In Defense of Lost Causes

504 Pages·2008·18.41 MB·English

by  Slavoj Zizek

IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
VERSO
London • New York
First published by Verso 2008
Copyright © Slavoj Zizek 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
1 3 5 79 10 8 6 42
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Printed in^he USA by iVlaple Vail
Alain Badiûu wiu once deated amongét the public in a room where 1 wad delivering a
talk, when hid cellphone (which, to add iiuult to injury, waj mine —I ha? lent it to
him) all of a dudden dtarled to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently interrupted
me and adked me if I could talk more doftly, M that he could hear hut interlocutor
more clearly . . . If thUi WAi not an act of true friendship, I do not know what
friendship u. So, th'u book id dedicated to Alain Badiou.
Contents
Introduction: Causa Locuta, Roma Finita 1
PART I The State of Things
1 Happiness and Torture in the Atonal World 11
Human, all too human — The jcreen of civility — Gift and
exchange — UlyMM' rcalpoUtik— The atonal world—Serbdky
Institute, Malibu—Poland oj a ifymptoni—Happy to torture?
2 The Family Myth of Ideology 52
"Capitalst realLtm "— The production of the couple in Hollywood . . .
—. . . and out—The real Hollywood Left—Hiitory and
family in Frankenstein—A letter whœh did arnve at Ltd
destination
3 Radical Intellectuals, or, Why Heidegger Took the
Right Step (Albeit in the Wrong Direction) in 1933 95
Hiding the tree in a forest—A domestication of Nietzsche —
Michel Foucault and the Iranian Event—The trouble with Heidegger —
Ontolagical difference—Heidegger's smoking gun?—Repetition and the
New—From Heidegger to the drive —
Heidegger's 'dwine violence"
PART II Lessons from the Past
•4 Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao 157
"What do you want?"—Asserting the inhuman —
Tranjubstantiatiouii of ÄlarxLim — The limits of Mao s
dialectical — Cultural revolution and power
Stalinism Revisited, or, How Stalin Saved
the Humanity of Man 211
The Stalinidt culturai counter-revolution —A letter which did not
reach its destination (and thereby perhaps saved the world) —
Krenilinology—From objective to subjective guilt—Shostakovich
in Casablanca—Tiéi; StalinLil c a r n i v a l in the films
of Sergei Eisenstein — The minimal difference
Why Populism Is (Sometimes) Good Enough
in Practice, but Not in Theory 264
Good enough in praetiee but not good enough in
theory— The "determining role of the economy": Marx with
Freud—Drawing the line —The act —The Real—The vacuity
of the politivé of jouissance
PART HI What Is to Be Done?
7 The Crisis of Determinate Negation 337
The humorous superego ...—... and its politics of resistance-
"Goodbye Muter Refuting Nonmd"—Negri in Davos —Deleuze
without Negri— Governance and movements
8 Alain Badiou, or, the Violence of Subtraction 381
Materialism, democratic and dialectical—Responses to the
Event—Do we need a new world?—The lessons of the
Cultural Revolution —Which subtraction? —Give the
dictatorship of the proletariat a chance!
9 Unbehagen in der Natur 420
Beyond Fukuyama —From fear to trembling —Ecology
against nature —The uses and misuse,* of Heidegger—
What is to be done?
Notes 463
Index 493
Introduction: Causa Locuta, Roma Finita
Roma locuta, caMa finita—t\\e decisive words of authority that should end
a dispute, in all its versions, from "the Church synod has decided" to "the
Central Committee has passed a resolution" and, why not, "the people
has made clear its choice at the ballot box" . . . However, is not the wager
of psychoanalysis the opposite one: let the Cause itself speak (or, as
Lacan put it, "I, the truth, speak"), and the Empire (of Rome, that is,
contemporary global capitalism) will fall apart? Ab lata causa tolluntur
effectua: when the cause is absent, the effects thrive {TJCS effets ru se portent
bien qu'en absence de la cause). What about turning this proverb around?
When the cause intervenes, the effects are dispelled . . .
