Long Sunday

The Kettle Logic of Islam

Much discussion has already taken place (here and here among others) regarding Zizek's recent Op-Ed piece in the NY Times.  And of course, as everyone suspected, the op ed is actually a cut and paste from a longer piece entitled The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason. What I think is striking is that it is one of few times Zizek succinctly (and somewhat persuasively) analyzes a current situation - in this case the violent Muslim response to the Danish cartoons.  What I found particularly convincing is his re-appropriation of the Freudian kettle logic, this time for the purpose of deconstructing Islamists denials of the holocaust:

1) [The] Holocaust did not happen. (2) It did happen, but the Jews deserved it. (3) The Jews did not deserve it, but they themselves lost the right to complain by doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to them.

What's missing?

The oddest element of The Parallax View is what's missing, namely, the film. What's up with that? Zizek talks ad nauseum about tons of films, but not this one. Why?

The obvious, boring answer is that his use of the term is drawn from Karatani and has nothing to do with the film. Well, that might work in your grad seminar, but that's not enough for LS. There has to be something more.

Could it be that the film is not very good? That is rarely enough for Zizek. His bread and butter is Soviet era melodramas, "Logan's Run," all the Alien and Matrix films.

Could it be that the film uses parallax primarily to designate the name of the shadowy big other, the bad guys, The Parallax Corporation? Zizek is moving ever further away from discussions of the Symbolic and toward the Real, so returning to that well-worked theme wouldn't take him very far.

But, it seems to me that parallax in Zizek's sense is present in the film in the gap between explanations that account for the immediacy of an event and explanations that account for the totality of forces behind them; or, perhaps, better, in the way that investigating a crime or matter shifts imperceptibly into becoming part of the very crime or matter. Beatty's character moves from being a reporter to being part of the situation, to being involved, hence suggesting the presence of the observer within the frame (our good old anamorphic stain from the early days, filled out better as the gaze, then the shift from desire to drive, really, the strings here are endless...).

So, why doesn't he talk about the movie?

Bartleby in power

At the end of The Parallax View, Zizek presents Bartleby's "I prefer not to" as the key figure of a new politics, a politics that moves past "the politics of 'resistance' or 'protestation,' which parasitizes upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation."

What is involved in this position?

Solidarity, justice, and the Third

(Cross-posted at I Cite).

As with Habermas, one might see Zizek's discussion of justice and solidarity as two sides of the same coin. But, rather than reconciled within a communicative universality, Zizek's two sides are those of the law and the revolutionary collective, the impersonal, abstract law that must suspend imagination and focus on principle, on the one side, and the revolutionary violence and hatred in the service of the work of love, that is, in the service of revolutionary justice, on the other. Each side involves an abstraction, a subjective destitution, a resolve to escape the 'vicious cycle of understanding.'

How, then, do we understand solidarity?

Solidarity is the one virtue specific to the political. We don't use solidarity to describe relations between friends, family members, congregants in a church, or soldiers in an army. It is not a relation of consumer to consumed, capital to labor, professor to student. It is not even properly understood as a relation between governors and the governed. Rather, solidarity is a category of the political understood in Schmitt's terms as rooted in the distinction between friend and enemy. The relation between political friends is that of solidarity.

Zizek and Us

One of my favorite books in political theory is Althusser's Machiavelli and Us. Althusser reads Machiavelli (with and through Gramsci) as particularly difficult insofar as Machiavelli presents himself as scientific and objective, yet somehow unsystematizable. Althusser writes:

...the central point where everything is tied up endlessly escapes detection. It is impossible to provide a systematic, non-contradictory and complete exposition of a theory presented strangely, in the form of fragments of a whole that has been deemed 'unfinished' (Croce), but instead seems absent--and fragments arranged in a strangely deformed space, constructed in such a fashion that it is not possible to encompass or hold them together in perfect unity.

To my mind, Althusser's point applies well to Zizek.

Did Somebody Say Pop Culture?

