-The Protocols of the Learned Lacanian of Ljublitzia
Proudhon had a natural inclination for dialectics. But as he never grasped really scientific dialectics he never got further than sophistry. This is in fact connected with his petty-bourgeois point of view. Like the historian Raumer, the petty bourgeois is made up of on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand. This is so in his economic interests and therefore in his politics, religious, scientific and artistic views. And likewise in his morals, IN EVERYTHING. He is a living contradiction. If, like Proudhon, he is in addition an ingenious man, he will soon learn to play with his own contradictions and develop them according to circumstances into striking, ostentatious, now scandalous now brilliant paradoxes. Charlatanism in science and accommodation in politics are inseparable from such a point of view. There remains only one governing motive, the vanity of the subject, and the only question for him, as for all vain people, is the success of the moment, the éclat of the day. Thus the simple moral sense, which always kept a Rousseau, for instance, from even the semblance of compromise with the powers that be, is bound to disappear. – Karl Marx, Letter to J B Schweizer “On Proudhon”[1]
In 2008, as a mysterious “crisis” of the LIBOR spreads was transformed into the pretext for a massive transfer of wealth from state treasuries and workers to the ruling class (the so-called “bailouts” of banks and insurance companies[2]) bourgeois media enjoyed a season of cinematic apocalypticism. Cameras planted on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange swiveled nauseously as if they were on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, observing Wall Street traders like doomed sailors staring up at the stock ticker as into an annihilating tidal wave, recalling the gazes of September 2001 lifted to the burning World Trade Center towers.
Like Sadam’s WMD in 2002, the threat posed by the tightening credit of 2008 was made to seem infinite for being undefined, but this time the terrible menace just below the horizon was global, and the fabric of reality itself, now daily called “capitalism” in the world media heretofore shy of this term, was threatened with extinction: without any real reportage, newscasts disseminated narratemes from Hollywood disaster films presaging total obliteration of the familiar. Strife was promised in terrifying and titillating epic visions – of a period of riotous turbulence, of systems crashing and structures imploding, of reigning isms lying in ruin and our species’ hubris chastised, of hedonistic society abruptly repentant in the wake of cataclysm, of wastelands of Darwininan struggle, all lying just around an epochal bend – but first, with special vividness, of perilously inadequate economic plumbing, suggesting that if the “toxic assets”[3] “clogging the system” were not cleared without delay, at any moment the world would be submerged in deep financial shit.
Fittingly then, at the center of all this managed spectacle in the dry-ice-and-laser-show, Gotterdammerung style could be found the exceedingly strange figure of Slavoj Žižek, the Slovene “intellectual charlatan”[4] who has been international director of London’s Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities for some years and who had become famous principally for riffs on scatological themes – chocolate laxative[5] as a metaphor for liberalism, toilet designs[6] as keys to national character conceived psychoanalytically, the fabled shortages of toilet paper[7] in former Communist Europe, a Muslim prohibition of toilet paper[8] as the crux of their alien indigestibility for the Enlightened West – all this passed off as mind-blowing “philosophical insights.” Before becoming a global celebrity, Žižek was the chief ideologist[9] of the anti-communist, pseudo-left, ethnic separatist Slovene Liberal Democratic party, but over the 1990s he transformed himself for the Anglophone market into a vaudeville Communist.[10] This he accomplished by simply declaring himself a “Stalinist” and then proceeding to recycle Hitlerian anti-communist propaganda[11] and vent Hitlerian complaints[12] about liberalism to the already confused audiences of the imperial core university circuit.
What exactly was supposed to be communist about Žižek all these years nobody has ever been able to say. Advanced initially as a Yugoslavian native informant prepared to deliver the brand new US propaganda myths for NATO’s illegal assault on Yugoslavia by a New Left Review[13] (at the time under the guidance[14] of socialist apostates Quentin Hoare and Branka Magas) then championing the neo-Ustase Croat separatist and negationist Franjo Tudjman, Žižek presented himself at first as a Lacanian post-Marxist loosely associated with the post-structuralist moment although engaged in a particular mission to rescue it (to rescue, in fact, Nietzschean-Heideggerian-Hitlerian irrationalism and anti-intellectualism, in the mask of Lacan) from superstition, relativism and obscurantism (his caricature of the anti-imperialism in thought and deed of the global working class) with a revived neo-Kantian “Politics of Truth”[15] capable of combatting “the demise of symbolic efficiency.”[16] (Despite being first promised over a quarter of a century ago, nothing actually constituting this new Enlightenment-flavored politics of truth has ever appeared, in fact, although Žižek is still declaring the need for it on account of the ongoing degeneration of authority he attributes to the malign “hegemony”[17] of “liberal multiculturalism.”[18]) His unmistakably imperialist, right-wing affects and preoccupations had been noted fairly early in his celebrity in the West, for example by one of his first enablers, Ernesto Laclau,[19] whose populist politics (his support for Chavism in Venezuela, for example) Žižek in revenge attacked as inherently fascist,[20] while his imperial white supremacist and fascioid hostility to the whole range of protagonists of the “New Left” Social Movements, (feminism, African diaspora freedom struggle, anti-colonial endeavor,) was wittily dispensed with (in, among other approaches, a mockery of his own fatuous psychoanalytic “readings”) by Leigh Claire La Berge, Paul Bowman and colleagues in the 2005 volume The Truth of Žižek that ought have ended his career, at least in academia, but mysteriously did not. (It’s failure to do so certainly had something to do with a sudden massive push of crossover product popularizing him – the unctuous fan documentary Žižek! by Astra Taylor, the BBC TV series A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, both 2006, and other masscult merchandise and mainstream hype). For the most part, however, his critics have been anti-communist progressives and select liberals who, unwittingly it seems, fulfill Žižek’s own project of charade and manipulation by portraying him as the threat of a resurrected Stalinist Totalitarian Tyranny® suggesting the need for lustration.
Since his big hit pamphlet of 2001 Welcome to the Desert of the Real, in which his pro-war harangue was presented as “contrarian,” Žižek has been hawking a flashy superhero comic book version of Huntington’s discredited Clash of Civilizations thesis offered in mournful wrappers as the regrettable concession to hard truth of a diehard red fugitive from the ashes of Yugoslavia, a kind of masquerade Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov[21] but with ostentatiously repulsive manners and childish habits of thought. Promoted by the mainstream liberal establishment in “the West” variously as their favorite “radical leftist,” “Marxist,” or “Stalinist” – like the harmlessly mad neighbor in a situation comedy – this Central Casting blowhard turns up everywhere there is a popular “Left” event to declare himself – as both a Fascist and a Stalinist – prophet and savior come to revitalize the Jacobin Spirit[22] of a Left gone soft with what in the 90s he named “vulvoliberalism,”[23] and variously insults as “political correctness,” “multiculturalism,” “identity politics,” “localism,” “direct democracy,” “culture studies,” “feminism,” and “fidelity to the name Jew” (interchangeable euphemisms for uppity non-Aryans), recognizably that figure of Nietzsche’s slave revolt which his confrčres without masks like Andras Behring Breivik of late call “cultural Marxism.” His sub-Rabelaisian preoccupation with earthy muck matched to his grandiose, avowedly somatophobic project of “reviving German Idealism” is designed to elicit that frisson of charming bathetic “incongruity” (Mafioso in psychoanalysis, drug lord in marketing 101[24]) that tickles youthful hipsters in their entertainments.
Within months of the commencement of the spectacular dramaturgy of “credit crisis” and “austerity” response – which sham crash would be followed by the sham rebellions of the “movements of the squares” and “Arab Spring,” – Žižek’s thirty-first book in English had appeared, purportedly to address this latest catastrophe, the last of the Bush regime and the first of the historic Obama Presidency. It was called, with endless wells of irony, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, and while like all the previous it was announced as the definitive, reinvigorated “Marxist” analysis of the global crisis of the moment, it was, like all the others, an incoherent, patchwork tract, composed (like Tristram Shandy trying to reach the moment of his birth to begin the proper narrative of his life) entirely of digressions from a spine of argument that is always promised and never delivered, and featuring Žižek’s usual abundant liberal platitude, disinformation and fascist innuendo such as the insistence that the world’s economic woes were the result of the bizarre, alien, anti-social essence embodied in Bernard Madoff[25] (whose traditional Ponzi scheme was actually destroyed by the Bush regime’s daring multi-trillion dollar swindle).
World systems theorists like Wallerstein and Amin had been since the destruction of the USSR chronicling an unprecedented ruling class offensive to push forward a transformation out of an obsolescent form of competitive capitalism to the next shape of class rule; popular dissident economists and social theorists like Robin Blackburn, Michael Hudson, Naomi Klein, and Robert Brenner had simultaneously been tracking the increasing precariousness of the financialized post-Bretton Woods arrangements. Indeed Klein had recently published an enormous bestseller The Shock Doctrine which, for all its many flaws, provided a neologism for ruling class praxis that vividly conveyed its premeditated malice, violence and cunning, and which was well suited to advance conversations across social strata and diverse communities about the events unfolding in 2008. But, predictably, despite a substantial array of established public intellectuals ready to deliver demystifying explanations, it was Slavoj Žižek whom the US-owned global mass media and – significantly – many traditional left institutions turned to most, and kept at constant center stage, to voice the “radical left” “anti-capitalist” perspective and deliver the “Marxist” wisdom for which a stunned and frightened public were now clamoring. Judging from his behavior in this spotlight, we can assume his remit from his enablers and sponsors was to help prevent an anti-war, anti-counter-revolutionary resistance from forming around this loose consensus covering the altermondialist perspective disseminated by Klein in her bestseller and the spectrum of adherents of a reviving communist project.
Thus in 2008, as the spectacle announced that Act II of History Resumed post-Fukuyama was beginning, it was as though the moment Žižek had been created for had arrived. He stepped forward an already established herald of the Raving Bolshevik Revolutionary Terror bogey of mainstream liberal fairy tale – that monstrously virile specter lying in wait for this opportunity of capitalist weakness to commit some divinely violent Act that would turn the world into a huge gulag for his grotesque satisfaction – only to call everything of that kind off. So far from exhorting his ardent followers to resist, he continued, in exaggerated form, the pantomime of his other persona, the one that is always in the present (contrarily for a professed radical leftist) urging passivity[26] and obedience[27] to the US empire, which after all is “not always the bad guy,” and excoriating everything the working class undertakes whether it’s anti-racist militancy,[28] wage-protecting labor mobilizations[29] or anti-imperialist policy[30] in government, as primitive, mindless, really complicit with capital, inescapably conservative and/or protofascist, while hinting at future feats of unimaginable epic originality and boldness.
Immanuel Kant countered the conservative motto “Don’t think, obey!” not with “Don’t obey, think!”, but with “Obey, BUT THINK!” When we are blackmailed by things like the bail-out plan, we should bear in mind that we are effectively blackmailed, so we should resist the populist temptation to act out our anger and thus hit ourselves. Instead of such impotent acting out, we should control our anger and transform it into a cold determination to think, to think in a really radical way, to ask what kind of a society are we leaving in which such blackmail is possible.[31]
While the Žižek long announced by his acolytes in the liberal press was a terrifying and thrilling Robespierre and Lenin, and long feared by the Eustonite Decents[32] as a bloodthirsty megalomaniac HitlerStalinMao of liberal nightmare, the Žižek who arrived when the curtain went up was, by his own design, not even as uncooperative as the Bartleby the Scrivener[33] in political matters he had recommended to his audience as model the year before.
“Obey!” Žižek the burlesque Stalin thus commanded his public as the financial crisis erupted into the headlines on the eve of President Obama’s election. “Bush should be nominated for honorary membership in the American Communist Party,” he repeated everywhere he was invited to comment, a move which not only harmonized with the bourgeois media’s spin of the grand heist but was entirely in keeping with his habit of hailing figures like Richard Nixon, Benito Mussolini or the Spartan King Leonidas from the live action cartoon 300, for their admirably “Leninist” “acts”. With regard to the US bailouts specifically, Žižek insisted the actual sums were “sublime” and beyond comprehension, pointless to discuss or investigate. As a limp gesture to criticism, all he could muster was a platitude (a classic “inoculation” as Barthes long ago diagnosed in Mythologies[34]) about the hypocrisy of the imperial managers, suddenly able to find the money “when it really matters” though their pockets are to let when the funding of public services is required, etc.. For authority, the “radical Marxist” alternative to the NY Times’ Keynesian pundits reached for the inanity of Ayn Rand, another of his guiding lights: “She says money is in a way a means of liberty. In the sense of: we have to divide things, exchange and so on. She says, money means we can do it peacefully. I pay you, you sell it to me only if you want to. If not money, then there has to be some kind of direct domination, brutal extortion, whatever.” The repeated resort to Rand as the (regrettably recognized) prophet of the times grounded his affirmation of the ruling class’ official vision of reality (the Thatcherite There Is No Alternative): “The utopia here is not a radical change of the system, but the idea that one can maintain a welfare state within the system. Here, again, one should not miss the grain of truth in the countervailing argument: if we remain within the confines of the global capitalist system, then measures to wring further sums from workers, students and pensioners are, effectively, necessary.”[35] This clumsy rhetorical maneuver - in which the official reactionary stance of the capitalist class is advanced as an ultra-left radical rejection of the social democratic charade and a cry of Death to the System – is one Žižek had enacted many times before and would enact many after, his fans, led by the editors of mainstream centrist press, never seeming to tire of it.
In the midst of the furor caused by the global financial crisis and the “necessary” “measures to wring further sums from workers,” with which governments proposed to manage it, cheered on by Žižek (albeit wearing a sad clown face of ostentatious regret), Žižek and his close associate the neo-Platonic former “French Maoist” philosopher, Alain Badiou, seized the opportunity to organize a big academic celebrity conference exploiting “renewed interest in alternatives to capitalism.” It turned out a grand demoralizing heat sink for the fury and alertness that threatened popular mobilization, helping in no small measure to diffuse campus-based response in the UK to the bailouts.
