The Lost Cause of Democracy

Frans Tassigny

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Žižek strongly advocates an overturning of capitalism through a daily revolution; the latter can only become possible if our perception of society and its constructs can be changed to achieve a view of a new horizon of human possibilities. If we can relegate the ambient democratic sentiment to the background, then the much-needed radicaldemocracy can appear.
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• Publié par: Une-Universite-de-la-Psychanalyse
• Nombre de lectures: 5
• Langue: English

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The Lost Cause of Democracy

byJérôme Melançon[18-12-2008]

Žižek strongly advocates an overturning of capitalism through a daily revolution; the latter can only become possible if our perception of society and its constructs can be changed to achieve a view of a new horizon of human possibilities. If we can relegate the ambient democratic sentiment to the background, then the much-neededradicaldemocracy can appear.

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by Jérôme Mélançon

Review of: Slavoj Žižek,In Defense of Lost Causes(London: Verso, 2008), 504 p.

What we have withIn Defense of Lost Causesis an attempt to update Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” With his critique of contemporary political thought and his use of Hegelian, Marxian, Freudian, Lacanian and Badiouan concepts targeted at radical political theorists, Žižek’s goal is primarily theoretical: beyond his goals to remind us of the libidinal economy of politics and to pierce through the current dominant ideology, he aims to give us the means to effectively fight capitalism.

That being said,In Defense of Lost Causesis not a book praising political mistakes. In fact, Žižek remains far from the position of those actors and theorists he thinks have erred in politics, albeit in the right direction (namely Heidegger, Foucault, the Jacobins, or Stalinists and Maoists). There is more to their work than what theydidthink and, to take but one example, we should not “avoid the effort tothinkwith and through Heidegger, to confront the uneasy questions he raised.” (117) We ought to be careful, then, not to caricature Žižek’s reliance on such potentially shocking predecessors as mere posture. Instead, we should recognize his attempt to draw lessons from the past as the beginning of an answer to a different question: how can we surpass the limits of ethics and theory when facing social relations, in order to invent a truly emancipatory radical politics?

Preparing the Terrain for Radical Politics

The opening chapter indeed seeks to show that there is a fundamental hypocrisy to all ethics: there is always a point where we close our eyes to a certain level of suffering. The same pattern of interrogation is continued in the second chapter. We only have one way to deal with the truly traumatic, with the torture we are subjected to, with the torture donein our nameby our government, or even with Revolutions, totalitarian regimes, or the extinction of humanity: it is to bring such events down to domesticated and familiar problems such as we

find in amorous or familial relationships.Thatis mystification;thatis the function of ideology: to mask what really threatens us – real, brutal violence.

With this understanding of ethics and ideology, Žižek sets out to go beyond “impotent moralistic outrage” (102) and simple subversion. His critique of democratic ethics and ideology “is the risky but necessary gesture of rendering problematic the very notion of “democracy,” of moving elsewhere – of having the courage to elaborate a positive liveable project “beyond democracy.” (106) “Democracy” is what we must fight, because it is the dominant ideologicalpolitical form stopping us from questioning capitalism. We must overcome our belief in necessity for a necessarily democratic struggle for democracy. Only then will we see that (non-liberal) democracy equals politics, and that it is at once the regulated choice of those in power and the violent egalitarian imposition on the part of those who are excluded by those in power, who try to keep us depoliticized and focused on our daily lives.

Žižek seeks to answer a question that goes far beyond the traditional understanding of politics – that of the implications of Heidegger’s concept of ontological difference for politics. This problem is at the heart of the book, and as such it deserves to be explained in slightly different terms than Žižek does. Particularly inBeing and Time, Heidegger presented under this name the idea that the very essence of human beings is what sets them apart from anything else. There would then be two levels to existence. The first, theontic, is what a human being (Dasein) shares with everyone and everything else, it is the product of circumstances and could have happened otherwise. It is what sets apart a twentieth-century German philosopher from the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ancient Greece. Politics, or religious and secular beliefs, for instance, would belong to the ontic dimension of our lives. The second level, where the meaning of what it is to be and to exist is in question, is the ontological dimension; here we touch on the essence of being human. On one hand, with the ontic we have a horizon of meaning for our existence that disappears beyond our daily activities, because we forget about it; on the other hand, we have the emergence of this horizon as a horizon through our possibility to question it, we have ontological reflection. What might then unite us and make us properly human would be this question of being, where our very being, what we are, is in question. And since its answer is to be found beyond the ontic, we could see this distinction as leading us to put more value on the ontological and to treat politics as a secondary or lower realm of activity.

