Slavoj Žižek: un philosophe à chanter, Occupy Wall Street, Sur Kant et Marx

Frans Tassigny

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Le penseur slovène, qui provoque à la fois droite et à gauche avec ses discours sur la société et l'humanité, est maintenant une source d'inspiration pour quatre nouveaux opéras. Comment s'en sortent-t-il entre les mains de Covent Garden?
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Informations

• Publié par: Une-Universite-de-la-Psychanalyse
• Nombre de lectures: 35
• Langue: English

Extrait

Slavoj Žižek: a philosopher to sing about

The Slovenian thinker, who provokes both right and left with his discourses on society and humanity, is now an inspiration for four new operas. How will he fare at the hands of Covent Garden?

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Slavoj Zizek at his home in Lubljana. Photograph: David Levene/guardian.co.uk

He has been called the Elvis ofphilosophyand the Marx Brother, had a book of his philosophicaljokespublished in an edition of one by a conceptual artist and been linked via a viral internet hoax to Lady Gaga.

It should perhaps come as no surprise, then, that theRoyal Opera House, eager to produce contemporary and iconoclastic work, has just announced that it has commissioned four new operas inspired by the writings of the leftwing Slovenian thinker, Slavoj Žižek, the most high-proîle and controversial public philosopher of our time.

Signalling his commitment to staging new productions alongside the "bohèmes and traviatas",Kasper Holten, theRoyal Opera House's director of opera, said that Žižek's work "challenged opera writers to write about their fears and hopes for the world now".

It is hard to think of another living philosopher whose work could lend itself to such extravagant reinterpretation, but Žižek, despite his beard and drably utilitarian dress sense, is no ordinary philosopher. He is, rather, a thinker of choice for the internet generation, whose commitment to old-school communism is matched only by histalent to provokeand bemuse both the right and the liberal left.

To this end, he has compared Julian Assange favourably to Mahatma Gandhi, while describing them both with admiration as terrorists. More controversially, he recently wrote: "The problem with Hitler was that he was 'not violent enough', his

violence was not 'essential' enough." To be fair, this characteristically provocative claim was framed by a wider, deeper reection on violence, revolution and what Žižek calls "gigantic spectacles of pseudo-revolution" such as Nazism, which, he argued, are staged to disrupt but not threaten the established capitalist order. Nevertheless, it led to a recent typically selective article in theTelegraphheadlined "Is Slavoj Žižek a Left-Fascist?The English political philosopherJohn Gray, writing in theNew York Times, echoed that sentiment in more measured terms, noting: "There may be some who are tempted to condemn Žižek as a philosopher of irrationalism whose praise of violence is more reminiscent of the far right than the radical left."

Nothing, though, about Žižek is simple or straightforward and that is exactly how he likes it. "I don't give clear answers to even the simplest, most direct questions," he told me when I interviewed him in 2010. "I like to complicate issues. I hate simple narratives. I suspect them. This is my automatic reaction."

That stance has underpinned the ongoing series of books that has made his name. The îrst,The Sublime Object of Ideology, published in 1989, compared Marx's treatise on commodities with Freud's dream theories by way of Kant and the radical psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan, one of Žižek's key inuences. InThe Fragile Absolute: Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, Žižek, an atheist, argued that Christians and Marxists should unite against "the contemporary onslaught of vapid spirituality".

Žižek was born in what was then communist Yugoslavia on 21 March 1949 to an economist father and an accountant mother. A loner, he read voraciously, his love of theory blossoming at university in Ljubljana, where he îrst fell under the spell of Lacan. His postgraduate thesis was rejected for being too critical of Marx and he subsequently struggled to înd a teaching post, working instead as a translator of philosophy books.

In 1978, he was "banished to a marginal research institute", he told me, where he had time to write his breakthrough book,The Sublime Object of Ideology.The following year, he had a brief but intense irtation with party politics, astounding his leftist friends by standing for election as a Liberal Democrat candidate. (He came îfth.) Chastened, he devoted himself exclusively to writing and, since then, buoyed by teaching posts at Columbia, Princeton and London's Birkbeck College, he has established himself as the world's most well-known and divisive contemporary thinker (only Noam Chomsky comes close).

He has been married at least twice: to Renata Saleci, a fellow Slovenian philosopher, and to Analia Hounie, a model – and Lacanian scholar – from Argentina. He has two sons, one in his 30s, the other 12 years old. Despite theLady Gaga internet rumour, which prompted theDaily Starto report: "Pals fear Lady Gaga's head is being îlled with extremist ideas by Slovenian-born Slavoj Žižek", he is currently single. (This is perhaps unsurprising given that the documentaryŽižek!revealed that he keeps his underwear and socks, mostly of the free airline variety, in his kitchen drawers.)