The On the Idea of Communism conference, held first at Birkbeck in 2009 and then taken on the road to a degree, seems to have been modelled on the The Politics of Truth conference the same celebrity ringleaders had arranged in 2001, which had given rise to a popular volume of collected papers from Verso called, in Žižekian masscult referencing style, Lenin Reloaded. The Žižek, Badiou, and Stathis Kouvelakis contributions in particular would become the grimoires of irrationalist advertising campaigns for fascioid, ersatz left political movements Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain; Maidan and the Umbrellas also echoed the themes and motifs appearing there. The language of both altermondialism and its critique, entwined and fused, accomplished something recognizably described here, in this chart of psyops tactics found among the Snowden leaks[36]:
Conspicuously absent from the 2009 Birkbeck On the Idea of Communism conference was anything resembling a communist. Indeed everything about the conference had the smell of a ruse with a family resemblance to the pranks that produce color revolutions, and the sorts of operations Žižek and friends carried off in their project to destroy Yugoslavia.[37] While the conference was hailed – and promoted, amazingly for an academic affair targeting graduate students in the more rarified realms of humanities, across the British media – as the expression of massive rebirth of socialist militancy, the price of attendance was a positively startling Ł100 and Ł45 for students. All twelve of the speakers invited were white; eleven were men. The proposal of the conference was specifically to treat Communism as an Idea, a kind of spiritual dream recommended to people in a messianic ecstasy that could thus be untainted by the human history of the 20th century universally deplored by the participants, a collection of progressive liberals (e.g. Michael Hardt), present and former Trotskyite anti-Communists (Terry Eagleton, Alex Callinicos), anarchistic social democratic post-structuralists (Jacques Rancičre), and the acolytes of hosts Žižek and Badiou.[38]
Although this whites-only, 90+% male, 100% anti-communist line-up might easily have come about by the sheer thoughtless arrogance and insularity of the organizer, things soon developed suggesting it was in itself a kind of classically Žižekian “provocation,” part of his ongoing revanchist project. Talk soon began to circulate that certain students from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) were objecting to both the cost of the event and the lack of diversity of the speakers, though their complaints mostly reached the media second hand. (The interest of these student with these objections in the event was never entirely explained; news sources increasingly portrayed the conference as a kind of global left emergency meeting, so it was simply understood that all individuals with leftist concerns already in London would desire to attend.)
A larger auditorium[39] than initially scheduled was secured, and a spillover hall for closed circuit observation. But then an anonymously penned “alternative programme” for the conference appeared and was circulated through the networks associated with the Badiouvian-Žižekian Centre for Modern European Philosophy, Goldsmiths and Birkbeck colleges, Historical Materialism, and the Socialist Worker’s Party, and issued online. This document was purported, by the Žižek acolytes who published it but did not claim authorship of it nor claim to know its provenance, to be a half-serious, half-jesting squib from inexplicably anonymous SOAS students dissatisfied with the scheduled event. (Žižek’s hand is visible there already in the accepted inconsistency of messengers knowing the authors were SOAS students without knowing who they were.) What it was in fact was a multiply disavowed, racist caricature of anticipated critics of Žižek, Badiou and the white supremacist, imperialist, idealist, anti-communist Idea of Communism Žižek was known to promote, and a vicious attack on what remains of a radical left in anglophone universities.
This prank facsimile of a joke alternative schedule for the grandiose neo-Platonic, unreconstructed Eurocentric, mythologically imperialist pseudo-communist conference encapsulates, as we will explain further below, the psyop that is Slavoj Žižek. Wheels within wheels of disavowal and distancing offer an audience the pleasures of reactionary enunciations with myriad, flexible alibis, and further the re-segregation that divides and demoralizes the spectrum of candidates for a popular front against empire:
The original programme:
Friday March 13
Registration opens at 11.30am
2pm Costas Douzinas Welcome
Alain Badiou Introductory remarks
Michael Hardt “The Production of the Common”
Bruno Bosteels “The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in the Age of Terror”
Peter Hallward “Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Will”
Jean-Luc Nancy will be present throughout the conference and will intervene in the discussions.
6 pm End
Saturday March 14
Registration opens at 8.30am
10am Alessandro Russo “Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism?”
Alberto Toscano “Communist Power / Communist Knowledge”
Toni Negri “Communisme: reflexions sur le concept et la pratique”
1pm Lunch
3pm Terry Eagleton “Communism: Lear or Gonzalo?”
Jacques Ranciere “Communists without Communism?”
Alain Badiou ”Communism: a generic name”
6pm End
Drinks Reception – Jeffery Hall
Sunday March 15
10am Slavoj Žižek “To begin from the beginning over and over again”
Gianni Vattimo “Weak Communism?”
Judith Balso “Communism: a hypothesis for philosophy, an impossible name for politics?”
Concluding Debate
2pm End
The “alternative” circulated anonymously, but rumored – also from anonymous sources – to be the work of School of Oriental and African Studies students, representing, supposedly, their real wishes expressed however with satire:
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
“It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do” (B. Brecht)
ON THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM
(Updated programme!)
13th/14th/15th March 2009
Logan Hall, Institute of Education
20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL
“The intellectual impulses of the 90s will come from women”
[Illustration: Annette Frick. Action with Gaby Kutz in front of Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits
Ludwig Museum, Cologne, 8.8.1990]
Communism in the 2010s: a world where many worlds fit?
In solidarity,
riverside cells
Friday March 13
Registration opens at 11.30am
Costas Douzinas Welcome to the people
2pm Stuart Hall Opening Remarks
Alain Badiou Introductory remarks
Angela Davis “Women, race and class”
Michael Hardt “The REproduction of the Common”
Lynne Segal “What Feminism did to Communism”
Bruno Bosteels “The Postcolonial Hypothesis: Frightened Communism?”
Nancy Hartsock “The Proliferation of Radical Standpoints”
Peter Hallward “Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Body”
Jean-Luc Nancy, Christine Delphy and members of migrant and feminist groups will be
present throughout the conference and will intervene in the discussions.
6 pm End
Saturday March 14
Registration opens at 8.30am
10am Starhawk “Thinking with worms: Reclaiming the communist soil”
Alessandro Russo “Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism?”
Subcomandante Marcos “Intergalactic Decentralized Communism”
Alberto Toscano “Communist Power / Communist Ignorance”
Toni Negri “Communisme: reflexions sur la pratique”
Silvia Federici “Creating Communities of Care”
1pm Lunch
3pm Vandana Shiva “Ecofeminism and the challenge to Western Communism”
Terry Eagleton “Communism: Leontes or Paulina?”
Jacques Ranciere “Communism without Communists?”
Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon “Communists without Communism”
Alain Badiou “Communism: an empty name”
Hilary and Steven Rose “Alas, Poor Marx”
6pm End
Drinks Reception and Street Party – Jeffery Hall and outside
Sunday March 15
10am Slavoj Žižek “The view from up here: Communism from above is
no communism at all”
Sandra Harding “Communisms from below”
Donna Haraway “On Interspecies Communism”
Gianni Vattimo “Weak Communists”
Judith Balso “Communism: a hypothesis for philosophy, an impossible
name for politics?”
bell hooks “Ain’t I a Communist?”
12am Skill sharing workshop: Alter-communisms!
Bring your experiences and visions from local and transversal struggles
Concluding Collective Trance: Channelling Karl Marx
2pm End
The message is painfully clear: Here is what would happen were the virile whiteness of the Communist Event tarnished (by people of color, feminists or Communists). Some women and people of color (famous people chosen for the “alternative” solely on account of their gender and ethnicity, not because any of these people had expressed the least interest in Žižek’s anti-left publicity stunt) are (compelled somehow) to be speaking at the conference - or rather caricatures of these celebrities, ridiculous, contemptible, parodies, are conjured like spirits. Their presence, a deformed vision of anti-imperial praxis in intellectual production, is not only in itself a reduction in quality, bringing along a laughable and horrifying “interspecies” consequence, but their proximity, more sinisterly, infects the celebrity white males, who are tainted by the association and become trivial and ridiculous from the mingling, incapable of carrying out the civilizing mission; the contagion makes them decadent as well; they lose their dignity, their discernment and judgement, and their ability to lecture, teach and lead. Terry Eagleton, at the all white, all male setting, was to speak about great Shakespearean tragedy, but forced to mingle with the inferiors sharing the podium, he is infected with their inferiority and will be speaking instead about inferior Shakespeare romances. Peter Hallward has lost the bold triumphant “Will” of his Gramsci reference, and instead, surrounded by all these too material, too earthy, raced and gendered interlopers as colleagues, will be speaking of “the Body”. Bosteels was to speak on “The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in the Age of Terror” but has been cowed into a lecture entitled, “The Postcolonial Hypothesis: Frightened Communism?” Badiou’s science-y “generic” has been corroded and degraded to “empty”; Toscano is inspired by his new surroundings to celebrate “Ignorance” instead of “Knowledge.” “Alas, poor Marx,” the Roses lament from the sidelines as it all ends with bell hooks popping up to exhibit the ultimate indignity, the degradation of the language in the act of comical uppitiness. The presence of women and people of color naturally leads to the practice of magic instead of rational pursuits, and as in a screenplay the last shot is of all gathered in a risible séance. Marking certain of Žižek’s most pernicious achievements to date, the participants, and the young Trotskyists and anarchists who shared this jest, affected ignorance of what there could possibly be to object to in what they insisted was a sincere and gentle request for diversity and necromancy from unidentified students of Oriental and African Studies. The conference audience, in the end, was almost entirely white. A “safe space” for fascist, racist, imperialist discourse mis-labelled “communist” had been created. This safe space would metastasize in years to come.
Žižek never admitted to authoring this prank, but another anonymous document, an account of the conference and its discontents, appeared in Radical Philosophy journal signed by “M.H.”[40] It ignored the racist effrontery in the “joke” program, acknowledging only the implied objections regarding gender, and praised the anonymous SOAS students the anonymous author affirmed as anonymous authors: “All of which leaves a question hanging in the air: who are the more imaginative political thinkers: Badiou, Žižek, Rancičre, Negri and the rest, or the anonymous students of SOAS? It’s not hard to imagine what even old Bertie Brecht would have answered to that.” (Replace the antiracist, feminist leftist students with racist and sexist ones, one assumes is the implication, which indeed was what effectively was accomplished.)
At the conference itself, Žižek waxed lyrical[41] on a favorite theme of his, the crude imperialist vision of the gift of civilization that white Frenchmen generously bestowed upon Africans by enslaving them and then teaching them about the Rights of Man, and how “we white leftists can leave behind our endless self-flagellating guilt”[42] once “we” fully realize the benevolence of “our” white ancestors toward the ancestors of “them,” “our” contemporaries (always Other, never comrades) in Haiti. He took care to heap contempt on all things African at every opportunity:
Žižek: The Marseillaise problem, it’s a wonderful question! [someone had referred to the story of forces defending Cap ŕ Pierrot singing the Marseillaise] The usual multiculturalist answer would have been why Marseillaise, it’s French, we should all sing some some I don’t know, some –
Costas Douzinas: The internationale –
Žižek: yeah some some African song I don’t know or whatever. I would say unfortunately this is what white, white multiculturalist liberals like us to do. They don’t like the third world people to sing their songs, they want respect the same way you go a little bit to a Thai restaurant, to an Italian restaurant, and so on and so on, the white Marseillaise was revolutionary there. It didn’t mean – it meant something very precise. It didn’t mean, you see even we primitive half-ape blacks, our grandparents were still jumping on trees like apes in Africa, we can now even participate in your, No! It meant we are more Frenchmen than you!
A brief aside: Costas Douzinas, Žižek’s straight man there, is a British academic of Greek parentage and a practical creature of Žižek. Douzinas was brought up in England and made his entire career there; he was advanced in academia by Žižek’s favor and that of former CIA agent Duncan Kennedy (of Critical Legal Studies, a partially Marxist but dominantly Schmittian school of post-structuralist legal criticism) and ended playing an enormous role in what is perhaps Žižek’s most criminal enterprise since the Slovene embezzlement-by-secession caper and destruction of Yugoslavia, namely Syriza. Douzinas today, remarkably, is a member of the Greek Parliament, despite having no professional or political history in the country. Stathis Kouvelakis is another British longtime associate of Žižek who played a central role in Syriza, and of course Yanis Varoufakis, also very close to Žižek from the time of Syriza’s conception, is British-educated (an “Anglophile opportunist” and “would-be Mavrokordatos”, in the word of one party member and scholar[43]) In fact Syriza, a kind of color revolution, is a grand scale case of the Žižekian equivocation, performing as “simultaneously pro-BDS and pro-Israel, simultaneously anti- and pro-memorandum, regretfully memorandum-enforcing”[44]: neoliberal empire masquerading as its own nationalist opposition carrying out the seizure of Greece disguised as a daring act in the Jacobin spirit. In this way the middle classes were marshaled to crush the organized working class, as in traditional fascism, but misled into imagining themselves carrying out their salvation by the renewal of “the communist idea.” But what Žižek really thinks of communism and communists could not be more explicit than he made it in Greece,[45] shouting (to the applause of his bourgeois hipster audience): “The party, KKE, is basically the party of the people who are still alive only because they forgot to die.” These remarks were made at a time when “clashes” that saw anarchist provocateurs activate police reactions turned lethal for communist workers. Viewers of the video will see it is not merely a joke or an extemporaneous remark (he repeated the same formula on several occasions), but an incitement to violence under cover of witticism.
After the 2009 On The Idea of Communism conference, where the seeds of the propaganda campaigns for the Syriza swindle and other decoy left movements that would divert the energy and usurp the place of popular resistance to advance the ruling class offensive further were cultivated, Žižek was invited on BBC radio,[46] where the hundred quid a seat celebrity intellectual gathering was described as if it were a special meeting of the Comintern. Žižek was introduced as “one of 900 delegates” to the event. His summary was that the meeting proved once again that “the Left had no alternative” to the austerity policies of Western governments in particular or to capitalism in general. “All they want to do is outlaw racism.” Shortly thereafter he was lecturing another London audience[47] about how there is no Congolese working class, bringing Congo forward of an example of what happens when empire abandons the “former” colonized world, and explaining that making the public (not the shareholders of BP) pay for the Gulf oil spill cleanup is “a properly communist response.” His companions in another discussion on BBC radio[48] were audibly gasping in shock when he insisted, “I’ve looked closely into all criticisms of Europe especially this left liberal masochist one ‘no, no Europe is a history of slavery, it’s the worst of them all.’ What strikes me and gives me hope for Europe, and I mean it seriously, in a strict philosophical sense, are we aware to what extent even the most ferocious critique of imperialism, violence of Europe is founded in European legacy? That for example Indian independence, Congress Party. These were Indians educated in Cambridge. It’s true European tradition. This is what I like in Europe. Show me another civilization which, with all its horrors, and I admit them, has developed the strongest mechanisms that I know to criticize itself.” A guest from the previous segment insisted on being allowed to remain to rebut him on air. On another day he was telling another BBC camera[49] – this time after being introduced as the literal reincarnation of Marx – that the USSR was the greatest horror in human history, “worse than fascism,” and on another declaring in the New Statesman:
We should not be afraid to encourage, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the resurgence of an important figure in all egalitarian-revolutionary terror - the “informer” who denounces culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)
Once upon a time, we called this communism.[50]
Needless to say, the Enron whistleblowers are entirely fictional.
