{"id":4438,"date":"2009-11-02T12:53:04","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T16:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=4438"},"modified":"2010-03-21T11:34:43","modified_gmt":"2010-03-21T15:34:43","slug":"zizek-communist-hypothesis-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/11\/02\/zizek-communist-hypothesis-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"\u017di\u017eek communist hypothesis pt 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce<\/em>. New York: Verso, 2009.\u00a0 Print.<\/p>\n

For this reason, a new emancipatory politics will stem no longer from a particular social agent, but from an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose but their chains;’ we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.<\/p>\n

This triple threat to our entire being renders us all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity” <\/strong>as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure \u2014in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a homo sacer, <\/strong>and the only way to stop that from becoming a reality is to act preventively. If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times.<\/p>\n

It is easy to see how each of the three processes of proletarianization refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives . . . At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; “the end of times is near. ”<\/p>\n

Apocalypse is characterized by a specific mode of time, clearly opposed to the two other predominant modes: traditional circular time (time ordered and regulated on cosmic principles, reflecting the order of nature and the heavens; the time-form in which microcosm and macrocosm resonate in harmony), and the modern linear time of gradual progress or development.<\/p>\n

Apocalyptic time is the “time of the end of time;’ the time of emergency, of the “state of exception” when the end is nigh and we can only prepare for it. There are at least four different versions of apocalyptism today:<\/p>\n

Christian fundamentalism, New Age spirituality, techno-digital post-humanism, and secular ecologism. Although they all share the basic notion that humanity is approaching a zero-point of radical transmutation, their respective ontologies differ radically:<\/p>\n

Techno-digital apocalyptism <\/strong>(of which Ray Kurzweil is the main representative) remains within the confines of scientific naturalism, and discerns in the evolution of human species the contours of our transformation into “post-humans.”<\/p>\n

New Age spirituality<\/strong> gives this transmutation a further twist, interpreting it as the shift from one mode of “cosmic awareness” to another (usually a shift from the modern dualist-mechanistic stance to one of holistic immersion).<\/p>\n

Christian fundamentalists<\/strong> of course read the apocalypse in strictly biblical terms, that is, they search for (and find) in the contemporary world signs that the final battle between Christ and the Anti-Christ is imminent.<\/p>\n

Finally, secular ecologism<\/strong> shares the naturalist stance of post-humanism, but gives it a negative twist-what lies ahead, the “omega point” we are approaching, is not a progression to a higher “post-human” level, but the catastrophic self-destruction of humanity.<\/p>\n

Although Christian fundamentalist apocalyptism is considered the most ridiculous, and dangerous, in its content, it remains the version closest to a radical “milenarian” emancipatory logic. The task is thus to bring it into closer contact with secular ecologism, thereby conceiving the threat of annihilation as the chance for a radical emancipatory renewal.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Such apocalyptic proletarianization is, however, inadequate if we want to deserve the name of “communist:’ The ongoing enclosure of the commons concerns both the relation of people to the objective conditions of their life processes as well as the relation between people themselves: the commons are privatized at the expense of the proletarianized majority.<\/p>\n

But there is a gap between these two kinds of relation: the commons can also be restored to collective humanity without communism, in an authoritarian communitarian regime; likewise the de-substantialized, “rootless” subject, deprived of content, can also be counteracted in ways that tend in the direction of communitarianism, with the subject finding its proper place in a new substantial community. In this precise sense, Negri’s anti-socialist title, GoodBye Mr. Socialism, was correct: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, in place of the egalitarian collective, offers an organic community (Nazism was national socialism, not national communism). In other words, while there may be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist form. (If it appears otherwise, as in Stalin’s last years, it is only as an indicator of a lack of fidelity to the revolutionary event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title: “Socialism Failed, Capitalism Is Bankrupt. What Comes Next?” The answer is: communism.<\/p>\n

Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without addressing the fourth-without the singular universality of the proletariat. The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long-term antagonism and simultaneously avoid the communist solution, will be for it to reinvent some kind of socialism-in the guise of communitarianism, or populism, or capitalism with Asian values, or some other configuration. The future wil thus be communist . . . or socialist (95).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Michael Hardt has put it, if capitalism stands for private property and socialism for state property, communism <\/strong>stands for the overcoming of property as such in the commons. \u00a0Socialism is what Marx called “vulgar communism\u201d in which we get only what Hegel would have called the abstract negation of property, that is, the negation of property within the field of property \u2014it is “universalized private property.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009.\u00a0 Print. For this reason, a new emancipatory politics will stem no longer from a particular social agent, but from an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose … Continue reading “\u017di\u017eek communist hypothesis pt 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,41,20],"tags":[140],"class_list":["post-4438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-subjectivity","category-the-real","category-zizek","tag-tragedyfarce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4438"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4480,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4438\/revisions\/4480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}