Like a Marxist Morrissey, Žižek has a way with tantalising titles and a seemingly eortless talent to provoke:Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?critiques one of his recurring bugbears, the so-called "liberal-democratic consensus";In Defence of Lost Causesargues for a return to ideological engagement over the emptiness of post-modernism.

Alongside his dense and often wildly discursive theoretical works, he has written widely on îlm, tackling the Lacanian subtexts in the îlms of two of his favourite directors, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, while, less plausibly, setting out the "somewhat naive, but nonetheless basically accurate, illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory" that lurks unseen inKung Fu Panda.

This tendency to merge highbrow and popular culture has not enamoured Žižek to the academy, but he seems blithely unconcerned by his outsider status, which, one suspects, is more instinctive than adopted. In 2011, he summed up what he believed to be the philosophy establishment's prevailing view of him: "I should not be this man who talks aboutThe Dark Knightand Hegel, about the value of WikiLeaks and Lady Gaga. I should be a mediocre philosophy professor in Ljubljana."

In performance, which is what his lectures have become, he cuts an often alarming îgure, his thoughts owing freely in rapid-îre sentences punctuated by guttural grunts, a variety of facial tics and his constant dabbing at his spittle- ecked beard. He does not so much ignore the contradictions in his writings as revel in them, which, alongside his prankster tendencies, have led some to conclude that he is the clown prince of post-postmodern philosophy rather than its saviour. In an acidicewNYroekrproîle, Rebecca Mead described Žižek's approach: "His favoured form of argument is paradox and his favoured mode of delivery is a kind of vaudevillian overstatement, buttressed by the appearance of utter conviction."

For all that, though, Žižek has singlehandedly dragged Marxist dialectics into the mainstream, attracting a mainly younger audience to his lectures and energising theoretical discourse like no one since Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes in the heady post-structuralist days of the 1960s and 1970s.

What, then, are we to make of the most well-known thinker of our time? Is he, as Rebecca Mead insisted, the Marx Brother or, as Terry Eagleton put it, "the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general to have emerged fromEuropein some decades"? Or, is he both?

When I spoke to him for the publication of his book,Living in the End Times, in 2010, he leafed though the pages, going: "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah blah...", singling out only a few chapters as worthy of praise. (He also admitted to writing the chapter on the îlmAvatarbefore he had seen the îlm: "I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.")

In many ways, then, he is his own worst enemy, but that, too, may be part of his philosophical approach, to make us question the ideology of Žižekism as well as the ideologies of global capitalism and high and low culture.

His recent big, dense, scholarly, though no less scattergun, book on Hegel, which he described as "my true life's work", has done little to dent his reputation as the reigning prankster of philosophy, but he remains unrepentant. And popular.

The documentary îlm-maker, Sophie Fiennes, who has made two îlms about Žižek, including the forthcomingThe Pervert's Guide to Ideology, comes closest to explaining his peculiar status.

"He is very much a thinker for our turbulent, high-speed, information-led lives precisely because he insists on the freedom to stop and think hard about who you are as an individual in this fragmented society. We need a radical hip priest and Slavoj is that in many ways."

THE ŽIŽEK FILE

Born Slavoj Žižek, 21 March 1949, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia. His father was an economist, his mother an accountant. Studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Ljubljana. At least twice married.

Best of timesHis breakthrough in 1989 with the publication ofThe Sublime Object of Ideology, since when he has sketched out his own territory as a philosopher with a following way beyond the lecture hall.

Worst of timesLast year, British thinker John Gray provoked tumult by suggesting that Žižek was an armchair revolutionary who lent intellectual support to violence.

What he says"I am a philosopher, not a prophet. I don't answer questions but ask them to critique our society. It is also important not to say what everybody else is saying. It is boring, for instance, to criticise the US eternally. Why not China instead? It is China, after all, where they have banned îctional works considering alternative worlds, because they are afraid of their citizens' imaginations. "

They say"The role of global public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to the current model of capitalist expansion… [but his] wide inuence does not mean that his philosophical and political standpoint can be easily deîned." John Gray

Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next?

How a protest movement without a programme can confront a capitalist system that deîes reform

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Slavoj Žižek

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 April 2012 13.05 BST

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A demonstrator in Oakland holds a sign on 2 November, 2011. Photograph: Eric Thayer/Getty Images

What to do in the aftermath of theOccupy Wall Streetmovement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the centre, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world?

In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s:

"They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time."

Such statements display one of the great dangers the protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the "occupied" places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, "capitalism" is now clearly re-emerging as the name oftheproblem.

The îrst two things one should prohibit are therefore the critique of corruption and the critique of înancial capitalism. First, let us not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public îgures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to îght the culture of excessive greed and consummation – this disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, or, as one of the theologians close to the pope put it:

"The present crisis is not crisis of capitalism but the crisis of morality."

