Kapitalizmin Soytarısı: Slavoj Zizek
Günümüzün en önemli entelektüellerinin listelendiği Foreign Policy’nin 2012 tarihli “100 Büyük Düşünür” listesinde kendisine yer buldu, listede Dick Chaney, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu ve Mossad’ın eski direktörü Moir Dagan gibi isimler de bulunuyor.[1] ABD Dışişleri Bakanlığı’nın sanal kolu olarak bilinen dergiye göre kendisinin en önemli fikri; solun beklediği devrimin asla gelmeyeceği.[2]
Diğer fikirleri kesinlikle daha iddialı bunlardan bir kaç örnek seçmek gerekirse, çağımızın bu önemli küresel düşünürü, 20. yüzyıl komünizmini ve daha spesifik olarak Stalinizmi "İnsanlık tarihindeki belki de en kötü ideolojik, politik, etik, sosyal felaket" olarak tanımlamıştır.[3 ] Aslına bakarsanız, Stalin yönetimindeki Kızıl Ordu'nun Nazi savaş makinesini yendiği için üzüntü duyduğunu belirterek, "Acıyı soyut bir düzeyde ölçerseniz, Stalinizm Nazizm'den daha kötüydü" vurgusunu ekliyor.[4] Üçüncü Reich'in şiddet bakımından komünizm kadar "radikal" olmadığı konusunda ısrar ediyor ve "Hitler'in sorunu, yeterince şiddet yanlısı olmamasıydı."[5] Belki de bu konuda "on milyonlarca insanı açlıktan öldürmek için acımasız bir karar veren” Mao Zedong'dan bazı ipuçları alabilirdi. [6] Bu belgelenmemiş iddia, yazarını, Mao'nun kendi yurttaşlarını öldürme niyetinde olmadığını kabul eden Komünizmin Kara Kitabı'nın oldukça sağında konumlandırıyor. [7] Bununla birlikte, modern dünyadaki büyük "insanlığa karşı suçun" Nazizm veya faşizm değil, komünizm olduğu varsayımıyla hareket ettiği için, bu tür bilgilerin bu teorisyen için hiçbir önemi yoktur.
Zizek aynı zamanda, Avrupa'nın dünyanın diğer tüm bölgelerinden politik, ahlaki ve entelektüel olarak üstün olduğunu ima eden, Avrupa merkezli düşündüğünü kendisi ilan eden bir düşünür.[8] Avrupa'daki mülteci krizi, Batı'nın Akdeniz’de giderek genişleyen acımasız askeri müdahaleleri nedeniyle yoğunlaştığında, "Mültecilerin çoğunun Batı Avrupa'nın insan hakları kavramlarıyla bağdaşmayan bir kültürden geldiği basit bir gerçektir." diyerek Samuel Huntington'ın "Medeniyetler Çatışması" inancını papağan gibi tekrarladı. [9] 2016 seçimlerinde başkanlık için Donald Trump'ı da onayladı. [10] Yakın zamanda kötü şöhretli savaş çığırtkanı Henry Kissinger'ı pasifizmle suçlayarak ABD'nin Ukrayna'daki vekalet savaşına "tam desteğini" ifade etti ve Avrupa Birliği’nin savunulması için "daha güçlü bir NATO'ya ihtiyacımız olduğunu" iddia ederek kendisini açıkça Kissenger’ın da sağında konumlandırdı.[11]
Kurucu-muhafazakâr ulusal güvenlik ajanı Huntington'ın ortağı olduğu önde gelen dergi tarafından övülmek, önemli entelektüellere nadiren tanınan bir uluslararası ün düzeyine ulaşan bu küresel filozof için buzdağının yalnızca görünen kısmı.[12] Zizek, kapitalist dünyanın önde gelen kurumlarında prestijli atamalar ve sayısız uluslararası şovla akademik bir ünlü olmanın yanı sıra, muazzam bir medya platformunu sağlamlaştırdı. Bu, en önde gelen kuruluşlardan bazıları için baş döndürücü bir hızla kitap ve makaleler yayınladı, birden fazla filme konu oldu, düzenli olarak televizyonda ve büyük medya gösterilerinde yer aldı.
