Slavoj Zizek: Just an entertaining 'shock jock', or a sophisticated and engaged philosopher?
Slavoj Žižek has always been a controversial figure, attracting devotion and revile in equal measure. But it is only recently that I have noticed something of a popular front forming against him—with a combination of far left bloggers and everyday cynics rejecting him in synch. Of the former category, Louis Proyect, for one, accuses Žižek of being a ‘shock jock’ and has taken issue with his misrepresentation of Lenin merely to outrage liberals. Richard Seymour portrays him as a racist, cheering on pogroms against the Roma—a charge converging with those of rightwing critics such as Adam Kirsch writing in the New Republic regarding Žižek’s alleged anti-semitism. Why do I feel both these characterisations are unfair? And what do I feel is motivating this anti-Žižek front? This blog post attempts to answer both these questions by rebutting both Proyect and Seymour’s charges.
Proyect’s ‘Lone wolf’ Žižek
In his post Proyect makes a good point about the fact that Marxist theory needs to be a collective discussion rather than just pursued by a ‘lone wolf’ like Žižek theorising for maximum impact to secure their academic niche. Or, it would be a good argument if I believed that was all Žižek was up to; because whilst he does have the tendency to drift off into mere provocation at times, I would say that for those who follow his work he has a clear political project in confronting the tepid sentiment of our time and the numerous discourses of liberal anxiety. So insofar as Proyect’s charge is correct it is valid, but also insofar as one can intuit a necessity to Žižek’s provocations then the ‘lone wolf’ charge does not stick. After all, given the shrunken and introverted nature of the Marxist left, if to be a ‘lone wolf’ means to pursue your debates beyond its confines and not necessarily just in discussion with other Marxists in pursuit of doctrinal purity, then I don’t see that as such a bad thing. I came to Marx and Lenin very much mediated though Žižek’s work, and I imagine he has pulled many others in too to what would otherwise look like a fairly stale field of regurgitated orthodoxy. Similarly, for all our gripes about how he deploys and conceives ‘the idea of communism’ (included his flat out claim regarding the absolute, unmitigated disaster that were all communist regimes in the 20th century) he has nonetheless been instrumental in putting the word back on the semantic horizon of the left, creating the attenuated possibilities for an articulation of a more radical politics.
These good points to Žižek’s political project have to be balanced against the less appetising tendency of his critics to seize upon almost anything (from either a left or rightwing perspective) in order to hammer home their crusade against him. In the process it is little recognized how the motivations of these criticisms point to entirely opposite commitments. On the one hand, there are those critcisms of Žižek from a liberal-lefty, postmodernist academic perspective, which see him a regressive turn to an outdated politics of universalism, Marxism and revolution. For these critics it is Žižek’s unwillingness to concede to the new politics of difference that riles them. Into the mix is thrown a certain amount of jealousy regarding his academic stardom and ressentiment about his marriage to an Argentinian model. Needless to say, inasmuch as we conceive the left’s project as related to class struggle and the overthrowing of capitalism, few of these critics would be said to have anything but the vaguest sympathies to the cause of the left. On the other hand, for critics like Proyect and others I have run across online, it is precisely the lack of purity for which Zizek must be held accountable. Every reading of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin he provides is pored across for inconsistencies, to draw up the charge sheet for the prosecution. The problem is that by not recognising Žižek as at least on the same side of the emancipatory, Marxist cause, critics like Proyect loose sight of the fact that at least they can have a debate with someone like Žižek. Given that most of Žižek’s critics come from a political and philosophical perspective that would consider the likes of Proyect as retrograde to the point of complete irrelevance, one should probably recognize the theoretical ally in Žižek rather than expending copious energies to slaughter his deviations from within the Marxist debating chamber. That is not to say don’t criticize: just to say, have some perspective on things.
