{"id":9232,"date":"2012-09-07T15:10:14","date_gmt":"2012-09-07T20:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9232"},"modified":"2012-09-07T15:45:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-07T20:45:00","slug":"kotsko-on-z","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/09\/07\/kotsko-on-z\/","title":{"rendered":"kotsko on \u017d"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to Read \u017di\u017eek by Adam Kotsko<\/a>
\nSeptember 2nd, 2012<\/p>\n

SLAVOJ \u017dI\u017dEK, a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia, is one of the few academics to have achieved a degree of genuine popularity among general readers. He regularly lectures to overflow crowds, is the subject of a documentary film (called simply \u017di\u017eek!<\/em>), and surely counts as one of the world\u2019s most visible advocates of left-wing ideas. When \u017di\u017eek first broke into the English-speaking academic scene, however, few would likely have predicted such success. For one thing, his research focused on an unpromising topic: the long-neglected field of \u201cideology critique,\u201d a staple of Marxist cultural criticism that had fallen into eclipse as Marxism became less central to Western intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

\u201cIdeology\u201d is one of those philosophical terms that has entered into everyday speech with an impoverished meaning. Much as \u201cdeconstruction\u201d means little more than \u201cdetailed analysis\u201d in popular usage, so \u201cideology\u201d tends to refer to a body of beliefs, most often with overtones of inflexibility or fanaticism. But as \u017di\u017eek argued in his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology<\/em>, ideology is not to be found in our conscious opinions or convictions but, as Marx suggested, in our everyday practices. Explicit opinions are important, but they serve as symptoms to be interpreted rather than statements to be taken at face value.<\/p>\n

Racism, for example. \u017di\u017eek recommends that we look for symptomatic contradictions, as when the anti-Semite claims that the Jews are both arch-capitalist exploiters and <\/em>Bolshevik subversives, that they are both excessively tied to their overly particular tradition and <\/em>deracinated cosmopolitans undercutting national traditions. In the Jim Crow South, blacks were presented simultaneously as childlike innocents needing the guidance of whites and<\/em> as brutal sexual predators. In contemporary America, Mexican immigrants are viewed at once as lay-abouts burdening our social welfare system and <\/em>as relentless workaholics who are stealing all our jobs.<\/p>\n

These contradictions don\u2019t show that ideology is \u201cirrational\u201d \u2014 the problem is exactly the opposite, that there are too many<\/em> reasons supporting their views. \u017di\u017eek argues that these piled-up rationalizations demonstrate that something else is going on.<\/p>\n

A similar sense that something else is going on always strikes me when I read a review of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s work in the mainstream media. (A recent example is John Gray\u2019s review of two of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s books in the New York Review of Books<\/em>, to which \u017di\u017eek has responded.) Now academics are always ill-used in the mainstream press, particularly if they deal in abstract concepts and refer to a lot of European philosophers. Yet there\u2019s something special about the treatment of \u017di\u017eek. In what has become a kind of ritual, the reader of a review of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s work always learns that \u017di\u017eek is simultaneously hugely politically dangerous and<\/em> a clown with no political program whatsoever, that he is an apologist for the worst excesses of twentieth-century Communism and<\/em> a total right-wing reactionary, both a world-famous left-wing intellectual and<\/em> an anti-Semite to rival Hitler himself.<\/p>\n

The goal is not so much to give an account of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s arguments and weigh their merits as to inoculate readers against \u017di\u017eek\u2019s ideas so they feel comfortable dismissing them. To find left-wing thinkers and movements simultaneously laughable and dangerous, disorganized and totalitarian, overly idealistic and driven by a lust for power is to suggest: there is no alternative<\/em>. Rather than simply knocking around a poor, misunderstood academic in the public square, it is an attempt to shut down debate on the basic structure of our society. The rolling disaster of contemporary capitalism \u2014 war, crisis, hyper-exploitation of workers, looming environmental catastrophe \u2014 demands that we think boldly and creatively to develop some kind of livable alternative. \u017di\u017eek can help.<\/p>\n