Bu siyasi pozisyonun doğası ve burjuva kültürel aygıtı tarafından genişletilerek geldiği nokta göz önüne alındığında, söz konusu düşünürün emperyalist düşünce kuruluşları ve ABD Ulusal Güvenliği tarafından desteklenen sağcı bir ideolog olduğu varsayılabilir. Ancak tam tersine bu, internette radikal teori ve hatta marksizm hakkında araştırma yapan herkesin muhtemelen hemen karşılaşacağı bir yorumcudur, çünkü Slavoj Žižek solu temsil ettiği düşünülen en görünür entelektüellerden biridir.
Donald Trump, ABD propaganda makinesinin gücüne olan inancını, tek bir seçmeni kaybetmeden "Beşinci Cadde'nin ortasında durup birini vurabileceğini" iddia ederek rezil bir şekilde ifade etti.[13] Emperyalist çekirdek içindeki gösteriye dayalı sapkın ve yozlaşmış toplumumuzda, aynı şey küresel teori endüstrisinin reklam yüzü için de geçerlidir. Žižek, akla gelebilecek en gerici siyasi pozisyonları alabilir, kapitalist kültürel aygıt tarafından dünya çapında yayınlanmasını sağlayabilir ve yine de solun yükselen bir entelektüeli olarak sunulabilir. Nitekim tam da bunu yapmıştır.
Bilmeyenler İçin Çorba
1990'ların başında Amerika Birleşik Devletleri'nde genç bir felsefe öğrencisi olarak, bu işportacı ve onu terfi ettiren sistem tarafından kandırıldığımı itiraf etmeliyim. Ben lisans öğrencisiyken teori endüstrisinin Evel Knievel'i gibi sahneye fırladı. Hakkında hiçbir şey bilmediğim bir Avrupa felsefi tarihi üzerine bitmek bilmeyen incelemeler yerine, burada her şeyi yetersiz eğitimli 19 yaşındaki özenti bir entelektüele anlatabilecek biri vardı: Hollywood filmleri, bilim kurgu hikayeleri, tüketim toplumu, çevrimiçi kültür, havalı Avrupa'dan teoriler, pornografi, seks ve daha çok seks. Özellikle benim gibi kapitalist ideolojik aygıt tarafından yanlış eğitilmiş ve farklı olarak pazarlanan bir şeye aç biri için bunları okumak sarhoş ediciydi.
1990'lar ve 2000’ler başlarında çıkan her kitabı yaladım yuttum. Ben de peşinden onun entelektüel baba figürünün Alain Badiou'nun yönetiminde doktora yapmaya Paris’e gittim. Ancak kendimi eğitmeye devam ettikçe onun tekrarlarından, teorik yüzeyselliğinden ve ezberci retorik hareketlerinden sıkılmaya başladım. Onun kışkırtıcı maskaralıklarını, tarihsel ve materyalist analiz için zavallı bir sahtekarlık olarak giderek daha açık bir biçimde görüyordum. 2001 yılında, 11 Eylül olaylarını Matrix'in küstah bir Lacancı yorumuyla açıklamaya çalıştığında bu durum doruğa ulaştı. ABD emperyalizminin tarihine ve ulusal güvenlik devletinin entrikalarına dair titiz materyalist analizlerle karşılaştırıldığında, sıcak eleştiriler, sıcak kek gibi satılsa da, sönük kaldı. [14]
Daha sonra, yüksek lisans öğrencisiyken Jacques Rancière'in bir kitabını çevirdiğimde Žižek'in söylem çorbasının nasıl yapıldığını görmek için eşsiz bir fırsatım oldu. Rancière, o zamanlar İngilizce’de büyük ölçüde bilinmediğinden her yayıncı projeyi geri çevirdi. Aceleci bir dizi ilk ret sürecinden sonra nihayet içlerinden birini düşünmeye ikna edebildiğimde, yayınevinin -artık feshedilmiş olan- satın alma editörü bir koşul koydu: kazançlı satışları garanti etmek için, bir önsöz yazdırmam gerekiyordu: Žižek gibi radikal teoride büyük pazarlama gücüne. Zizek, kabul etti ve daha sonra bana Gıdıklanan Özne adlı kitabındaki Ranciere ile ilgili bölüme çarpıcı bir benzerlikten fazlasını taşıyan karışık bir metini özsöz niyetine yolladı.[15] Buna, Rancière'in sinema üzerine kitaplarından biri için bazı serbest çağrışımsal düşünceler ve önceden hazırlayıcı yorumlar eklemişti; bu, Rancière'in estetik üzerine çalışmaları veya söz konusu kitap hakkında çok az bilgi sahibi olduğunu veya hiç bilgisi olmadığını gösteriyordu (Le Partage du Sensible: Esthétique et politique -Duyarlılığın Paylaşımı: Estetik ve Politik-) Akademik titizliğe yönelik bu utanmazca umursamazlıktan tiksinerek, ancak o zamanlar herhangi bir kurumsal güçten veya daha derin bir siyasi analizden yoksun olarak, elim kolumun bağlı olduğunu hissettim çünkü istemesem de teori endüstrisinin bu şarlatanının metalarını tanıtmak için kullanmasını kabul etmem gerekiyordu aksi halde çevirdiğim kitap gün yüzü görmeyecekti . Önsözü bir son yazıya çevirerek ve etrafını Rancière'in çalışmasının bilimsel açıklamalarıyla çevreleyerek gömmeye çalıştım. Ancak geriye dönüp baktığımda, projeden basitçe vazgeçmeliydim.