Seymour’s racist Žižek
Richard Seymour of the blog Lenin’s Tomb (also author of The Liberal Defence of Murder & The Meaning of David Cameron, and all round rising theoretical star of the British Socialist Workers Party) has also been grinding an axe against Žižek for some time. Initially Seymour was enamoured by Žižek — despite outrage at some of his opinions — but around 2006 that started to change. Seymour confessed:
Perhaps it’s transference, but I used to think that Zizek had all the answers. Even when he was wrong, I assumed he knew it and was being contrarian, using the cunning of reason to provoke thought and all that rubbish. Even now when he’s writing absolute pig shit like this, (apparently a re-mix of this and this), I feel the urge to say “well, he didn’t meanthat“. But he did, and does. To clarify, practically everything in Zizek’s latest is a regurgitation of increasingly common Eurocentric – well, actually, Christian supremacist – platitudes about Islam and secularism.
From this post Seymour’s gripes becomes apparent: his charge is that scrape beneath the seductive theoretical exterior and you will simply find a warmed up liberal with Eurocentric and racist tendencies. “The seductive Lacanian packaging positions the “ire” at the Muhammad cartoons (which Žižek still doesn’t acknowledge as racist, only blasphemous, only disrespectful within the confines of religion) as a reaction to the West as perceived through a distorting phantasmatic screen, “a complex cobweb of symbols, images and attitudes”: this would be more impressive if Žižek did not reveal his own “complex cobweb” in the process.” From here on Seymour’s criticisms of Žižek have effectively operated via a single strategy: take Žižek’s reflections on a subject, from whatever angle they might be, and simply shout them down with charges of racism: a kind of rhetorical ‘nuclear option’. No one likes racism — a single Cartesian point across the political spectrum, aside from the far right — so repeatedly charging your opponent with it operates as vicious tool of deligitimation, and allows one to not even enter debate. In fact, to even debate the alleged racist’s position would be to enter into the same racist discourse. The example above acts as a case in point. Here, Seymour simply asserts that cartoons lampooning Muhammed are racist, ergo any attempt to think the reaction to them as anything more than justified rage against an obviously evil act of injustice is also racist.
This type of tautological rhetoric is repeated in his most recent post regarding Žižek’s commentary on an attack on a Roma community. For balance I will reproduce the quote isolated by Seymour and what I think is Seymour’s most substantial commentary on it.
Žižek wrote:
There was, in Slovenia, around a year ago, a big problem with a Roma (Gipsy) family which camped close to a small town. When a man was killed in the camp, the people in the town started to protest against the Roma, demanding that they be moved from the camp (which they occupied illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc. As expected, all liberals condemned them as racists, locating racism into this isolated small village, while none of the liberals, living comfortably in the big cities, had any everyday contact with the Roma (except for meeting their representatives in front of the TV cameras when they supported them). When the TV interviewed the “racists” from the town, they were clearly seen to be a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the constant theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of small harassments from the Roma. It is all too easy to say (as the liberals did) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of the centuries of their exclusion and mistreatment, that the people in the nearby town should also open themselves more to the Roma, etc. – nobody clearly answered the local “racists” what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems the Roma camp evidently was for them.
Seymour commented:
This was actually a response to a pogrom which observers compared to Kristallnacht. If the police hadn’t driven the gypsies out, the racist mob would have done so with fire and blades. But Zizek has no hesitation about regurgitating the classic anti-gypsy propaganda (they’re anti-social, they cause trouble, they basically bring it on themselves), championing of the racist mob and its ‘legitimate concerns’, counterposing the decent locals to snooty metropolitan elites, channelling the resentment of the ‘little man’ while slandering the little man’s victims. Richard Littlejohn wishes he could get away with this level of barbarism.
Seymour refuses to countenance the idea that there are any legitimate antagonisms, even only in addition to the pure racist frenzy driving the mob. Žižek’s stab at metropolitan, liberal condescension is taken simply as a ruse to allow his own racist instincts some veneer of criticality. But really, is it so incredulous that there were genuine frictions over safety and property in this instance? And does to even consider that possibility make one a racist? It seems to me that there is a hysterical, liberal view of racism — in a purely voluntaristic, moralistic register — at work in Seymour’s denunciations of Žižek. Rather than thinking through structurally how racism is intertwined with class, economics, culture and mechanisms that perpetuate real racial divides and concrete problems with race vectors (those structurally constructed and emergent upon racism), Seymour’s absolute scepticism tends towards the liberal position Žižek is criticising, so it is no wonder that he is so upset by Žižek’s repeated criticisms of liberal anti-racists.
