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?
