Reply on Method: How Not to Evaluate Žižek
Posted by Mike E on July 30, 2010
by Mike Ely
My response here is not about Zizek. It is about how to criticize Zizek. It is in response to an essay posted nearby: “Slavoj Žižek: A Case Study in Opportunism”
Militant Know-Nothingism
Believe it or not, this essay starts by saying:
“I don’t pretend to understand Dr. Žižek’s ‘Lacanian,’ ‘post-Maoist’ philosophy or critiques of popular culture or whatever it is that he does.”
That says it all — right in the opening sentence. It is a confession.
Friendly suggestion: Perhaps if you don’t understand someone’s work, you should remain silent. And listen to those who have done the hard work of understanding and actually critiquing that work.
In fact, this opening statement is a declaration that you don’t have to understand something to evaluate it. And that alone is revealing. It is a form of identity politics — it says we can categorize and dismiss an idea by considering the source. If we can peg the person speaking, then we can dismiss the idea. We don’t have to evaluate it, we don’t have to “divide it into two,” we con’t even need to understand it (or even “pretend to understand it”!)
In short, the essay starts with a militant statement of know-nothingism. that is its main theme, it is its main method. And it is truly militant: it is right there, proudly, in the opening sentence.
It is sometimes amazing to see the kinds of arguments that can be taken seriously. Stalin once quipped “Paper will put up with anything.” But it doesn’t mean we have put up with anything. So, if we have to confront Sarah-Palin mindlessness and populist identity politics within the left, then let’s confront it.
Identity Politics: “Consider the Source”
The idea that you would comment on whole schools of thought and philosophy without “pretending to understand” them is remarkable. It is a form of identity politics — assuming that you can judge an idea by judging its source.
Here this is connected with a particular form of workerist identity politics. (i.e. the idea that politics is rooted in a kind of “class stand,” not analysis, that arises naturally from working class experience or even a the mythological “class instinct.”
If we can tell the quality of an idea by its source, then we really can judge without knowing. That really is the core of this method: That we can judge without knowing. Compare that notion with with Marxism’s method, with materialist dialectics, with simple insights like “no investigation, no right to speak.”
In fact, let me post Mao’s full remark on that:
“Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn’t that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak? Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful. How can a Communist keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense?
“It won’ t do! It won’t do!
“You must investigate! You must not talk nonsense!”
Bill Martin says that the purpose of superficial dismissals is not to explain an opposing view, and expose it by dissecting it. It is instead to avoid the whole problem by having readers NOT read it.
“Look at this, it tastes terrible,” that is Bill’s quip — i.e. Zizek or Badiou or Mao or Stalin or anyone else really can be discussed (and essentially smeared) without any serious all-sided discussion of their actual views or their actual life’s work.
Zizek dismissed without discussing his philosophy, or the parts of his work that have influence. The method does not to raise anyone’s consciousness and does not intend to. The point is to AVOID the problem by having readers decide not to bother with Zizek. It is to reinforce the boundaries of a pre-existing and enclosed orthodoxy.
The purpose is to turn people off, to put blinders on their eyes, not to raise their consciousness.
Some Basics of Method:
You have to judge people by their main work. I.e. you have to judge an artist’s art to sum them up. Or analyze a philosopher’s philosophy to understand how to approach them.
You can’t look at someone’s personal life, or a passing political engagement, and think that (on that basis) you can situate and dismiss their actual work.
I’m The Yardstick, You Suck
Further, also underlying the method here is a simplistic assertion: There is only one communism, and we are it.
So if anyone (anywhere) claims to be a communist and don’t agree with us, then they are a liar, and opportunist, a phony, and need to be exposed.
So really you don’t need to actually understand ANYONE or their thinking — you just need a check list of YOUR OWN THOUGHTS. And then you compare everyone to this checklist of your own (pre-chewed) verdicts, and you can evaluate them (without knowing much about their work, their change-over-time, their context, their self-criticism, or anything else). Everything can be known and judged by grasping (more deeply) your OWN IDEAS.
This is a method that can be quickly taught.
We each can each create a checklist of our own assumptions — and train others to evaluate everybody and everything against that. And since OUR assumptions are right, we can quickly uncover that everyone else is a phony and a pig. And the best part is you don’t have to do any real work — you don’t have to read or understand Zizek to reject him.
This exact same method was used (by the way) by the RCP in their evaluation of Badiou: The RCP literally ignored Badiou’s philosophy, they set it aside. They mentioned it in passing, in order to day they weren’t dealing with it. They didn’t discuss his theories of the Event or Multiple-of-Multiples, or his application of mathematical set theory to social events.
Instead, they made a checklist of Avakian’s political beliefs (about the party, the state, the cultural revolution). They painstakingly compared Badou’s POLITICAL utterances (sketchy, ambiguous, secondary) to Avakian’s baroquely elaborated political views. Badiou and Avakian don’t agree obviously — so the polemic could quickly and smoothly sum up that Badiou is a dangerous force that leads people away from the true path (which we can all identify by that list of Avakian’s verdicts.)
It is the method of self-encapsulation. It assumes we have nothing to learn. And further it assumes that only people who agree with us POLITICALLY have anything to teach us (philosophically, factually, or in other means).
The idea that someone could have a terrible political practice (like Martin Heidigger‘s antisemitic and fascist activities) and still make major insights philosophically is simply rejected out of hand.
