Hugo-Yugo

To: Retort
Via: TJC, AG

[Here are two further responses to Zizek's 15 November 2007 essay "Resistance is Surrender" (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/zize01_.html) in the London Review of Books.  A letter by TJC, forthcoming in the LRB, and a longer riposte, just submitted to the LRB, send to us by Andrej, who notes: "David takes on my countryman Slavoj Zizek. I enjoyed immensely this critique of the intellectual class and Chavez-Zizek comparison (note the 'Wallersteinian twist' at the end: a foretaste of our forthcoming book on world-systems and anarchism)." IB] 


To: The Editor, LRB

Convinced, nay, chastened by Slavoj Zizek's arguments for a new Left realism, I shall be campaigning over the next months to dissuade those planning to 'save their beautiful souls' in street protests against the bombing of Iran from doing any such thing.  And I have written a letter to my congresswoman (she's a bit of an anti-war firebrand, so Zizek will forgive me if my intervention fails to have immediate results), along the lines:  'While respectfully recognizing the U.S. state's representation of my interests, and its right and duty to protect them by force of arms, might I propose that you propose that the strike against Iranian facilities be limited to 50 bunker-busters per nuclear installation, with a total TNT not exceeding, say, half the Hiroshima device per site?  And could I put in a plea for restraint in the use of depleted uranium?  I realize this may be intruding too far on the administration's prerogatives, but would you perhaps suggest, to those in the know, double-checking of intelligence before the targets are finally decided on?  Oh yes, collateral damage...  Couldn't we make a strictly-between-presidents offer of undercover medical help, QUDS-force to QUDS-force, in the unlikely event?'

These seem to me 'strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands.'  They're sure to do the trick.

T. J. Clark, Berkeley

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Referendum on Zizek?
David Graeber
Goldsmiths College, London
December 2007
 
Slavoj Zizek is a delightful provocateur and an extraordinarily gifted intellectual comedian. One day he's denouncing do-gooder capitalists like George Soros by insisting capitalism is an irredeemable system of structural violence; a few weeks later, he's informing the Left there's no chance of ever overcoming capitalism, but they should take hope in the fact that "we can do it better". One day he's embracing Lenin as a man who aim was to destroy all states forever' the next he's arguing the state must be maintained as the only possible remaining bulwark against capitalism. To respond to such statements as if they educed a consistent political position seems slightly oafish. Still, if you choose someone like this as a book reviewer,  your readers are unlikely to learn much about the book. Worse, "Resistance is Surrender," which purports to be a review of Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding, is clearly intended less as a review than as a political intervention aimed to head off any possibility that LRB's readers might give serious consideration to its message.

That would be unfortunate.

Critchley's book is important, it seems to me, because it is a kind of overture. It is almost unheard of for professional intellectuals—philosophers, no less—to engage seriously with radical social movements. The reason is simple enough: it requires listening. The last decade has seen a profound change in world politics, as social movements from Argentina to Japan increasingly reject the very idea of seizing state power, of creating freedom at the point of a gun, and began instead concentrating on the reinvention of new forms of democracy, sociality, and exchange. The intellectual classes have never known quite what make of it. Most reacted with condescension when the global justice movement first appeared on the horizon around 2000; some soon switched to giddy enthusiasm, followed by a sense of hurt dismay on discovering the movement wasn't looking for a vanguard. Over the last few years, as it has become apparent that revolutionary transformation of the sort the movement aims to achieve is going to take a great deal of time and patience, former intellectual allies have begun tumbling over each other to abandon ship, and find some "progressive capitalists" to whom to sell their souls (though so far, without a great deal of success). 

Critchley is one of the few who has made a serious effort to listen, to entertain the possibility, in effect, that those who are actively engaged in fighting capitalism and its empires might themselves have something relevant to say, to try to understand what they are trying to achieve, and how the intellectual tools at his disposal might be helpful. The book does not simply propound a Levinasian ethics, understood as an infinite responsibility towards otherness, it is in itself an attempt to practice it. Zizek appears to object to this project on principle (rather oddly, considering he endorses the book in precisely these terms on his blurb on the back cover). When you shave away the posturing, his real message to LRB's reviewers is simple: you are intellectuals. Intellectuals have always been, and always must be, whores to power in some form or another. Obviously, Zizek can't quite out and say this: so he conveys it in the form of a series of rather dishonest rhetorical maneuvers, mostly revolving around deployment of the term "we". "We" are intellectuals, "we" are the Left (since the Left apparently consists primarily of intellectuals), but we also seem to include anyone from Tony Blair and the Democratic Party to the current rulers of the People's Republic of China. As a result "we" obviously cannot stand opposed on principle to cruise missiles and interrogation chambers because our real brothers and sisters are not those being blown up by or strung up in them, but rather, those pushing the buttons and calculating stress positions.

Well, of course we can make that choice if we like. For most of human history, those who made their livings by writing mostly have. Still, I'd offer two points readers might wish to consider:

First, capitalism will not really be around forever. An engine of infinite expansion and accumulation cannot, by definition, continue forever in a finite world. Now that India and China are buying in as full players, it seems reasonable to assume that within at most 50 years, the system will hit its physical limits. Whatever we end up with at that point, it will not be a system of infinite expansion. Therefore it will not be capitalism. It will be something else. However, there is no guarantee that this something will be better. It might be considerably worse. Might we not do well to at least consider what something better might be like? If nothing else it seems an odd moment to call off all speculation about alternatives. And if one does wish to think about alternatives to capitalism, how better to do this than to engage with those building such alternatives in the present?
 
Second, to be able to do this, we will probably have to learn to get over ourselves a little. This is the eventuality against which Zizek seems to be making his heroic stand. After all, why choose Chavez? Why not, say, Evo Morales, who unlike Chavez really was placed in power by, and remains answerable to, genuine social movements? Obviously: for that very reason. Could we really imagine someone like Zizek, even in his fantasies, patiently listening to the demands of the directly democratic assemblies of El Alto? Chavez, on the other hand, is precisely the political figure Zizek would wish himself to be: a virtuoso performer and political comedian holding power with no real responsibilities to anyone except the pleasure of his audience. Sure, it's a seductive fantasy. But it's precisely the fantasy we have to get past if we want to make a genuine difference in the world.