Book Review / ANDREW BAST

We’re All Just Left Joking Around

Slavoj Žižek

• In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Žižek (Verso Books, 2008, 208 pgs.)

Jennifer Anniston is a terrorist. This is how low leftist intellectuals have sunk. Set aside for a moment what a downright silly moniker a leftist intellectual has become and instead consider this: theory-hungry thinkers are now spending $34.95 on a hulking hardcover book — In Defense of Lost Causes — by the rambling, more-intellectual-than-thou Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. What to expect? Riffing on Hollywood’s The Break-Up, Žižek argues that when Anniston screams at co-star Vince Vaughan, “I don’t want you to wash the dishes — I want you to want to wash the dishes!” this silver-screen trope is more than a spoof on the tedious bickering natural to cohabitation. Žižek writes that it is, “the minimal reflexivity of desire, its ‘terrorist’ demand.” Come again? This is bunk by the bulk, and amid the dissonant yammering that accompanies so much of politics today, the absurdity of In Defense of Lost Causes offers an opportune moment to state outright that, in this ripe political moment, the intellectual culture of the left is lost as a comical farce, and what is most devastating? Everyone just seems to be laughing along.

Where to begin with Žižek? The 59 year old philosopher lectures and publishes widely. Wearing a furry gray beard and an achingly anguished visage, in conversation he hustles as if unable to get to the next point quickly enough. His books such as Enjoy Your Symptom!, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and The Ticklish Subject, while difficult to categorize, might be deemed postmodern: Lacanian in approach, expansive in scope, and often about film. In a profile, the New Yorker asked, seemingly without a hint of irony, “He may appear to be a serious leftist intellectual, but is it not the case that he is in fact a comedian?” The ostensible topic of In Defense of Lost Causes, however, isn’t so funny: revolutionary terror. At times he cherishes it, at times he dissects it, but all in all, Žižek loses focus, and with it, his case. The book is neither leftist, nor comedy, nor brilliant, but instead a pioneering work in a newfound genre: that of overlearned, underdisciplined, philosophical blogger.

Earlier this semester, Žižek spoke to a sold-out audience at the Graduate Center. Billed as the world’s “most controversial public intellectual,” he packs lecture halls full of graduate students across the country. It would be a dirty fallacy to take Žižek as the intellectual barometer of today’s wider academic scene, but on several levels, his popularity points to symptoms with which few would disagree: the academy’s insularity, reliance on regimented and specialized fields of study, and perversely maniacal obsession with an exclusive, intellectual lexicon. (Do not be fooled, the lot of such pedantic prose makes trade book and newspaper editors cringe.) Put simply: not much of the public is very interested in faddish tropes about Lacan, determinate negation, and the former actress from Friends. The leftist public intellectual, here, has become a joke.

———

In Defense of Lost Causes argues a case for terrorism. Only, in whittling down the lumbering prose, the entire endeavor is more an exercise in rhetorical high jinks than a plan for politics. Terrorism, for Žižek, is always caught up in a discursive headache: i.e. “The problem here is not terror as such — our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror.” In other words, the plan is to learn from past revolutionary moments — circa France in 1789 or Russia in 1917. As a scholarly endeavor, understanding previous revolutions is an entirely worthwhile undertaking. At points, Žižek even jettisons his confused rhetoric and reflects eloquently about the revolutionary ideals of the Jacobins in France. Unfortunately, these moments are rare, and nestled amid long, bloggy entries that fail to coalesce into a coherent system. So, for instance, only a few pages after the Jacobins, he is wandering again through discussions of the “self-erasure of the Event.”

Žižek has attempted a radical co-optation of nothing short of the most overwrought phrase in political discourse today — terrorism — and for what? It remains unclear throughout for hundred-page stretches, as he rips out rambling entries entitled, “Transubstantiations of Marxism,” and, “A Domestication of Nietzsche.” His page-long paragraphs name drop worse than a Hollywood agent having an orgasm: in no time, he jumps from Sigmund Freud to Emmanuel Levinas to Jacques Lacan to Stephen King, all in a paragraph about, umm, fetishistic disavowal.

When writers get successful and old, they often emasculate their editors. Publishing your first book, your second book, probably your third book even, barring the unlikely fact that either of the first two broke out as bestsellers, the editor will run ruthless with red ink. Rewrite this chapter! Cut 200 pages! Granted, the orders usually come with more collegiality, the editor’s power to amend prevails. However, when an author becomes an asset — almost always so unfortunate! — she or he seizes the upper hand. Turning page after page of Žižek’s obese paragraphs, I thought of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which topped 1,000 pages, and rightfully so. Marx’s Capital took three big volumes; after all, he was busy explaining capitalism. After 500 pages of Žižek, though, I found myself still wondering what “lost cause,” exactly, he was defending. As I’d feared, the lost cause is Žižek’s book itself.