Kültür teorisinin sözde Elvis'iyle olan deneyimlerime dönüp baktığımda şimdi görüyorum ki, emperyalist çekirdekteki yükselen ve yanlış eğitim almış profesyonel yönetici sınıfının bir parçası olarak, onun maskaralıklarının hedef kitlesi bendim. 1989'da Berlin Duvarı yıkıldı ve Žižek'in ilk büyük kitabı Verso: The Sublime Object of Ideology(İdeolojinin Yüce Nesnesi-Çev:Tuncay Birkan, Metis Yay.) İngilizce olarak çıktı. Kitap, radikal demokrat Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe gibi post-marksistlerin -anti-marksistin havalı versiyonu— önsözüyle birlikte yeni amiral gemisi yayın olarak sunuldu. Sosyalizme destek vermek yerine "Sol için radikal ve çoğulcu bir demokrasi açısından tasarlanan yeni bir vizyon" sağlamak amacıyla, Martin Heidegger'den ilham alan Fransa'dakiler gibi "özcülük karşıtı" teorik eğilimlerden yararlanmaya çalıştı. [16] Siyasi yönelimleri "demokrasi yanlısı" olarak sunulan ve sosyalist ülkeleri dağıtmak için kullanılan anti-komünist hareketlerle yankılanan bu iki radikal demokrat, Žižek'in desteklenmesinde merkezi bir rol oynadı. Çalışmalarını Anglofon dünyada sunmaya davet ettiler ve ona prestijli yayın platformları açtılar. İlk kitabını, "geleneksel Marksizm"in "küresel çözüm:devrim" fikrine karşı ortak muhalefetlerine dayanarak, onların post-Marksist telaffuzları olan “Hegemonya ve Sosyalist Strateji'yi (1985) açıkça kullanarak karşılık verdi.[17] 1991'de, Sovyetler dağıtıldı ve Batı'ya hizmet eden hevesli post-Marksist teorisyen iki kitap daha yayınladı: biri Laclau ve Mouffe'un serisinden, biri de “Ekim” kitabı .[18] Böylece, emperyalist devletler ve onların istihbarat servisleri tarafından desteklenen "demokrasi yanlısı" muhalif hareketler, zenginliği yukarıya doğru yeniden dağıtmak için işçi sınıfının kazanımlarını agresif bir şekilde geri alırken, radikal demokrasinin yükselen teorik dalgasını kesin olarak yakaladı.