Žižek’s apparent posture swings and pivots wildly to be incessantly attacking, opportunistically, whatever current challenge to empire has the élan, and defending whatever policy of empire is facing resistance. On the surface this appears as “incoherence” – bashing the Bolivarian[51] revolution or any popular working class movement gaining ground for insufficient radicalism, suggesting they’re unworthy of support or at least that their demise is nothing to lament especially (their own fault for their timidity and inauthenticity), while hailing US backed palace coups as in Ukraine or US backed contra terrorist subversion as in Libya as “revolutions” that only the despicable beautiful soul liberals could fail to abet – but once the politics driving these shifting positions is grasped (defense of US empire and increasing fascization of culture) all the apparent quirks and hypocrisies reveal themselves perfectly consistent. Despite twenty years of posturing as a radical leftist, Marxist, and Linksfascist, whenever the moments of truth arrived – the financial crisis, the wars, the refugee headline – Žižek proved himself again and again both an ordinary establishment (neo-)liberal and simultaneously an ordinary right fascist.
How does he get away with this, then? At first glance, the travelling Žižek show appears an entirely clownish affair. Indeed many of Žižek’s defenders offer this clownishness as an excuse or even a kind of merit – it “gets a reaction,” “attracts an audience,” “gets people talking about Marx”, (much as Harry Potter is defended against criticism with the diversion that it “gets children reading again”) therefore it must be valuable – but that is part of its disguise. In the broadest terms, as Antonis Balasopoulos put it,
The purpose of [Žižek’s rhetorical] strategy is to i. attribute extreme right-wing content to communist ideas ii. attribute progressive content to extremely reactionary ideas iii. confuse everyone about which is which iv. slander the left while seeming to be “daring” and “provocative”.[52]
Unsurprisingly, in this endeavor he relies on rational exploitation of irrationalism and more or less scientific techniques of mediatic manipulation rather than argument. Many of his ruses and tactics, we shall show, derive from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and Carl Schmitt’s adaptation of it into a “critique of liberalism” that has competed with Marxism and served as its changeling since the early 20th century.
Žižek’s Rhetoric: Motifs, Gambits and Maneuvers
1. The Barflies
Carrying out a fascist revanchism within his defense of the nominally liberal status quo and the White House particularly, involving incessant labor to produce discursive “facts on the ground”, Žižek performs a hokey caricature of a European Bourgeois Intellectual seemingly oblivious to everything produced by radicals and even liberals in social and human sciences during the 20th century, mainly versed in the decrepit jargon of a tradition through which white supremacy issues its claims to civilization and superiority, using post-structuralist tropes and rhetorical machinery clumsily handled. His “mittel-European philosopher” persona is capable of little dissident enunciation beyond kvetching about “hedonistic” kids today and hippie-punching “the identitarian left”, but he will – and this is the crowd-pleasing shtick – also thrill his downwardly mobile petty bourgeois audience by dropping the mask of bourgeois civility to voice their ressentiment in naughty ways that rile them up. This usually involves ventriloquism or “sock-puppetry”, often of a very sophisticated kind where the position of enunciation is always shifting.[53] The tactic is not original, and among the inspirations for Žižek’s signature abuse and obscenity we can almost certainly number “Nightwatch”, a regular Sunday feature in Delo, the major Slovene daily, consisting of the latest sensational headlines (crime, atrocity, scandal) stirred into the weekly complaints of “the Barflies” – Archie Bunker/Alf Garnetts of Ljubljana’s popular classes. It is described in a Mirovni institute (Soros’ Open Society) publication thusly:
What are the bar flies’ topics, or rather the “Slovenian blisters” that worry the bar flies and bring them to open those blisters so arduously? At first glance, the list of topics is infinite. In essence, the list is timeless and hence depends on media events that are - judging by the rate of their processing - primarily dictated by electronic media. In reality, however, it revolves around an iron logic: threatened Slovenianness (Slovenian nation), (too low) birth rate, “those from the south”, those “from down there”, the Balkan folk, “Balkanophilia”, “Yugobums”, “beings with a half-roof over their heads24”, (local) politicians, “Yugos”, “Yugoviches”, reds, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians “jungle bunnies”, mafia, Chinese, gays, politics and, of course, when they run out of everything, women are always close at hand (no matter whether they are local or “imported girls”). If m. s. wanted to give a very precise answer to the question of what the bar flies’ topics are, than he would say that the bar flies have a “dark repertory of debatable issues” (24) and the favorites among them are “debates about Balkanization and similar trends” (84)! Last but not least, in addition to all that has been mentioned above, the bar flies are also a moral authority par excellence, or in some way the “nation’s consciousness”, except they are “beside themselves because they do not know which difficulty pestering our nation should be given priority” – Hate Speech in Slovenia, Tonči Kuzmanić[54]
The barflies themselves and the liberal persona of the author who conveys their brutish opinions are equally fictional constructs, (albeit not equally avowedly) and the interplay of their points of view generates the varied desired effects of normalizing, demonizing, disavowed articulation, etc.; the liberal authorial persona, creature and creator of tolerance and civility, perplexed by the task of managing a world with barflies in it, is himself an illusion far more effectively created indirectly, by implied contrast to the barflies, than he could be as the result of positive portraiture. Žižek is especially deft at the management of multiple voices to produce these illusions, on a much more elaborate scale. Like Nightwatch’s author, while his remarkably frequent (and repetitive to self-plagiarizing) publications “incorporate ever newer current events and popular cultural phenomena”[55] Žižek often is compelled to express at length repugnant sentiments he frequently attributes to a range of conjured stereotypes, sympathy with whom he (unconvincingly) disavows as he relishes the enunciation of effrontery or the pleasure of contemptuous caricature. Thus in any text or lecture of his we can be expect to be told of “primitive half ape blacks whose grandparents were jumping around like apes in trees in Africa,” “Typical Jews! Even in the worst gulag, the moment they are given a minimum of freedom and space for maneuver, they start trading—in human blood!” and on and on in this vein. In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, under a sequence from the movie Jaws showing a little white boy torn to death by a shark, the water crimson with his gushing blood off a Carolina beach full of white people, Žižek offers, in the guise of a (perfectly absurd) interpretation of the film, that “we fear immigrants, people whom we perceive as lower than ourselves, attacking us, robbing us, raping our children,” and then under the shot of the shark’s terrible fin inexorably slicing the sea toward the heroes’ boat, “we fear corrupt politicians, and big companies who may physically do with us whatever they want.” Endless examples can be found of Žižek retailing (wholly fictional or fictionalized) stories of crimes of moral turpitude committed by target Others and anecdotes of Their Inassimilable Otherness, of lesbians engaged in bestiality, of feminists who persecute men for looking them in the eye, of imams who encourage rape, of Vietnamese Communists who chop off the vaccinated arms of children to “reject the West,” assuring his audiences that “any man in Congo would sell his mother into slavery to move to the West Bank,” and on the West Bank noting “with all your terrorists here you are nothing to South Bronx,” commencing an essay purportedly on Lacan with a supposed puzzle lifted from “18th century French libertinage”:
The three women will be placed in a triangle around a large round table, each naked from the waist below and leaning forward on the table to enable penetration a tergo. Each woman will then be penetrated from behind by either a black or a white man, so she will be only able to see the color of the men who are penetrating the other two woman in front of her; all that she will know is that there are only five men available to the governor for this experiment, three white and two black….
… but confessing in a footnote: “Since we live in times more and more deprived of an even elementary sense of irony, I feel obliged to add that this sexualized version is my invention.”[56] Recently at the London School of Economics, he suddenly burst out with this:
Now you will say, if you are a racist (I’m not, here at least), you will say, oh those stupid n—-rs, they’re in the middle of Africa. These n—-rs are everywhere. Another big n—-r here is Putin, and yet a third n—-r are Christian fundamentalists. Fourth n—-rs are in my own country, Slovenia.
In the same audio archive, among the recordings of his “master classes,” one can hear him, with only the slightest gesture to ventriloquizing his son’s babysitter, defaming a Slovenian Roma family[57] and defending the neighboring landlords who carried out a pogrom against them that terrorized them from their homes into the woods in the middle of the night with shotguns and chainsaws, and successfully expropriated their legally purchased and long settled-on land. It is in his own voice, however, although estranged as “my worst, or best, critical self,” that he declares Joseph Mengele “not as guilty as we think,” and compares him to “an innocent country doctor.” [58]
The portrait given of Žižek by Jeremy Gilbert, in his contribution to the 2005 volume The Truth of Žižek much resembles the “Nightwatch” barflies:
Let us begin with certain indisputable truths about Žižek. In recent times an extraordinary quantity of words has been published under his name. This work has almost all been published by publishers largely known for academic publishing (although Verso, his usual publisher, is not merely an academic press). Yet this work does not even approach the standards of academic rigour that would normally be expected of an undergraduate essay….A second truth. Žižek’s main objects of attack have been on the left. Specifically, a loosely connected set of political positions and intellectual tendencies largely associated with the legacy of the ‘New Lefts’ has been the thing that Žižek has chosen to focus his critical attentions on. ‘Cultural Studies’, ‘political correctness’, ‘feminists’, ‘multiculturalism’, postmodernists, postcolonial studies, historicists and deconstructionists: despite his avowed anticapitalism, it is not capitalism and its specificities but the same litany of hate-figures that populates the fevered imagination of the American right for which Žižek has reserved most of his ill-informed ire.[59]
We can add that Žižek’s masperizing innovation is to supply a student-pleasing alibi for his attack on these Left hate-figures of conservative fantasy that consists of identifying them as the secret allies and “supports” of decadent globalized capitalism ; the minorities he attacks are portrayed as pets of guilty liberal multiculturalists with their condescending tolerance; the demands of Roma and feminists in Žižek’s new neoliberal Slovenia were denounced as “diversions from class struggle” (by Žižek, with no shame, who was directing the forces of privatizing capital expropriating and crushing the working class while deftly dividing their resistance with these age old means). This supremely cynical tu quoque response to the real (multicultural, multiethnic) working class, in the US, UK, or France as in the Slovenia, involves the cooptation and vitiation of popular left analyses of the pernicious trap of neoliberal “identity politics”.[60]
The resemblance to the “Nightwatch” barflies extends to the barbarizing effect Žižek accomplishes with his frequent breaks out of traditional academic manner and speech into down-to-earth foul-mouthed “honesty”, “acknowledging” what he presents as the obscene and vulgar, homely “truths” of political realism and cynicism. This kind of language has literally restored race hierarchy and white solipsism concretely to the spaces of left organizing and discussion Žižek has infiltrated, and literally created a dominant white faction where there had only been the lingering factor of white individual privilege, and that under concerted assault.
This procedure (the Žižekian left whipped up like a lumpen petty bourgeois mob positioned as aggressively hostile to the loosely termed Black Lives Matter left at Left Forum, picking a fight within “the left” that is really a disguised assault on the left from the fascioid liberal bourgeoisie[61]) is not, as many who assist it seek to portray it, a tempest in a teapot over “hurtful words.” It is an analog on the level of culture wars of the imperial strategy of fomenting sectarianism and terror that Žižek abetted in Yugoslavia and propagandized for in Iraq, Libya and Syria as well.
Žižek’s seeming “digressions” again and again into tales with racialized paradigms and images solidify, obliquely, an array of identities as object Others and an understanding that only white Europeans and settlers can be the true subjective protagonists of “class struggle”, so that for the (mainly white, petty bourgeois) population which has been indoctrinated by his entertainments, the very evocation of Marxist vocabulary conjures, implies and refreshes a throwback Hegelian Aryanism. The gestures with which he and his supporters restore a white tribal presence are likewise presented as valiant, in the style of the Le Pens and Farages on the European scene – for the liberals would not like us to talk so frankly; “you will lynch me for this,” Žižek assures his Birkbeck audience, doubling them as their contemptible liberal parents and their intrepid taboo-breaking selves at once, strengthening the illusion of the existence of both.[62] This contempt for the interests and wellbeing of all but the white core populations – the dismissal of the majority of humanity’s poverty and suffering in capitalism as the trivial exception to the white European/Settler rule of prosperity, civil liberties and enfranchisement – is an indispensable pillar of the apology for US-European capitalist empire, of course.
Such unadorned but undeniable “truths” his rough bonhomie compels him to admit as: that those to whom Žižek refers as “we white leftists” of course exhibit their courteous refinement in not shoving their superiority in the faces of the Untermenschen, but among themselves the dirty secret that they are superior can be confessed and celebrated, and ought be proclaimed more publicly. That the whole history of actually existing communism in the 20th century was “a total disaster, worse than fascism.” Or: that yes of course capitalist imperialism is terrible, unjust, and doubtless unpleasant for hoi polloi, but after all let’s be honest, it’s the best thing there is, and the only question now is how to save it from itself.
These “truths”, which Žižek explains are forbidden by the political correctness gestapo, typically belong to the classic “yes, but” liberal formula (“yes the United States has produced the most extravagantly bogus war propaganda in the past, but that doesn’t mean the evil Gaddafi is not pumping rapist Orcs full of Viagra” “Yes the US commits atrocities, it’s not a perfect world, but Hezbelosevicassad shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that” “yes Palestinians have been tortured, terrorized and dispossessed, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t also be exterminated”), and they form the substance of a key topos of Žižek’s repertoire:
2. The Fetishistic Disavowal
A handful of fragmentary jokes and anecdotes that form Žižek’s vaunted “theory of ideology” – his Madison Avenue homilies – serve as both the incessantly rehashed content of his “analysis” and the rules by which his own manipulative performances are constructed. The one that most thoroughly penetrates the Žižekian oeuvre is the fetishistic disavowal – the persistence of irrational belief in the face of rational conviction to the contrary. (It is an enduring irony that Žižek’s defenders become particularly insulted when the master is treated as explicable in psychoanalytic terms.)
“Fetishistic disavowal” is the primary maxim of both Žižek’s hermeneutics and his con artistry, heralding and justifying his complex programme of irrational appeals:
What can we say, then, about somebody with whom a sexual relation is possible only when the clitoris is cut out? Moreover, what can we say about the woman who accepts this and demands the right to undergo the painful ritual of cutting out her clitoris? Is this part of her “right to enjoyment,” or are we supposed to liberate her in the name of Western values from this “barbaric” way of organizing her enjoyment? This point is, there is no way out: even if we say a woman can humiliate herself as long as she does so of her own free will, we can imagine the existence of a fantasy that consists in being humiliated against her will. What to do, then, once we are confronted with this fundamental impasse of democracy? The “modernist” procedure (the one to which Marx is attached) would be to conclude— from such an “unmasking” of formal democracy, i.e., from the disclosure of the way the democratic form always conceals an imbalance of contents—that formal democracy as such has to be abolished, replaced by a superior form of concrete democracy. The “postmodernist” approach would require us, on the contrary, to assume this constitutive paradox of democracy. We must assume a kind of “active forgetfulness” by accepting the symbolic fiction even though we know that “in reality, things are not like that.” The democratic attitude is always based upon a certain fetishistic split: I know very well (that the democratic form is just a form spoiled by stains of “pathological” imbalance), but just the same (I act as if democracy were possible). [my emphasis] Far from indicating its fatal flaw, this split is the very source of the strength of democracy: democracy is able to take cognizance of the fact that its limit lies in itself, in its internal “antagonism.” (Žižek, Looking Awry)
(Nota bene, Žižek seizing the opportunity he himself has created in a demonstration that had begun with the supremely European Donatien Aldonse de Sade to raise a Barfly vexation, what to do about the barbarians and their cliterodectomies.)