There is a name for this method: it is know-nothingism. It is a dumbing down of everything. And, worse, it makes you unable to undestand the world you live in, and encapsulates you in your own tentative and fragmentary assumptions so you can’t even learn from others.
Unspoken Assertion on Capitalist Restoration in Slovenia
This article rests on a further series of remarkable assumptions: Especially the unspoken claim that Slovenia in the 1980s was socialist, therefore Zizek’s political activism was counterrevolutionary, therefore he is a pig, therefore we can dismiss his work.
This is wrong on many levels . But this article doesn’t even bother to state its assumption. It simply proceeds as if no one knows that it is controversial (to put it mildly) to view Slovenia (and Tito’s Yugoslavia) as a socialist country.
Luckily I wrote a whole history of this, including the particular role of Slovenia in the development of Yugoslavian capitalism.So feel free to engage an actual analysis.
One of Mao’s most famous essays (and an opening shot of his theoretical work on capitalist restoration) was the letter “Is Yugoslavia a Socialist Country?” (written in the early 60s) where he answers “No.” and explains why. The anti-Zizek authors (obviously) don’t have to agree with that analysis, but they do have to deal with the fact that communists have viewed Yugoslavia as capitalist for sixty years.
You can reject that communist (i.e. Maoist) analysis of capitalist restoration and reject Stalin’s analysis of Tito. You can uphold the oppressive capitalist developments of Slovenia, and Yugoslavia and anywhere else in the world.
But you can’t actually write an essay based on assuming Slovenia is socialist without even bothering to make an argument — or denounce Mao’s theories, or make some (superficial? passing?) explanation of why anyone in the world should take that proposition seriously.
The questions of political change in Eastern Europe during the 80s and 90s are (obviously) quite complex — old forms collapsed in utter unpopularity, new ones emerged (drenched in illusions about the west). People engaged in political life in ways that are often hard to evaluate from afar and require both context and specific analysis.
But here too, the author is not cowed by lack of knowledge or insight. Everything is simple, and because things are so simple, the work of the essay is simple: We simply stand Zizek up next to our pre-fabricated thermometer of correctness, and he falls short.
Back to Method
It has occurred to me, that by this same checklist method, some readers may dismiss my comments here. I.e. if they don’t agree with Mike E on the arcane historical details of Slovenia they may then dismiss his criticism of workerist identity politics.
What a small, cloistered, self-encapsulated world this kind of thinking inhabits!
A method like that will never produce a creative revolutionary movement.
Luckily, most people have a sense of how terribly mind-numbing such methods are, and are interested in actually understanding what others are thinking and doing — including Zizek but not just….
redguard said
Wow, Mike, I think you are way off. I see you applying the same method to this essay that you accuse it of — it doesn’t measure up to your take on the countries of Eastern Europe, so ipso facto…
I think the author of “A case study in opportunism” made an excellent point, not “no-nothingism,” but that Zizek is clearly not writing for a working-class audience or even for revolutionary “leaders” but for navel-gazers who have the time to wrestle with his convoluted philosophy and method.
At first I was excited to see Zizek writing about Lenin and communism — at least it showed there was a growing audience that was interested in thinking about the class struggle again. And as an objective phenomenon, I’d say that’s still true. But the content and what it means as we seek to rebuild a revolutionary movement is another matter.
I’ve read and tried to understand Zizek (and Badiou) — I’m self-educated, but not unsophisticated — and most of it is frankly gibberish. But what DOES come through loud and clear is the anti-Leninist, anti-communist conceptions of their “rethinking.”
You think Zizek’s past political actions aren’t significant? That they don’t inform who he is and what he says now? You may disagree about the content of what he did in the context of Slovenia and Yugoslavia, but that doesn’t invalidate the argument.
celticfire said
The entire essay (“What about Slavoj Žižek?”) is like high five to yourself.
How can you say you uphold Mao without acknowledge the shocking discarding of the defining features of his thought (ie: the development of capitalist restoration WITHIN the ruling capitalist party).
This is anti-intellectual authoritarianism.
Hannie Schaft said
1) Yugoslavia was a revisionist country, but the openly capitalist gangster class that runs the show now is worse. Mao’s critique of Tito didn’t write a blank check to the Slovenian far right.
2) Zizek admits that his peeps were in error during this period. He might agree with much of the essay.
3) You still have to come to terms with his arguments. Can’t reduce Zizek to his activities in the late 80s. But you also shouldn’t reduce his work AWAY from its class/national context, which Mike seems to advocate. (I say that because apparently Mike takes a HARD po-mo line on Heidegger. I prefer Bourdieu on the subject—Heidegger might not have invented a “Nazi philosophy,” but it was presented in a double voice that both targeted and appealed to the far right). But in the end, one still has to read the book to comment on it!
espοir - надежда said
Sorry … you don’t have to eat the whole egg, to understand it’s rotten foul. It just smells bad.
i realize it sounds simplistic, but so does everything else.
Mike E said
I appreciate the chance to clarify what I am trying to say here.
Redguard writes:
I’m not sure why you think that.
I’m saying that you have to evaluate a philosopher mainly by his philosophy. You can’t do a quick (superficialy, barely informed) scan of his political activity (decades ago), and then on that basis, dismiss him and his philosophy.