Sovyet tarzı sosyalizm tasfiye edilirken, bu Doğu Avrupalı yerli muhbir, post-marksizmini giderek artan bir şekilde marksizmin en radikal biçimi olarak sunmuyordu. Siyahi toplulukların müziğini sahiplenerek, evcilleştirerek ve yaygınlaştırarak müzik endüstrisinde kötü şöhretli bir şekilde yükselen Elvis Presley'den farklı olarak, Žižek marksizmin en önemli içgörülerini ondan ödünç alarak küresel teori endüstrisinde bir paravan haline geldi. Marksist geleneğin bir parçası olmaksızın aksine onun özünü ezmek için oyunbaz bir postmodern kültürel karıştırmaya maruz bıraktı, böylece onları komünizm karşıtı rövanşizmin neoliberal çağında kitlesel tüketim için metalaştırdı. Bu bağlamda, kapitalist düzen 1990'larda tarihin sözde sonunu kutlarken, aynı zamanda radikal liberal entelijansiyasının oldukça niş sosyal tabakası için*, sözde özünden kurtarılmış Marksizm sembolü olduğunu dikkat etmek önemlidir., -Kapitalist güdümlü- rüzgâr hangi yönden eserse kırmızı bir balon gibi o yana uçan Žižek ivmelenen anti-komünist neoliberal çağın en tanınmış "Marksist"i olacaktı. Bu doğulu gizemli adam bu "deli"; marksizm karikatürü, en iyi "Felsefenin Boratı" lakabıyla kavranabilir. Zizek, Sovyet sosyalizmini yok eden alevlerin küllerinde alenen mastürbasyon yapan sapık bir anka kuşu gibi hızla yükseldi.
*Çevirmen Notu: Aklınızda bu kesimden bir tip canlanmadıysa İlker Canikligil’i düşünebilirsiniz.
***DÜZENLEDİĞİM KISMIN SONU 10 Ocak 2023.
Yazar: Gabriel RockhillÇeviren: Mustafa Özaydın
[1] I would like to express my gratitude to Jennifer Ponce de León, Eduardo Rodríguez and Marcela Romero Rivera for encouraging me to write this article and providing feedback on it, along with Helmut-Harry Loewen and Julian Sempill. I accept full responsibility, however, for any errors or infelicities.
[2] See Foreign Policy (December 2012): [https://web.archive.org/web/20121201034713/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_global_thinkers?page=0,55#thinker92](https://web.archive.org/web/20121201034713/http:/www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_global_thinkers?page=0,55#thinker92) (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[3] See his interview on the British BBC show “HARDtalk” on November 4, 2009: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThTJBKYPiNo&t=153s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThTJBKYPiNo&t=153s) (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[4] Ibid. Also see Slavoj Žižek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), 127-129.
[5] Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 151 (Žižek’s emphasis).
[6] Ibid. 169.
[7] See Domenico Losurdo’s insightful critique of Žižek in Western Marxism. Trans. Steven Colatrella (New York: 1804 Books, forthcoming).
[8] See, for instance, Slavoj Žižek. “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.’” Critical Inquiry 24:4 (Summer 1998): 998-1009; Slavoj Žižek. “Nous pouvons encore être fiers de l’Europe!” Le Figaro (October 31, 2022); and his oral comments on the future of Europe available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pA35HuhEYY (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[9] Quoted in Thomas Moller-Nielsen. “What Is Žižek For?” Current Affairs (Sept/Oct 2019): https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/what-is-zizek-for (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[10] See, for instance, his statements during a 2016 Channel 4 interview archived here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154211377601939 (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[11] See Slavoj Žižek. “Pacifism Is the Wrong Response to the War in Ukraine.” The Guardian (June 21, 2022): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/21/pacificsm-is-the-wrong-response-to-the-war-in-ukraine (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[12] Huntington served as White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. He also worked as an adviser to P.W. Botha’s Security Services in Apartheid South Africa (Botha was an outspoken opponent of Black political power and international communism, as well as an unrepentant defender of Apartheid).
[13] Reena Flores. “Donald Trump: I could ‘shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’” CBS News (January 23, 2016): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-i-could-shoot-somebody-and-i-wouldnt-lose-any-voters/ (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[14] See, for instance, Noam Chomsky. 9/11: Was There an Alternative? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001) and Michael Parenti. The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002).
[15] Issues of plagiarism and self-plagiarism have arisen so often regarding Žižek’s work that there is even a section of his Wikipedia page with links to multiple articles on the topic. See, in particular, Jay Pinho. “A Year of Writing Dangerously: Žižek’s Serial Self-Plagiarism.” The First Casualty (September 22, 2012): http://archives.jaypinho.com/2012/09/22/the-year-of-writing-dangerously-slavoj-zizeks-serial-self-plagiarism/ (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[16] See their description of the book series “Phronesis” in Slavoj Žižek. The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). For an insightful critique of radical democracy, see Larry Alan Busk. Democracy in Spite of the Demos: From Arendt to the Frankfurt School (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020).
