Kasama

Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou at NYC's Jack Tilton Gallery

Part 1: Alain Badiou on the Communist Hypothesis (23 min) – mp3, 10mb

Part 2: Slavoj Zizek on Private and Public Use of Reason (37 min) – mp3, 17mb

By Radical Eyes

Last Friday evening, October 15, around 200 people gathered in the tight if posh quarters of the Jack Tilton Art Gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to listen to a “dialogue” between world renowned radical philosophers, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, on the topic of “Philosophy and Communism.” The event was organized to promote the release of the most recent issue of the journal Lacanian Ink .

Certainly it is a promising sign that so many people, particularly so many young people –graduate students, undergrads, artists and others—came to hear an exchange of views on this important theme. Several individuals that I spoke with had travelled hours to attend the event. Tickets (free actually) were “sold out” a full week in advance, while dozens of us who had not reserved spots waited on the steps and sidewalk outside the Tilton Gallery for as long as two hours to assure a standing room space inside. There is, obviously, considerable enthusiasm out there, both for these speakers, and for the topic of Communism.

Each speaker expressed his own particular enthusiasm and sense of urgency regarding the necessity of reconstituting communism for the 21st century, though what this means exactly, still remains very abstract. For the most part Badiou and Zizek avoided any discussion of concrete or practical tasks (aka “What is to be done?”) aside from

1. the need to restore the Communist Hypothesis to its proper place among philosophers and other thinking people, and
2. to pay close attention to those new forms of political practice that emerge through current struggles.

As Badiou himself put it, this hypothesis is essentially a negative operation, amounting basically to the assertion and belief –recurrent throughout history, from at least Sparatacus on—that it is possible and necessary to transcend the structures and limitations of class society, and to establish an egalitarian order.

Unfortunately, from this reporter’s point of view, the event did not in fact live up to its billing as a “dialogue” (let alone a critical debate) between these two figures. As Zizek himself joked early on in the event, the night would not feature much back and forth, but rather would entail separate and mostly self-referential monologues, emphasizing points of general accord. At no point in the entire two-hour event did either speaker even gently criticize the work of the other; their only back and forth was of a complimentary and supportive character. Zizek especially appeared to take a jovial pleasure in demonstrating the duo’s “unity,” to the exclusion of anything resembling “struggle.” (Which of course, from this reporter’s perspective, means that no higher level of Unity was achieved.)

If we assume that the audience present was totally unfamiliar with even the basic coordinates of the philosophers’ work, such a “united front” orientation, deferring discussion of contradictions for another time, may be understandable.

However, it seems likely that most of us in the hall were already more than causally familiar with each philosopher’s writings, and with their general political stance. (Certainly the group of us associated with Kasama were!) In this light, the failure of the speakers to seize this public opportunity to clarify, delineate, and sharpen differences between their positions–and to struggle over these differences—is regrettable. A real opportunity was missed. In this sense the event was more academic in tone than a communist might hope for.

And yet, though you would not have known it from this event, there are some real and important differences between these two thinkers in terms of how they view both Communism and Philosophy these days. Be it their understandings of capitalism and political economy, the relevance of Marxism today, the legacy of Mao and the Chinese Revolution, their attitude towards Hegel, or their orientation towards the crucial concepts of the Party and/or the State, there are, in fact, a whole host of key issues on which these philosophical comrades have distinct, important and quite developed differences.

In particular, the most recent writings of both Zizek and Badiou offer sharp critiques in each direction. In the fascinating third chapter of his (altogether very uneven) most recent volume Living in the End Times, for instance, Zizek accuses Badiou of completely dismissing Marxian political economy and of reproducing a naïve and politically disabling view of the “economy” that prevents Badiou’s theoretical approach from being able to conceptualize the relationship between developments in capitalism and the emergence of fissures of radical possibility. Zizek here turns to Georg Lukacs to explore the interpenetration of politics and economics (of subjectivity and apparent objectivity) that is inherent in capitalism, a point which he claims Badiou is blind to.

Badiou for his part has offered very sharp and penetrating criticism of Zizek, as well, particularly regarding the latter’s stated views on Mao Zedong . This comes in the recent published “Letter to Slavoj Zizek: On the work of Mao Zedong” in the Appendix to Badious’s 2010 book The Communist Hypothesis. Praising his Slovenian colleague and friend for his courage and seriousness in taking up the legacy and texts of Mao at all (in the introduction to Verso’s recent edition of Mao’s selected writings), Badiou nonetheless calls Zizek to task for relying upon reactionary propagandists’ statistics (drawn from Chang-Halliday’s slanderous biography of Mao) when he paints his own—decontextualized—account of those supposedly killed by The Great Leap Forward. As Badiou writes there:

“It is vital not to give any ground in the context of criminalization and hair-raising anecdotes in which the forces of reaction have always tried to wall them [communist leaders] up and invalidate them.”