The biggest obstacle facing the reader of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s work is not the academic trappings \u2014 the technical terms, the references to other thinkers \u2014 but a writing style that defies convention. Broadly speaking, the general expectation of argumentative writing is that it will lay out a more or less straightforward chain of reasons supporting a clear central claim. Even though we acknowledge that this format is almost never encountered in its pure form, it still remains a kind of ideal. In \u017di\u017eek\u2019s writing, though, it\u2019s difficult to pick out anything like a \u201cthesis statement,\u201d and the argument most often proceeds via intuitive leaps rather than tight chains of reasoning. This is true even of pieces that are more or less totally non-academic, and it is doubtless one of the reasons his work is so often misunderstood. One thing I hope to show here, though, is that his method fits with his goals and with the kinds of phenomena he is trying to get at. Although \u017di\u017eek\u2019s work can be difficult to get into at first, he is one of the most engaging and thought-provoking writers working in philosophy today, with a unique ability to get people excited about philosophy and critical theory. He is, in short, a gateway drug, and I\u2019m the pusher.<\/p>\n

I<\/strong><\/p>\n

Already in this brief discussion of ideology, one of the most consistent features of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s work shines through: his fascination with contradictions and reversals. \u017di\u017eek will frequently present what he views as a commonly accepted belief, then turn around and ask, \u201cBut is not the exact opposite the case?!\u201d And then, as one continues reading, it often begins to seem as though the forcefully asserted opposite view is not quite \u017di\u017eek\u2019s own; it too gets called into question, with the surprising result that the first na\u00efve view begins to look somehow less na\u00efve.<\/p>\n

The initial reversal can sometimes look alarmingly like a cheap, Christopher Hitchens-style contrarianism, particularly since \u017di\u017eek\u2019s political writings often start with a mainstream liberal view and then assert one that sounds much more right-wing. Yet the point is not simply to \u201cprovoke\u201d liberals or to play devil\u2019s advocate. Rather, these reversals are part of a strategy to keep the thought in motion. Instead of proposing a solution or finding a resting place, \u017di\u017eek relentlessly seeks out further conflicts and contradictions, carrying out what Marx called \u201cthe ruthless criticism of everything existing.\u201d The goal is not to arrive at a settled view, but to achieve greater clarity about what is really at issue, about what is really at stake in a given debate.<\/p>\n

And what is always at stake is a conflict<\/em>, because for \u017di\u017eek, society is always riven with conflict and contradiction. That\u2019s why ideology produces mutually conflicting answers \u2014 it\u2019s responding to an underlying reality that is inherently contradictory, a struggle so deep and irreconcilable that it can\u2019t directly be put into words. Nothing is a complete and harmonious whole, from quarks all the way up to the most abstract philosophical ideal. Nothing is inherently stable, but only temporarily stabilized. It\u2019s not that there are first positions that then come into conflict \u2014 all our positions amount to a kind of \u201cfall-out\u201d of our attempts to manage this ultimately unmanageable conflict.<\/span><\/p>\n

Remaining faithful to the Marxist tradition, \u017di\u017eek believes that the most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is \u201cclass struggle.\u201d The \u201cstruggle\u201d is not between two pre-existing classes \u2014 the working class and the capitalist or owner class \u2014 that happen to enter into some kind of conflict. These two classes are the \u201cfallout\u201d of capitalism, which is itself conflictual in nature: people \u201cworked\u201d before capitalism, but the working class as a massive population of landless laborers who must sell their labor power to survive only came about as a result of capitalist development. Similarly, there were rich people before capitalism, but not a class of people who sought to extract profits from this \u201cfree\u201d labor power. The conflict is the system, the system the conflict.<\/p>\n

\u201cClass struggle\u201d is important for \u017di\u017eek because it produces two completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world \u2014 the difference between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a difference of opinion, it is a completely different framework. Reasonable people from \u201cboth sides\u201d cannot come together and hash out a compromise that takes everyone\u2019s interests into account. The \u201cmiddle ground\u201d is an unbridgeable chasm, and ideology represents our attempts to paper over and ignore that chasm.<\/p>\n