[17] Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 6 (on Žižek’s embrace of their theoretical matrix, see his acknowledgements on page xvi). I also refer the reader to the book Žižek and Laclau wrote with fellow ‘anti-totalitarian’ radical democrat Judith Butler for the “Phronesis” series. In their co-authored introduction, they present the book as being founded on Hegemony and Socialist Strategy insofar as it “represented a turn to poststructuralist theory within Marxism, one that took the problem of language to be essential to the formulation of an anti-totalitarian, radical democratic project” (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000, 1, my emphasis).
[18] Žižek described his second book for the series “Phronesis” as being based on a series of lectures in Slovenia “aimed at the ‘benevolently neutral’ public of intellectuals who were the moving force of the drive for democracy” (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991, 3). In addition to Laclau and Mouffe, the Lacanian Joan Copjec helped facilitate the rise of Žižek in the Anglophone world through her promotion of his work in the circles of the French-theory driven New York City arts journal October. As he points out in the acknowledgments to his 1991 book Looking Awry, published as an October book with MIT Press, Copjec “was present from the very conception” of the project, encouraged him to write it, and spent time helping him with the manuscript (Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991, xi).
[19] Jodi Dean. Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), xi.
[20] Benoit Denezit-Lewis. “The Man Behind Abercrombie and Fitch.” Salon (January 24, 2006): https://www.salon.com/2006/01/24/jeffries/ (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[21] Slavoj Žižek. “The Communist Desire.” Los Angeles Review of Books. “The Philosophical Salon” (July 25, 2022): https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-communist-desire/#_ednref1 (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[22] Michael Parenti. To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (London: Verso, 2000), 17. Drawing on World Bank data, which could not be suspected of pro-socialist sympathies, Michel Chossudovsky provides a similar portrait of pre-1980 Yugoslavia in The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Pincourt, Canada: Global Research, 2003), 259.
[23] Tony Myers. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Routledge, 2003), 10.
[24] Ibid. 7.
[25] On the Heideggerian ‘opposition’ and Žižek’s first book, see Christopher Hanlon and Slavoj Žižek. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek.” New Literary History 32:1 (Winter, 2001): 1-21.
[26] See, for instance, Barbara Day. The Velvet Philosophers (London: The Claridge Press, 1999).
[27] On the NED, see William Blum. Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (London: Zed Books, 2014), 238-243. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing the NED, openly acknowledged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” (ibid. 239).
[28] See, for instance, Ian Parker. Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004). On the CIA’s support of French theory and intellectual anti-communism more generally, see Gabriel Rockhill. “The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left.” Los Angeles Review of Books. “The Philosophical Salon” (February 28, 2017): https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/ (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[29] Thomas Moller Nielsen. “Unrepentant Charlatanism (with a Response by Slavoj Žižek).” Los Angeles Review of Books. “The Philosophical Salon” (November 25, 2019): https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/unrepentant-charlatanism-with-a-response-by-slavoj-zizek/ (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[30] Ernesto Laclau. “Preface.” Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, xi.
[31] See the BBC documentary “The Death of Yugoslavia”: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3VyGPu6PKc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3VyGPu6PKc) (accessed on November 22, 2022). On Žižek’s weekly column, see the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on him: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Slavoj-Zizek (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[32] Amongst other sources, see his interview on the British BBC show “HARDtalk” on November 4, 2009: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThTJBKYPiNo&t=153s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThTJBKYPiNo&t=153s) (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[33] Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 990.
[34] Cited in F. William Engdahl. Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance (Wiesbaden: mine.Books, 2018), 101.
[35] Matthew Sharpe claims that Žižek was the cofounder of the LDS in his article on the Slovenian philosopher in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://iep.utm.edu/zizek/ (accessed on November 22, 2022). Although I have not found this information confirmed by other sources, it is very clear that Žižek was, at a minimum, a major public spokesperson for the LDS.
[36] See, for instance, “Lacan in Slovenia: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl.” Radical Philosophy 58 (Summer 1991). It would be interesting to explore the history of this party’s financing, following the lead of the great Michael Parenti’s analysis of the dismantling of Yugoslavia: “US leaders—using the National Endowment for Democracy, various CIA fronts, and other agencies—funneled campaign money and advice to conservative separatist political groups, described in the US media as ‘pro-West’ and the ‘democratic opposition’” (To Kill a Nation, 26).