My argument against this method is completely independent of my view of Slovenia. I know very little about Zizek’s political activity in Slovenia, and my argument is not based on some approval of that activism.
Among communists, a superficial evaluation happens (unfortunately) all the time. Want to hear an evaluation of Salvador Dali? People often mention his notorious pro-Franco moments (as if that is suffucient knowledge to evaluate this major artist).
Want to evaluate Thomas Jefferson? What would you think if someone said “I tried to look into his political role, but it was too complicated for me to sort out — but he owned slaves, what else do I need to know?”
Also the method we are discussing assumes that our purpose is a simple “up or down.” Is Zizek one of us, or is he an asshole? As if this is a binary world.
All you need to do (then) is find some proof that he is not one of us (i.e. he ran as a secessionist in Slovenia in a sequence of events that proved disasterous in the Balkans). And then (by this method) what else do you need to know?
In fact people and their role is complicated. There is a relative distinction between someone’s theoretical work and their political activism. There may be some elements of Zizek’s work that are valuable, and others that play a negative role. There may be parts of his work that are insightful, and others that are disturbingly wrong and obscurantist. His role in one period may be different than his influence in aother. His role in Slovenia may be different (and more negative) than his role in larger discussions.
It is highly reductionist to treat this as a simple reductionist question: Is he good or bad?
Again, if we have this reductionist assumption, then all you need is to find something (anything?) that is truly bad about someone, and you have your assessment.
No need for context. No need to actually do the work. No need to really consider things in their complexity (as a unity of opposites). Everything is simple. And if someone is not one of us (i.e. our particular current of communism) what else is there to know?
In fact, we can learn a great deal from people who are wrong on major matters. The work of someone who has reactionary politics can have an important influence on progressive thinkers.
Zizek for example has introduced a large numbers of people to Lenin and Mao in a new way — reintroducing communist theory and practice to a broad academic discussion (where it is so often excluded). This can be a major positive contribution (today) even if his own theory is not that helpful or valuable.
there are a number of remarkable assumptions embedded here.
Are we only interested in people who write for a “working class audience” or for a revolutionary movement? Why?
Lots of valuable thinkers have no connection to working class or radical audiences. Was Stephen Jay Gould writing for such audiences? Nope. Was his work valuable (including for a revolutionary movement)? Yes.
Lots of philosophical work is completely inaccessible to working class audiences — and even to highly literate audiences. A great deal of it is only understandable to specialists. Does that mean it is worthless? That it may not have valuable insights that communism should grapple with? Of course not.
I think you touch on something in your snide remark about ” but for navel-gazers who have the time to wrestle with his convoluted philosophy and method.”
It does take time to wrestle with philosophy (or physics, or history, or dialectics, or political economy). And millions of people have no time to reach that level of inquiry. Does that mean that those fields are nonsense? Or that the people who do have the time (or take the time) to understand these fields are inherently “navel gazers”?
This argument will lead you directly to destroying communist theory. You will reduce theory to what is easy to popularize. You will rule out learning from people who (for various reasons) write in difficult idioms. You will assume that whatever you don’t understand is worthless. (Why not rule out Das Kapital then? Or Grundrisse? Did you find that easy to understand? Perhaps we should rule out large swathes of Marxist theory as well.)
I agree with your point here, Redguard. It is an important point. It is a valuable part of any evaluation of Zizek.
And I want you to note that the essay on “The Marxist Leninist” did not spend a second on such a consideration. It didn’t fit their simplistic message.
Really?
When I entered a study seminar on Badiou it was extremely difficult. Two of us would read the essays out loud, literally sentence by sentence, and work together to understand what was being said, and what it meant.
Some people respond by saying “this was incomprehensible.” Or even “this was gobbledygoog.” It strikes me as highly odd to argue “If i can’t understand it, it must be bullshit.” Really? The world is full of things I don’t understand that are highly valuable — I have strained to understand General Relativity and String theory (for example). I hope to deepen my understanding of set theory so that I can tackle Badiou’s Being and Event again.
Why in the world would any of us assume that if we can’t understand it, it must be nonsense. What a narrow view of knowledge (and more than a bit arrogant).
Let me ask in response: Can all important ideas and arguments (in any sphere?) be explained in a way understandable than anyone? I think not.
I have not expressed any personal opinion of Zizek in these discussions. This is both because it is not what i am seeking to deal with — I am talking about a dogmatic method that encapulates earlier marxism by excluding everything else. And also because I have not read enough Zizek to think I can express a public opinion.
But I have read enough to know that I don’t agree with your comment above. His view of communism is far more complex. His introduction to “REvolution at the Gate” is far more complicated than that.
Again, you seem trapped in a binary view: is it good or bad? is it this or that? is it up or down?
But in fact, his views are not that easy to categorize (and neither, frankly, should our views be).
Reality is itself inherently complex, contradictory and dynamic. If our views are fixed, simple, and binary we have invented a worldview that cannot comprehend (or change) reality.
I think they have significance as part of the political history of a major modern philosophy.
Just as the fact that Jefferson owned slaves is part of the overall picture — for understanding a major political figure in the early United States.
But to actually evaluate Zizek’s political actions would actually require some work: What did he do? What was its impact? What did he think he was doing? What is the relationship between his political engagement and his philosophical work? What does he now think about that political work? What has he done since then?