A few passages near the end pack enough punch to jolt the reader awake one last time. For instance, he writes: “Progressive liberals today often complain that they would like to join a ‘revolution’ (a more radical emancipatory political movement), but no matter how desperately they search for it, they just ‘do not see it’ (they do not see anywhere in the social space a political agent with the will and strength to seriously engage in such activity). While there is a moment of truth here, one should nonetheless also add that the very attitude of these liberals is in itself part of the problem: if one just waits to ‘see’ a revolutionary movement, it will, of course, never arise, and one will never see it.”

At worst this is manipulative, at best, naïve. Letting slide his useless employment of “scare quotes” that scar the text throughout, reading his rambling musings, one has to wonder if Žižek ought to be reminded that terror — not the CNN kind, but cold, hard, fear — hurts really bad. The fault does not lie with progressive liberals, some of whom in very concrete ways are fighting for justice, equality, economics, and institutions. The fault, dear Slavoj, lies not in our causes, but in ourselves: the intellectuals. The lacking ideal keeps the revolution at bay, not the do-gooders, desperately searching for nothing. It is I. And you.

———

What is frightening, simply put, is Žižek’s utter disregard for reality. In the final pages, he grapples with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 declaration of the “End of History,” undoubtedly a text to be reckoned with — moved past, if you will — in any serious discussion of where humanity is heading. Frankly, I breathed a sigh of relief, eager for his response. What came to mind was a final passage from Fukuyama’s essay: “The end of history will be a very sad time,” the long-time neoconservative and professor of international political economy at the School of Advanced International Study at Johns Hopkins wrote in the midst of the Cold War’s end almost two decades ago. “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

And in conclusion, what does Žižek offer? A slipshod analysis of the growing slum cities around the world, and why their dispossessed residents ought be tapped to find strategies for the rest of us to organize resistance against … against … It is still unclear. Global capitalism? Repressive state apparatuses? Overblown institutions? Feeble social welfare organizations? Privatized medical establishments? And on top of all this, if anyone should know, Žižek the intellectual should, that revolution rarely, if ever, comes from the peasants. History teaches us, in France, in Russia, in Iran, in Ethiopia, in China, the list goes on and on, that revolution comes from out-of-power elites. And their allegiance sworn to the intellectuals.

———

It is eerie that exactly four decades after 1968 the world pivots on such a precipitous cleft of history. The United States has been stripped of its high status as superpower. At the same time, China, the rising economic and neo-imperial power, will soon host an already politically charged Olympic games. The global economy — as integrated and confused as it has been since the early 20th century — stands on the cusp of an oil shock that could dwarf those of the late 1970s. Nationalism is resurgent the world over. (Need we recall the last time nationalism went overboard?) Food prices are sparking riots that are deposing leaders around the world. All that would be enough to make the story of this year worth a hundred novels, yet intellectuals face an even more momentous fact: in six months, the U.S. will elect a new president.

Yet, the more things change in the world, the more everything in the academy remains the same. Since 1968, the country has moved politically and economically to the right, fueled by conservative ideas from a new brand of think tank intellectuals. Reading Žižek and talking about the left, one is left with a troubling question. Should Democrats take power on Pennsylvania Avenue, would they be equipped with an idea machine to arm them with an array of new policies? After all, the academy is loaded with a cadre of overeducated liberals, is it not? Surely, then: eight years of Obama or Clinton would mean a new swing to the left in American politics fueled by intellectuals from the nation’s greatest universities. Imagine not only universal health care, but a resurgence of an innovative welfare state; a newly mobilized and reinvigorated working class; increased taxes to fund clean energy inventiveness; a restructuring of the public school system; and a cooperative foreign policy that champions international institutions, economic interdependence, and calms the threat of major war.

Are you laughing too? Do these prospects of real reform strike you as far fetched? Fear not, Žižek offers an insight on invigorating the electoral process. “What if part of the procedure to test the candidates for the U.S. presidency were also the public torture of the candidate? Say, a waterboarding of the candidates on the White House lawn, transmitted live to millions? Those qualified for the post of the leader of the free world would be those who could last longer than Mohammed’s two and a half minutes.” Such a comedian. Though, perhaps it would be funny if anyone was actually laughing.

Because those writing, say, torture policy weren’t laughing. There is no joking around in the more than 1,200 pages compiled by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel in The Torture Papers. What is more chilling — on several levels — is that those somber memos and legal codes were drafted by men and women who believed their course of action was the best for the country. And in response? Though it may sound wistful, one has to ask, do the intellectuals of the left — encompassed by all those who readily invoke the moniker — have anything remaining to believe in at all?

John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, lefty comedy nights. Why is all of this so funny? Privilege, perhaps.

It is always interesting to watch Obama at a late-night victory rally — everyone is dizzyingly exhilarated and dead tired at the same time — and he always closes those speeches with a seemingly impossible call, “Let’s get to work!”

Leftist intellectuals, losing badly for decades now, would be wise to commit with such vigor. What about tossing Žižek from the bookshelf and cutting cable TV from the diet and engineering an idea or, say, a thousand? Well, let us be serious. Just one great one would do.

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