What is the deeper explanation for all this? We enter the realm of conjecture now, but I don’t think Seymour’s running battle with Žižek can be disassociated from the politics of the Socialist Workers Party. For a great deal of investment has been made by the party in the last ten years in defending the victimised Muslim, combating Islamophobia, anti-fascist campaigns and anti-racism music festivals, and so on. Indeed, the stock and trade of the SWP has increasingly come to be a variant of liberal anti-racism, with the establishment of permanent united fronts with Tories, rightwing Muslim groups, and so on. So there is a lot at stake for the party in whether or not liberal anti-racism is the correct paradigm. Žižek has thus become a target for party-political reasons.
“From here on Seymour’s criticisms of Žižek have effectively operated via a single strategy: take Žižek’s reflections on a subject, from whatever angle they might be, and simply shout them down with charges of racism: a kind of rhetorical ‘nuclear option’.”
Absolutely untrue. Where I have accused Zizek of racism, I have dealt with specific examples, providing details and argument. There’s nothing ‘circular’, as you allege, about this.
Question: are Zizek’s claims about the gypsies, and specifically the Strojan family, true? Is he merely stating a well-known truth, or is he fabricating, lying egregiously? The answer is that it’s the latter. What he said wasn’t true. Did you bother to check this before reflexively leaping to Zizek’s defence? No sign of it in this post.
Next question: if it wasn’t true, then why the hell would he say it? The context is that he’s denying, or at least putting in serious doubt, the idea that the pogrom against the Strojan family was racist, the mob itself was racist. He puts this charge in scare quotes. He’s trying to explain the terrible burden of living with a gypsy family nearby, in order to give a real, material pretext for the violence. Now. I did not say that he cheered on the violence. I was quite specific about this. He championed the mob and its ‘legitimate grievances’. He’s acting as an advocate for the poor, ordinary guy whose son comes home beaten up by gypsies, and who lashes out in grief. So his fabrications – and they are fabrications – are an act of apologia. This is what I alleged.
Third question: can such allegations be separated from the racist discourses about gypsies that are current in Europe, and particularly in Slovenia where this pogrom took place? These discourses, you will no doubt be aware, depict gypsies as anti-social thieves and killers. They scapegoat gypsies for real social problems – there is theft and murder and anti-social behaviour as a matter of course in all capitalist societies. They other the gypsies, making them appear as an alien intrusion in an otherwise cohesive, integrative society. In Slovenia, there over ninety gypsy settlements, and gypsies have long sought legal normalization, an end to segregation in schools, an end to de facto segregation in access to property, infrastructure, running water, and that sort of thing. The discourses which dehumanise them as anti-social, a burden, thieves and killers, aside from just happening to be rely on anecdotes which – where they can be checked – prove to be untrue, blame gypsies for this appalling state of affairs, and validate their racial oppression. Zizek’s specific claims, aside from being untrue, and hitched to an unjustified apologia for a racist mob, are inseparable from these wider discourses (from which they were undoubtedly culled).
Now it seems to me that you haven’t dealt with any of that – indeed, haven’t even bothered to do the basic work of finding out what the subject is about. You refer coyly to real antagonisms, but this isn’t good enough.
You also misrepresent the argument about the Danish cartoons controversy:
“Seymour simply asserts that cartoons lampooning Muhammed are racist, ergo any attempt to think the reaction to them as anything more than justified rage against an obviously evil act of injustice is also racist.”