We need context and dialectical thinking.
And again (the opening point of my essay) mainly you evaluate people by their work: You evaluate Picasso in the context of his artistic work. You evaluate Hegel mainly in terms of his philosophy. You evaluate Darwin mainly in terms of his scientific discovery (not his Whig politics). etc.
It is worth noting and evaluating all kinds of personal details outside the context of their work — seeing them in the context of their times, and larger currents, etc.
But no, I don’t think each person is reducible to their immediate political activity and affiliations (especially if it is reported in a distorted and superficial way). And no, I don’t think that you can make a summation of Zizek (as a philosophical and political influence in our world today) by “exposing” what he did in the late 1980s.
Put another way: I find that it is a very mechanical thing to evaluate people by one thing. Cops and rightwingers often think a person is defined by their rap-sheet — so a kid is consider “a thief’ or “a gangbanger,” without context or nuance. There may be reactionary episodes in Zizek’s life (that would not surprise me, precisely because I am aware of the complexity of politics in EAstern Europe).
But (to return to method) I am against a simplistic and reductinist method in general. Easy tidy verdicts based on superficial investigations. Especially when, as this one was, it starts by saying that the author does not pretend to understand the actual work of Zizek.
It is a confession that what we are reading is a shallow hatchetjob, not a serious assessment of someone and their work.
* * * * * * *
Espoir writes:
Yes, it does sound simplistic. Especially if you are saying that you can evaluate complex works of philosophy by just sniffing at one small part of them. It’s not just simplistic, it is simply untrue.
You can choose not to read something based on a brief taste. But don’t pretend you can understand or intelligently discuss it.
zerohour said
“You think Zizek’s past political actions aren’t significant? That they don’t inform who he is and what he says now? You may disagree about the content of what he did in the context of Slovenia and Yugoslavia, but that doesn’t invalidate the argument.”
This is a distortion, the point is that those are not his politics anymore, and he has criticized those politics. Of course people’s past actions “inform” who they are, but that’s a slippery term. No one has actually shown that he still holds those politics. The only argument put forth for this is that people can’t understand his work, and won’t even try. This is nonsensical and, ultimately, reactionary, as it promotes the same sort of “aw shucks, I’m just an everyday workin’ stiff” kind of ignorance that was the stock in trade of the Bush era.
May9 said
Yes, we’re all supposed to ignore the fact that Zizek not only helped lead the destruction of Yugoslavia and has long consulted with a neoliberal gangster party, but that when NATO bombings were falling on Yugoslavia in the late 1990s he was cheering from the sidelines and demonizing the Serbs.
Some hero.
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-nato.htm
zerohour said
“Yes, we’re all supposed to ignore the fact that Zizek not only helped lead the destruction of Yugoslavia…”
Is this a joke? Please cite the histories of Yugoslavia in which Zizek was noted as a leader or even a notable participant.
May9 said
“No one has actually shown that he still holds those politics.”
Zizek currently supports a splinter group from the LDS – called Zares, a party affiliated with “Liberal International”, ideologically not very different from the LDS.
http://www.zares.si/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zares
I’m sure this fact will be dismissed too.
May9 said
Sadly not a joke, he was Presidential candidate for the party and co-founded the party that came to dominate Slovene politics for much of the 1990s.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/zizek/
“n-law. In this period, Zizek wrote a second dissertation, a Lacanian reading of Hegel, Marx and Kripke. In the late 1980s, Zizek returned to Slovenia where he wrote newspaper columns for the Slovenian weekly “Mladina”, and cofounded the Slovenian Liberal Democratic Party. In 1990, he ran for a seat on the fourmember collective Slovenian presidency, narrowly missing office.”
Slaney Black said
I fail to see where Zizek’s essay on the Yugoslav war cheerleads. Yes, it does demonize the Serbs a bit. But I mean FFS it also has the most succinct and cogent critique of liberal human rights discourse I’ve read (second paragraph). So no, it doesn’t come right out and say the war was wrong; it does take a sledgehammer to the underlying ideological supports of the war. That’s rather significant.
As for Zizek being an Ivory Tower navel-gazer: I got into activism from reading his writings on Lenin. I might be the only person in the world that statement is true of, but just sayin’.
On Zizek’s involvement with various social liberal suck parties, even up to the present: yes. He’s got arguments for it though, which are the same arguments he uses to only semi-ironically praise Stalin. I dunno: Zizek is not an orthodox M-L. He’s still worth reading IMHO.
Tell No Lies said
I can’t count the authors (especially philosophers) whose works I thought were gibberish the first time I tried to read them, starting with Marx’s Capital. Lukacs. Hegel. Althusser ain’t no walk in the park either. Foucault of course. Derrida still. Of course there are works out there that genuinely are gibberish, and many more that are just faddish fluff. But I’ve learned not to trust those initial encounters and to deeply distrust easy dismissals of figures who command the respect of obviously intelligent people. Its no fun to not understand something and that makes the proposition that its popularity is just some sort of elitist intellectual posturing very seductive.
But if you haven’t done the work of really studying a difficult body of theoretical writing you should refrain from commenting on it until you do. Or as Mao said, “no investigation, no right to speak.”