However, which Cause should speak? Things look bad for great Causes
today, in a "postmodern" era when, although the ideological scene is
fragmented into a panoply of positions which struggle for hegemony, there
is an underlying consensus: the era of big explanations is over, we need
"weak thought," opposed to all foundationalism, a thought attentive to the
rhizomatic texture of reality; in politics too, we should no longer aim at all-
explaining systems and global emancipatory projects; the violent imposi­
tion of grand solutions should leave room for forms of specific resistance
and intervention ... If the reader feels a minimum of sympathy with these
lines, she should stop reading and cast aside this volume.
Even those who otherwise tend to dismiss "French" postmodern
theory with its "jargon" as an exemplary case of "bullshit" tend to share
its aversion towards "strong thought" and its large-scale explanations.
There is indeed a lot of bullshitting going on these days. Unsurprisingly,
even those who popularized the notion of "bullshit," such as Harry
Frankfurt, are not free from it. In the endless complexity of the con­
temporary world, where things, more often than not, appear as their
opposites — Intolerance as tolerance, religion as rational common sense,
and so on and so forth —the temptation is great to cut it short with a
violent gesture of "No bullshit!" —a gesture which seldom amounts to
IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES
more than an Impotentpasöage à l'acte. Such a desire to draw a clear line of
demarcation between sane truthful talk and "bullshit" cannot but re­
produce as truthful talk the predominant ideology itself. No wonder that,
for Frankfurt himself, examples of "no bullshit" politicians are Harry
Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and, today, John McCain —as if the pose
of outspoken personal sincerity is a guarantee of truthfulness.
The common sense of our era tells us that, with regard to the old
distinction between doxa (accidental/empirical opmion, Wisdom) and
Truth, or, even more radically, empirical positive knowledge and abso­
lute Faith, one should draw a line between what one can think and do
today. At the level of common sense, the furthest one can go is en­
lightened conservative liberalism: obviously, there are no viable alter­
natives to capitalism; at the same time, left to itself, the capitalist dynamic
threatens to undermine its own foundations. This concerns not only the
economic dynamic (the need for a strong state apparatus to maintain the
market competition itsell, and so on), but, even more, the ideologico-
political dynamics. Intelligent conservative democrats, from Daniel Bell
to Francis Fukuyama, are aware that contemporary global capitalism
tends to undermine its own ideological conditions (what, long ago. Bell
called the "cultural contradictions of capitalism"): capitalism can only
thrive in the conditions of basic social stability, of intact symbolic trust, of
individuals not only accepting their own responsibility for their fate, but
also relying on the basic "fairness" of the system —this ideological
background has to be sustained through a strong educational, cultural
apparatus. Within this horizon, the answer is thus neither radical liberal­
ism à la Hayek, nor crude conservatism, still less clinging to old welfare-
state ideals, but a blend of economic liberalism with a minimally "author­
itarian" spirit of community (the emphasis on social stability', "values,"
and so forth) that counteracts the system's excesses —in other words
what Third Way social-democrats such as Blair have been developing.
This, then, is the limit of common sense. What lies beyond involves a
Leap of Faith, faith in lost Causes, Causes that, from within the space of
skeptical wisdom, cannot but appear as crazy. And the present book
speaks from within this Leap of Faith —but why? The problem, of course,
is that, in a time of crisis and ruptures, skeptical empirical wisdom itself,
constrained to the horizon of the dominant form of common sense, cannot
provide the answers, so one must risk a Leap of Faith,
This shift is the shift from "I speak the truth" to "the truth itself speaks
(in/through me)" (as in Lacan's "matheme" of the analyst's discourse,
INTRODUCTION
where the agent speaks from the position of truth), to the point at which I
can say, hke Meister Eckhart, "it is true, and the truth says it itself."'^ At
the level of positive knowledge, it is, of course, never possible to (be sure
that we have) attain (ed) the truth —one can only endlessly approach it,
because language is ultimately always self-referential, there is no way to
draw a definitive line of separation between sophism, sophistic exercises,
and Truth itself (this is Plato's problem). Lacan's wager is here the
Pascalean one: the wager of Truth. But how? Not by running after
"objective" truth, but by holding onto the truth about the position from
which one speaks.