In the third chapter, speaking about Heidegger as a radical intellectual, Žižek takes on the question of ontological difference, but gives a renewed importance to the ontic: “what if there is a fundamental discordance between the ontological and the ontic, so that, as Heidegger put it, those who reach ontological truth have to err in the ontic? What if, if we are to see with the ontological eye, our ontic eye has to be blinded?” (124) Yet such a view is still not complete enough: instead, Žižek points to a politics that would be “merely ontic” (120) but would open up a space for ontological reflection, by focusing on what Lacan called the Real. Indeed, the Real is “that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real [...], the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances” (127) and we can only see the Real through fictions, ideology and symbolism – in fact, they are all that is.

Violence and the (non-existent) big Other

And so, by a reversal of the original question, ontological difference appears as a rift within the ontic, and ontological change will become possible only through ontic politics. Žižek thus seeks a renewed relation between theory and action, where each opens up new spaces for both activities, where being open to both is being open to the Event and the changes it brings, though traumatic they may be. We needontologicalviolence in order to truly achieve change – more precisely, to overcome capitalism. This form of violence is assumed as being violent without any regard for the big Other, it exceeds any end to which it might be a means, it aims at changing the very way we interact with each other, at transforming our society in its most hidden structures, at redefining the horizon that makes our lives possible and meaningful, instead of merely bringing changes within our lives. If we are to surpass ideology and thus leave behind the old social order and the old culture, we need violence and terror, and we need to realize that there is no big Other (which is “the order of public appearance” (242), “the ruling ideological gaze” (243) of... no one, it turns out) – and thus to overcome our moral qualms.

While in this manner the fourth and fifth chapters address the promises and shortcomings of Revolutionaries and Marxists, the sixth and seventh chapters criticize at length the contemporary political theorists with whom Žižek is most likely to be associated. E. Laclau, Y. Stavrakakis, S. Critchley, G. Agamben, and M. Hardt and A. Negri are all shown as recognizing the full hegemony of global capitalism and accepting the triumph of capitalism and limiting themselves to resistance. The task of “radical emancipatory politics” is instead to make precise and finite demands which cannot be dismissed by those in power in the name of realism; it is to desire and to bring into existence a revolutionary event by engaging in a movement. The goals of political action should then be limited, but its aims must be to abolish capitalism as the invisible background of our lives, first of all (as Žižek does) by rendering it visible. True radicalism consists in reorganizing daily life and the state, in changing social relations, in excessive destruction and in creation: “imposing on social reality a new lasting order. This is the properly “terroristic” dimension of every authentic democratic explosion: the brutal imposition of a new order.” (419) We must not only create a new society, we must create new hopes and dreams so we always press forward and escape falling back into what we wanted to destroy in the first place.

Trespassing on Žižek’s Limits

Following the re-evaluation of some of Lacan and Badiou’s core concepts in the eighth chapter, the conclusion of the book is a search for the social bases of change in the main antagonisms of contemporary global politics: ecology; the slums; biogenetics; challenges to intellectual property. Along these lines of opposition, exclusion follows the privatization of what ought to be common to all (as the “shared substance of our social being” (428), what is immediately produced by subjectivity). A new “proletariat” has been formed by this exclusion – and with it, a revolutionary position anyone can join.

Stated as such, the conclusions of the book are disappointing and rather similar to those of the authors Žižek criticizes throughout. Of course, there is an appeal to political invention and to the assumption of the necessity of violence and terror, and there is an ascription of revolutionary agency to actual phenomena. However, his language falls short of the destruction and invention deemed necessary for politics, and we remain within the theoretical context of Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Freud, Lacan and Badiou – as important as may be Žižek’s search for the correct meaning and ultimate consequences of their concepts. What is

more, Žižek remains quite silent on the practical aspects, on how we can adopt a revolutionary, communist position against the destruction of the commons.

This being said, we can be more charitable to Žižek: perhaps this criticism is asking too much of one person or, more precisely, perhaps we are asking the wrong question. And so the real problem with this book might lie elsewhere – and it might be one of its strengths. Although we must read between the lines and enter into our own questioning of theoryas a practice, the key to understandIn Defense of Lost Causesmight be to refuse to place Žižek in the position of the big Other. Above all, it is the destruction of mystifications that is the main object of this book, with Žižek bordering on theoretical excess to open up the possibility of creating something new. But if they are not to fail, his answers must be understood as provocatively allusive: through ideas like utopia, emancipatory terror, the negation of the negation, communism, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, we must be provoked to go beyond his few and scarce suggestions and create new possibilities for social relations. Like him, we must act as if the future we want is already here, if we are to hope to undo what makes our destiny and act against the catastrophic outcome that is emerging in our present.