If someone wants to present a serious argument describing in some detail and linking Zizek’s political activities in the late 80s to his present philosophical work and arguing how this reveals particular problems in his philosophical work, I would welcome and eagerly read such an analysis and would judge it on the strength of the evidence and argument presented. It certainly doesn’t strike me as an automatically far-fetched argument to make. What I object to is the sloppy stringing together of a few facts along with a proud anti-intellectualism that in my view only acts to intellectually disarm the revolutionary movement.
It is a fact that most philosophy is not particularly accessible to most working class people. Its not even accessible to most university-educated middle class people. And shamefully many self-styled revolutionaries, who could with struggle understand it, are proud of their refusal to read philosophy.
But that doesn’t mean its unimportant. Just as exceptional workers and peasants around the world have struggled through Marx’s The German Ideology and Capital, there are dishwashers and data-entry workers who read Zizek. Independent of whether we want to embrace some, all or none of what Zizek has to say, this is a good thing.
Because right or wrong Zizek is important and influential and any class that aims to make revolution and any movement that aims to lead humanity, needs people who can engage the full spectrum of influential ideas out there. It is central to the task of making the oppressed fit to rule the world.
Those who model a know-nothing attitude towards major contemporary philosophers are irresponsibly training their readers to not think.
Tell No Lies said
May 9,
Your characterization of the article on the NATO bombing is inaccurate. Maybe Zizek “cheered the bombing from the sidelines” elsewhere, but not in that article. Nor does he “demonize the Serbs.” Rather he makes a historical argument that Serbian national chauvinism wrecked post-Tito Yugoslavia and was primarily responsible for the war. If you are an apologist for Slobodan Milosevic, I’m sure it sounds terrible. But then make that case rather than mischaracterizing Zizek’s article.
May9 said
“Your characterization of the article on the NATO bombing is inaccurate. Maybe Zizek “cheered the bombing from the sidelines” elsewhere, but not in that article. Nor does he “demonize the Serbs.”
You’re kidding, right? “Serbian monsters”.
“All that yakking popular on the Left about the Ustasche symbols in Tudjman’s Croatia doesn’t change in the slightest that Serbian aggression against Bosnia in 1992 did not spring out of a conflict between ethnic groups. It was purely and simply the attack of Serb-dominated pre-war Yugoslavia against Tito’s post-war Yugoslavia.
Looking back, one has to say that in the debate over NATO’s bombing both sides were wrong. Not that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. On the contrary, both sides, the supporters as much as the opponents of the bombing, were simply wrong. Both try attempt to take a universal, neutral, and ultimately false standpoint. The supporters of the bombing make their stand on depoliticized human rights. Their opponents describe the post-Yugoslavian war as an ethnic struggle in which all sides are equally guilty. But both sides miss the political essence of the post-Yugoslavian conflict. And that is why the conflict continues to smolder under the ashes. The imposed NATO peace has certainly dammed it up for a while. But it hasn’t extinguished it.”
In essence, both sides are wrong because this this is about Serb aggression, plain and simple. But this isn’t demonization, of course not!
The “imposed NATO peace”. Right, so if it wasn’t for NATO, the Serbs would still be on a rampage. Talk of pro-fascist HDZ forces expelling all Serbs from Krajina region doesn’t matter, firing Serbs from their government jobs didn’t matter, Mujahadeen playing soccer with severed Serbian heads doesn’t matter, it’s all the Serbs fault. The Croats and Slovenes upheld Tito’s principles! Really? What was Croatian Spring all about, and how did Tito find that? Oh that’s right, he dismissed it as nothing but chauvinistic drivel, which it was. I also didn’t know Tito was a Holocaust denier, like Tudjman, the leader of the Croat separatists who loved Titoite principles so much.
May9 said
http://de-construct.net/?p=4869
Tudjman, the Titoite, famously said “If we (Croatia) didn’t want the war, there wouldn’t have been any”. While his own minister of police admitted he wanted to eliminate all Serbs from Croatia.
To claim Zizek isn’t cheerleading when he’s demonizing the victims of the war, absolving Croat and Bosnian fascists from their role in starting it, and claiming NATO has helped contain is intellectually dishonest and cowardly.
TOR said
I’ve actually always had a problem with the idea that we should force communist militants to read obscure academic theorists who have no connection to the movements of working and oppressed people and denounce anyone who writes off their work as academic drivel for being close-minded. To me, this is extremely elitist and should not be supported any more than the opposite and equally damaging practice of those who needlessly write off obscure academic work and discourage others from even looking at it. Communists should always support a critical reading of diverse texts, though it is important to school people in more basic stuff in general before they move on to Zizek, who is a bit heavy on references to traditional philosophy and Marxist theorists and is hard to understand for anyone new to these texts.
Also, as a communist activist, I find Zizek very entertaining and sometimes very insightful despite the fact that I think he does nothing for the movement, doesn’t really care about the Left or the working class, and cares more about feeding his ego and getting huge speaking fees than actually doing anything positive. However, if I met another communist who just denounced him and said he was horrible, I would probably largely agree with them, though tell them that I find him funny and actually agree with some of his analyses on certain issues.
Badiou is a totally different story than Zizek, as he always struck me as being very genuine in his politics despite the fact that his language and method are often extremely difficult to understand and very elitist.
Ian Anderson said
Great response here. The point isn’t whether they’re right about Zizek, it’s that the argument is based on wilful ignorance, both on historical and philosophical grounds. That’s the opposite of Marxism.