So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican immigrant as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really<\/em> at stake can\u2019t be a conflict between cultures, because for \u017di\u017eek 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\u2019t exist in the first place. No, the conflict is inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans aren\u2019t taking \u201cour\u201d jobs \u2014 the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress wages, with no interest in who they pay.<\/p>\n

II.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

The example of immigration demonstrates that conflict is never truly eliminated, but can be shifted. The task of the critic is to shift the conflict back<\/em> to its proper place. Since straightforward argument presupposes a shared frame of reference, it is not a suitable tool for carrying out the kind of frame-shifting that \u017di\u017eek is trying to achieve. More indirect methods are necessary.<\/p>\n

One of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s primary tactics for shifting the frame of reference is overidentification. This strategy grows out of his experience under the Communist regime in Yugoslavia. Observing his country\u2019s political life, \u017di\u017eek came to a paradoxical realization: the fact that no one \u201creally\u201d bought into the official socialist ideology was not an obstacle for the rulers \u2014 cynical distance was part of their strategy for maintaining control. In this situation, \u017di\u017eek proposed, the best way to resist was to take the ruling ideology at its word, na\u00efvely demanding that the leaders fulfill the promise of their ideals.<\/p>\n

The political situation in the contemporary West is not as straightforward, but \u017di\u017eek continues to carry out a version of this strategy of overidentification in his political writings. His diagnosis of the basic political situation is found in his 1993 book Tarrying With the Negative<\/em>, where he claims that mainstream liberal political leaders are fundamentally complicit with right-wing nationalism, using it as a tool in their attempt to maintain the capitalist status quo. On the one hand, right-wing outbursts and movements serve as helpful distractions, diverting people\u2019s energy away from the real problem (people who might otherwise be rioting against bank bailouts are demanding to see Obama\u2019s birth certificate, or arguing that birthers are crazy). On the other hand, they serve as an ever-present threat, as in the demands for the Greek electorate to approve of the E.U.-I.M.F. program, lest fascism overrun the land. One can see both sides of this dynamic in the Democratic Party\u2019s political strategy: on the one hand, they must continually make unfortunate concessions to the political right out of a supposed \u201crealism,\u201d but on the other hand, they present themselves as the only thing standing between us and the unmitigated horror of a Tea Party government.<\/p>\n

In this situation, where liberals are continually conceding that the right wing is expressing \u201clegitimate concerns,\u201d \u017di\u017eek says essentially: yes, they are expressing legitimate concerns, but not the ones they think they\u2019re expressing<\/em>. To return to the immigration example, \u017di\u017eek would proceed by agreeing that right-wing outbursts should be taken seriously \u2014 not as signs of the need for a more homogeneous culture, or for preserving American jobs, or for keeping foreigners from overwhelming the welfare state, but as symptoms of the disruptive contradictions of capitalism. Similarly, when liberals acknowledge that conservatives have a point about the need to preserve \u201cthe European tradition\u201d or \u201cthe Christian heritage,\u201d \u017di\u017eek agrees that they do indeed have a point: we absolutely need to preserve the European tradition of radical revolution and the Christian heritage of radical equality! He shifts the conflict from one between liberals and conservatives to the one at the heart of the cultural tradition itself.<\/p>\n

This strategy of overidentification \u2014 which can be summarized in the vertiginous formula, \u201cYes, of course I agree completely, but aren\u2019t you actually completely wrong?!<\/em>\u201d \u2014 may be difficult to follow, but it produces jolting shifts that could not easily be produced any other way.<\/p>\n

III.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his more academic texts, \u017di\u017eek rarely states his own view directly, but routes it through the great thinkers of contradiction: above all, the German Idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan \u2014 two thinkers who proceed through dialogue and whose own views are notoriously difficult to decipher. This coupling of Lacan and Hegel is absolutely crucial for him. In fact, in the introduction to his latest major work, Less Than Nothing<\/em>, he claims that for him and his close intellectual comrades, \u201cwhatever we were doing, the underlying axiom was that reading Hegel through Lacan (and vice versa) was our unsurpassable horizon.\u201d Other thinkers are also extremely important to him \u2014 most notably Marx, another great thinker of contradiction who worked primarily in the mode of critique \u2014 but none so much as these two.<\/p>\n