byJérôme Melançon[18-12-2008]

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SLAVOJ ZIZEK - BIOGRAPHY

Slavoj Žižek, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a visiting professor at a number of American Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York University, University of Michigan). Slavoj Žižek recieved his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis. He also studied at the University of Paris. Slavoj Žižek is a cultural critic and philosopher who is internationally known for his innovative interpretations ofJacques Lacan. Slavoj Žižek has been called the ‘Elvis Presley’ of philosophy as well as an 'academic rock star'. He is author ofThe Indivisible Remainder;The Sublime Object of Ideology; The Metastases of Enjoyment;Looking Awry:Jacques Lacanthrough Popular Culture;The Plague of Fantasies; andThe Ticklish Subject. Slavoj Žižek's work can be characterized as vibrant, full of humor, blatant disregard for distinctions between high and low forms of culture and his work and presence has gathered him critical acclaim as a superstar in the world of contemporary theory.

Slavoj Žižek was born into a family of average wealth, his father Jože Žižek grew up in eastern Slovenia and worked in economics. Slavoj Žižek's mother Vesna was an accountant. It was in Ljubljana, the capital of modern day Slovenia, that Vesna gave birth to Slavoj on March 21, 1949. Both of Slavoj Žižek's parents were atheists. Most of young Slavoj's childhood took place in Portorož, a small seaside community. Slavoj Žižek states in an interview with Helen Brown of theTelegraph, "at 15, I wanted to be a movie director. But I saw some really good European films and I accepted that I couldn’t do that. Then, at 17, I decided to become a philosopher." When Slavoj Žižek became a teenager the family returned to

Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School. Slavoj Žižek when to the University of Ljubljana in 1967 to study sociology and philosophy, receiving a Doctorate in the Arts in Philosophy. During this period in what was then Yugoslavia was a tumultuous political environment. It was at this time that the Communist regime began a series of liberalization policies. Later Slavoj Žižek went on to study psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with François Regnault and Jacques-Alain Miller (Jacques Lacan’s son-in-law).

The Marxist Slovenian philosopher Božidar Debenjak was an early influence on Slavoj Žižek. It was from Debenjak that Slavoj began to turn to German idealism and Slavoj Žižek began to be influenced by the Frankfurt School. It was in Božidar Debenjak's course at the University of Ljubljana that Slavoj Žižek readKarl Marx'sDas Kapitalthrough the lens ofGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel'sPhenomenology of the Mind. The perspective formed through this interrogation ofKarl MarxandGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegelhas heavily influenced Slavoj Žižek's contemporary works. Slavoj Žižek has associated with Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič, both Heideggerian philosophers.

Slavoj Žižek was hired at the University of Ljubljana in 1971 where he worked as an assistant researcher. His master's thesis was controversial due to the Marxist tendency of the reformist Slovenian regime in 1973 and therefore he lost his position at the university. After this period he worked for the Yugoslav army in Karlovac. Slavoj Žižek later began to work as a clerk for the Slovenian Marxist Center where he became acquainted with Mladen Dolar and Rastko Močnik. Both of these scholars were focused on the works ofJacques Lacan. Slavoj Žižek began working for the Institute of Sociology for the University of Ljubljana in 1979. Shortly after in the 1980's he began to publish books which examined Heglian and Marxist theories from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Slavoj Žižek has two sons from two different marriages.

Slavoj Žižek wrote the introduction to John Lee Carre and G.K. Chesterston's Slovenian translated novels. Slavoj Žižek edited a number of translations ofLouis Althusser,Jacques LacanandSigmund Freudto Slovenian. It was not until the late 1980s when Slavoj Žižek came under the scrutiny of public attention. During this period he was a columnist from his work forMaldina, a magazine aimed at youth which criticized the Titoist regime. The magazine gained notoriety for its stance against certain aspects of the times Yugoslavian politics, in particular the increasing militarization policies aimed towards society. Up until October of 1988 Slavoj Žižek was an active member of the Communist Party of Slovenia. He quit during the protest against the JBZ-trial. He was not alone in this protest, he quit along with thirty two other public intellectuals with origins in Slovenia. Slavoj Žižek was involved with the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights a social movement fighting for democracy in Slovenia. In 1990 the first free elections were held in Slovenia. At this time Slavoj Žižek ran for President aligned with the Liberal Democratic Party.