I don’t simply assert that at all. In some considerable length, and in detail, through a number of posts I went into an explanation of why these specific cartoons (not just any old cartoons lampooning Muhammad) were racist. They collectively drew on a series of essentialising tropes about Islam that have nothing to do with the facts of Islam, but which have everything to do with the demonisation of Islam. These held that Islam is, from is inception, about violence, fanaticism, and the oppression of women. It so happens that this isn’t true. (Nor, incidentally, is the cartoon about the virgins for martyrs actually based on anything in the Quran or the Prophetic Tradition). These are tropes which, I have reason to know, became important to colonial pedagogy because of the encounter with Muslim resistance to empire. Resistance had to be explained in terms that did not reference the injustice of imperial predation. It was explained in terms of, among other things, Mahometan fanaticism and a propensity toward violence. “Imperial feminism” in the same era depicted colonised male subjects as being inherently more barbaric in their treatment of women (thus also in practise weakening the struggle against female oppression in Europe). Lastly, the soliciting and repeated publication of these cartoons, the refusal to acknowledge diplomacy for months before there was a single protest, and the desperate attempts by newspapers to provoke a reaction by talking them up before there was a reaction, is obviously not separable from the context of the ‘war on terror’ and the civilizational narratives that have moralised and rationalised its prosecution. So, again, I charge racism on very specific grounds that the implied depiction of the subject is false, is othering, and is part of the means by which their oppression is validated and perpetuated. You may well disagree with this, but you would have first have to understand the argument and engage with it – which you have absolutely refused to do. It’s not just you, of course: all of Zizek’s defenders point blank refuse to engage with this argument.
It does not follow, by the way, that the “reaction to [the cartoons]” doesn’t deserve real anatomisation. I am more than happy to countenance an analysis of protests against Danish cartoons which suggests that they are more than a protest against an injustice. Clearly, there were other dynamics, including the willingness of local dictatorships to allow people to vent steam over the issue. But to simply deny any injustice at all without any consideration of the issues is itself unjust. Further, as I argued, Zizek is not equipped to carry out such an anatomy. For example, he demonstrates in his analysis that he either doesn’t know anything about Danish politics or is being wilfully misleading – those who follow these sorts of things know that Denmark was never the epitome of tolerance, and certainly not particularly tolerant of its Muslim minority. But the suggestion that Denmark is coming under attack despite its obvious tolerance, despite everything its done to be open to all races, is important to Zizek’s analysis, and particularly his claim that the reaction isn’t really about what it would seem to be about. And when Zizek comes to explaining what the protests are “really” about, he falls back on a crude, essentialist analysis of Islam and its texts, which bears the same relation to Islam and its believers as Raphael Patai’s work does to the ‘Arab mind’.
Finally – your attempt at a symptomatic reading redounds to your discredit. If it’s true that I am basically upholding the SWP’s politics of anti-racism (which you ignorantly caricature as liberal, demonstrating that you know almost as little about the traditions of anti-racism as Zizek does), then those politics would seem to be validated here. They certainly have a clear political advantage over any position which perpetuates malicious, racist falsehoods, in a context in which the perpetuation of those falsehoods is liable to get people killed.
wrt Seymour i definitely agree with the analysis here, but i don’t think the point is well made… the liberal attitude towards racism stems far wider in the left than merely from the SWP. the anarchists in particular – no doubt owing in no small part to their fragmented para-social perspective on ‘resistance’ are extremely guilty of muddling these cultural arguments, replacing broad class analyses with totemic cultural iconography and symbols. Social Democracy is also riddled with this liberalism – in fact i would go as far as to say that every moderately sized organisation in the country (with the potential exception of elements of the Socialist Party) is culpable in this instance.
the final paragraph seems to be shoehorned in, and the attempts to dissect this pervading culture throughout are hamstrung by a need to justify your final conclusion. i would like to see a good left critique of these positions, but i just think it would take a little more preparation.
just my two cents.. but thanks for posting it up! easy to sit on the sidelines and criticise i know..
Seymour refuses to countenance the idea that there are any legitimate antagonisms, even only in addition to the pure racist frenzy driving the mob.