Yet it should be emphasized that this combination is in many ways counterintuitive, if only because Lacan is himself very distrustful of Hegel\u2019s philosophy, and most so in the very works that are central for \u017di\u017eek. This is far from the only example of a counterintuitive pairing in \u017di\u017eek\u2019s work \u2014 one of his earliest books is entitled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock<\/em>, dedicated to explaining Lacan\u2019s psychoanalytic concepts through Hitchcock\u2019s films. Similarly, he can pair Kant with Blade Runner<\/em> or Schelling with Lassie Come Home<\/em>. He can explain Hegel by means of an obscene joke, and he can end a book on the subversive potential of Christianity with a meditation on a cheap candy with a toy in the middle (the \u201cKinder Egg\u201d). He calls these \u201cshort-circuits,\u201d unexpected pairings that produce striking insights. The goal is not to show how the two fields are \u201cactually\u201d connected in a previously unseen way. \u201cThe reader should not simply have learned something new,\u201d he says. \u201cThe point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another \u2014 disturbing \u2014 side of something he or she knew all the time.\u201d The same could be said of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s work as a whole: the point isn\u2019t so much to learn about a topic as to be jolted into a new (and yes, disturbing) perspective on the familiar.<\/p>\n

IV.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like Marx\u2019s, \u017di\u017eek\u2019s \u201cruthless critique of everything existing\u201d doesn\u2019t critique \u201cboth sides\u201d in a conflict equally. Contradictions are always asymmetrical<\/em>. In the conflict between the capitalists and the workers, for example, it isn\u2019t a matter of two different, equally limited viewpoints. In the ultimate short-circuit, the particular position of the workers represents the \u201ctruth\u201d of the entire situation \u2014 the worker embodies<\/em> the contradiction of capitalism. Similarly, the relationship between men and women in our male-dominated society cannot be accounted for in terms of stable complementary roles for the two sexes \u2014 in another short-circuit, the woman\u2019s position directly reveals the central contradiction around which the entire society is structured.<\/p>\n

In short, for \u017di\u017eek, one must <\/em>take sides in order to have access to the truth. Truth is not \u201cuniversal\u201d in the traditional sense of applying equally in every situation \u2014 each situation has its own truth. In Less Than Nothing<\/em>, \u017di\u017eek explains this dynamic in terms of the relationship between the universal and the particular, a topic that has bedeviled philosophers for centuries. Whereas we might normally view a \u201cuniversal\u201d as an unattainable ideal like justice or democracy that we must always strive to approximate in our particular circumstances, \u017di\u017eek takes the opposite view: particular societies aren\u2019t inadequate compared to the universal, but rather the very idea of the universal arises out of the inherent inadequacies of every particular system. In other words, the truly universal dimension is not the noble ideal, but the complaint \u2014 what unites us is not our devotion to high ideals and deep human values, but the fact that the world sucks, everywhere.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek does not hold out the utopian hope of eliminating all conflict \u2014 in fact, he believes our supposedly \u201cpost-ideological\u201d era is blinded by the truly utopian hope that all genuine conflicts might be resolved, allowing the system of liberal-democratic capitalism to go on more or less forever. What \u017di\u017eek hopes for, in tracking down the contradiction at the heart of our society and identifying with the class that embodies it, is not that the world will no longer suck, but that it will no longer suck in this particular way<\/em>, that we will no longer be stuck in this particular <\/em>vicious cycle, that we can somehow find a way to stop frantically grasping at rationalizations for our self-destructive fixations and do something else \u2014 in short, to jolt us into the realization that there is <\/em>an alternative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to Read \u017di\u017eek by Adam Kotsko September 2nd, 2012 SLAVOJ \u017dI\u017dEK, a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia, is one of the few academics to have achieved a degree of genuine popularity among general readers. He regularly lectures to overflow crowds, is the subject of a documentary film (called simply \u017di\u017eek!), and surely counts as … Continue reading “kotsko on \u017d”<\/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":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9232","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=9232"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9235,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9232\/revisions\/9235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}