Slavoj Žižek became widely recognized as an important theorist of contemporary times with the publication ofThe Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book to be written in English, in 1989. Since this time Slavoj Žižek has taken the contemporary philosophical world by storm, never afraid of confrontation he is a dangerous theorist. Slavoj Žižek's work cannot be categorized easily. He calls for a return to the the Cartesian subject. Slavoj Žižek also calls for a return to The German Ideology, in particular the works ofGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Slavoj Žižek's work draws on the works ofJacques Lacan, moving his theory towards modern political and philosophical

issues, finding the potential for liberatory politics within his work. But in all his turns to these thinkers and strands of thought, he hopes to call forth new potentials in thinking and self-reflexivity. Slavoj Žižek also calls for a return to the spirit of the revolutionary potential of Lenin andKarl Marx.

Slavoj Žižek is an atheist and often his theories go against analytical philosophical currents. He tends to be politically incorrect and has therefore caused quite a disruption within intellectual circles. It is his unique brand of political and philosophical bravery that has created a name for himself as the foremost thinker of our times. Slavoj Žižek puts forth that for one to understand today’s politics we need a different notion of ideology.

Slavoj Žižek was a visiting professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis, Université Paris-VIII in 1982–83 and 1985–86, at the Centre for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Art, SUNY Buffalo, 1991–92, at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1992, at the Tulane University, New Orleans, 1993, at the Cardozo Law School, New York, 1994, at the Columbia University, New York, 1995, at the Princeton University (1996), at the New School for Social Research, New York, 1997, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998, and at the Georgetown University, Washington, 1999. He is a returning faculty member of the European Graduate School. In the last 20 years Žižek has participated in over 350 international philosophical, psychoanalytical and cultural-criticism symposiums in the USA, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Brasil, Mexico, Israel, Romania, Hungary and Japan. He is the founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.

Slavoj Žižek's published books include:Začeti od začetka, Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba(2011),Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic(2011),Paul's New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology(2010),The Idea of Communism(2010),Living in the End Times(2010),Philosophy in the Present Polity(with Alain Badiou, 2010),Badiou & Žižek: Hvalnica Ljubezni (Love and Terror)(2010),Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo(2010),Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism(2009),First As Tragedy, Then As Farce(2009),In Search of Wagner(2009),Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?(2009),Violence: Big Ideas/Small Books(2008),In Defense of Lost Causes(2008),En defensa de la intolerancia(2007),On Practice and Contradiction(2007),Terrorism and Communism(2007),Virtue and Terror(2007),How to Read Lacan(2006),The Parallax View(2006),Lacan: The Silent Partners(2006),Neighbors and Other Monsters (in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology)(2006),The Universal Exception(2006),Interrogating the Real(2005),Kako biti nihče(2005),Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle(2004),Paralaksa: za politični suspenz etičnega(2004),The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity(2003),Organs Without Bodies(2003),Kuga Fantazem(2003),Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings(2002),Welcome to the Desert of the Real(2002),Repeating Lenin(2001),Opera's Second Death(2001),On Belief(2001),The Fright of Real Tears(2001),Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?(2001),Strah pred pravimi solzami: Krzysztof Kieslowski in šiv(2001),Krhki absolut: Enajst tez o krščanstvu in marksizmu danes(2000),The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?(2000),The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway(2000),Contingency, Hegemony, Universality(2000),The Ticklish Subject(1999),Alain Badiou, Sveti Pavel: Utemeljitev Univerzalnosti(1998),The

Plague of Fantasies(1997),The Abyss of Freedom(1997),Argument za strpnost(1997),The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters(1997),Slovenska smer(1996),The Metastases of Enjoyment(1994),Problemi: Eseji 4-5(1994),Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan... But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock(1993),Tarrying With the Negative(1993),Filozofija skoz psihoanalizo VII(1993),Enjoy Your Symptom!(1992),Looking Awry(1991),For They Know Not What They Do(1991),Hitchcock II.(1991),Beyond Discourse Analysis (a part in Ernesto Laclau's New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time)(1990),Beseda, dejanje svoboda: Filozofija skoz psihoanalizo V(1990),The Sublime Object of Ideology(1989),Druga smrt Josipa Broza Tita(1989),Pogled s strani(1988),Jezik, ideologija, Slovenci(1987),Hegel in objekt(1985),Problemi teorije fetišizma: Filozofija skoz psihoanalizo II(1985),Filozofija skozi psihoanalizo(1984),Birokratija i uživanje(1984),Zgodovina in nezavedno(1982),Gospostvo, Vzgoja, Analiza: Zbornik tekstov Lacanove šole psihoanalize (editor, translator)(1982),Hegel in označevalec(1980),Znak, označitelj, pismo(1976) andBolečina razlike(1972).