To put it in the Lacanian terms: during the infamous 3 ˝ seconds, Ilsa and Rick [in the film Casablanca] did not do it [commit adultery] for the big Other (in this case: the order of public appearance which should not be offended), but they did do it for our dirty fantasmatic imagination. This is the structure of inherent transgression at its purest: Hollywood needs both levels in order to function. This, of course, brings us back to the opposition between Ego-Ideal and obscene superego: at the level of Ego-Ideal (which here equals the public symbolic law: the set of rules we are supposed to follow in our public speech), nothing problematic happens, the text is clean, while, at another level, the text bombards the spectator with the superego injunction “Enjoy!”, i.e. give way to your dirty imagination. To put it in yet another way, what we encounter here is the clear example of the fetishistic split, of the disavowal-structure of “je sais bien, mais quand meme…” (I know very well, but…”): the very awareness that they did not do it gives free rain [sic] to your dirty imagination. You can indulge in it, because you are absolved from the guilt by the fact that, for the big Other, they definitely did not do it. (Žižek, “Ego Ideal and Superego: Lacan as a Viewer of Casablanca”)
This Lacanian “insight” cum advertising industry rule of thumb forms the core of what is grandiosely trumpeted as “Žižek’s theory of ideology.” It is also the practical basis of Žižek’s repeated formula of assertion and disavowal, his ceremonial admissions or denials (“This is my racist reaction” or “I don’t mean this in a nationalist way, but,“) giving permission (“Enjoy!”) for the audience to reassert and relish the content that is clasped in those protecting quotation marks or brackets. One example of the dissemination of reactionary content equipped with this type of alibi, deploying “fetishistic disavowal” to facilitate the function of the Barfly ventriloquism, ought suffice:
In a recent comment in Le Point, Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out how Sarah Palin, -contrary to Segolčne Royal’s masculinity, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood. She has a “castrating” effect on her male opponents not by way of being more manly than them [sic], but by using the ultimate feminine weapon, the sarcastic put-down of a puffed-up male authority – she knows that male “phallic” authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked. Recall how she mocked Obama as a “community organizer,” exploiting the fact that there was something sterile in Obama’s physical appearance, with his diluted black skin, slender features, and big ears. (Žižek, Living in the End Times)
The “superego’s” proper public enunciation here is to condemn the odious celebrity Barfly Sarah Palin of course. Under cover of this condemnation of the genuinely condemnable figure, Žižek provides the “obscene” pleasure for his white audience of a rather shocking revival of the lurid phantasmagoria of biologistic racism and the image of the future US President as a “sterile” mule/mulatto whose blackness envisioned as a kind of essence is “diluted.” That the mechanism by which this racist pleasure is blamed on Palin is transparently absurd (“community organizer” may be belittling and “castrating” – the violent image around which Žižek constructs his grotesquely obscene dog-whistle – but does not conjure the myth of mulatto sterility, and even if it did it cannot account for Žižek’s positive assertion of all the evocative imagery of 19th century race theory in his insistence on “the fact that there is something ….diluted black skin”) underscores the deftness of Žižek’s operations. Although his motions here are obvious as can be, as is his delectation in exposing this unsightly conception, they are still protected from criticism or objection from the “leftist” readers, who would be implicating themselves in “defending Sarah Palin” and even “defending Sarah Palin’s racism” if they were to challenge Žižek’s obscene flashing here. This is very clever, canny rhetorical manipulation, proceeding under the flaunted shield of ad hoc, spontaneous associations and disorganization. And this overt racist aggression, in public but behind this force field of his always-granted benefit of the doubt, is the thrill with which Žižek seduces and converts a segment of imperial core “lefts”; the very flimsiness of the cover story, and yet its adequacy, is part of the ecstasy of the bullying, evoking the fantasy of a Jim Crow environment.[63]
3. Three Ps: Paradox, Parallax, Paraconsistency
Fetishistic disavowal, the “constitutive paradox of democracy” is the basis of a whole repertoire of maneuvers that Žižek deploys to accomplish his primary goal, to be both liberal and fascist, and advance both liberalism and fascism, simultaneously, to both idealize and fascistically calumniate a vision of European social democratic society. This rhetorical repertoire can usefully be conceived as a complex constellation of variations on the theme of esoteric and exoteric content as described by Leo Strauss, who is certainly one of Žižek’s gallery of extreme right reactionary inspirations[64]:
We can easily imagine an historian living in a totalitarian country…might be led by his investigations to doubt the soundness of the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion. Nobody would prevent him from publishing a passionate attack on what he would call the liberal view. He would of course have to state the liberal view before attacking it: he would make that statement in the quiet, unspectacular, and somewhat boring manner which would seem to be but natural; he would use many technical terms, give many quotations and attach undue importance to insignificant details: he would seem to forget the holy war of mankind in the petty squabbles of pedants. Only when he reached the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think. That central passage would state the case of the adversaries more clearly, compellingly and mercilessly than it had ever been stated in the heyday of liberalism, for he would silently drop all the foolish excrescences of the liberal creed which were allowed to grow up during the time when liberalism had succeeded and was therefore approaching dormancy. His reasonable young reader would for the first time catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit…Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. (“Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Leo Strauss)[65]
Žižek, who has often complained of the oppressive hegemony of political correctness, can be seen frequently employing these textual tactics, for example to revive a malicious pseudo-scientific homophobia that has – or had – been truly eradicated in both left and mainstream realms he addresses:
In an incident at the US academia, a couple of years ago, a lesbian feminist claimed that gays are today the privileged victims, so that the analysis of how the gays are underprivileged provides the key to understanding all other exclusions, repressions, violences, etc. (religious, ethnic, class…). What is problematic with this thesis is precisely its implicit (or, in this case, explicit even) UNIVERSAL claim: it is making exemplary victims of those who are NOT that, of those who can be much easier than religious or ethnic Others (not to mention the socially - “class” - excluded) fully integrated into the public space, enjoying full rights. Here, one should approach the ambiguity of the connection between gay and class struggle. There is a long tradition of the Leftist gay bashing, whose traces are discernible up to Adorno - suffice it to mention Maxim Gorky’s infamous remark from his essay “Proletarian Humanism” (sic! - 1934): “Exterminate (sic!) homosexuals, and Fascism will disappear.”(Quoted from Siegfried Tornow, “Maennliche Homosexualitaet und Politik in Sowjet-Russland,” in Homosexualitaet und Wissenschaft II, Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel 1992, p. 281.) All of this cannot be reduced to opportunistically flirting with the traditional patriarchal sexual morality of the working classes, or with the Stalinist reaction against the liberating aspects of the first years after the October Revolution; one should remember that the above-quoted Gorky’s inciting statement, as well as Adorno’s reservations towards homosexuality (his conviction about the libidinal link between homosexuality and the spirit of military male-bonding), are all based on the same historical experience: that of the SA, the “revolutionary” paramilitary Nazi organization of street-fighting thugs, in which homosexuality abounded up to its head (Roehm). The first thing to note here is that it was already Hitler himself who purged the SA in order to make the Nazi regime publicly acceptable by way of cleansing it of its obscene-violent excess, and that he justified the slaughter of the SA leadership precisely by evoking their “sexual depravity”… In order to function as the support of a “totalitarian” community, homosexuality has to remain a publicly disavowed “dirty secret,” shared by those who are “in.” Does this mean that, when gays are persecuted, they deserve only a qualified support, a kind of “Yes, we know we should support you, but nonetheless… (you are partially responsible for the Nazi violence)”? What one should only insist on is that the political overdetermination of homosexuality is far from simple, that the homosexual libidinal economy can be co-opted by different political orientations, and that it is HERE that one should avoid the “essentialist” mistake of dismissing the Rightist “militaristic” homosexuality as the secondary distortion of the “authentic” subversive homosexuality. (Žižek, “Repeating Lenin”)
(Of course this does the usual double and triple and quadruple duty, pouring disdain upon a caricature “lesbian feminist” while warning against revolutionary Marxists as frighteningly homophobic and authoritarian, at the same time that it contumeliously undermines the immense and varied body of leftist writing, much of it Marxist, e.g. Wilhelm Reich, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Barbara Burris, Maria Mies, Gerda Lerner, Silvia Federici, bell hooks, Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, examining imperial fascist cultures as expressions of extremes of dominant heterosexual patriarchal relations.) In more colloquial terms, Žižek is engaged in “dog-whistling” that part of his audience, often in deep disguise, who are fascists and racists or sympathetic to their worldview. The manner in which he does this – speaks to this reactionary audience in ways equipped with plausible deniability and alibis – and the labyrinthine edifice of escape routes from responsibility for enunciation of the content of his work, is extremely elaborate.
While the mechanism of fetishistic disavowal - the primary iteration of this multivalence – is both diagnosed and provoked in the world by Žižek, when named specifically this remains a marker of distance, a lightly condemnatory identification of a flaw or at least of something that could conceivably be altered. However vociferously Žižek may insist that everyone is neurotic, and there’s nothing moralizing about the description, to discover “fetishistic disavowal” in a political position is inescapably to pathologize it. Similarly, however adamantly he may insist on the inescapability of this “structure of fantasy,” merely to name it is to imply an escape. But over the course of his texts Žižek develops other similar mechanisms to serve this purpose of permitting his double game of liberalism and fascism, both under the mask of “communism”, each progressively shifting the incoherence or contradiction which “fetishistic disavowal” locates in the individual psyche from the psyche to historical material reality, thus each making the dissonance more incurable and more closely identified with Truth itself.
It is very often in Žižek’s attempt to establish white supremacy and the mythology undergirding the colonial Civilizing Mission (the pillar of the apology for US empire) as truth, while using the obvious irrationality to inoculate the reader in the Barthesian manner (again, see “Operation Margarine”[66]), that these rhetorical processes are most elaborate and complex. Observe how in this excerpt, Žižek accomplishes several rhetorical goals with this card-trick sophistry that would be impossible to accomplish with the rational making of a case:
Even if all the reports on violence and rapes had proven to be factually true, the stories circulating about them would still be “pathological” and racist, since what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: “You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!” In other words, we would be dealing with what could be called lying in the guise of truth: Even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.
Of course, we never openly admit these motives. But from time to time, they nonetheless pop up in our public space in a censored form, in the guise of denegation: Once evoked as an option, they are then immediately discarded. Recall the recent comments by William Bennett, the compulsive gambler and author of The Book of Virtues, on his call-in program “Morning in America”: “But I do know that it‘s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” The White House spokesman immediately reacted: “The president believes the comments were not appropriate.” Two days later, Bennett qualified his statement: “I was putting a hypothetical proposition … and then said about it, it was morally reprehensible to recommend abortion of an entire group of people. But this is what happens when you argue that ends can justify the means.” This is exactly what Freud meant when he wrote that the Unconscious knows no negation: The official (Christian, democratic … ) discourse is accompanied and sustained by a whole nest of obscene, brutal racist and sexist fantasies, which can only be admitted in a censored form.[67]
A. He has established, or rather bullied the reader into accepting in order to simply relieve the discomfort of facing a nonsensical paragraph, that the specific fact that William Bennett alleges regarding the effects of “abort[ing] every black baby” in the United States is true. For semiosis to occur at all in the passage, this has to be a factual statement. B. He has undermined the pejorative connotation of “racism” – he has indeed dismantled the conception of racism in thought as a specific kind of untruth – and introduced as intelligible the notion of racist truths. C. More subtly he has, Iago-like, dropped seeds of doubt regarding the historical facts of what happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (and he will continue this in one of his books), insinuating that political correctness gestapo are forcing him to pretend to believe the rumors were false, requiring him to merely ever so surreptitiously hint at the truth. D. He has advanced a kind of fascist irrationalism regarding the relationship of knowledge and perception to emotional and moral convictions. E. He has established, in passing, the validity of framing the aftermath of Katrina as a story of violence committed by the victims (overwhelmingly black) of the ethnic cleansing, shoot-to-kill mercenary, military and vigilante white terror ordered by the ruling class and Bush regime, while the real (State, ruling class, and white petty bourgeois) violence is wholly erased. F. He has appropriated and vitiated a critique more or less established as common sense in liberal progressive anti-racist discourse that contests the way the deeds of individuals are used by bourgeois culture production to build misleading stereotypes and false, defamatory ethnographies.
And importantly all this has been accomplished in the ostentatious pose of saying something more radically anti-racist than liberal consensus, protecting his articulations from critique by pre-emptively assigning any critic a position presumptively attacking anti-racism. He takes this to further extremes when he declares that “white racism” has “performative efficiency”[68] and therefore its protagonists do not merely misrecognize “whites” as superior in “being” but literally make us/them so; therefore whites are in fact superior, and are so through our/their own fault/merit, and the real racists are those who deny that “blacks” are “inferior” in fact, because they deny the true extent of the damage that white racism with its Germanic Mind-esque power over reality does to “blacks.”
Such Abbot and Costello, but pernicious, “paradoxes,” become, eventually, “Parallax View”[69] and finally, (in the “magnum opus” Less Than Nothing, with its vaunted “new reading of Hegel”,) “Paraconsistent Logic,” Žižek’s peculiar adaptation of a conception from analytic philosophy,[70] completing the naturalization of the “fetishistic disavowal” as the multivalence of truth itself, a cosmic condition to which one can only accommodate oneself. In that tome of a thousand pages – once again composed entirely of digressions from a principle case that is promised and like l’Arlesienne never arrives – Žižek claims to discover in Hegel a Paraconsistent Logic that simply assigns sophistical, joke-punchline and fungal pun types of contradiction to reality per se. Everything is its opposite all the time. Heads I win, tails you lose. The universe is structured as a joke about a guy purloining letters in empty wheelbarrows, and everyone is hunting elephants in each other’s pajamas. It is not very convincing philosophically, or exegetically, but it is admirable indeed from the point of view of the science of propaganda. Couched in his signature at once corny and pretentious language is Žižek’s valid discovery, which he puts to lethal use, that coherence and rationality are no advantage to the propagandist, whose task is to seduce, confuse, distract, titillate and gratify, not convince, and to cultivate a landscape of mythology and fantasy motifs, not pave a path through reality to synthetic understanding. What is always most effective is freighting what is already desired, perhaps forbiddenly, with what one is selling, and concealing one’s motions in increasingly convoluted ways that often involve hiding in plain sight. (Enjoy!)
