially in America, mostly because people disagree with him; he is well-known but very few actually endorse his writings in a big way. But beyond that, you obviously have no idea of how Žižek interprets Hegel, his reading of Hegel is totally different from your summary; you obviously havent read any of Žižek’s major works. You misquote dostoevsky, too which goes more alog the lines of “if there is no god, everything is permitted.”
I would read his works “the Ticklish Subject, “In Defense of Lost Causes” and “The Parallax View”
For a good secondary source, read Žižek’s Ontology by Adrian Johnston
8:40 am, September 28, 2011alex /
ah, thanks for reminding me why i am not an academic. firstly, if i was recommending a book to introduce zizek i would not start with ticklish subject or parallax view. i would probably suggest fragile absolute, for they know not what they do or tarrying with the negative, depending on what angle someone was coming from.
also, the paraphrase from dostoevsky is i have said it. i apologize for not recalling which work it is from, but it originates from the christian simpleton speaking with the bad christian — maybe its from the conversation between Ivan and Alexei. it’s the paradox of how God can be good and yet why there is evil in the world.
i don’t care to speak for zizek on hegel either. that’s definitely not the point i was seeking to make…which is more about inherited aesthetics of ‘what they are trying to do’ than ‘what they are saying’.
besides, isn’t a class where there is a ‘correct’ answer… its not about satisfying or matching the voice of the Big Other (which is the ‘disingenuous’ and ‘consistent’ discourse of the university) but more in showing how we are all discontinuous small others.
so to adopt ‘the Real of the Internet’:
nice troll.
lurk moar.
1:41 am, September 30, 2011Eli Rosenthal /
Well, I’m not an academic either. If you write a post on him, i would hope that you wouldn’t need an introduction to Zizek; the works I recommended were works that I thought someone who wrote your comments on Zizek and Hegel should read or re-read. I think that if you want to talk about Zizek and Hegel, then you shouldn’t start with stuff like the Fragile Absolute, or his work from the early 90s, even if it is some of his best work. Zizek’s philosophical register, at least on the ontological level, has changed dramatically since his main encounters with Schelling in the mid to late 90s.
This is not about reaching a correct answer or anything, it’s about engaging with a thinker on his/her own terms before disagreeing with them. Your summation of Hegel, in my opinion, shows a high level of ignorance of Zizek’s interpretation of the thinker. Your bits about Zizek becoming an apologist for the status quo are a little ridiculous; they may be true if people only read certain selections from his work. However, he is always criticizing other philosophers (read any of his comments on Deleuze or Hardt&Negri and you’ll have good examples) for having conceptual apparatuses that are complicit with capitalism even though the thinkers themselves are anti-capitalist; his use of Hegel (who is much more of a prominent influence than Marx, for Zizek) along with Lacan uses concepts like negativity and the death drive to counteract what he sees as the prevailing cynicism of current politics.
You seem to accuse Zizek of being a proponent of a doctrine that he has been opposed to for his entire career, and I just don’t see anything in the way of support for those assertions in the above posts.
6:58 pm, September 30, 2011alex /
Thank you for your reply. I don’t really mind if you think me ignorant — but the point of this entry wasn’t to parrot Zizek or Hegel or to give any illusion of mastery. A few years ago Zizek heartily chided an American academic for trying to pigeon hole him in the context of being a Slovenian and a ‘response’ to American Imperialism, i.e. in the way of ‘look what a monster we have created because of our economic policies’.
I don’t believe that strictly speaking, I am pretending to speak for anyone, except myself. This is the illusion of academia — that one can speak in someone else’s words in the same way that they mean it. In fact, you seem to be doing what academia does quite well by saying “You can’t speak of this treasure until you have proven your credentials! You don’t have any right to join the conversation until you have parroted certain tropes, and worked your ass off! I want you to work on something for [some period of a long time] until we of this imaginary inner circle give you permission to speak” (permission here, only given after one has proven oneself of a certain study that won’t make the rest of us ‘established folks’ look like fools!)
