finitely demanding - zizek in the lrb

Really like this piece that everyone is linking to from Zizek in the LRB, except I don't really understand the last two paragraphs. Specifically, the relationship between the last two paragraphs:

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

That last line doesn't seem to me to be in sync with the previous paragraph and its praise for Chavez's seizing and refitting of state power. Chavez doesn't seem to me to be issuing "demands," precise, finite, vague, or infinite. There is, I think, a huge gap between the two paragraphs, and the gap re instantiates the very problem of left posture (or, the problem of the postural left) that Zizek so artfully describes at the opening of the piece. The gap is the gap between the "he" of the first paragraph above and the "we" of the second. It is clear that Zizek wants us to think and act more pragmatically and less through the lens of utopia. But the big question - the only question - persists across this inconclusive finale: how are we to do that?

Comments

[CBR]

Great question. Zizek's authoritarianism is troubling, and you've put your finger on the problem.

Still on a pragmatic level, Zizek is spot on (no?). I always thought the anti-war protests should have been organized around a precise positive, rather than generic "no." (On a philosophic level of course there is an affirmation at the heart of many "no's"- but we're talking about political-speech (or what IT calls 'Nu-Language') and its incumbent power-level here. (e.g.)

[zube]

The whole question of political intervention by the left in a now all dominating statist situation is THE central theoretical and practical problem to be solved and no other thinker like Badiou has seriously engaged with this and it seems to me that Zizek has absorbed much of Badiou's thinking on this matter, in particular the idea that what the left needs to do now is to engage in a form of stoic patience. The most we can do now is to engage in or work towards the development of, a less revolutionary politics (in the sense of the freneticism of scizophrenically moving from one political issue to the next with no sense of overall political direction) to a form of engaged patience, a form of waiting for an evental miracle. Its a telling point that Zizek shares Badiou's interest in Christ's resurrrection as a prototype for this potentially new kind of revolutionary patience.
So i suppose my thought is to what extent the critique of mettanarratives has been successful insofar as the left now seems to be dependent on some kind of evental miracle as the new model of revolution along with the machinary of faith, and that Hegelian dialectics as some kind of "inevitable" logic of the end of capitalist history is now defunct. And if this is the case, then what are the new parameters for any attempt to answer Lenin's perennial question-"What is to be done?"

[bix]

Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us.’

Or, it accepts that there is this inexcusably sloppy, aspiring trend-setter authoritarian instead of nothing? But, why?

[bix]

Sorry but Zizek's lack of care, deliberate and cruel obfuscation, misquotation, tiresome polemic at the cost of (any, really) reading just doesn't do him any favors, still.
I haven't read the SC book, but it seems pretty obvious to be a straw-man sort of slapping on Z's part. Do people really find this sort of thing helpful?

[whenceleft]

I've now read the Critchley book, INFINITELY DEMANDING, twice. There are holes, but whereas Zizek claims to be critiquing some kind of empty utopian ethics, Critchley's argument is, I found, precisely an attempt to concretely answer Lenin's perennial question. Zizek rejects Critchley's proposal (withdraw from the state; localized/interstitial resistance & demand formation), but conveniently fails to mention the motivation for that proposal: the terms of the state as we know it are unfit to grasp, let alone answer to, 'organically'-grown demands. My question is, how different, really, is Critchley's sort of localized demand formation from any liberal concept of 'civil society'?

[whenceleft]

I've now read the Critchley book, INFINITELY DEMANDING, twice. There are holes, but whereas Zizek claims to be critiquing some kind of empty utopian ethics, Critchley's argument is, I found, precisely an attempt to concretely answer Lenin's perennial question. Zizek rejects Critchley's proposal (withdraw from the state; localized/interstitial resistance & demand formation), but conveniently fails to mention the motivation for that proposal: the terms of the state as we know it are unfit to grasp, let alone answer to, 'organically'-grown demands. My question is, how different, really, is Critchley's sort of localized demand formation from any liberal concept of 'civil society'?

[Barret Weber]

I don't think the question of Critchley's book is whether or not there are holes in its argumentation. Rather, it is that he lets the state off the hook - running the state is what the 'bad' unreedemed Republicans do. Zizek asks an important and very anti-po.mo. question, one that Max Weber would himself support: What about taking the responsibility to govern (such as Chavez)? The question is not so much about enunciating an infinite number of demands, as if such a divine thing would be possible, but, rather, precisely those finite demands that would be capable of revealing the weakness of liberal democracy itself (which tends not to not think much about the concept of "the state" anyways - the "depoliticized" economy is much more important).

I think Zizek's article on Heidegger in the most recent edition of IJZS (Vol 1, no.3), and the distinction between the ontological and the ontic, is a key consideration in regards to his support of Chavez's revolutionary violence. The following represents a restatement of Zizek's position, but still includes the "gap" in thought CR correctly highlighted above (thanks for pointing this out CR!). It seems to me that Zizek hasn't thought much past what happens once one takes power... This could be a problem.

