In Defense Of Lost Causes [Paperback]

If for nothing else, you should buy this book because it engages, in a direct and rigorous fashion, with the thought of various luminaries of the Left. While Zizek's discussions of Mao, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Robespierre are stirring in their own right, his assessments of Antonio Negri, Ernesto Laclau, Simon Critchley and fellow-traveler Alain Badiou are acute and incisive. Of especial interest is his careful evaluation of the latent ambiguities in Badiou's political thought, probing its interstices and interrogating its silences. Also crucial is Zizek's neo-Deleuzian injunction to `repeat' Lenin, to actualize the multiple virtualities that Lenin missed. The importance of Zizek for our time lies in his continued exhortation to look beneath the post-structuralist affirmations of endless differentiation, creativity and diversification- tropes that are in no way inimical to the `permanent revolution' of global capitalism- and discern the underlying sameness beneath the protean flux. For instance, what is repressed/disavowed in the First World's triumphalist discourses on limitless mobility and decentralized organization, what is its hidden subtext? As Boltanski and Chiapello have told us in The New Spirit Of Capitalism, the movement of some requires the inertia of others- the nomadic flight of today's jet-setting executive is made possible by the sweatshop worker, the office janitor, outsourced labor. As such, the properly `transcritical' attitude (Kojin Karatani) is to refrain from treating `globalization' as a revolutionary break, a `cut' in history- we must identify the residual sediments of the past that persist in our purportedly `postmodern' age (traces of premodern feudalism in Japan, the predominance of noncapitalist forms of production in South America). This theory of `uneven development' means that we should regard all celebratory affirmations of globalization with extreme suspicion.

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This book is divided against itself: parts of it are outstanding while other parts are esoteric and non-sense other than for members of a strange sect of what I call novo-Marxists.

Its basic theses that failures of the actual praxis of revolutions do not negate some of their values and that global capitalism should not be accepted as irreplaceable by better alternatives are well taken. The discussions of coping with biogenetics are fascinating. And many other insights make the book as a whole worth reading.

However, instead of focusing on main theses and working out coherent alternatives to global capitalism, or at least indicating ways to inventing such alternatives, the book gets lost in at least four labyrinths: (1) It devotes a lot of space to debates with other "sect members" on esoteric issues and responses to their criticism of the author's writings; (2) the book is one-dimensional in its assumptions on human psychology, relying i on some versions of Lacan and Lacanian reinterpretations of Freud, completely ignoring alternative and not less "scientific" schools of psychology; (3) it is captive to Marxian paradigms, making artificial efforts to fit important ideas into outdated language games, instead of bravely developing new paradigms; and (4) the authors pins his hopes on "trust in the people" without any non-anecdotal justification either in history or social sciences.

The fourth error is the most serious of all, undermining the main thrust of the book. The author relies on the new global excluded population of slum-dwellers as the new "good old Marxist...proletarian revolutionary subject " (page 425), where one should look for "signs of the new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives: they will be the germs of the future." (page 426). This ignores the realities of slum populations as revealed in empirical studies, ignores radical differences between various groups of slum populations, and leaves out of account the near-certainty that if they should endanger a state or the global order, they will be easily and effectively "repressed" in one way or another.

The author demonstrates in this book ability to contribute to an urgently needed paradigmatic global revolution, but not as long as he is captive to phantasm. What is really needed is some kind of a "Global Leviathan" containing the danger of "the acts of a single socio-political agent [who] can really alter and even interrupt the global historical process [for the worse, up to global calamity] (page 421, my additions in brackets) and to take care of new forms of the "common" as rightly discussed by the author. But such a Global Leviathan can probably only take the form of an authoritative oligarchy of main powers, contrary to from the dreams of the authors.

To make a real contribution of at least some historic significance, the author needs a good dose of "subtraction" (to use a favorite term of the book) from the ideological traps in which this book is caught.