There are still only two theories which imply and practice such an
engaged notion of truth: Marxism and psychoanalysis. They are both
struggling theories, not only theories about struggle, but theories which
are themselves engaged in a struggle: their histories do not consist in an
accumulation of neutral knowledge, for they are marked by schisms,
heresies, expulsions. This is why, in both of them, the relationship
between theory and practice is properly dialectical, in other words, that
of an irreducible tension: theory is not just the conceptual grounding of
practice, it simultaneously accounts for why practice is ultimately
doomed to failure —or, as Freud put it concisely, psychoanalysis would
only be fully possible in a society that would no longer need it. At its most
radical, theory is the theory of a failed practice: "This is why things went
wrong . . ." One usually forgets that Freud's five great clinical reports are
basically reports on a partial success and ultimate failure; in the same
way, the greatest Marxist historical accounts of revolutionary events are
the accounts of great failures (of the German Peasants' War, of the
Jacobins in the French Revolution, of the Paris Commune, of the
October Revolution, of the Chinese Cultural Revolution . . .). Such
an examination of failures confronts us with the problem of fidelity:
how to redeem the emancipatory potential of these failures through
avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic attachment to the past and of all-too-
slick accommodation to "new circumstances."
The time of these two theories seems over. As Todd Dufresne recently
put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about
all the fundamentals of his theory than Freud^—with the exception of
Marx, some would add. And, indeed, in liberal consciousness, the two
now emerge as the main "partners in crime ' ot the twentieth century:
predictably, m 2005, the infamous The Black Book of Coinmunuun, listing all
the Communist crimes,*^ was followed by The Black Book of P.iychoanalyjLi,
IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES
listing all the theoretical mistakes and clinical frauds of psychoanalysis/
In this negative way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and
psychoanalysis is now displayed for all to see.
There are nonetheless signs which disturb this postmodern compla­
cency. Commenting on the growing resonance of Alain Badiou's thought,
Alain Finkelkraut recently characterized it as "the most violent philo­
sophy, symptomatic of the return of radicality and of the collapse of anti-
totalitarianism" — an honest and surprised admission of the failure of the
long and arduous work of all kinds of "anti-totalitarians," defenders of
human rights, combatants against "old leftist paradigms," from the
French nouveaux philosophes to the advocates of a "second modernity."
What should have been dead, disposed of, thoroughly discredited, is
returning with a vengeance. One can understand their despair: how can it
be that, after having explained for decades not only in scholarly treatises,
but also in the mass media, to anyone who wanted to listen (and to many
who did not) the dangers of totalitarian "Master-Thinkers," this kind of
philosophy is returning in its most violent form? Have people not caught
on that the time of such dangerous Utopias is over? Or are we dealing
with some strange ineradicable blindness, or an innate anthropological
constant, a tendency to succumb to totalitarian temptation? Our proposal
is to turn the perspective around: as Badiou himself might put it in his
unique Platonic way, true ideas are eternal, they are indestructible, they
always return every time they are proclaimed dead. It is enough for
Badiou to state these ideas again clearly, and anti-totalitarian thought
appears in all its misery as what it really is, a worthless sophistic exercise,
a pseudo-theorization of the lowest opportunist survivalist fears and
instincts, a way of thinking which is not only reactionary but also
profoundly reactive in Nietzsche's sense of the term.
Linked to this is an interesting struggle which has been going on
recently (not only) among Lacanians (not only) in France. This struggle
concerns the status of the "One" as the name of a political subjectivity, a
struggle which has led to many broken personal friendships (say,
between Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner). The irony is that this struggle
is taking place among ex-Maoists (Badiou, Milner, Levy, Miller,
Regnault, Finkelkraut), and between "Jewish" and "non-Jewish" in­
tellectuals. The question is: is the name of the One the result of a
contingent political struggle, or is it somehow rooted in a more substantial
particular identity? The position of "Jewish Maoists" is that "Jews" is
such a name which stands for that which resists today's global trend to