Let us recall the famous joke fromErnst Lubitch's Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coee without cream; the waiter replies:

"Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coee without milk?"

Was not a similar trick at work in the dissolution of the eastern european Communist regimes in 1990? The people who protested wanted freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation, and what they got was freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice. Likewise, the Catholic theologian close to pope is carefully emphasizing that the protesters should target moral injustice, greed, consumerism etc, without capitalism. The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by deînition cannot be controlled.

One should avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause, of admiring the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. What new positive order should replace the old one the day after, when the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising is over? It is at this crucial point that we encounter the fatal weakness of the protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a minimal positive program of socio-political change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

Reacting to the Paris protests of 1968, Lacan said:

"What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one."

It seems that Lacan's remark found its target (not only) in the indignados of Spain. Insofar as theirprotestremains at the level of a hysterical provocation of the master, without a positive program for the new order to replace the old one, it eectively functions as a call for a new master, albeit disavowed.

We got the îrst glimpse of this new master in Greece and Italy, and Spain will probably follow. As if ironically answering the lack of expert programs of the protesters, the trend is now to replace politicians in the government with a "neutral" government of depoliticized technocrats (mostly bankers, as in Greece and Italy). Colorful "politicians" are out, grey experts are in. This trend is clearly moving towards a permanent emergency state and the suspension of political democracy.

So we should see in this development also a challenge: it is not enough to reject the depoliticized expert rule as the most ruthless form of ideology; one should also begin to think seriously about what to propose instead of the predominant economic organization, to imagine and experiment with alternate forms of organization, to search for the germs of the New. Communism is not just or predominantly the carnival of the mass protest when the system is brought to a halt; Communism is also, above all, a new form of organization, discipline, hard work.

The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them, but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coee without caeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture. In boxing, to "clinch" means to hold the opponent's body with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches.Bill Clinton's reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching; Clinton thinks that the protests are "on balance … a positive thing", but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause. Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a couple million jobs in the next year and a half". What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of "concrete" pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the îeld of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to îll this vacuum in in a proper way, since it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly New. The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the third world troubles is enough to make them feel good.

Economic globalization is gradually but inexorably undermining the legitimacy of western democracies. Due to their international character, large economic processes cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms which are, by deînition, limited to nation states. In this way, people more and more experience institutional democratic forms as unable to capture their vital interests.

It is here that Marx's key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever: for Marx, the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper. The key to actual freedom rather resides in the "apolitical" network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform, but a change in the "apolitical" social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a factory, etc – all this is left to processes outside the

sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can eectively change things by "extending" democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing "democratic" banks under people's control. In such "democratic" procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is, the solution is sought in applying the democratic mechanisms – which, one should never forget, are part of the state apparatuses of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction.

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: it reects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn't know to what they are answers, and the analyst has to formulate a question. Only through such a patient work a program will emerge.

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aaware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends:

"Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false."

After a month, his friends get the îrst letter written in blue ink:

"Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show îlms from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an aair – the only thing unavailable isred ink."

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants – the only thing missing is the "red ink": we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conict – "war on terror", "democracy and freedom", "human rights", etc – are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it.

The task today is to give the protesters red ink.

• This article is based on remarksSlavoj Žižek will be making at an event at the New York Public Library on 25 April, ahead of publication ofThe Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2012).

The Salon interview with Zizek: I am not the world’s hippest philosopher!–Salon.com

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December 29, 2012by Peter Gratton

Probably one of the better interviews with Zizek:I am not the world’s hippest philosopher! – Salon.com. It starts o well, asking about his strategy interviews, but then gets caught up talking about where he puts his socks (again). While I’m at it, here is Peter Osbourne’scritical assessmentofLhtnasesihgnNto(2012), which portrays it as bordering on empty formalism.

http://philosophyinatimeoferror.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-salon-interview- with-zizek-i-am-not-the-worlds-hippest-philosopher-salon-com/

The parallax view: Karatani’s 'Transcritique. On Kant and Marx' - Slavoj Žižek

The philosophical basis for social action, as recast in Kojin Karatani’s striking Transcritique. On Kant and Marx. Slavoj Žižek investigates the irreducible antinomies of production and circulation — or economics and politics — as envisioned from the gap in between.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: THE PARALLAX VIEW In today’s English, ‘pig’ refers to the animals with which farmers deal, while ‘pork’ is the meat we consume. The class dimension is clear here: ‘pig’ is the old Saxon word, since Saxons were the underprivileged farmers, while ‘pork’ comes from the French porque, used by the privileged Norman conquerors who mostly consumed the pigs raised by farmers. This duality, signalling the gap that separates production from consumption, is a case of what, in his formidable Transcritique. On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani refers to as the ‘parallax’ dimension. [1] Best known as the most striking Japanese literary critic of his generation—his Origins of Japanese Literature presented to the English-speaking world by Fredric Jameson—Karatani has moved from subsequent reections on Architecture as Metaphor to one of the most original attempts to recast the philosophical and political bases of opposition to the empire of capital of the current period. [2] In its heterodox theoretical ambition and concern with alternative revolutionary traditions—here principally anarchist—Transcritique might be compared with Roberto Unger’s trilogy Politics, a work out of Brazil. But Karatani’s thought-world is closer to that of Marx, and behind him to the heritage of classical German philosophy.

