Toughen Up

The New Republic really is the peak of “liberal” mediocrity.  Let’s be frank for a moment and state flat out that the people who are faithfully pouring over the pages of TNR are not likely to be paying much attention to Zizek; so a hit piece on him which teeters on some of his feverish “obscenities” pulled wildly out of context, once intended to shake us from the fog of old ways of speaking, will probably put a real dent in his rep among their readership of zionist-loving boners.  Except they probz already hate him in the abstract anyway.

I’m having a hard time even finishing the piece.  Can you really take seriously any article that begins with a hardly subtle appeal to lowbrow nationalistic fury?

What Zizek really believes about America and torture can be seen in his new book, Violence, when he discusses the notorious torture photos from Abu Ghraib: “Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people; in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.” Torture, far from being a betrayal of American values actually offers “a direct insight into American values, into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the U.S. way of life.” This, to Zizek’s many admirers, is more like it.

What wisdom can possibly come from any dickhead who doesn’t recognize the grotesque pornography American media has wound itself into?  Is that why the footage of a 80 year old woman being mugged and beaten in her stairwell is replayed ad nauseum on the 10 o’clock news for better ratings, and why we watch real people hopelessly ruin their ruined lives in a minstrel show called Celebrity Rehab? It’s only the tip of an iceburg of shallow analysis and masturbatory outrage, all predicated on an astoundingly myopic reading, if he even read Zizek, or any theory written in the last century, at all–not understanding why Heidegger was significant precisely because of his Nazi allegiance, for example, is actually embarrassing when used in support of smearing Zizek as anti-Semetic.  Either you never read Heidegger or Zizek, or you’re too stupid to have understood it.  Real talk.

Zizek is not Derrida, but later writings of Derrida had a beautiful concern for the legacy that post-structuralism would leave, an attention to the paralysis of nihlism.  I think Zizek, like Spivak and Cornell, is born from the trajectories of these writings, from Levinas’, too; the point is that he would reject them.  The eventual gift of Derrida would be certainty of the moment, but not ever of forever.  It is the recognition of the wish for stasis as a suicidal impulse.  It would be a mistake to confuse that with futurelessness–in fact, it is pure faith in the newness of the moment.  From “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” in 1987:

The most rigorous deconstruction has never claimed…to be possible…For a deconstructive operation possibility would rather be the danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible approaches.  The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible: that is…of the other–the experience of the other as the invention of the impossible, in other words, as the only possible invention.

Zizek might or might not like that used in support of him, but my pleasure in Zizek does not come from my agreement (I don’t, sometimes), it comes from my appreciation for his use of, but not dogmatic reliance upon, what has come before.  He pushes it towards something new, and does not do so by falling into the trap of disavowing the past, nor ignoring the differences which reformulate readable historical schemas.  One of the mistakes people make reading Derrida/et al. is conceiving of “deconstruction” as a dogma rather than a process, like its an inversion of philosophy.  It’s not.  It doesn’t necessarily dismantle and abandon, but is ultimately only a means of examining how meaning and political agency function.

What is most sad about the left, in privileged Europe even moreso than America I think, is perhaps how it cowers in absolute terror of violence.  We crave safety, to be coddled by some outside authority who will relieve us of the duty of engagement, so we find ourselves limp and passive (moreso than ever with constantly expanding new media and the overwhelming flow of information).  Europe feigns disgust at the brute thuggishness of American culture, and yet implicitly and deeply rely on our military and economic muscles, and even more ironically are the ones finding themselves in a curious struggle with a powerful surge of anti-Islamo fascism.  Anyone who has sat through a community action meeting knows: consensus doesn’t work.  Some voices?  They don’t deserve to be heard.

That’s scary and dangerous and violent (in a dialectic sense), but we need to outgrow the insistence on what’s easy and what has already been written.  When hateful appeals to the most reptilian tendencies are allowed equal stage time alongside ethically-based politics, we get fascists holding office in ostensibly “democratic” nations right now, this very moment.  On the surface maybe the call to marginalize certain voices sounds the same, but is it?  And is that an avoidable condition?  One is a singular and shortsighted view of surrounding circumstances, and the other is born from a necessary abstraction of the human experience.  Even if it were possible to dismantle hierarchy entirely, would it be desirable?  (I’d say no to both.)

What, then, is the way out of this deadlock? Balibar ends with an ambiguous reference to Mahatma Gandhi. It is true that Gandhi’s formula “Be yourself the change you would like to see in the world” encapsulates perfectly the basic attitude of emancipatory change: do not wait for the “objective process” to generate the expected/desired change, since if you just wait for it, it will never come; instead, throw YOURSELF into it, BE this change, take upon yourself the risk of enacting it directly. However, is not the ultimate limitation of Gandhi’s strategy that it only works against a liberal-democratic regime which refers to certain minimal ethico-political standards, i.e., in which, to put it in pathetic terms, those in power still “have conscience.” Recall Gandhi’s reply, in the late 1930s, to the question of what should the Jews in Germany do against Hitler: they should commit a collective suicide and thus arouse the conscience of the world… One can easily imagine what the Nazi reaction to it would have been: OK, we will help you, where do you want the poison to be delivered to you? (from the Obscenity of Human Rights)

The radical margins will never be the center, nor should they be.  They have one of the most critical jobs of all, which is to be critical.  It seems to be more accurately the TNR tradition of “liberalism” which enables the most devestating violence done in its honor, the consequence of handing over absolute and unwavering loyalty to a certain worldview as the ultimate truth, and never allowing a pause to challenge one’s own beliefs.  What else could explain excusing the zionist massacres and secret horrors which I’m sure will not unfold themselves for years to come as if they were done in “self-defense” of preserving a virtuous, democracy-loving nation committed to preserving human dignity?  How do you deny it?  How do you dismiss it from the ethical imagination?  And how, most repulsively of all, do you justify it by exploiting one of the single most monstrous events in human history?  Zizek pulls a quote to explain:

Arthur Koestler, the great anti-Communist convert proposed a profound insight: “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”

Zizek dares to imagine new permutations on old themes.  For those who crave a single answer written in a single book, that’s a mighty threatening drive he’s got.  But in the end, as Arednt says, we must push ourselves towards “thinking without a banister.”