“This argument will lead you directly to destroying communist theory. You will reduce theory to what is easy to popularize. You will rule out learning from people who (for various reasons) write in difficult idioms. You will assume that whatever you don’t understand is worthless. (Why not rule out Das Kapital then? Or Grundrisse? Did you find that easy to understand? Perhaps we should rule out large swathes of Marxist theory as well.)”
Well said. I also disagree with the assumption that working-class people are necessarily uneducated.
Slaney Black said
May9: Srsly? Milosevic, formerly the IMF’s favorite communist? Milosevic, Yugoslavia’s own Yeltsin, avant la lettre? He, and the constituency behind him, was a bystander in the breakup of Titoism? It was all just Tudjman and his Ustase fetish?
TOR: Communists should always support a critical reading of diverse texts, though it is important to school people in more basic stuff in general before they move on to Zizek, who is a bit heavy on references to traditional philosophy and Marxist theorists and is hard to understand for anyone new to these texts.
It’s not uncommon to move from Zizek into Marxism-Leninism rather than vice-versa.
orinda said
I found it hard to separate in Zizek’s NATO article where he was being sarcastic and where he was paraphrasing others versus stating his own opinion. From the his third paragraph it appears the paragraph above is what he think Havel’s stand was. I’m not going to deconstruct his whole essay, it would bore everyone. My brief take on it is that he claims Serbia started the violence but that nevertheless they were no better or worse than any of the other nationalist forces in Yugoslavia. His understanding of NATO’s motives seem naive to me.
zerohour said
TellNoLies has already pointed out where May9 [deliberately?] misreads a point in Zizek’s essy on NATO here at point 17.
But there is a fundamental problem at the heart of May9′s misreading of the whole essay which I believe to be a failure to recognize the validity of any line of questioning other than one’s own. to be fair, Zizek’s style of writing is not linear making it difficult to understand his point, but not impossible if one is actually interested in understanding it.
Above, May9 quotes Zizek: “Looking back, one has to say that in the debate over NATO’s bombing both sides were wrong. Not that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. On the contrary, both sides, the supporters as much as the opponents of the bombing, were simply wrong. Both try attempt to take a universal, neutral, and ultimately false standpoint. The supporters of the bombing make their stand on depoliticized human rights….” and interprets it this way: “In essence, both sides are wrong because this this is about Serb aggression, plain and simple. But this isn’t demonization, of course not!” This argument is just plain wrong. For the demonization point, see TellNoLies’s comment that I referenced above.
Zizek does argue that Serbian nationalism was the main protagonist, but he’s criticizing analysts from both sides for not understanding its political nature and its role in the Yugoslav war, because they are both trapped in the framework of a depoliticized human rights discourse promoted by NATO. This human rights discourse is what he’s concerned to critique. Orinda mentions Zizek’s naive take on NATO’s motives, but he never talked about NATO’s motives, he was going after the pretext they used as cover for their bombing, and showed how even “Western pacifists” adopted it, which had the effect of undermining their own pacifist stance, despite their intentions.
Both pro- and anti-bombing forces are wrong because they both depoliticized a political event, whether they adopted the framework of human rights or, as he criticizes Badiou for, the notion that all sides were guilty of ethnic struggle. He states the point throughout the essay. In the middle, he says this: “But it’s not only NATO that depoliticized the conflict. So has its opponents on the pseudo-Left.” His point was to demonstrate, in dialectical fashion, how positions that appear to be opposed on the surface, human rights vs. ethnic war, led to the same depoliticized conclusion, which ultimately helps perpetuate further “humanitarian interventions” [a term not used in the essay].
He continues his critique of liberal human rights discourse here.
Zizek was not writing a history of the war. One can certainly contest his account, but his main his concern in this essay is stated in the first paragraph: “It is therefore time to ask what the meaning of this war war. What were its ideological and political consequences?” Even if one holds that the Croatian forces had greater culpability than Serbian ones, does this invalidate the question Zizek raises? Isn’t it a crucial one? When imperialists portray a war in a certain way, isn’t it done with great consideration for future political ramifications?
Perhaps it would be more useful to actually try to understand an argument before claiming to refute it. Failing that, silence might be the more reasonable option.
zerohour said
As for Zizek’s support for Zares, it’s unclear to me what it has in common with the LDS circa the 1990s so perhaps better sources can be provided. He was also a member of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in Slovenia, so as you can see from the NATO essay, one can’t reduce his political stances to his past in some simplistic manner.
Furthermore, I cant see how this impacts his writing in the way May9 insinuates. The only argument here is a variant of guilt by association: one simply has to link practice and theory in a mechanical way, show that one is tainted, and the other is automatically discredited by default. This amounts to an advocacy of intellectual laziness in the service of dogma. While it’s fashionable in some faux populist way to attack “incomprehensible” intellectuals [do they have some sort of overwhelming influence on the masses?], this sort of know-nothingism holds far greater sway and is far more damaging to any liberatory project.
tellnolies said
I have an empirical question. Did Zizek support the NATO war against Serbia? He does not do so explicitly in the essay that May 9 linked to (and so badly misread) but neither does he condemn it in that piece. Just to be clear I don’t think the absence of such a condemnantion in this piece proves anything except that the piece was not about the question of whether the war was justified but rather about the meaning of the war as it had been framed by the opposing sides. I know that he was critical of protests against the bombing that defended the Milosevic regime, but did he ever actually support the bombing?
spot said
My two cents:
It’s (debatably, I’m sure one of you could or will say) a fact that within any ideology, even a flexible ideology with room for debate, that some amount of dogma must exist in order to make commentary intelligible. Without some foundation which we agree not to question (with the ability to revise, of course, if it is found to be faulty), all questions would be forever first questions, and the work of finding solutions could never commence for not having sufficiently nailed down the problems.