4. A fourth P – or really the first – The Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion
In 1988-89, the Ljubljana student paper Tribuna, funded and run by the Slovene Communist Youth League, published the first known Slovenian language edition of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.[71] Žižek and colleagues of his were at the time in the process of transforming the league into the Liberal Democratic Party, of which Žižek was the chief ideologist from its creation, and whose first Presidential candidate he would become as well on the eve of secession. (His campaign deployed Protocolsian themes[72]). By the time The Protocols was published by the party’s student paper, Žižek had already made a name for himself as a theorist of anti-Semitic ideology, which he treated as “Ideology” par excellence; his essay in the Ljubljana Lacanian journal Problemi in 1983, O Slovencih in antisemitizmu, had been enlarged into his first English language book The Sublime Object of Ideology (the sublime object of the title of which being “The Jew”), published in 1989. Appearing simultaneously with the student paper’s edition of the Protocols, TSOOI shared a great deal of content with Golovinski’s famous forgery. Žižek’s subsequent work is full of references to “the Jews” and Hitler and anti-Semitism, which form the nest of topoi to which all his digressions seem eventually to return. His first article for the anglophone left press, in the New Left Review, opened with an anti-communist Jewish joke (which incidentally itself exemplifies the mechanisms of ventriloquism for its comic multivalence that we find Žižek using around it) made acceptable by an ever so slight wrapping of distancing self-awareness, and reflexively put through its paces for the reader’s amusement.
It is remarkable how much of the wisdom, strategy and tactics of the propaganda we find renewed, advanced, and deployed by Žižek can be found, along with many of the motifs and figures of his political worldview, in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which arises from a response to the same historical events that inspired Marx’ inestimably influential essay The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and, as already mentioned, has long served as a vitiated substitute for its analysis. Repeatedly introducing himself as a “Marxist” only to propagate some version of the hackneyed “Socialism of Fools,” Žižek is continuing an ancient game of interloping and usurpation.
Most obviously, the “critique of liberalism” that Carl Schmitt picked up from the Protocols’ Chief Elder, dusted off the remnants of satire and facsimile from, and reissued as his “Political Theology,” with its friend/enemy (Jew/Goy) fulcrum and its facile sub-Hegelian inversions, constitutes the bulk of Žižek’s political “analyses”. The posture is familiar from Nazism and fascism: the bourgeoisie itself (its disaffected youth, typically, addressed) is adjured to turn against bourgeois liberal democracy; a critique of the hollowness, inauthenticity and fragility of liberal democracy is launched that borrows from Marx and socialist and anarchist thought generally, masked in its indignation, but whose aim is the preservation of the order of property, race and empire, and whose lament is: “the paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough”[73] to save (the distinct and superior) European or Aryan Civilization (from godless Communism in the East, from the barbarians of the periphery, from Islamofascism, from the insurgent proletariat, from its own decadence.) Liberalism is recognized as the virtuous essence of the European and His Civilization, but it also entails risks of degeneracy and effeminacy and so must be sacrificed to fight off a more primitive and virile foe. Liberalism the true nature of the Europeans must be postponed until that race/tribe/people has exterminated (or otherwise eliminated) alien interlopers and (often gesturing to Plato) productively, benevolently or (as Nietzsche advised) with thoughtless, guiltless, life-loving exuberance, enslaved the useful dark brutes.[74]
The description of the ills of modernity instrumentalized by this propaganda was from inception an extensively perverted imitation of the kind of critique Marx produced, and it remains so today. For example, where Marx identified two kinds of determinations (an historical determination and a class determination) on such “superstructural” elements of social life as, say, “Justice,” the pseudo-historical pseudo-critiques of the Protocols, Schmitt, and Žižek offer instead a cod-Platonic, priestly revelation that the democratic bourgeois notion of Justice is the mere Satanic trick pulled on the People by their sinister (Jewish, in one way or another) overlords, a worldview that Gramsci described as “the belief that everything which exists is a ‘trap’ set by the strong for the weak, by the cunning for the poor in spirit.” (from Prison Notebook 14[75]) The pseudo-critique, which develops into Nietzschean solipsism, mystical Heideggerian laments for lost Authenticity, and all kinds of related superstitious nonsense, suggests of course an entirely different form of resistance and opposition than the Marxist critique, In Žižek as in Protocols and Schmitt the response proposed to the debunked, bogus democratic order is fascist violence. The parties Žižek exhorts to this violence are the petty bourgeoisie, his readers, in a scourging of decadence that is presented in cinematic comic book visions of burlesque Jacobins in power, the wild-eyed legatees of a tradition inherited from John of Leyden and Savonarola similarly caricatured. This Jacobin Spirit Žižek repeatedly invokes serves as kind of mediator symbol in a sophistical argument whose purpose is to celebrate contemporary ruling class protagonists of imperial aggression and fascism as the inheritors of a glorious past: recent and contemporary embodiments are Nixon, Thatcher, Obama, and now Donald Trump.
Žižek is often defended against Marxist objections with the insistence that he does what he does “to upset liberals,” and this is often offered as an excuse for his fascist harangues that both acknowledges the frivolity (because he is recommending terror or insulting minorities just to upset liberals, Marxists should ignore the recommendation and applaud the upsetting of the liberals) and denies it (indulging a petty bourgeois fantasy that upsetting the liberal parents of Žižek’s student fans is a revolutionary act that indeed justifies and valorizes fascist terror). A British comedian had a biting routine where he represented himself kicking a vagrant asleep on a sidewalk and with each blow asserting “take that Amnesty International”, declaring in grunts how this liberating and bold behavior would really vex the upper middle class ….
Along with this childish, idealist pseudo-analysis, much of the fantastic worldview from The Protocols also echoes in Žižek’s oeuvre. Most obviously, Žižek’s anti-Semitism (not mere aversion to Jewish people, but acceptance of the whole pseudo-history) has been often remarked in “the West”, but although it is very thinly disguised when it is disguised at all, it has become the cause of considerable dispute.[76] Many of Žižek’s defenders and critics have, if they do not outright deny his anti-semitism, dismissed it as a personal peccadillo irrelevant to what is generously called his “political theory” and “philosophy.” At the same time, other critics who have acknowledged the formulaic “philosophical” Pauline anti-Semitism Žižek shares with Badiou (both have penned books hailing Saint Paul as another action figure of Lenin as Savior) are sure to add that this doesn’t mean Žižek enacts interpersonal Judeophobia. (Žižek is always himself boasting of the ubiquity of these contradictions in terms of his reception.) In contrast, as early in Žižek’s fame as 1999, Claudia Breger, in her Diacritics essay The Leader’s Two Bodies (without recognizing the precedents in the classics of political anti-Semitism) perceived the integration of these features of Žižek’s product: “the antidemocratic—and, as I will argue, both anti-feminist and anti-Semitic—moment of Žižek’s theory is to be located not only in the way he performs Marxism, but also in the way he performs Lacanian psychoanalysis.”
Breger observed:
When Žižek describes the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis as a “desperate” attempt “to seize, measure, change [this remnant of the Real] into a positive property enabling us to identify Jews in an objective-scientific way” [SO 97], he does not question the operation of othering “the Jew” as such. Rather, Žižek’s performance of ideology binds “the Jew” to the position of this ascribed otherness by endlessly reiterating stereotypes and racist jokes….[H]e suggests: “Let us suppose, for example, that an objective look would confirm—why not?—that Jews really do financially exploit the rest of the population, that they do sometimes seduce our young daughters, that some of them do not wash regularly” [48]. ..Is it necessary, however, to rhetorically propose the possible truth of the stereotype in order to make this psychoanalytic claim? Žižek’s presentation of anti-Semitism suggests that he is less interested in analyzing—and, possibly, deconstructing—its discursive constitution than in proving— and reiterating—its necessary place in the symbolic order.[77]
Žižek is frequently noting how “ironic” it is that Jews he knows or has heard of happen to embody and confirm The Protocols as ethnography:
This is the deepest irony that escapes [Jean-Claude] Milner: he fails to notice the radical ambiguity of his thesis about the Jewish exception resisting modern universality. When Milner posits the Jews as existing on the Quadruple of the familial tradition, against the dissolution of this tradition in the non-All of modernity, he thereby repeats the standard anti-Semitic cliché according to which the Jews themselves are always in the first ranks of the struggle for universal mingling, multi-culti, racial confusion, liquefaction of all identities, nomadic, plural, shifting subjectivity [my emphasis[78]] – with the exception of their own ethnic identity. The passionate appeal of the Jewish intellectuals to universalist ideologies is tied to the implicit understanding that Jewish particularism is exempt, as if the Jewish identity cannot survive when Jews live side by side with other people who also insist on their ethnic identity – as if, in some kind of parallax shift, the contours of their identity can become clear only when the identity of others is blurred. The alliance between the USA and the State of Israel is thus a strange cohabitation of two opposed principles: if Israel qua ethnic state par excellence stands from the Quadruple (tradition), the USA – much more than Europe – stands for the non-All of society, the dissolution of all fixed traditional links. (Žižek, The Parallax View p. 258)
He advises his readers when assessing the anti-totalitarian propaganda of those he calls the “Jewish Maoists” (a group of public intellectuals, some of whom were once affiliated with French Maoism, typically known as the nouveaux philosophes), to remember past Jewish perfidy to Christian Universalism:
François Regnault claims that the contemporary Left demands of Jews (much more than of other ethnic groups) that they “yield with regard to their name” – a reference to Lacan’s ethical maxim “do not yield with regard to your desire”…[ellipsis in original] One should remember here that the same shift from radical emancipatory politics to the fidelity to the Jewish name is already discernible in the fate of the Frankfurt School, especially in Horkheimer’s later texts. (Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes p.5)
This sinister Jewish multiculturalism-for-others, tribalism-for-us, is not merely cited by Žižek as some anti-Semite’s fantasy but lamented as a reality: “Jews were the first multiculturalists,”[79] Žižek writes (in his own voice this time), while lamenting “the proverbial white man’s excessive Political Correctness of the Western white male who questions his own right to assert his cultural identity, while celebrating the exotic identity of others”[80] as its consequence; meanwhile the vision of nefarious Jewish power that exists as a result of this praxis in this mythology is affirmed[81] by Žižek, who however reassures his readers: “Who today remembers the kibbutz, the greatest proof that Jews are not ‘by nature’ financial middlemen?”[82]
Throughout his work, Žižek repeats this procedure of othering, in accordance with 19th century European colonial mythology, with all identities usually considered outside his Aryan conception of whiteness, while he repeatedly conjures an explicitly “white” “Western” community to whom and for whom he thinks and speaks (mainly about what to do about these Others machinating against “us”/them or foisted on “us”/them by those liberal multiculturalists), and whose interests and wellbeing need no justification, whereas the interests of the Others are always subject to qualification and the legitimacy of their struggle for it submitted to the white us for approval. (The Others are always commanded to prove their struggle has benefits for European white us and their existence is harmless to European white us.) Having observed that racialist beliefs (the bizarre assertions of pseudo-science that have justified, post hoc, racialized class relations) have largely vanished in the cosmopolitan core,[83] Žižek urges his audiences to resume, in accordance with Pascal’s wager, the practice of these Aryanist, anti-Semitic, white supremacist rituals (not only racist jokes and racist “theorizing,” but practices of segregation and discrimination) until they become (again) the reality of caste, according to the Alcoholics Anonymous slogan “fake it until you make it.” [84] (In Kosovo, in a television interview, he avowed his support for ethnic separatists states – ethnic groups need “breathing room,”[85] he said, dog-whistling Nazis; at LSE recently and elsewhere he has been openly advocating ethnic segregation[86] and warning in familiar fascist terms of the dangers to Europe and Europeans of immigrant Others; over the years, when justifying his incessant articulations of racism as “jokes,” he raises their efficacy in 1970s and 80s Yugoslavia, leaving audiences to conclude his goal is a global analog of the bloody civil war that broke up the country into ethnically cleansed mini-states subsequent to the imperial funding of nationalisms stoking this culture of verbal racist aggression that separatists like Žižek had produced over decades behind the veil of lighthearted friendly jesting.[87]) Aware of the running of the machinery of “fetishistic disavowal” all the while in Žižek’s work, a reader will recognize that the invitation, which will at length become explicit, is “yes, we know very well that anti-Semitic theory [or racist pseudo-science] is absurd mythology, but all the same….” in passages like: “First, the series of markers that designate real properties are abbreviated-immediated in the marker 'Jew’: (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty…)—Jew. We then reverse the order and 'explicate’ the marker 'Jew’ with the series (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty…)—that is, this series now provides the answer to the question 'What does “Jew” mean?’”
Breger picks up on the pretextual and diversionary character of the ineffectual, pseudo-Marxist critique of liberalism that Žižek unrolls, but her unfamiliarity with the fascist traditions Žižek rehashes (populist propaganda and elite writing) halts her critique at the level of the denouncement of a seemingly egregious, historically meaningless, vaguely neurotic individual case. This error is now standard among the many liberals who have objected to their fellow liberals delighting in and promotion of Žižek. The arch-liberal New Republic’s Adam Kirsch, without Breger’s sophistication regarding the Gestalt of Žižek, repeated many of the specific observations of articulated Judeophobia, adding to the list from more recent Žižek publications. Along with the valid discoveries, both produced the same fundamental misdiagnosis, convenient to anti-communism, that the Žižek act is designed to elicit from democratic liberals: both Breger and Kirsch finally damn Žižek, as Laclau did before them, as the threatening protagonist of an insane neo-“Stalinist” project on the political left (a sphere in such disarray it is vulnerable to demagogic madmen), as he pretends to be.
The explanation for this and similar common misconstructions regarding Žižek is also to be found in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which is also the origin of the more insidious and successful features of the Žižekian oeuvre, those oscillations of which Žižek constructs his alibis and the truly vertiginous indeterminacy that he creates and exploits. But the secret of this peculiar protean capacity is a little more complex than it appears. Žižek has taken a profound but fortuitous ambiguity in this unusual text and turned it into a model for equivocation.
Most people are now aware that The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a forgery created for the Czarist secret police, believed mainly the work of the aristocrat Matvei Vasilyevich Golovinski, although, significantly, many do not find the text less convincing about its subject for being a proven fraud. It purports to be something like the minutes of a meeting of the leaders of the Jewish cabal plotting world domination. The work retains a remarkable persuasiveness as a description of reality despite its debunking. It would seem that Žižek, who imitates the accidental ambivalences in the text, identified its profound incoherence (the confused way it presents some controversial but attractive materials) as the source of its mesmerizing power and, especially, its immunity to factual disproof.