But you have countenanced the “legitimate antagonisms” of the mob. Presumably you can identify them. What are they? You will of course know from your research for this post that Zizek’s assertions – that “a man was killed at the camp” and that the Strojan family’s land was “occupied illegally” – are libellous fictions. So what are the “legitimate antagonisms”? I’m afraid they really will remain “incredulous”, to use your Palinism, until you come up with a shred of evidence for the “genuine frictions over safety and property” you casually insinuate are the fault of the Strojan family.
Zizek is a compulsive liar: nobody clearly answered the local “racists” what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems the Roma camp evidently was for them. Nobody answered the racists? The government evicted the family, demolished their camp and stole their land: wasn’t that enough of a ‘concrete’ solution for these poor marginalized “frightened” folk?
Rather than thinking through structurally how racism is intertwined with class, economics, culture…
Seymour has analyzed, researched and written about the structures of Western racism for years; there is a substantial body of work on the net and in print to prove this (and it has thus been disappointing for some of us that it took him this long to identify Zizek’s virulent and enduring racism). Where’s the evidence that you are “thinking through” these things? Or that Zizek is?
My other hatchet jobs on the Lacanian celebrity:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/Henwood_Zizek.htm
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/Zizek.htm
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/zizek_lenin.htm
[...] multiculturalism very useful (which is why one can agree with Seymour on this issue, and still be in defence of Slavoj Zizek, so to speak). I will attempt to place it in its correct [...]
[...] multiculturalism very useful (which is why one can agree with Seymour on this issue, and still be in defence of Slavoj Zizek, so to speak). I will attempt to place it in its correct [...]
I think this type of “anti-racist” baiting is what made me give up Marxism in the first place. As an old Trot, I suppose I would say that local workers militias should be formed independent of the bourgeois state to defend the workers and the peasants from lumpen elements, but who are we kidding? And I am from an ethnic minority (Mexican American) that has been pretty vilified by the American right in the last few decades. So much of the left’s posturing is the result of an inverted, patronizing racism. Really, from what I have taken from Zizek is that he is calling the left out on this. Look, it never feels good to be the object of real or rhetorical racist violence, but if we get too worked up about it, we end up moralizing the question, and that is not what we want. If the left is not careful, it will bow to bourgeois nationalism and backward atavism in the name of tolerance (that’s what the Maoists often did, at least when I was around them) that will morph into the sectoralized symbolic actions of the New Left and support for the liberal bourgeoisie. Really, we have to address the problems of the slums without romanticizing them, or mindlessly calling people racists because they don’t want their cars or stereos stolen.
I am not sure I would get too worked up about it. I mean being an ‘all round rising theoretical star of the British Socialist Workers Party’ must count as one of the least important things to become ever. Seymour is the classic moralizing Trot failing to take real workers concerns seriously all the whole living out some weird Leninist fantasy. His dogmatism is a relic of the past and the best that come from this is that he channels all his time into the blog and so can’t cause too much damage in the real world.
Nice to see left unity against the twin scourges of Trotskyists and gypsies.
Why so quiet, Sebastian? Remember, you are Zizek’s first line of defence – great things are expected of you.
Enjoyable read. Glad to see these critiques taken up and problematized.
It seems to me that, at least within the left, the rabid denunciations of Zizek tend to reflect a tendency of projection rather than any authentic insight. To read Zizek dogmatically, as Mr. Proyect seems inclined, is to mis-read him in a most egregious way. Further, such an expectation is anachronistic: Zizek isn’t speaking to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc; he’s speaking to us in the here and now. If Zizek *were* espousing views more consonant with those historic iconoclasts, I think he’d be far less relevant today. In this instance, Mr. Proyect seems to be projecting inappropriate and irrelevant standards of value to Zizek’s project. Similarly, Mr. Seymour’s charge of ‘racism’ betrays violent moralizing and imposes a singular, unbending reading of Zizek as a text. To accuse Zizek of racism, supporting pogroms, and liberalism when his theory and praxis speak to an altogether different worldview smacks of hermeneutic naivete. Sadly, Mr. Seymour seems far more interested in ‘defending the Party line’ than building solidarity. In my opinion, he makes a terrible exemplar. The left isn’t well-served by arrogance and in-fighting, but that’s exactly what Mr. Seymour seems most intent on bringing to the table.