Having said this, let me attempt to bridge this gap. Deleuze has wrote heartily on many a philosopher/writer/thinker in his ‘buggary’ method. It’s more interesting to dwell on what someone doesn’t say (but ends up saying) than what they do say. Nowhere will Zizek say “Hey, I am now a capitalist tool” or anything like that. In fact, I am certain that Zizek will always add more to a comment about himself with ‘this is not it, you cannot pigeon-hole me as… for such a pigeon-holing is more a reflection on your fears hopes and what not than a reflection of me!’ with some remark about the return of the Real.
So, forgive my hyperbole, but the point isn’t really that Zizek is conservative or liberal — I think he’s moved quite beyond the conservative-liberal positions he used to adhere to, although I do work within that dichotomy for this entry as I address an imaginary audience of liberals… If anything is this reading is more of a “logic of sense” persuasion than of an anglo-saxon empiricist-analytical reading in that this isn’t what Zizek means to say but what he ends up saying. To sum up, Zizek isn’t on the side of liberals! He is on the side of Zizek.
To be honest, I find it a little surprising that you chose to comment on this entry rather than others, which have more meat. Perhaps this is only because this is the latest or maybe this is the easiest to provide a succinct criticism?
1:22 am, October 1, 2011Eli Rosenthal /
I just stumbled uPon a link to this p
1:23 am, October 1, 2011Eli Rosenthal /
Sorry, accidentally hit enter…
1:45 am, October 1, 2011Eli Rosenthal /
I just stumbled upon this post. Would you prefer I read another one?
I think this kind of my perpetrating some exclusionary academic dogma is a little misplaced; and your discussion of Deleuzian reading is a nice way to understand why. In my view, Deleuze used his “buggery” method to see the (latent?) potential in a thinker; you are right to imply that the idea is to “make an author say something s/he wouldn’t normally say” but you forget the real thrust of the argument: Deleuze used his method of reading to show how a thinker’s conceptual apparatus can be used in an innovative manner. Even if your post could even aspire to a sort of relevance to Žižek’s work (which I don’t think it does) Deleuze would probably say that the end result was useless. Deleuze’s monographs, while at times critical(like in the Kant book) were not criticisms.
Going back to your description of Academia: first, I’m a high school student in a poor little public school, so I have yet to be directly indoctrinated by this monstrosity you have described in your comments. Still I think that you can and should say something different than what everyone else is saying, but that does not mean you don’t have to work hard understanding and engaging with a figure. That’s why Deleuze’s readings are some of the best ever (IMO), they were both original and rigorous.
And that leads me back to repeating myself: i don’t think you succeed in arguing Žižek “ends up saying” that his philosophy is politically bankrupt because you have not seriously engaged with Žižek’s Hegel, which is completely contrary to your assessment; more than that I think your kind of interpretation is the exact kind of assessment of Hegel that he wants to combat with his.
2:51 am, October 1, 2011alex /
It’s up to you if you want to or not.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. You’re right in that I am imposing the dichotomy of liberal-conservative onto Zizek, but then again I don’t believe that dichotomy to be central to his work as most liberals seem to think it is.
It’s impressive as a HS student that you have a grasp of such a subject, but even in HS such impositions are prevalent, especially in cliques… of which I would tentatively say academia is such. I think the best examples of this rigidity exists in how teachers correct student essays, attacking the language of expression more than the intent and meaning.
In a way, I would suggest that Hegel really isn’t fully necessary to be involved — my accusation as you say, relies heavily on locating the liberal/conservative dichotomy as understood by most liberals to be outside of the main push of Zizek’s work. I invoke Hegel though, as I think it’s the easiest way to express why a push from Zizek is not as most of his fans would swoon it to be. I suppose this is the root of our disagreement and can’t really be resolved without a closer reading, although I suspect that we would probably still disagree.