Nick R said
I can’t believe this could be so blatantly ignorant. Other people are at least this bad of course, but to basically admit it right up front is amazing. And to almost revel in it too! Wow.
I also think it is extreme and unbalanced to compare the Croatian regime in the 90s to the Ustase. I have made that comparison myself before, but more for the rhetorical trick to shock other Croatian Americans out of supporting the more recent Nationalists. I think this is a huge problem and really inconsistent with the really strong anti-Ustase sentiments most of us hold. Coming from the context of someone who is denying any atrocities by Serbian Nationalist forces in the 90s is sort of scary and threatening. That is exactly the sort of rhetoric that was used by these nationalist forces when they attacked Croatian and Muslim civilians. With the help of the German and Italian armies the Ustase controlled a far larger territory than the modern Croatian state did even during the worst period of the wars, and they murdered enormous numbers of people on a scale nothing in the modern conflict is close too. 1.5 million people died in Yugoslavia in WWII, mostly from one fascist group or another. I don’t like Franjo Tudjman, but he was no Ante Pavelic.
Tony K said
Tellnolies, I think that’s an important point many have missed. Zizek was saying how both supporting NATO and supporting Milosevic are part of the same logic that structures the “New World Order” (ie post-Cold War American hegemony and militarism), and that the answer lies outside of this false “opposition”.
May9 said
Yes, he did support the bombing. In fact he says NATO did not bomb Serbia enough (and that really the Serb people in general should be targeted). I’m this disgusting piece won’t convince any of his adoring fans, though. Ely will probably claim it’s equivalent to Jefferson’s personal foibles.
““So, on the one hand, we have the obscenities of the Serb state propaganda: they regularily refer to Clinton not as “the American president,” but as “the American Fuehrer”; two of the transparents on their state-organized anti-Nato demonstrations were “Clinton, come here and be our Monica!” (i.e. suck our…), and “Monica, did you suck out also his brain?”. The atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time being, carnavalesque in a faked way — when they are not in shelters, people dance to rock or ethnic music on the streets, under the motto “With poetry and music against bombs!”, playing the role of the defying heroes (since they know that NATO does not really bomb civilian targets and that, consequently, they are safe!). This is where the NATO planners got it wrong, caught in their schemes of strategic reasoning, unable to forecast that the Serb reaction to bombardment will be a recourse to a collective Bakhtinian carnivalization of the social life… This pseudo-authentic spectacle, although it may fascinate some confused Leftists, is effectively the other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: in Belgrade people are defiantly dancing on the streets while, three hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking place…
“So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma “Bomb or not?” is: not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE. In the last decade, the West followed a Hamlet-like procrastination towards Balkan, and the present bombardment has effectively all the signs of Hamlet’s final murderous outburst in which a lot of people unnecessarily die (not only the King, his true target, but also his mother, Laertius, Hamlet himelf…), because Hamlet acted too late, when the proper moment was already missed. So the West, in the present intervention which displays all the signs of a violent outburst of impotent aggressivity without a clear political goal, is now paying the price for the years of entertaining illusions that one can make a deal with Milosevic: with the recent hesitations about the ground intervention in Kosovo, the Serbian regime is, under the pretext of war, launching the final assault on Kosovo and purge it of most of the Albanians, cynically accepting bombardments as the price to be paid. When the Western forces repeat all the time that they are not fighting the Serbian people, but only their corrupted regime, they rely on the typically liberal wrong premise that the Serbian people are just victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact is that Serb aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority of the population — no, Serbs are not passive victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the bad nationalist spell.”
May9 said
This filth comes from
http://www.lacan.com/kosovo.htm
Let the apologies and dismissals begin!
May9 said
“I don’t like Franjo Tudjman, but he was no Ante Pavelic.”
Well, yes, he didn’t get to kill as many people. He was no less a fascist, however. He cleansed virtually the entire Serbian population from Croatia (with the help of his NATO allies). And he definitely was pro-Ustashe, and he wrote a long treatise about why the Holocaust was a hoax. So he wasn’t quite at Hitlerian levels, I suppose we should give him a round of applause for that. Although if he had the military capabilities of the Hitlerians, he’d probably be worse.
Speech on the “Freedom Train” after Tudjman’s ‘successful’ ethnic cleansing of the Krajina Serbs who have lived in Krajina for 400 years.
“And [applause] there can be no return to the past, to the times when the Serbs were spreading cancer in the heart of Croatia, cancer which was destroying the Croatian national being and which did not allow the Croatian people to be the master in its own house and did not allow Croatia to lead an independent and sovereign life under this wide, blue sky and within the world community of sovereign nations.”