[37] See the televised 1990 election debate archived here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942h8enHCZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942h8enHCZs) (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[38] “Lacan in Slovenia,” 30.
[39] See another segment of the same televised 1990 election debate, archived here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfNeIRQ350 (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[40] See the digital archive of NSDD-133 available here: https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-133.htm (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[41] Geert Lovink. “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality: A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek.” Ctheory (February 21, 1996): [https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14649/5529](https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14649/5529) (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[42] Neil Clark. “NS Profile—George Soros.” New Statesman (June 2, 2003): http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ns062203.htm (accessed on November 22, 2022). “From 1979,” Clark specifies in this article, “he [Soros] distributed $3m a year to dissidents including Poland’s Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and pumped millions of dollars into opposition movements and independent media. Ostensibly aimed at building up a ‘civil society,’ these initiatives were designed to weaken the existing political structures and pave the way for eastern Europe’s eventual colonization by global capital.”
[43] Cited in Néstor Kohan. Hegemonía y cultura en tiempos de contrainsurgencia “soft” (Ocean Sur, 2021), 63.
[44] See Myers, Slavoj Žižek, 9.
[45] Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[46] See, for instance, Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty, 267: “Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia had agreed to loan packages to pay off their shares of the Yugoslav debt […]. The all too familiar pattern of plant closings, induced bank failures, and impoverishment has continued unabated since 1996 [i.e. in the wake of the November 1995 Dayton Accords]. And who was to carry out IMF diktats? The leaders of the newly sovereign states have fully collaborated with the creditors.”
[47] “The fall of the Berlin Wall,” writes Minqi Li, “was followed by massive declines of living standards for large sections of the world population. The disintegration of the socialist economies contributed to the weakening of the global working classes. National income has been redistributed from labor to capital in nearly every part of the world” (“The 21st Century: Is There an Alternative (to Socialism)?” Science & Society 77:1 (January 2013): 11). Also see Božo Repe. “Slovenia” in Günther Heydemann and Karel Vodicka. From Eastern Bloc to European Union: Comparative Processes of Transformation since 1990 (New York: Berhahn Books, 2017) and Leopoldina Plut-Pregelj and Carole Rogel. The A to Z of Slovenia (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2010), 241. On the imperialist dismantling of Yugoslavia, whose horrific consequences for the majority of the local population were in inverse proportion to the increased profits for the capitalist ruling class, also see Boris Malagurski’s documentary film The Weight of Chains (2010) and Michael Parenti’s 1999 lecture “The U.S. War on Yugoslavia”: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waEYQ46gH08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waEYQ46gH08) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEzOgpMWnVs (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[48] See Matjaž Klemenčič and Mitja Žagar. The Former Yugoslavia’s Diverse Peoples (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2004), 300-301.
[49] See, for instance, Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[50] See the second segment of the 1990 presidential debate mentioned above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfNeIRQ350 (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[51] Ibid.
[52] Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[53] Slavoj Žižek. “NATO, the Left Hand of God.” Nettime (June 29, 1999): https://www.lacan.com/zizek-nato.htm (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[54] Parenti, To Kill a Nation, 81.
[55] Quoted in ibid. 92.
[56] Slavoj Žižek. “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead.” New Left Review I/183 (Sept/Oct 1990): 58.
[57] Žižek, “Lacan in Slovenia,” 29. Milošević reportedly launched his campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Kosovo in a speech he gave in 1989. As reported by Michael Parenti, who provides essential contextualization that contradicts, on numerous points, Žižek’s hot takes, here is part of what Milošević said: “Citizens of different nationalities, religions, and races have been living together more and more frequently and more and more successfully. Socialism in particular, being a progressive and just democratic society, should not allow people to be divided in the national and religious respect” (To Kill a Nation, 188).
[58] Žižek, “NATO, the Left Hand of God.”
[59] Cited in Parker, Slavoj Žižek, 35.
[60] Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[61] “Slavoj Žižek on Cuba and Yugoslavia” (December 1, 2016): [https://zizek.uk/slavoj-zizek-on-cuba-and-yugoslavia/](https://zizek.uk/slavoj-zizek-on-cuba-and-yugoslavia/) (accessed on November 22, 2022). Also see Žižek, “The Communist Desire.”