Golovinski’s forgery was created largely by plagiarizing, and then producing a frame around, significant portions of a satirical 1862 text by Maurice Joly, Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Like Marx in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Joly was fascinated by and motivated to explain the element of fraudulence, of ersatz populism, bogus liberalism and phony democracy, in the Second Empire. Joly’s text, as the title suggests, consists of a debate between the damned spirits of these two great political thinkers. Montesquieu, imagined as the champion of the contemporary conception of la République, defends his vision of liberal constitutional government as a system that will guarantee liberty to the citizenry. Machiavelli, portrayed as a figure of the spirit animating the regime of Napoleon III, explains gleefully how a plutocratic ruling class can operate a disguised tyranny behind this impeccably designed, Republican facade. Joly’s critique emerges from the interaction of these two personae, in a play of satire: while Joly’s sympathies are really with the values and hopes that motivate Montesquieu, insofar as he embodies the spirit of the French Revolution and the struggle for civil liberties and against authoritarian violence in the text, it is Machiavelli of course who is the author’s true spokesman, voicing his real assessment of (if not his feelings about the aspirations of) the liberal project. A lacerating critique of liberalism “from the left” emerges although the device of its delivery is a celebration of liberalism’s corruptibility and convenience to despotism “from the right.” The Machiavelli figure is villainous - he is the mastermind behind the despotic invisible subversion of Republican liberalism– but also charming, in the right and speaking truthfully: the reader is really “on his side” in the argument although remaining at a distance from his enjoyment of the truth of his critique. At the same time the reader’s sympathy with Montesquieu’s ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité is increasingly undermined by contempt for his naiveté and increasing suspicion of his sincerity. Although Machiavelli makes a strong case for the desirability of despotism as well as its inevitability, Joly’s satire is always on the side of the people and the ideals of the French Revolution which Montesquieu professes to champion. Joly’s fire is all aimed at the travesty of those ideals embodied in a system formally observing the spirit of democracy but retaining an aristocratic-bourgeois plutocracy in the realm of relations of property.
Golovinski’s publication for the Czarist secret police aimed to transform this material to retain the seductive bitterness and brilliance of its description of the fraudulence of the pseudo-liberal constitutionalism under Napoleon III, but alter the target of the attack and fundamentally change the political sympathies and ethos of the work. Cannily, he played a double game on the double game of satire: primo, the work would disseminate political anti-Semitism as a decoy to distract from analyses of ruling class praxis such as those produced by Marx as well as Joly; secondo, for those communists and other lefts who would not be taken in by racist mythology, the work would discredit such analyses of ruling class praxis by associating them with anti-Semitism.[88] Golovinski’s was the first successful smearing of political analyses of the ruling class’ conduct of class war as “complottisme” (today the all-purpose disqualifier “conspiracy theory”).
While Joly’s satire flayed the aristo-bourgeois ruling class of the Second Empire for exploiting the superficial trappings of liberal and democratic society to continue and even strengthen its despotic powers – written from a position clearly favorable to the popular and populist, democratic beliefs that were cynically deceived by these elaborate stratagems (Joly was close, during his life, to Blanqui, and seems to have read and sympathized with Marx) – Golovinski would use the same material to defend an undisguised despotism, the Czarist regime, and its analogs across Europe, and to attack not only corrupt bourgeois democracies but the liberal and socialist convictions that animated popular hope in them and were betrayed by them.
The Machiavelli of Joly, then, becomes the leader of the Jewish world plot, The Chief Elder of Zion, and a certain noise, a resonant ambivalence, is created in the derivative text, because Machiavelli was written as an object of reader identification – he is the clever political theorist who knows what is really going on and can explain it – and the same texts are then attributed by Golovinsky to a figure who is intended to incite reader horror and dismay. The re-signification of Machiavelli’s remarks is accomplished in myriad ways that however do not entirely erase the valences of the original. For example in the following passage, the reader is encouraged of course to accept the insights Machiavelli offers in the spirit of misanthropy, pessimism and righteousness, but to continue to desire and believe in the possibility of the true democracy – the socialist democracy that must supplant the corrupt liberal democracy that is the disguise of plutocracy if the ideals of liberalism are to be realized:
Machiavelli: Speaking abstractly, are violence and cunning evils? Yes, but it is quite necessary to use them in governing men as long as men are not angels. Anything can be good or bad according to the usage that one makes of it and the fruit that one can derive from it; the end justifies the means and, if you now ask me why I – a republican – give preference to absolute government, I would say to you: witness the fickleness and cowardice of the populace in my homeland, its innate taste for servitude, its incapacity to conceive of and respect the conditions of free life; in my eyes, it is a blind force that dissolves itself sooner or later if it is not in the hand of a single man. I would respond that the people, left to their own devices, would only know how to destroy themselves; that they would never be able to administrate, judge or make war. I would say to you that Greece only shone in the eclipses of liberty; that, without the despotism of the Roman aristocracy, and that, later on, without the despotism of the emperors, this brilliant civilization would never have been developed.[89]
The Golovinsky reworking puts the sentiment in a context suggesting that in fact aristocratic absolutism is, indisputably, the only means by which the Gentile nations can defend themselves against the nefarious enemy, who has therefore discredited it with liberal and socialist propaganda:
The Chief Elder: Out of the temporary evil we are now compelled to commit will emerge the good of an unshakable rule, which will restore the regular course of the machinery of the national life, brought to naught by liberalism. The result justifies the means. Let us, however, in our plans, direct our attention not so much to what is good and moral as to what is necessary and useful… In order to elaborate satisfactory forms of action it is necessary to have regard to the rascality, the slackness, the instability of the mob, its lack of capacity to understand and respect the conditions of its own life, or its own welfare. It must be understood that the might of a mob is blind, senseless and un-reasoning force ever at the mercy of a suggestion from any side. The blind cannot lead the blind without bringing them into the abyss; consequently, members of the mob, upstarts from the people even though they should be as a genius for wisdom, yet having no understanding of the political, cannot come forward as leaders of the mob without bringing the whole nation to ruin. Only one trained from childhood for independent rule can have understanding of the words that can be made up of the political alphabet. A people left to itself, i.e., to upstarts from its midst, brings itself to ruin by party dissensions excited by the pursuit of power and honors and the disorders arising therefrom. Is it possible for the masses of the people calmly and without petty jealousies to form judgment, to deal with the affairs of the country, which cannot be mixed up with personal interest? Can they defend themselves from an external foe? It is unthinkable; for a plan broken up into as many parts as there are heads in the mob, loses all homogeneity, and thereby becomes unintelligible and impossible of execution. (The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion)
It is this profound indeterminacy arising from the incomplete redirection of the already ambivalent, satirical, sarcastic Joly text, that Žižek emulates to extraordinary success. More convolutedly and reflexively even than first appears, he emulates its enunciation and a critique derived from it simultaneously (to be both liberal and fascist…both Machiavelli the Republican and Joly the Blanquist superimposed, and at the same time again, both Golovinksy the authoritarian nobleman and The Elder of Zion the Satanic tribal oligarch superimposed). The basis of his critique of liberalism, adorned with Lacanian jargon, as we’ve seen is this rehashed: “The democratic attitude is always based upon a certain fetishistic split: I know very well (that the democratic form is just a form spoiled by stains of “pathological” imbalance), but just the same (I act as if democracy were possible).” He deftly uses these clashing mixes, the displacements of right wing rhetoric and plentiful disinformation, for example, into ostensibly left wing texts, to make them run together in a seemingly intelligible and yet deeply incoherent (so deeply as to be anti-rational, fugitive from interpretation, effectively indisputable) discourse —
5. Overidentification
One of if the more complicated alibis this Protocolsian technique provides for Žižek is the suggestion that he is performing an exaggerated caricature of a true believer either of the fascist right or the liberal mainstream in order to cause some vaguely imagined revelatory spectacle, i.e. that he is embedding in an ostensibly serious practice of “philosophy” something like a comedy act of the sort familiar to US and UK audiences in Stephen Colbert’s parody of a Murdochian right wing television pundit, or Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, in order to make something or other happen (the efficacy of this practice is hinted at only obliquely, in his suggestion that when the Slovenian Communist Youth League pretended to believe elections were legitimate in Slovenia, communism simply collapsed in embarrassment.) In other words, his defenders allege that Žižek only sounds like a fascist and a liberal because by some sympathetic magic this will cause the disintegration of fascism and liberalism.
The dogma of this stance is traced to Žižek’s defense of Laibach[90], a Slovenian pop band that took the German name of Ljubljana and performed in Nazi garb as an invidious parody of Socialist Yugoslavia and was much beloved of Slovene separatists. Toma Longinovich explained, “Laibach’s parody of the socialist state through a post-punk performance of over-identification with its inherent totalitarian logic was an early manifestation of the Slovene desire to distance themselves from the object of their parody, to flee the union with those other peoples that did not belong to the same civilizational tradition.”[91] (These shenanigans were contemporaneous with pranks like Slovenians donning yellow stars to identify themselves as the new Jews menaced by the new Nazis identified as “the Serbs” in the rising imperial propaganda.[92]) One of Žižek’s most prominent American evangelists, Adam Kotsko, published several recent defenses of Žižek’s “provocations” that offered the tactic of “over-identification” as an explanation for his racist and finally unveiled hostility to immigrants and especially to refugees arriving from regions under the apocalyptically violent assault of empire. Kotsko’s description of the desired devastating effect of these performances is that they “shift the frame” of something. Kotsko avoided specifics, and refused to quote from Žižek’s texts, but here is an example of Žižek himself professing to “shift the frame” of something or other:
When one hears formulae such as “we need neither total state control nor totally non-regulated liberalism/individualism, but the right measure between these two extremes,” the problem that immediately pops up is the measurement of this measure—the point of balance is always silently presupposed. Suppose someone were to say: “We need neither too much respect for Jews, nor the Nazi holocaust, but the right measure in between, some quotas for universities and prohibition of public office for the Jews to prevent their excessive influence,” one cannot really answer at a purely formal level. Here we have the formalism of wisdom: the true task is to transform the measure itself not only to oscillate between the extremes of the measure. (Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes)
Unsurprisingly Kotsko chose to create a substitute example:
So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican immigrant as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake can’t be a conflict between cultures, because for Žižek that would imply pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first exist and then subsequently happen to come into conflict. Nor can it be about the Mexicans who come to America and disturb the balance of our local culture, because that balance didn’t exist in the first place. No, the conflict is inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans aren’t taking “our” jobs — the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress wages, with no interest in who they pay.[93]
Obviously both the real Žižek anecdote and the fake one concocted by Kotsko merely perform a coin trick for children, heads I win, tails you lose….announcing that they intend to oppose a formula, they merely re-inscribe it, now with reinforced protection from factual critique because of the illusion of having performed some grand irrefragable defense against challenge. Both affirm the Nazi or American Nativist version of a problem: Jews. Mexicans. “We” don’t want the absence of all restrictions for Jews/them [us, who are othered], and capital is in fact menacing us (you/they whites, Europeans) with Mexicans [us, who are othered]. Incidentally, Kotsko is misrepresenting Žižek especially brazenly by inventing this example for him, for he is repeatedly explicit about adopting the side of European or white workers against workers of color and immigrants, in an imaginary conflict envisioned by him and other racists as a race bloc labor competition, repeatedly portraying the latter bloc as a danger to the former bloc, the former being the bloc of subjects whose interests need no justification, never the other way around, to the extent that he even describes an Indian working in a call center in Mumbai as an immigrant who has not yet immigrated, taking jobs rightfully belonging to white Europeans or Americans:
The free circulation of labor is, on the contrary, in the interests of big capital, since cheaper immigrant labor will put pressure on “our own” workers to accept lower wages. And is outsourcing not also now an inverted form of employing immigrant workers? Resistance against immigrants is primarily the spontaneous-defensive reaction of the local working classes who (not wholly unjustifiably) perceive the immigrant worker as a new kind of strike-breaker and, as such, as an ally of capital. In short, it is global capital which is inherently multiculturalist and tolerant. (Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce)
As we can see, if there is a part Žižek is playing disingenuously, it is a comic role as a right wing caricature (shared with various incarnations of New Left and now reviving in the circles Žižek has poisoned) of the Marxist idealist so rigidly attached to his vision of class struggle from old Bolshy posters that he wouldn’t recognize the working class if it smacked him in the head with its folkloric peacock wands. This aligns with his Protocolsian procedure, with all its oscillations….dog-whistling the fascists and discrediting Marxism with the radicals simultaneously. “I, Satan, invented liberté, egalité, fraternité!” “I, the mad Stalinist, love the bloodthirsty Aristide and his murderous chimčres!”[94] “I, the Marxist philosopher, recognize the immigrants as the savages foisted on the true proletarians by the liberal cosmopolitans.”
In a paper given at NY’s Left Forum in 2014, Ethan Hallerman took on such cynical “over-identification” alibis, describing the real uses of this tactic for Žižek in the concoction of his disguises and the recruitment of a fan base bodyguard to escort such blatantly reactionary content into left dialogues:
So, Žižek was apologizing for a pogrom. He repeats racist, anti-Roma clichés – they’re dirty, they steal, he falsely accuses them of murdering someone – so it should probably go without saying that none of this is true, none of this was every corroborated anywhere – but Žižek’s interest is in blaming some abstract liberals he’s invented. He puts racist in scare quotes; he implies a class contrast between the “comfortable liberals in the big cities” and the “frightened people” in their village, which inverts the actual class relationship between the Slovenian majority in Ambrus – both articles describe the village as upper middle class – and the [Rom] Strojan family living on the edge of town. Žižek constantly attributes racism to the working class and anti-racism exclusively to an imagined group of snooty cosmopolitan liberals. It’s always “racist populism”, it’s always “hypocritical leftists” who don’t understand that racism is a working class attitude. Somehow for Žižek, Muslims, immigrants, black people, Roma, always get excluded from the working class. They are never themselves anti-racist. It’s always something that belongs to the ruling class. Just as for Žižek in this instance the locals are the Slovenians but not the Strojan family that had been living there for decades. He always does this casually, in passing, as if it’s a given. Homogenizing working class status with non-Muslim and non-Roma status. Again, this transformation of working class solidarity into ethnic solidarity, by deliberately blurring the two in rhetoric, is also a specific strategy that belongs to a specific tradition…So I’d encourage people to pay more attention to how much his right wing rhetoric, his anti-anti-racism, his anti-feminism, his authoritarianism, his valorization of violence as a good in itself can’t be written off as a performance, and to take him seriously in that regard. That in fact he does want an authoritarian terror state instead of democracy, that he does think anti-racism and cultural mixing threaten white Christian Europe. Of course there are some things Žižek says that do sound left and don’t seem to line up with this….If like Žižek you think left wing values dominate and threaten society, as he says, then it just becomes a matter of which values to “performatively over-identify” with, now.