Professor Yehezkel Dror
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
msdror@mscc.huji.ac.il

Over the recent past, Slavoj Zizek has attracted a kind of cult followership. Some devotees attend to each of his public appearances, consult all his interventions on the internet, and voraciously read each and every volume that he publishes at an amazing pace. For others, he is a proto-terrorist on the loose, and his brand mix of Freudism and Marxism sets back the intellectual clock to the worst hours of leftist dogmatism. For my part, although I am far from sharing Zizek's political orientation, I find reading the Slovenian social scientist a useful distraction from more conventional readings, as well as a useful mind-stretching exercise. Like many other readers, I read Zizek for fun.

But reading In Defense of Lost Causes made me think again about why I took to reading his works with a kind of compulsive frenzy. I can think of several reasons. First, there is the shock of provocation, the "can he really mean that?" feeling when you stumble across sentences like "We need to reinvent revolutionary terror", "Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It is called Democracy" or "The problem with Hitler is that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not 'essential' enough", or again chapters titled "How Stalin Saved the Humanity of Man" or "Give the Dictatorship of the Proletariat a Chance!"

So my first impulse was to check out his politics, so as to determine whether he really meant what he wrote. In fact, it took me a while to see clearly through his political agenda, as the first work I read (The Parallax View) was not very explicit in that respect. But In Defense of Lost Causes presents a clear overview on where Zizek stands with respect to issues of democracy, revolutionary terror, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the New Left agenda, or the antiglobalization movement. And there is only one conclusion I could draw: when he writes something, he means it.

The second element that makes reading Zizek an addictive pastime is the broad array of his references, spanning from pop culture to classical philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, or modern critical theorists like Badiou, Laclau, Negri, Mouffe or Deleuze. Readers who praise Zizek's references to pop culture, his ability to mix high-brow references to continental philosophers with astute commentaries of Hollywood productions, might be frustrated with this volume. Zizek has only one single chapter on popular movies and novels. But his analysis of the commonalities in Michael Crichton's novels (fear of women) or in Steven Spielberg dramas (the rebuilding of a family), or his disclosure of the subversive element in Zack Snider's 300 (the film can be viewed as an apology of resistance to US imperialism) are pure Zizek vintage.

Zizek also reveals himself as a classical music lover, revisiting the debate on whether Dmitri Shostakovitch was a faithful Soviet composer or a closet dissident, or comparing him to the fate of Sergei Prokofiev, the other great name of Soviet music, who had a more tormented relationship to the regime. Other passages include an in-depth analysis of Robert Schumann's Humoresque, a piano piece with the vocal line reduced to silence, or the hint that Beethoven implanted a subversive irony toward the ideal of universal brotherhood in his Ninth Symphony's Ode to Joy.

The third reason that makes me relish Zizek is because I share with him a cultural horizon that tends to get lost in the current intellectual debate. Zizek bears testimony to a time when conservative intellectuals could engage their radical brethren on a discussion about dialectic materialism or the subversive element in Freud's writings. Zizek refers to marxism and psychoanalysis because they are "not only theories about struggle, but theories which are themselves engaged in a struggle". Here struggle should not be understood solely in terms of politics and ideology, but as a struggle within the self, an inner strive that leads to a higher form of self-consciousness. This is why many among the best conservative intellectuals, and this also includes the neo-cons, were former marxists, or at least defined their thought in relation to marxism.

According to Zizek, we now live in a post-ideological world, not in the conventional sense that we are at least liberated from the burden of great ideological narratives, but in the more cynical sense that power no longer needs to legitimize its rule and now exposes itself naked. The search for profit, the debasement of any intellectual pursuit, the acknowledgement of the use of torture are now part of our political horizon. This situation satisfies him: what Zizek hates the most is the recuperation of subversive discourses by the powers that be, who treat radical theorists as "harmless gadflies who sting us and thus awaken us to the inconsistencies and imperfection of our democratic enterprise."

Zizek wants no part in this legitimation business. Neither harmless gadfly nor amusing pet, he would like to rekindle the flame of radicalism that burned out after the seventies. But as we know, history only repeats itself as farce.

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