As is well-known, Zizek delights in obscenities, in references to toilets, pubic hair, sexual acts, in dirty jokes and examples from popular culture. Nearly every commentator on his work emphasizes his combinations of high and low culture, of philosophical engagements with the German Enlightenment combined with observations on cartoons, Coke, the Gap, and Kinder-Eier. For some readers, this engagement with popular culture marks Zizek as necessarily unserious or not worth taking seriously.

Other readers of his work criticize less this engagement with popular culture than Zizek's own self-popularization. He seems not to take himself seriously, so why should we? So, he has all sorts of popular pieces in the London Review of Books and In These Times, not to mention a feature length documentary film all about him. The moves in the popular writing seem both too simple and too hard; too hard if to defend them requires references to twenty other books; too easy in their quick reductions and simple equations. Shouldn't serious philosophers do better? If they can't make the argument in a short space, then wouldn't seriousness require them not to make it at all?

Otherness

In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (a question the answer to which seems to be yes, in fact, Zizek does in first few books), Zizek links together Habermas and Derrida. They both "presuppose an ethical demand or norm that precedes and sustains every concrete political intervention which is never able fully to live up to it". More specifically, "each articulates what the other has to presuppose and disavow to sustain his position." Derridean (and Levinasian) otherness is irrational without norms. That is, so long as it is unconstrained by norms or customs, the absoluteness of the Call of the Other becomes an irrational demand. Conversely, Habermasian normativity reduces the Otherness of the Other: the norms and suppositions of the communicative action constitutively exclude those who reject or fail to recognize them. In sum, each resists Otherness.

I think this is right as a reading of Habermas and Derrida. But, what sort of relation to Otherness is possible? Zizek's answer of course involves the Act: in the act I am the absolute Other, object. But, the Act is necessarily a disruptive internvention, a radical change. It's a relation to Otherness that completely, traumatically changes who I was and what we will be and become.

What seems clear, then, is that the relation to Otherness is not ongoing. In the aftermath of the Act, a new world or reality is installed. And, where is Otherness here?

If this line of inquiry has merit, then it might well be that Zizekian Otherness isn't exactly otherness: it functions more like negativity. If Otherness is conceived as negativity, are we in yet another Western, racist logic?

Zizek's Symptom

“The texture of Knowledge is, by definition, always total—that is, for Knowledge of Being, there is no excess; excess and lack of a situation are visible only from the standpoint of the Event, not from the standpoint of the knowing servants of the State. From within this standpoint, of course, one sees ‘problems,’ but they are automatically reduced to ‘local,’ marginal difficulties, to contingent errors—what Truth does is to reveal that (what Knowledge misperceives as) marginal malfunctionings and points of failure are a structural necessity. Crucial for the Event is thus the elevation of an empirical obstacle into a transcendental limitation. With regard to the ancien régime, what the Truth-Event reveals is how injustices are not marginal malfunctionings but pertain to the very structure of the system which is in its essence, as such, ‘corrupt.’ Such an entity—which, misperceived by the system as a local ‘abnormality,’ effectively condenses the global ‘abnormality’ of the system as such, in its entirety—is what, in the Freudo-Marxist tradition, is called the symptom…” The Ticklish Subject(Pg. 131)

Not quite a universal exception

Adam Kotsko ruined my weekend when he sent me a link to the introduction to The Universal Exception, a new collection of Zizek's popular writings and opinion pieces. The introduction, by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, is called "Slavoj Zizek's Third Way." The authors' contend that Zizek 'is absolutely in agreement with the Third Way and its desire to institute progressive social programs in the face of conservative opposition." I think the authors badly misread Zizek. In addition to ignoring and distorting specific elements of Zizek's thought, they rely, in their presentation of his ideas, on an untenable form/content distinction. I take up these points in turn.

Unknown Knowns

"In February 2002, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don't know we don't know." For Rumsfeld, these "unknown unknowns" represent the greatest threats facing the United States. But Rumsfeld forgot to add the crucial fourth term: the unknown knowns, things we don't know that we know-which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used to say. In many ways, these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to, may pose an even greater threat." Zizek, Iraq's False Promises