[62] Žižek, “Nous pouvons encore être fiers de l’Europe!”
[63] See his interview on the British BBC show “HARDtalk,” cited above, and Lovink, “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality.”
[64] This segment of the televised debate was archived here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfNeIRQ350 (accessed on November 22, 2022). For a brief summary of some of Churchill’s contributions to imperial atrocities, including the 1943 Bengal famine that claimed the lives of three million people, see Johann Hari. “Not His Finest Hour: The Dark Side of Winston Churchill.” Independent (October 28, 2010).
[65] On Europe, see, for instance, Steve Weissman, Phil Kelly and Mark Hosenball. “The CIA Backs the Common Market.” Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Eds. Philip Agee and Louis Wolf (New York: Dorset Press, 1978). It is also important to note that the European Union has been an important anti-communist force. In 2019, the European Parliament passed a resolution that largely equated communism with fascism and condemned “all manifestations and propagation of totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism or communism” https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2019-0021_EN.html (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[66] Žižek, “Nous pouvons encore être fiers de l’Europe!”
[67] Slavoj Žižek. First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 115.
[68] Žižek, “Nous pouvons encore être fiers de l’Europe!”
[69] Slavoj Žižek. “New Statesman Interview, with Jonathan Derbyshire.” New Statesman (October 29, 2009): https://zizek.uk/new-statesman-interview-with-jonathan-derbyshire/ (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[70] See, for instance, Domenico Losurdo’s insightful critiques of Croce in Antonio Gramsci: Del liberalismo al comunismo crítico(Madrid: disenso, 1997).
[71] Ronald Radosh. “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, told Me He Was ‘a Leninist.’” Daily Beast (April 13, 2017): https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-trumps-top-guy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[72] Spencer’s tweet was archived here: https://archive.ph/qT5Xu (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[73] Slavoj Žižek. “New Statesman Interview.”
[74] Michael B Kelley. “Last Year President Obama Reportedly Told His Aides that He’s ‘Really Good at Killing People.’” Business Insider (November 2, 2013): https://www.businessinsider.com/obama-said-hes-really-good-at-killing-people-2013-11?op=1 (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[75] Žižek, “New Statesman Interview.”
[76] “Doug Henwood Interviews Slavoj Žižek.” No Subject – Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (February 27, 2002): [https://nosubject.com/I_am_a_fighting_atheist](https://nosubject.com/I_am_a_fighting_atheist) (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[77] Ibid.
[78] Slavoj Žižek. Repeating Lenin (Zagreb: bastard books, 2001), 137.
[79] Žižek, “The Communist Desire.”
[80] To take but one example among many others, Žižek has the audacity to claim that class struggle is not part of “objective social reality” but is instead the Real “in the strict Lacanian sense,” meaning that class struggle “is none other than the name for the unfathomable limit that cannot be objectivized, located within the social totality” (Slavoj Žižek, Ed. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 2000, 25, 22).
[81] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. Vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 49.
[82] Badiou draws attention in particular to the books by the rightwing dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was welcomed with open arms by Hienrich Böll and the CIA networks he was involved with in Germany (see Hans-Rüdiger Minow’s 2006 documentary for ARTE, Quand la CIA infiltrait la culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58QTcf_mFag, accessed on November 22, 2022). The metaphysician also refers to the “outstanding, incontrovertible work” on the Stalinist Terror and positions “in the first rank” the “great book” by J. Arch Getty, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932-1939 (Slavoj Žižek, Ed. The Idea of Communism. Vol. 2. London: Verso, 2013, 6). Badiou declines to mention that this work was funded by the U.S. Department of State, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Open Society Fund. He also omits the fact that the book was published in a series whose advisory board includes powerful members of the U.S. imperial elite, including U.S. State Department operative Strobe Talbott and the anti-communist National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. The latter was involved, amongst other things, in covert CIA operations in Afghanistan that funded and supported the Mujahideen—including Osama bin Laden—to fight the Soviet Union (see Chomsky, 9/11, 82).
[83] For an excellent critique of Badiou along these lines, see Losurdo, Western Marxism.
[84] Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, Eds. The Idea of Communism (London: Verso Books, 2010), viii.