He asserts that “the rules of discussion [amongst communists] imply an absolute refusal to collaborate with the adversaries ranting” (264), and finds Zizek in violation of these rules at a number of points. This important criticism, which in the present reporter’s view could be extrapolated more generally into a critique of Zizek’s frequent reliance on anticommunist accounts of Communism even in the midst of his own (perverse) defenses of the “Lost Cause,” is just one of a number of insightful criticisms that Badiou brings forward in this open letter.

But alas, even when prompted to do so by an audience question (mine!), such differences remained locked in the closet for the evening.

In truth, for those already familiar with the recent writings of Badiou and Zizek, the event offered very little that was new. (Please others correct me, if I am missing something here.) Badiou provided in his opening remarks essentially a summary of his basic view of “The Communist Hypothesis” as articulated first in his New Left Review article. He outlined his concept of “the communist idea” and surveyed what he describes as the first and the second “sequences” of the Communist hypothesis, highlighting what he sees as the defining problems, accomplishments, and limitations of each “sequence.”

Later in the evening he elaborated—but only a bit—on some of what he sees as the problems particular to our era, the era of attempting to launch of “third sequence” of the communist hypothesis. Most notable here was his insistence that in our era the need is not simply for ideological critique (typical of the first sequence), nor for disciplined organization that is capable of seizing and holding state power (the second sequence), but for the development of an attitude of subjective affirmation. His diagnosis of a pervasive cultural cynicism today helps to explain the prominence he gives to the notion of fidelity as well as his various appropriations of concepts from religious discourse, such as eternity and immortality. At the same time, Badiou continues to liken the present era in many ways to the first sequence of the Communist Hypothesis, the era before socialist states, when a cynical capitalism was running amok, colonialism was dominant, and when inequalities within and between countries reached the sort of extreme levels that we are now again experiencing.

Though introductory, Badiou’s presentation had at least the virtue of being clearly organized and systematic. Zizek’s talk was neither.

Nor did Zizek bring forth the kind of incisive and radical thinking about the current moment so exemplified by his most recent New Left Review article “Permanent Economic Emergency.” Instead, throughout the night, Zizek relied on more than the usual quota of lewd and vulgar jokes, anecdotes, and elaborate hypothetical examples. The two main themes for his humor appear to be absurd futuristic sexual practices and ironic references to “Stalinist” bureaucracy and repression.

Particularly striking was the way that Zizek responded to those few—actually I believe there were only two–critical questions or challenges from the audience by launching into ironic longing for the “good old days” of “Stalinism,” when the utterance of such tough critical questions could be “properly dealt with.”

When pressed by the present writer, for instance, to answer to Badiou’s aforementioned published criticism of his work for relying on the “facts” and estimates drawn from reactionary enemies’ accounts (aka the Chang-Halliday book on Mao), Professor Zizek responded with words to the effect of: “In the good old days, you would be disappeared for a question like that….The question would not be, what question had you asked, but rather, who had seen you last before you disappeared.” Ha. Ha. Ha.

Suffice it to say that Zizek rejected my (and Badiou’s) criticism, imploring that he had “done his homework on this one.” (Incidentally, those interested in an empirical refutation of the “35 million dead” that Zizek quotes from Chang-Halliday can see Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen’s comparative analysis of famine in China and India during the 1950s and 60s. Jean Dreze & Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 1989)

Certainly Zizek was not up for public self-criticism on this occasion. (Is he ever?) Professor Badiou on the other hand, appeared to be too kind to press the issue himself. Perhaps he believes that his published text will speak for itself.

Unfortunately, throughout the evening, Professor Badiou often had difficulty getting a word in edge-wise. Not only did the fact that conversation was carried out in English give Zizek a distinct advantage—he often served as translator for Badiou throughout the event– but Zizek’s quick, rapid, tangential style allowed him to consistently shift discussion onto his own terrain (and towards more provocative anecdotes). Indeed few speakers can compete with Zizek at the discussion table from a strict standpoint of performance, irrespective of the ideas and arguments involved.

In conclusion: it is tempting to say that where the “dialogue” ended would have in fact made a proper starting point for a discussion amongst philosophers and communists. What is to be done? What are the specific lessons to be learned from the successes and failures of the first two “sequences” of international Communism? Where ought we to be paying particularly close attention today to be able to seize upon the new theoretical and practical breakthroughs that may make a third Communist sequence a reality? Neither of the two featured speakers spoke much to these particular questions, at least not this night.