In any case, consider the following section from zizek's "preview paper":

"It never entered Heidegger’s mind to propose – say, in a liberal mode – that the failure of the Nazi engagement is merely the failure of a certain kind of engagement which conferred on the political the task of carrying out “a project of onto-destinal significance,” so that the lesson of it could be simply a more modest political engagement? In other words, what if one concludes from the failure of Heidegger’s political engagement that what one should renounce is the expectance that a political engagement will have destinal ontological consequences and engage in “merely ontic” politics which, far from obfuscating the need for a deeper ontological reflection, precisely opens up a space for it? What if even the very last Heidegger, when he expresses his doubt that democracy is the political order which best fits the essence of modern technology, still did not learn the ultimate lesson of his Nazi engagement, since he continues to cling to the hope of finding an (ontic) political engagement which would fit(be at the level of) the ontological project of modern technology? (Our premise, of course, of course, is that the liberal engagement is not the only alternative: Heidegger was right in his doubt about liberal democracy; what he refused to consider was a radical Leftist engagement.)" (Zizek, "Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933", 18-19).

[old]

I hesitate to do this since I am having no time to read the weblogs, let alone write for them, but I think it's high time that someone in our region of blogalalia propose and put together a symposium on the state, yes or no. Critchley seems often to be the main target of 'seize the state' supporters, but it really ought to be clear the Negri and Hardt are the really formidable anti-statists.

[CBR]

The late Heidegger did not draw a distinction between "ontic" and "ontological." The essence of technology involves a particular constellation of presencing, within which certain political configurations are possible. The question is whether some of these--the nation itself, Heidegger suggests in his Parmenides lectures--are premised on metaphysical norms that have lost their binding character for us.

[Barret]

CBR - I suppose it remains an open question then of which 'late Heidegger' Zizek is speaking. Is this the significance of what your point?

Old - my response to your question about a symposium re:the state, even though my time is extremely limited with the banality of course work, is "yes!" I agree that Negri and Hardt are key anti-statists, but Badiou and Agamben must also be included...

[CBR]

1. I glanced at ZIzek's Heidegger piece, and he periodizes Heidegger in three stages. Neither stage 2 nor 3 includes the "ontic-ontological" split. True, H still talks about the difference between Being and beings, but this in a newly historical sense, and it would make no sense to say that a political regime should operate on the level of "Being" and not "beings"--no sense at all. So I don't think the question is "which" Heidegger, unless that means Z's made up Heidegger or the real one.

2. If there is to be such a symposium, I'd like to see it not confined to academic writers, but also include anarchist and anti-state communist writers...many of whom are completely ignored by academia. Some names might be Bob Black, Wolfi Landstreicher, Alfredo Bonanno, Gilles Dauve, even John Zerzan (who is admittedly a crude thinker)...

[Jon]

Old, I think a symposium on the state would be a great idea.

[Matt]

The late Heidegger did not draw a distinction between "ontic" and "ontological."

That's an interesting problem, isn't it?

Heidegger's chapter on being-towards-death culminates in a series of questions that threaten to bring down the whole edifice that Heidegger was constructing, by mandating the return of what had been so carefully excluded and thereby confirming that ultimately the distinction between the ontological and the ontic cannot be sustained (read more)

CR: it seems to me that your question for Zizek circles back to Heidegger as well. The question of a certain experience of faith, surely not far from what Agamben re-reads as "the thing itself" (_Potentialities_), also certainly *neither* theology, nor religion, yet unavoidably at the heart of the "already common experience of language and of a 'we'" (Derrida, reading Heidegger in _Acts of Religion_, page 96)

- frankly, one suspects if Zizek gets his cue on the ontic/ontological "split" largely from Derrida (without attempting to read him any more than he (Zizek) begins to really read Heidegger). Not that his interventions are entirely without value, but the made-up Heidegger is (and should be) tiresome.

[CBR]

Yeah, Bernasconi's a great reader of Heidegger...thanks for that. I agree that its the inability to assimilate an analysis that is both transcendental and factical that causes SZ to founder...the ontic-ontological distinction cannot be rigidly maintained.

[nickmann]

Zizek's suggesting that if you want to hold authority accountable then don't ask more of it than you know it can provide. If you demand too much the powers'll just say, "You know we can't possibly make this happen now!" and of course they'll be right and then they're off the hook.

When Heidegger decided that Germany needed an authoritarian solution (to what?) he couldn't go left for the reason that his political instincts were those of an old-fashioned Catholic bourgeois. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a reactionary. Sublime philosopher, ghastly social thinker.

[david]

The question can be posed in (dare I say) "pragmatic" rather than "theoretical" terms: "What constitutes an effective struggle?" The answer, of course, is going to be different in different times and places.

One way of telling the Chavez story is to say that when power is seized by capitalist forces, perhaps the only possible struggle is through good-old sovereign power. If all the TV channels are owned by private moguls with interests in oil and US support, then the state-run channel may be the only way to communicate with the community (see "The Revolution will not be Televised.") In other times and places, capitalist powers may very well be the only way to struggle against oppressive sovereign power (if Chavez will become a true dictator, this might be the only line of flight).

In short, there are no purely "good" or "evil" means to the end of struggle. We fight against certain apparatuses by means of other apparatuses, but an apparatus has no a priori value. This is true about Zizek's "political demand," as it is true about Critchley's "ethical demand." There are situations in which it can be effective to initiate an exodus from politics and situations in which it can be purely evasive.

To see "the ethical," but also "the political," as an infinite demand is to see an absolute that our lives must be subjected to. I do not accept either of these demands in and for itself. And so, my fellow theoreticians, ask not what you can do for the ethical or the political - ask what the political or the ethical can do for you.

[matt]

Our own Adam Thurschwell's review is now available here.