We can elaborate on Hallerman to point out that typical instances of Žižek “performatively over-identifying” as this guilty white European multiculturalist he ridicules in liberal contexts occur when he addresses leftist audiences; these instances repeat a Straussian trick of (scarcely) coded and disavowed racism of the most lurid kind. These over-identifying performances consist of Žižek (usually libelously, always dishonestly) accusing some anti-imperialist or working class protagonists of acts of violence, and then after vividly and absurdly painting pictures of wild and atavistic savage eruptions like something out of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, (images often seem to have implanted in his head by the Nazi propaganda clips in the Sorrow and the Pity), characterizing these usually entirely fictional acts as “divine violence”[95] to distinguish them from the consciously political, rational use of force and violence he attributes to, glamorizes in and encourages white European subjects to undertake, he declares he “can’t really condemn it” although of course it upsets him (nothing Authentic-Act-like here), and it’s ultimately reactionary in effect. Žižek persistently conjures, vividly and emotionally, two kinds of violence, in stark contrast: the glorious white violence of the implicitly and explicitly superior race and its action heroes (according to Badiou, there has never been an Event in Africa) and the terrifying, scary, inhuman, ancient, prehistoric, animalistic or simply despicable violence (often entirely fictional) he deplores on the part of the rest of humanity, those who figure in Nietzsche as slave races. (the Strojans, the Paris, London, and Ferguson uprisings, the Lavalas supporters in the Haitian bidonvilles, Congolese, immigrants in Cologne, the black kids in the Chicago High School who beat up his white friend’s white son in his new favorite anecdote, etc.). Žižek never equates these sensational and cartoonish anecdotes of “divine violence” with the type of heroic Violence[96] he habitually defends and romanticizes, and he never explains why. It’s all left to imagery, steeped in racialized phantasmagoria. And he always identifies with its, always white or white-positioned, victims.
While that over-identifying burlesque of the Guilty White Liberal condescendingly forgiving of and fascinated with the Other’s primitive bloodthirstiness is played mainly for progressives and leftists, right wing critics are also often the complicit addressees of Žižek’s over-identfying performances with a caricature Stalinist, his favorite personae from the gallery of fascist fantasy to stage everywhere and chew the scenery in. Žižek rarely resists the temptation to boast of his clever ruses, and one can see him explaining this one to Paul Mason on the BBC in one of Mason’s most sycophantic interviews. At the conclusion of the interview, after Žižek expresses his disgust with the idea of compassion and makes a series of typical contemptuous gestures dismissing “humanitarian” concern for “starving African children”, the interview winds up: Mason thanks him, and Žižek replies: “See you in hell or Communism.” The tape continues to roll however, as the BBC likes to do a stagey behind the scenes moment, and Žižek laughs and explains “you see? If you are a right winger, you say but they’re the same!” Admitting that he is deliberately activating this response with his embodiment of Burke’s famous caricature of the heartless, genocidal, “monster” Jacobin doesn’t blow the game in the least of course: the force-field of his always-granted benefit of the doubt transforms this spectacle into some other arcane act of “shifting the frame.”
Similarly, in Greece, as part of his labors to sell Syriza to the Greek electorate mobilized to oppose the troika memorandum, Žižek again found it useful to perform his Stalinist Madman act, and declared to the press as elections neared that anyone who did not vote for Syriza “should be sent to the gulag.” The remark got all the press Žižek and company could have hoped for. Greek communist Antonis Balasopoulos again explains what this stunt accomplished:
By using a completely historically ridiculous analogy, he a) made SYRIZA look like the really communist party b) deployed the most sensationalist of anti-communist stereotypes in a manner that could only hurt Greek communists and c) occasioned blanket attacks on “Stalinism in the Greek Left” from the Right, which further legitimated his preposterous linkage of SYRIZA with actually existing socialism. The double bind serves to exclude precisely that which cuts through it, that’s why it’s there.
6. The Mobius Strip
The atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time being, carnivalesque in a faked way - when they are not in shelters, people dance to rock or ethnic music on the streets, under the motto “With music against bombs!”, playing the role of the defying heroes (since they know that NATO does not really bomb civilian targets). Although it may fascinate some confused pseudo-Leftists, this obscene carnivalization of the social life is effectively the other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: while in Belgrade people defiantly dance on the streets, three hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking place. (Žižek, “Against the Double Blackmail,” 1999)
Is an African genocide supposed to be bigger or smaller than a European genocide? But we cannot pursue this inquiry. The imagery has its built in defenses – asking what “African” could be doing in this paragraph, if not evoking a racist phantasmagoria to slot the facts into in order to produce a fantasy of Serbs as raced savages in mad revolt against civilizing NATO, would seem to be uncaring of African victims of African genocides, even racist (why would you assume “African proportions” is meant to conjure these lurid ideas of savagery…) etc., although this supposed genocide (a pure fabrication of NATO propaganda) is taking place within the region of the Nazi Holocaust. A word or image like this functions as a kind of bend in the rhetoric, with which Žižek fashions his strange texts that make racist and anti-racist, “left” and “right”, fascist and liberal, progressive and reactionary, dissident and official discourses all run together in one smooth line of endless digression. In his convoluted and imagistic defense of the US backed ultra-right fascist coup in Ukraine[97] and its lawlessly sadistic war upon the resisting population, for example, one can observe a series of such twists, deploying the images of Lenin and Stalin statues (shifted like chess pieces – Lenin equals Putin, Putin swapped for Stalin, Stalin the allegory of Empire and Multiculturalism!) that seemingly seamlessly join a Leninist position on national liberation to the official propaganda in favor of EU expansion and NATO aggression.
In an editorial for Outlook in 2012,[98] Žižek enacted with the same techniques, the same pseudo-Hegelian juggling of abstractions emptied of historical content, a classically Žižekian contortion to produce an ideological Mobius strip tailored for the needs of Modi’s sadistic assault on Dalit rights and entitlements. A certain leftist common sense that informs solidarity with Dalit struggle within broader class struggle has to be undermined and twisted into the service of the Hindu fascist project. Ambedkar will be the figure, as Lenin in the previously discussed article, reduced from an historical agent to a trope imaging malleable abstractions, whose resignification will serve as the fold in the ribbon allowing the left logic of a concrete praxis that enacts a critique of caste and fascism to run smoothly full circle into the validation of the fascist conclusion that sparked the critique.
Žižek begins rehashing the Nietzschean account of the Laws of Manu, stressing its “holy lie” quality and defining it within his motif of “fetishistic disavowal”: like Niels’ Bohr’s horseshoe, [99]which “works just as well if you don’t believe in it,” the laws of Manu “focus on everyday practices as the immediate materiality of ideology: how (what, where, with whom, when…) we eat, defecate, have sex, walk, enter a building, work, make war, etc.” The “structure” of the Code, which rather than merely separating permitted and prohibited acts, minutely regulates the anticipated routine violations of prohibitions, is one, Žižek claims, of “universality with exceptions” (a favorite motif of Žižek’s, formally homologous to his conception of Lacan’s image of the psyche, and of totalities generally, always “requiring” some “gap” or “obscene support”, like “the Jew” in a “Europe” conceived as Christendom.) The Code of Manu even more completely fits Žižek’s Schmittian Protocolsian vision of “reality as a trap set for the weak by the strong” – which is nonetheless, in accordance with “paraconsistent logic”, an inescapable condition – for having been imposed upon India by the British colonizer, manufacturing an “invented tradition.” Its own internal accommodation of violation of its rules is then mirrored by the fact that its very historical illegitimacy, by the operation of “fetishistic disavowal”, according to Žižek, strengthens is social efficacy. In short, Žižek establishes the Code of Manu as a dishonest, pragmatic, devious “human face”[100] (posture of humanism and universal compassion) fitted as fix and disguise on the beautiful, naive Heideggerian barbarism of the Vedic cosmology. It’s the guilty, cunning, psychologically complex Judaism (in Nietzsche’s vision) come to destroy the happy brutal joyful paganism of the earthly “food chain”. We can recognize here the code of Manu transformed from Nietzsche’s picture of simple Aryan virility to its Nietzschean alternative, the cynical, tricky, bad faith pseudo-mores of the Jewish Priests – a caste system preserved but no longer to express the amoral affirmative appetite for life and nature red in talon and tooth of the warrior nobles, but the life-denying, ascetic, dishonest posturing of the Priests.
The Code of Manu clearly is here, in this characterization, meant to be read as suggesting the Indian Constitution with its reservations[101] – “universalism with exceptions.”
Žižek then stages a battle pitting Gandhi (pictured as Žižek repeatedly pictures Himmler, holding a copy of Bhagavad Gita like a talisman ), portrayed as an advocate of pernicious “identity politics” – associated with this life-denying, hypocritical sophistry and “universalism with reservations” – against Ambedkar, ironically the author of this actual constitution, depicted as the maximalist universalist (in what Žižek will elsewhere insist is a “European” tradition) devoted to the destruction of the caste system, the non-recognition of caste, that will so profoundly erase the legacy of caste that only liberal individuals will remain. This involves another twist, where Christianity as Universalism, overturning the cunning Judaism of the Priests, is fused with the life-affirming Heideggerian hierarchy of Being in the ancient barbaric “food chain”, to glamorize and naturalize the neoliberal order and its competition. (A passing evocative inanity about Marx’ – quickly abandoned – Hegelian notion of the “Asiatic mode of production” would seem to confirm that Žižek is up to all his pernicious tricks, with a coded Eurosupremacy operating throughout.) Meanwhile, implicitly, so long as “the Untouchables” [sic] - who “stand for Universality” (that which is excluded by the caste system) – are recognized, there will be a caste system. The obverse is stated and made to imply its inversion: Ambedkar is quoted as saying, “There will be outcasts as long as there are castes” but glossed as meaning “as long as Dalits are recognized (in the manner vilified as “identity politics”, as in the Indian constitution), the caste system will be reproduced.” Thus Ambedkar, author of the constitution guaranteeing compensations to Dalits for historical exploitation and expropriations, is transformed into the bridge that carries his anti-caste, anti-racist humanism into the field of reaction and deploys it as a weapon against the most vulnerable.
It is no surprise then to find Modi replicating this maneuver exactly.[102]
In this same way, Žižek has to an extent defended himself against us, by luring us into a serious exegesis he does not deserve, and perhaps even onto the mobius strip that will transform our critique into some perverse act of admiration, or worse, advertisement. At Left Forum in NY this month a young man “pranked” Žižek[103] in an obscene manner that may serve as that long awaited antidote that will finally break the charm with which he has mesmerized so many and put an end to his celebrity where so many earnest rebuttals and exposés have failed.
In this essay so far we have only devoted ourselves to interpreting Žižek. Now we must remind ourselves that our duty is to destroy him.
Žižek Delendus Est
[1] Der Social-Demokrat, No. 16, February 1, 1865 in Engels, F. and Marx, K., Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1962)
[2] Michael, Hudson, “How a $13 Trillion Cover Story Was Made”, 17 June 2011
http://michael-hudson.com/2011/06/ho...y-was-written/
[3] John B. Taylor & Kenneth Scott, “Why Toxic Assets Are So Hard To Clean Up,” Wall Street Journal 21 July 2009
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124804469056163533
[4] Bill Van Auken and Adam Haig, “Žižek in Manhattan: An Intellectual Charlatan Masquerading as Left,” World Socialist Website, 12 November 2010
[5] For example, Slavoj Žižek, “Nobody Has To Be Vile,” London Review of Books, 6 April 2006 This is a motif Žižek, repeats constantly, in books as well as articles and lectures. In its deployment here to describe the financier George Soros, who is the Rathenau and Rothschild figure for today’s resurgent anti-Semitism, it is plain to see what is sometimes less obvious, that this chocolate laxative theme, along with the motif of the “decaffeinated Other” is a “comical” adaptation of the complaints in Mein Kampf:
There is a chocolate-flavored laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicized with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. – Žižek, “Nobody Has To Be Vile”
Socially, what is most toxic is the foreign Neighbor–the strange abyss of his pleasures, beliefs and customs. Consequently, the ultimate aim of all rules of interpersonal relations is to quarantine (or at least neutralize and contain) this toxic dimension, and thereby reduce the foreign Neighbor–by removing his otherness–to an unthreatening fellow man. The end result: today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism is an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness–the decaffeinated Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality while features like wife beating remain out of sight….This vision of detoxification of the Neighbor presents a clear passage from direct barbarism to barbarism with a human face. – Žižek, “Barbarism With A Human Face”, In These Times 23/11/.2010
In order to mask his activity and lull his victims, however, he talks more and more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The fools begin to believe him. Since, however, his whole being still has too strong a smell of the foreign for the broad masses of the people in particular to fall readily into his nets, he has his press give a picture of him which is as little in keeping with reality as conversely it serves his desired purpose. His comic papers especially strive to represent the Jews as a harmless little people, with their own peculiarities, of course-like other peoples as well-but even in their gestures, which seem a little strange, perhaps, giving signs of a possibly ludicrous, but always thoroughly honest and benevolent, soul. And the constant effort is to make him seem almost more 'insignificant’ than dangerous. – Hitler, Mein Kampf
[6] Žižek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies, (New York: Verso 1997), p. 3
[7] Slavoj Žižek, “The Lacanian Real: Television,” Lacan dot com,
http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?p=38
[8] Slavoj Žižek, “The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason: A Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed,” Lacan dot com
http://www.lacan.com/zizantinomies.htm
[9] Dušan I. Bjelić , “Žižek ’s Balkans: Geopolitical Fractures in Žižek ’s Universalism,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 2011, Vol 16, 3, 276-280
[10] Svetlana Slapsak, “Žižek/s Lads,” 24 April 1999
http://www.desk.nl/~pribeziste/svetlana.html
[11] Slavoj Žižek, “Stalinism,”
http://lacan.com/zizstalin.htm
[12] For example Slavoj Žižek, “A Plea for Leninist Intolerance,”
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-plea.htm and Slavoj Žižek, “The True Hollywood Left,”
http://www.lacan.com/zizhollywood.htm
[13] Slavoj Žižek, “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,” New Left Review, vol. I/183, September-October 1990
https://newleftreview.org/I/183/slav...lics-of-gilead
[14] Tariq Ali, “Neo-Liberalism and Protectorate States in the Post-Yugoslav Balkans,” Counterpunch, 26 February 2008
[15] see Žižek, Slavoj ed. Lenin Reloaded, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) and Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernest & Žižek, Slavoj Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000)
[16] Žižek, Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000) p.322
[17] See Sara Ahmed, “Liberal Mutliculturalism is the Hegemony – it’s an empirical fact: a response to Slavoj Žižek,” Darkmatter101.com 19 February 2009
http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/20...-slavoj-zizek/
[18] See Slavoj Žižek, “Appendix: Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion,” Lacan.com
http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454
[19] Ernesto Laclau, “Laclau versus Negri, Hardt and Žižek,” Pagina 21 5 June 2006
[20] Slavoj Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” Lacan.com
[21] This is the name of the “last living Bolshevik” in Tony Kushner’s play Perestroika, part ii of Angels in America.