“What has happened historically to make Knin become such an anti-Croatian place of horror, which prompted them to start a struggle against an independent and democratic Croatia in 1990, but which also brought about their ignominious disappearance from Knin and the region as though they had never lived here! [tumultuous applause]
“In order to achieve this, dear Croatian brothers and sisters, we had to unite the disunited Croathood. We had to muster all Croatian wit and reject all Croatian stupidity. We had to create our own Croatian Army, our own armed force, with which we were capable of defeating the Serbs and convince and prove to the world that we are capable of preserving and ruling our country. [ sound of crowd cheering and shouting "Franjo" for 24 second]
Here in Knin they Serbs were creating their own Serb state in order to unify it with those Bosnian Serbs and Serbia proper and their Yugoslavia. Here in Knin they were saying that they had three Serb pine threes. Here in Knin they were preparing for a long-term war. They were printing their own money and then, owing to the strength of the Croatian Army, the wisdom of our decisions and our leadership, they disappeared in two to three days [applause for 12 seconds] . They didn’t even have the time to take with them their filthy foreign currency or their knickers”
Croatian Radio, transcribed by BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, August 28, 1995
Tony K said
Wow, so Srebrenica didn’t happen? And the siege of Sarajevo didn’t happen as well? This amount of historical revisionism amazes me, but I suppose it’s necessary to hold the fantasmatic logic together.
And all this whispering campaign against Zizek avec Golobic is sickening. Golobic is a “close personal friend” of Zizek because they were academic fellow travellers. This whole guilty by association thing (assuming there is anything to be guilty of) is just nonsense.
Let’s not even get into the accusations of racism. Zizek *gasp* used the word “African”? Possibly in relation to the Rwandan genocide? That’s completely unacceptable, referring to the continent where the (transnational) atrocities occurred. And don’t get me started on this whole “he shouldn’t comment on the Serbians etc racist! etc”. He’s a Slovene, he lived through the Balkan Wars, he KNOWS what happened.
I’m sorry if my tone is inappropriate, but I’m getting tired of all the intentional and unintentional misrepresentations of Zizek. Just see this http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=513
May9 said
From his treatise “Wastelands of Historical Truth”, 1988
“Genocidal violence is a natural phenomenon in harmony with the societal and mythologically Divine nature. Genocide is not only permitted it is also recommended, even commanded by the Word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or the restoration of the earthly kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation and spreading of its one and only correct faith”.”
He also razed any memorial of Jasenovac (the infamous Ustashe-run WWII death camp) to the ground, making way for a “bird sanctuary”. He called the quisling pro-Nazi state of Croatia
“an expression of the historical aspirations of the Croatian people for an independent state of their own and recognition of international factors — the Government of Hitler’s Germany in this case.” He made this speech at the first convention of the HDZ, where hundreds of Ustashe who had been in hiding attended and were now welcome to live in Croatia. He established a committee to commemorate the so-called “Bleiburg martyr” (Croatian fascists from WWII) and countless streets have been renamed to honor Ustashe figures. Synagogues and Orthodox churches were routinely attacked under his rule.
May9 said
“Wow, so Srebrenica didn’t happen? And the siege of Sarajevo didn’t happen as well? This amount of historical revisionism amazes me, but I suppose it’s necessary to hold the fantasmatic logic together.”
Your willingness to believe every imperialist lie about the war and minimize the atrocities of the Croat fascists (and their overall responsibility for launching the war), of course, doesn’t amaze you.
No one brought up Srebrenica or Sarajevo, but those are nice NATO black legends to whip out. If you’re serious about discussing those, I will. But I’m not loathe to do so because you’re just going to shout “revisionist” while making apologisms for the Croats and their open and unapologetic ethnic cleansing campaign.
May9 said
“He’s a Slovene, he lived through the Balkan Wars, he KNOWS what happened.”
He did not “live through the Balkan wars”. His country experienced 10 days of war (largely thanks to his work). Just because he’s a Slovene he has a monopoly on truth about the region? His repulsive endorsement of waging all out war on civilians disqualifies him from commenting on anything about these conflicts, as does his woeful regard for basic facts. Aside from the late 80s, the guy spent most of his time in Paris (in the 80s with the Lacanians) and in the 90s he was doing “jobs” in the US. He experienced nothing of war.
Nick R said
“making apologisms for the Croats and their open and unapologetic ethnic cleansing campaign.” – May9
See this is the attitude I thought was hiding behind some of your other statements. Not only do you deny that any war crimes were committed by any Serbs, you go and connect all Croats to the crimes some committed. What do you think Milosevic was some kind of socialist? The Croatian population of Krajina was attacked by Serbian militias before the retaliation by Tudjman latter in the war. There were sieges and attacks on multiple civilian populations in Bosnia: Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde to name just the more prominent ones. But all this goes down the memory hole if you feel the need to make NATO’s enemy out to be innocent. On the other hand other ethnic groups, especially Croats, are totally responsible for the violence and ethnic cleansing. In fact you are now lumping all Croats together as responsible. This is bigoted.
Tony K said
Nick R: “What do you think Milosevic was some kind of socialist?”
Well, Milosevic was a “socialist” in the same way that Boris Yeltsin was a “socialist”.
And don’t you know, apparently Sarajevo and Srebrenica were lies constructed by US imperialist propaganda…
Personally, I think it’s pretty much futile to argue with someone who has such flexible conceptions of truth, validity, and facts.
Kyle Stone said
This is a strong defense. Thanks for writing it!