Zizek on Haiti
Friday, August 15, 2008
Via Brad, Zizek’s review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment. Consider this an open thread for responses.
I would particularly like to see what Joseph Kugelmass thinks, as his responses to Zizek’s recent articles have been growing progressively more unhinged — culminating in “Zizek the Embarrassment” (recently quoted in The Nation), which includes the bizarre claim that we must denounce Zizek’s “political ambitions that are clearly renascent now, long after his failed attempt to become President of Slovenia.”
Friday, August 15, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Not much of an observation, but that book has taken a long while to come out.
http://itself.wordpress.com/2007/03/08/report-on-hallward-seminar/
Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 6:45 am
Then again, In Defence of Lost Causes had been delayed for about eight months. Is that just the norm for Verso?
I am wondering if Zizek will drop mentioning Chavez and concentrate on Lavalas from now on, and whether or not that is a response to some of the criticism that Chavez has drawn of late.
Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 8:40 am
When I read the article I thought, “I know exactly what Chabert will say”. And so it came to pass. All the things Z’s apparently in favour of, he’s really against because he characterises them in the way people who are against them normally characterise them, thereby reinforcing the message that they really are that way. So when Z says, in effect, “instead of defending the ‘chimeres’ from the accusation that they are a violent rabble, we should…” and goes on to talk about “divine violence” and the incompatibility of popular political involvement with the “pacifying” effects of parliamentary democratic institutions, the only point of this statement is to slander the Lavalas movement, yet again, as a violent rabble. All the rest, the “…and a good thing, too!” part of the message, is just contrarian posture, designed to perk up the message and distract from the imperial propaganda that makes up its real substance. Um, apparently.
Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Zizek’s rhetorical strategy is certainly insidious.
Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Indeed, he is perhaps the most sophisticated propagandist for U.S. hegemony currently working. He carefully cultivates a buffoonish image coupled with abstruse theory — all to provide him plausible deniability as he relentlessly promotes conventional wisdom. All kinds of malign messages are getting into people’s brains through his work, when we should instead be putting healthy and positive messages there. In a way, he’s kind of like The Dark Knight, making people love neoconservativism when they think they’re fascinated by the Joker! Thank God we have real leftist interpreters out there to point out the negative messages that are, again, getting into people’s heads illegitimately.
Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Ignore the insignificant. The opening of the article is fabulous.
Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Meaning “great” and “wonderful” as opposed to anything to do with fable!
Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Does anyone else think there’s something really awry with Zizkek abusing Critique of Violence reasoning in order to demand fealty to state preserving violence?
Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 8:48 am
Arguably, the very rare acts of popular self- defence committed by Lavalas partisans are examples of what Walter Benjamin called “divine violence”: they should be located “beyond good and evil”, in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical. Although we are dealing with what can only appear as “immoral” acts of killing, one has no political right to condemn them, because they are a response to years, centuries even, of systematic state and economic violence and exploitation.
I understand “popular self-defense” to indicate non-state action.
Monday, September 1, 2008 at 11:17 am
Thanks for the post and links.
Miller’s article in the Nation is a perfect example of an ongoing trend: ever notice how arguments that are out to attack Zizek eventually end by concluding that he is ‘mad’ or crazy; not that his argument(s) fails or stands? However, this falls right into Zizek’s ‘rhetorical’ trap: arguments of this nature (like that of Miller’s) usually conclude not only that Zizek is mad but also that radical alternatives to present deadlocks are impossible. In that sense, ‘yes’ Zizek writes for people that are already convinced of his position – but ‘no’ this is not based around the supposed inherent legitimacy of one institution over others. Zizek seems to make the case that all options are on the table; that old ideas can be revitalized in the present moment; that the impossible can be achieved by thinking about the finite and the possible. I suppose for some this is all out of bounds – clearly some ideas are dead and off the table, and that includes a connection between (radical) thought and (radical) action… I also think that the debate between Z and Badiou is esoteric and implicit, especially in the texts of the latter…
Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Here here NotOften!
I don’t know how you can believe anything “the kugelmass” writes when he badly misreads Z’s LRB piece on Critchley, writing:
“In Zizek’s new column, the contradictions come so quickly that it is hard to keep track of them all. For example, he writes: “One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible.” Then he bitterly condemns he who “accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done.”
it’s clear when you read the LRB peice that when Z writes that “The lesson of the last few years is that capitialism is indistructable” he is talking about the likes of Critchley, and not what he thinks is the truth about capitalism.
He Talks about “the state” in this new Hallward review in the same way he took a stance against Critchly: you can’t just ignore the state, you seize it and use it for the people – which is of course classic Marx, Engels and Lenin. To write that Zizek’s version of violence is pro-state is to again badly read what he’s written. He starts the Haiti piece writing about the way that the US (and it’s imperialist allies) want to see the state run is a totally de-politicized top-down version of politics, whereas the “seizure” (i.e. democratic election of a leader who fends for the people against the US, and France’s Racism) by the Lavalas regime is against the imperialist state, and for the people – i.e. the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’:
“…he Lavalas regime was in effect one of the figures of how “dictatorship of the proletariat” might look today: while pragmatically engaging in some externally imposed compromises, it always remained faithful to its “base”, to the crowd of ordinary dispossessed people, speaking on their behalf, not “representing” them but directly relying on their local self-organisations. Although respecting the democratic rules, Lavalas made it clear that the electoral struggle is not where things are decided: what is much more crucial is the effort to supplement democracy with the direct political self-organisation of the oppressed.”
To call Zizek a madman and an embarrassment and to call his strategy ‘insidious’ is not only anti-intellectual, it’s lazy and doesn’t match what’s on the page.
Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 6:36 pm
And I just read the Nation piece, and my fears are confirmed: More Laziness!…:
“the puzzling proposal that the left should adopt the mantle of Herman Melville’s enigmatic clerk Bartelby the Scrivener and pursue a political strategy of systematically “preferring not to.” It was a strange nomination on balance, given that Melville’s own story ended with his protagonist being sent to prison for vagrancy and dying in misery.”
Instead of relying on his memory of the melville story, he should read Zizek’s book! And the Author doesn’t seem to know that Z isn’t the only author who’s made this sort of reference to Bartleby (though in a different way): Agamben, Deleuze, and Hardt and Negri also point to Bartleby as of political interest.
“Do not be fooled by the sound and the fury: beneath the rhetorical bombast trembles a disarming timidity. Žižek is quite plainly stating here that he has written a book solely for people who already agree with him.”
What does that MEAN exactly? He should be writing books that people will agree with? As the author of the Nation piece himself points out, in DoLC Zizek takes aim at a lot of contemporary and popular people who take up a lot of space in the ‘canon’ these days (Critchley, Badiou, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri). If the Nation’s author had actually READ _Parallax View_, as they claim, they would see a similar argument in the first few pages: If you’re looking for ‘infinite love of the other’ arguments, you’re not going to find them in Zizek. I don’t see how that translates into writing for people who agree with you. To write a book that people who don’t agree with you would like would be to compromise what one actually thinks.