Karatani starts with the question: what is the appropriate response when we are confronted with an antinomy in the precise Kantian sense of the term? His answer is that we should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect of it to the other (or, even more, to enact a kind of ‘dialectical synthesis’ of the opposites). One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the irreducible gap between the positions—the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus to see things ‘neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through dierence (parallax)’. [3] Karatani reads the Kantian notion of the Ding an sich (the Thing-in-itself, beyond phenomena) not so much as a transcendental entity beyond our grasp, but as what is discernible only via the irreducibly antinomic character of our experience of reality.

Theories of value According to Karatani, when Marx was faced with the opposition between classical political economy (Ricardo and his labour theory of value—the counterpart to philosophical rationalism) and the neo-classical reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance (Bailey—the counterpart to philosophical empiricism), his ‘critique of political economy’ accomplished exactly the same breakthrough towards the parallax view. Marx treated this opposition as a Kantian antinomy—that is, value has to originate both outside circulation, in production, and within circulation. ‘Marxism’ after Marx—in both its Social Democratic and Communist versions—lost this parallax perspective and regressed to a unilateral elevation of production as the site of truth, as against the ‘illusory’ spheres of exchange and consumption. As Karatani emphasizes, even the most sophisticated theory of reiîcation—that of commodity fetishism— falls into this trap, from the young Lukács through Adorno up to Jameson. The way these thinkers accounted for the lack of a revolutionary movement was to

argue that the consciousness of workers was obfuscated by the seductions of consumerist society and/or manipulation by the ideological forces of cultural hegemony. Hence the shift in the focus of their critical work to cultural criticism (the so-called ‘cultural turn’)—in others, the disclosure of the ideological (or libidinal: here lies the key role of psychoanalysis in Western Marxism) mechanisms that keep workers under the spell of bourgeois ideology. In a close reading of Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form, Karatani grounds the insurmountable persistence of the parallax gap in the salto mortale that a product has to accomplish in order to assert itself as a commodity:

The price [of iron expressed in gold], while on the one hand indicating the amount of labour-time contained in the iron, namely its value, at the same time signiîes the pious wish to convert the iron into gold, that is to give the labour- time contained in the iron the form of universal social labour-time. If this transformation fails to take place, then the ton of iron ceases to be not only a commodity but also a product; since it is a commodity only because it is not a use-value for its owner, that is to say his labour is only really labour if it is useful labour for others, and it is useful for him only if it is abstract general labour. It is therefore the task of the iron or of its owner to înd that location in the world of commodities where iron attracts gold. But if the sale actually takes place, as we assume in this analysis of simple circulation, then this diïculty, the salto mortale of the commodity, is surmounted. As a result of this alienation—that is its transfer from the person for whom it is a non-use-value to the person for whom it is a use- value—the ton of iron proves to be in fact a use-value and its price is simultaneously realized, and merely imaginary gold is converted into real gold. [4] This jump by means of which a commodity is sold and thus eectively constituted as a commodity is not the result of an immanent self-development of (the concept of) Value, but a salto mortale comparable to a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, a temporary and fragile ‘synthesis’ between use-value and exchange-value comparable to the Kantian synthesis between sensibility and understanding: in both cases, two levels irreducibly external to each other are brought together. For this precise reason, Marx abandoned his original project (discernible in the Grundrisse manuscripts) of ‘deducing’ in a Hegelian way the split between exchange-value and use-value from the very concept of Value. In Capital, the split of these two dimensions, the ‘dual character of a merchandise’, is the starting point. The synthesis has to rely on an irreducibly external element, as in Kant where being is not a predicate (i.e., cannot be reduced to a conceptual predicate of an entity), or as in Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, in which the reference of a name to an object cannot be grounded in the content of this name, in the properties it designates.

The very tension between the processes of production and circulation is thus once again that of a parallax. Yes, value is created in the production process; however, it is created there as it were only potentially, since it is only actualized as value when the produced commodity is sold and the circle m-c-m is thus completed. The temporal gap between the production of value and its realization is crucial here: even if value is created in production, without the successful