[85] See Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de León. “Toward a Compositional Model of Ideology: Materialism, Aesthetics and Social Imaginaries.” Philosophy Today 64:1 (winter 2020).
[86] Žižek, Looking Awry, 39; Slavoj Žižek. Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 30. “The Real,” Žižek writes, “is precisely that which resists and eludes the grasp of the Symbolic and, consequently, that which is detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances” (Metastases of Enjoyment, 30).
[87] Ibid. 76.
[88] Žižek, Looking Awry, 12. I am under no illusion regarding the stability of Žižek’s political positions or, for that matter, his interpretation of Lacan or other issues. As an opportunist, he has, of course, taken numerous different positions, some of which show clear signs of self-contradiction. What I am pointing out here, then, is simply one of the more coherent through-lines in his work, namely the theme of the ethical act, as it segues with Badiou’s theory of the subject.
[89] Alain Badiou. L’hypothèse communiste (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2009), 189. On numerous occasions, Žižek explicitly embraces Badiou’s Idea of communism, which overlaps with the former’s extensive writings on the ethical act. Here is one example: “The communist Idea thus persists: it survives the failures of its realization as a specter which returns again and again, in an endless persistence best recapitulated by Beckett’s already-quoted words: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’” (Douzinas and Žižek, Eds., The Idea of Communism, 217).
[90] Badiou, L’hypothèse communiste, 188.
[91] Ibid. 189.
[92] Ibid. 202. Never to be outdone in the realm of hyperbole, Žižek doubles down on Badiou’s position and takes it even further: “If it is to survive, the radical left should thus rethink the basic premises of its activity. We should dismiss not only the two main forms of twentieth century state socialism (the social-democratic welfare state and the Stalinist party dictatorship) but also the very standard by means of which the radical left usually measures the failure of the first two: the libertarian vision of communism as association, multitude, councils, anti-representationist direct democracy based on citizens’ permanent engagement” (Taek-Gwang Lee and Slavoj Žižek. The Idea of Communism. Vol 3. The Seoul Conference. London: Verso, 2016).
[93] Badiou, L’hypothèse communiste, 190. Badiou tellingly references the following examples: “the
Solidarność movement in Poland in the years 1980-81, the first sequence of the Iranian Revolution, the Political Organization in France [Badiou’s political group], the Zapatista movement in Mexico, the Maoists in Nepal” (ibid. 203). In the third volume of The Idea of Communism, which was based on a conference in South Korea—a capitalist state and de facto U.S. colony occupied by the military—Badiou insists in his opening comments that the participants in the conference “have nothing to do with the nationalist and military state of North Korea,” adding for good measure: “We have, more generally, nothing to do with the communist parties that here and there continue the old fashion of the last century [i.e. actually existing socialism].”
[94] “Slavoj Žižek: ‘Humanity Is OK, but 99% of People Are Boring Idiots.” The Guardian (June 10, 2012): https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jun/10/slavoj-zizek-humanity-ok-people-boring (accessed on November 22, 2022).
[95] Žižek has written extensively on Antigone as someone who performed just such an act by rebelling against the state and rejecting the reign of the ‘reality principle’ in favor of an uncompromising dedication to her desire (to bury her brother and thus honor the higher law of the gods). “An act is not only a gesture that ‘does the impossible,’” he contends in his glorification of individual desire à la Antigone, “but an intervention in social reality which changes the very coordinates of what is perceived as ‘possible’” (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 167).
[96] Badiou and Žižek have occasionally taken political positions in support of the working class, and this is not the object of my critique. It is instead their stalwart opposition—with only very minor and explainable exceptions—to the international socialist movement from 1917 to the present, which has taken the form of anti-imperialist state building projects from the USSR to Vietnam, China, Cuba and beyond.
[97] See Radhika Desai. “The New Communists of the Commons: Twenty-First-Century Proudhonists.” International Critical Thought1:2 (August 1, 2011): 204-223.
[98] V.I. Lenin. Collected Works. Vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 396.
[99] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. Vol. 20 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 33.
*Gabriel Rockhill* is a Franco-American philosopher, cultural critic and activist. He the founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. His books include Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy (2017), Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics (2016), Radical History & the Politics of Art (2014) and Logique de l’histoire (2010). In addition to his scholarly work, he has been actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, as well as a regular contributor to public intellectual debate. Follow on twitter: @GabrielRockhill