This was my first time visiting your blog. I found my way here via a retweet, and on the basis of this post and your front page I will happily add you to my RSS reader.
Seymour conveniently disabled commenting on his blog – he’s probably checking facts on his Google Translator set to Slovene – so I’ll continue here.
What Žižek says there about *those particular* gypsies was not a lie, but something everyone who came in contact with that family believes to be true – except the politicians, who wouldn’t admit the police and the state failed at what they should do and liberals throughout the world who do not leave any space for the notion of a gypsy commiting a crime without it being called bigotry if refered to it as such – because these people are suposedly really a bunch of trigger happy petty criminals.
“In fact, the argument in this post and the follow-ups, and throughout all the comments threads, has consistently returned to *those particular gypsies*”
What are we even discussing then here? No, it has not, and you know it very well. You refer to Žižek’s comments as to an attack on all gypsies while the man was obviously refering to that particular family.
What do you think these people said to the camera when being asked about the whole thing? Falsely acussing them of small theft because they don’t like the way they look?
“Gun ownership and criminal records are common in Montana too.”
Around here a criminal with a gun in his house is someone you do not wan’t to deal with on any social level if you don’t have to. And criminal records are not “common”. Anywhere.
The man emphasized the fact that racism was specifically located in that village as if whole Slovenia was otherwise rid of other “unnamed racisms” – it later spread to EU – because “those barbaric Slovenes” turned out to be racists as in “thank God it wasn’t us.” He talks about “rendering the civil racism invisible” by means of pinpointing it to a specific group or a person. What’s not clear about this?
“People do (crimes) all the time. This is a normal fact of life in capitalist society, but it usually doesn’t result in a racist pogrom.”
There are three grownup males in that family – two have criminal records, one of them is a drug addict. Numerous other grownups were seen at their settlement. When police failes to eradicate all gangs in, lets say, Los Angeles — people living near by are unhappy with it. Well, in Continental Europe, some people form mobs. You not ok with that? You mad.
There are numerous accounts around the net that this family was well known for its criminal activities around that area.
Here, where I live, we have two gypsy families living in the town. Not once did anyone of us thought of maltreating these people in any way. They’ve been around here forever and they live their lives just as any other family, the’re just poorer than most. My small town must be an advanced and progressive secular society? If “peaceful people respecting other peaceful people” means just that, then we probably are.
I’ll repeat here the only valuable thing Seymour said about this whole issue so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle:
“What is at issue is that the Roma communities desperately need formal legalization, secure tenure, access to infrastructure and education, and an end to state-led practises of discrimination. Give them the same legal protection as national communities like the Italian and Hungarian minorities, end the practise of segregation in schools, stop forcing them to live without access to water, stop preventing them from purchasing local property, etc etc.”
Žižek would agree.
Although I find Zizek’s work entertaining, there are two persistent problems I have with him:
(1) So much of his rhetoric is based on out-flanking leftists, provoking scandal without much substance. Laclau really got his number in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality when he said that Zizek always chastises the postmodern left for not being revolutionary enough, but Zizek himself hasn’t told us what his proposed revolution would look like. If he’s going to chastise me and my ilk for not trying to overthrow capitalism, maybe he could give us some indication of how he thinks we should do that, what we should replace it with, etc. (and saying that he wants “communism” or “Marxism” is not enough).
(2) He is a laughably sloppy scholar. His books read like a stream-of-consciousness series of remarks published without any thought given to whether and how they form any kind of coherent unity. He is also a chronically terrible reader of texts and media of all sorts.
Basically, Zizek is intellectual junk food. He’s fun and dynamic and alluring, but at the end of the day it’s just empty calories.