[22] e.g. Slavoj Žižek, “The Jacobin Spirit: On Violence and Democracy,” Jacobin Magazine, May 2011 This magazine, run by figures associated with the Democratic Socialists of America launched under the spiritual aegis of Žižek and his enablers; their biography of contributor Slavoj Žižek: “a maverick philosopher, is the author of over 30 books and has been acclaimed as both the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’ and the ‘most dangerous philosopher in the West.’ He is today’s most controversial public intellectual.”
[23] Boris Vezjak, “The Relaxed Ideology of the Slovenes,” Mirovni Institut 2007
[24] These are the situations in the HBO dramedies The Sopranos and The Wire.
[25] Žižek, Slavoj, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso 2009) pp. 35-37
[26] Slavoj Žižek, “Resistance is Surrender,” London Review of Books, 15 November 2007
[27] See video “Big Think”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgR6uaVqWsQ
[28] Slavoj Žižek, “Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters 5. C'est mon choix… to Burn Cars”,
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance4.htm and Slavoj Žižek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” London Review of Books, 19 August 2011
[29] See discussion of French strikes on Democracy Now:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/...rise_in_europe
[30] Žižek even claims the Chavez administration in Venezuela was “exploiting” the United States: see Žižek, Slavoj, Living in the End Times, (London: Verso 2011) pp. 241-2 or video in Brazil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRJF1YuGzrM
[31] Žižek, Slavoj, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, (London: Verso 2009) p.17 This paragraph had also appeared in several articles globally from 2008
[32] See Alan Johnson, Žižek’s Theory of Revolution: A Critique, with Paul Bowman’s How Not to Read Žižek, Global Discourse website
https://globaldiscourse.wordpress.co...y-paul-bowman/
[33] See Žižek, Slavoj, The Parallax View, (London: Verso 2009) pp.342, 381-382 for a version of the use of the Melville short story that he had been offering in speeches and writings for some four years prior.
[34] Barthes, Roland, “Operation Margarine,” in Mythologies, (New York: Macmillan 1972) p. 40+
[35] Slavoj Žižek, “A Permanent Economic Emergency,” New Left Review, 64, July/August 2010
[36] Glenn Greenwald, “How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations”, The Intercept, 24 February 2014
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
[37] See for example Žižek’s discussion of Laibach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BZl8ScVYvA, or his time in “half-dissident, half-tolerated” journal publishing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BIUkUUtvFI, and the discussion of the role of Mladina in Kenney, Padraic, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)
[38] See the collection of papers, Douzinas, Costas & Žižek , Slavoj eds. The Idea of Communism, (London: Verso 2012)
[39] Duncan Campbell, “Move Over Jacko: Idea of Communism is the hottest ticket in town this weekend,” The Guardian, 12 March 2009
[40] M.H., “Gender Trouble at the Birkbeck Boys’ Institute for Humanities,” Radical Philosophy 155 May/June 2009
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp...onferences.pdf This is a rare and possibly unique pseudonymous article in the journal.
[41] See video at MRZine, “On the Idea of Communism”
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/ioc260309.html
[42]Žižek, Slavoj, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, (London: Verso 2009):
[Once having grasped that great white intellect liberated the black Haitians], we white Leftist men and women are free to leave behind the politically correct process of endless self-torturing guilt. Although Pascal Bruckner’s critique of the contemporary Left often approaches the absurd, this does not prevent him from occasionally generating pertinent insights-one cannot but agree with him when he detects in European politically correct selfflagellation an inverted form of clinging to one’s superiority. Whenever the West is attacked, its first reaction is not aggressive defense but selfprobing: what did we do to deserve it? We are ultimately to be blamed for the evils of the world; Third World catastrophes and terrorist violence are merely reactions to our crimes. The positive form of the White Man’s Burden (his responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians) is thus merely replaced by its negative form (the burden of the white man’s guilt) : if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving others of responsibility for their fate (when a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never fully its own responsibility, but always an after-effect of colonization: they are merely imitating what their colonial masters used to do, and so on) :
“We need our miserabilist clichés about Africa, Asia, Latin America, in order to confirm the cliché of a predatory, deadly West. Our noisy stigmatizations only serve to mask the wounded self-love: we no longer make the law. Other cultures know it, and they continue to culpabilize us only to escape our judgments on them.”
[43] …according to a KKE connected correspondent, by email.
[44] …in the words of the same correspondent
[45] See video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVhSfINWOE
[46]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006...dcasts/2009/03
[47] At the SWP’s annual London “Marxism” conference:
https://versouk.wordpress.com/2010/0...ay-at-marxism/
[48]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jrk36
[49]
http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2010/07/bbcs-marxism.html
[50] Slavoj Žižek , “Joe Public Versus the Volcano,” The New Statesman, 29 April 2010
http://www.newstatesman.com/environm...re-catastrophe
[51] Slavoj Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” Lacan.dom
[52]
https://storify.com/cordeliers/obscureobjet-exposes
[53] Here is a close reading of a passage to examine the floated voicing phrase by phrase
http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2011/09/too-starkey.html
[54] Tonči Kuzmanić, “Hate Speech in Slovenia: Racism, Sexism and Chauvinism,” Mirovni Institut, 1999
[55] Leigh Claire la Berge, “The Writing Cure: Slavoj Žižek, Analysand of Modernity,” in Bowman, Paul & Stamp, Richard eds. The Truth of Žižek (London: Continuum 2005)
[56] Slavoj Žižek, “The Role of Chimney Sweepers in Sexual Identity,” International Journal of Zizek Studies, 7.2 2013
[57] The Strojans, who were driven from Ambrus by a pogrom in 2006. See Nicholas Wood, “Roma family’s forced move raises rights issue in Slovenia – Europe,” International Herald Tribune, 7 October 2006
[58] See audio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPmE51Oo-9A Lecture at Birkbeck. Friday 19 June 2009
“Slavoj Žižek – Masterclass – day 5 – Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture – Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism” also available at Backdoor Broadcasting site.
[59] Gilbert, Jeremy, “All the Right Questions, All the Wrong Answers,” in Bowman & Stamp, eds. The Truth of Žižek (London: Continuum 2005)P. 61+
[60] Slavoj Žižek, “Breaking Taboos: In the Wake of Paris Attacks the Left Must Embrace Its Radical Western Roots,” In These Times, 16 November 2015
[61]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tt8zpTwFSk
[62] A reader of a draft, who writes under the pseudonym somnavagint, pointed out to me the relevance of Ariel Dorfman’s influential How to Read Donald Duck, a book initially brought to my attention by Jacob Levich (and apparently absorbed!), to these maneuvers of Žižek’s. As it happens, one of Žižek’s acts of routine disinformation involves the spreading of a fake Gramsci quotation, a quotation concocted through the transformation of a bad French translation of a passage by Gramsci into Goebbels through seemingly minor adjustments to wording. Žižek has Gramsci writing, “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters,” a pronouncement entirely alien to Gramsci’s style and thought and which seems written to be crawling up the screen in glowing green letters to the candied Wagnerian sounds of John Williams in the opening of the next Star Wars movie. The original passage from the prison notebooks that is tampered with concerns the issue of crumbling social authority and the “interregnum” Gramsci perceives Italy to be living between the collapsing authority of past tradition (bourgeois and feudal, church and civic community) and future communist manners and mores. The “demise of symbolic efficiency,” a familiar kvetch about modernity, is Žižek’s Schmittian/Hitlerian take on this; he perceives the present as an era of “hedonism,” decadence and degeneracy. He transforms Gramsci into the herald of “a time of monsters” to justify his advertising a dream of social renewal through fascist violence, but a dream had by a reassured and reassuring liberal, so that it arrives in the sheep’s clothing of a comical guise, reminiscent of Springtime for Hitler (as in the Mel Brooks’ comedy, The Producers). With his audience he frequently plays a game like that Disney plays with children through its cartoons, interpellating them into a fascist order.
[63] Žižek and his audience seem nostalgic for conditions memorably described by Richard Wright in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch.”
[64] See Žižek, Slavoj, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, (London: Verso, 2005) Appendix.
[65] I’m indebted for this Strauss connection to Julian Duane.
[66] Barthes, Roland, “Operation Margarine,” in Mythologies, (New York: Macmillan 1972) p. 40+
[67] Slavoj Žižek, “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape,” In These Times, 20 October 2005 and Žižek, Slavoj, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, (New York: MacMillan, 2005) (Versions of this passage appear repeatedly in Žižek’s books and articles, so once again the excuse that it is sloppy and throwaway attempt to say something entirely different, and therefore should be treated as if it did merely reiterate some platitude like “racist articulations are ungenerous toward the raced,” won’t wash. This is modelled on his oldest gambits concerning Nazi Anti-Semitism and Anti-Ziganism)
[68] Žižek, Slavoj, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, (New York: MacMillan, 2005) pp. 72-76
[69] A film whose celebrated brain-washing montage seems to have inspired much of Žižek’s practice.
[70] See also Thomas Riggins, “Coming to Grips with Žižek,” London Progressive Journal, 12 July 2012
[71] Tribuna, vol 38, issue 18, 1988/89
[72] See Bjelić, Dušan I., Normalizing the Balkans (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2011)
[74] Žižek: “If you don’t have a basic patriotic identification—not nationalism, but in the sense of “we are all members of the same nation and so on”—then democracy doesn’t function. You cannot have a living democracy in this pure multiculturalist liberal dream.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/1...lavoj_zizek_on Appearance on Democracy Now, May 12, 2008
[75] Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1971)
[76]
http://alphonsevanworden.tumblr.com/...-great-love-of
[77] Claudia Breger, “The Leader’s Two Bodies: Slavoj Žižek’s Postmodern Political Theology” Diacritics
Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 73-90
[78] Note how the joke programme represents the result of these Jewish machinations
[79] Slavoj Žižek, “A vile logic to Anders Breivik’s choice of target,” The Guardian, 8 August 2011
[80] Slavoj Žižek, “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face,” Lacan.com
http://www.lacan.com/zizsmash.htm
[81] Žižek, Slavoj, In Defence of Lost Causes, (London: Verso 2009) pp.37-38 and Slavoj Žižek, “Mel Gibson at the Serbsky Institute:, Lacan.com
[82] Žižek, Slavoj, The Puppet and The Dwarf, (Boston: MIT Press 2003)
[83] From Josephina Ayersza & Slavoj Žižek “It Doesn’t Have to Be a Jew,” Lacan.com
http://www.lacan.com/perfume/Zizekinter.htm
[84] Ibid
SZ: Of course, we cannot be really anti-Semitic today. Duke is a kind of nostalgic figure. His thing is, “Wasn’t it nice when it was still possible, like in Hitler’s good old days?” I’m not saying it is not dangerous; it is even more disgusting, even more dangerous. Do you know why?
JA: Is it the same, but with no sublime object?
SZ: There still is the symbolic in play, but again, the basic feature of today’s ideology, in correspondence with this Spinozist universality of the signifier, is not a kind of fundamentalism, but a mixture of nostalgia and cynicism: cynical distance, nostalgia, etc.
[85]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL9pTuNA8hA
[86]
https://twitter.com/RedKahina/status/725004210887077888
[87]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri0qiAita4s
[88] As Žižek stages himself as “Stalinism”/“Marxism” that is anti-Semitic, racist, Eurocentric, Eurosupremacist, dishonest, sexist, misogynist, queer-bashing, uneducated, sociopathically callous and sadistically violent.
[89] Joly, Maurice, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, (Lanham: Lexington Books 2003) p. 11
[90]Slavoj Žižek, “Why Are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?” Retrograde Reading Room Online
http://xenopraxis.net/readings/zizek_laibach.pdf
[91] Toma Longinovich, “Indivisible Remainders,” Art Margins, 16 April 2001
[92] Žižek’s first wife, Renata Salecl, whose work he derived copiously from, wrote in The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Ideology after the Fall of Socialism (London: Routledge. 1994) “[A]long with Albanians, Slovenes have also emerged as the enemies of Serbian nationalism; they are supposed to share with the Albanian separatists the wish to constrict the political hegemony of Serbia. What do we get when we combine these two enemies? Remember that in Serbian mythology, Albanians are presented as dirty, fornicating, rapacious, violent, primitive, etc., while the Slovenes are presented as unpatriotic, anti-Yugoslav intellectuals, and as non-productive merchants who exploit the hard work of Serbs, etc.. If we simply put the two pictures together, we get the typical anti-Semitic portrait of a Jew: dirty, fornicating, but at the same time the intellectual, non-productive, profiteering merchant. So add an Albanian to a Slovene and you get a Jew.” Both Žižek and Salecl seem to enjoy dwelling on, and eventually confirming, the flattering images of Slovenes they attribute to “the Serbs”, whom they repeatedly portray as a hive of barbarian Nazis captive to a ressentiment-al idée fixé; in Žižek’s debut at the New Left Review, where he laid out a white supremacist scheme for the anglophone readers’ understanding of Yugoslavia as the US backed aggression to break up the country was getting under way, he made sure to inform his readers that Slovenes were not Balkan or Slavic after all, but descended from “Etruscans,” whom he elsewhere insisted were particularly high on the heritable civilization and whiteness hierarchy.
[93] Adam Kotsko, “How to Read Žižek,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 September 2012 Kotsko felt the need to have comments disputing his contentions suppressed; they can be read here:
http://alphonsevanworden.tumblr.com/...s-beneath-adam
[94] Slavoj Žižek, “Democracy Versus the People,” The New Statesman, 14 August 2008
[95] Slavoj Žižek, “Divine Violence in Ferguson,” The European, 3 September 2015
[96] Duncan Law’s very useful summary of Žižek’s historical revisionist manipulations and vitiation of left critiques of violence/nonviolence found here:
https://duncanlaw.wordpress.com/2013...zeks-violence/
[97] Slavoj Žižek, “Why both the left and right have got it wrong on Ukraine,” The Guardian 10 June 2014
[98] Slavoj Žižek, “The Apostate Children of God,” Outlook (India) 20 August 2012
[99] Slavoj Žižek, “Move the Underground,” Lacan.com
Niels Bohr, who gave the right answer to Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice” (“Don’t tell God what to do!”), also provided the perfect example of how such a fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology: seeing a horse-shoe on his door, the surprised visitor said that he doesn’t believe in the superstition that it brings luck, to what Bohr snapped back: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!” What this paradox renders clear is the way a belief is a reflexive attitude: it is never a case of simply believing - one has to believe in belief itself. Which is why Kierkegaard was right to claim that we do not really believe (in Christ), we just believe to believe - and Bohr just confronts us with the logical negative of this reflexivity (one can also NOT believe one’s beliefs…) At some point, Alcoholics Anonymous meet Pascal: “Fake it until you make it..”
[100] Slavoj Žižek, “Barbarism with a Human Face,” In These Times, 23 November 2010
[101] See A.R., “Indian Reservations: Affirmative Action” The Economist, 29 July 2013
The US War on Yugoslavia
Originally Posted by communist cunt
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