The Magician of Ljubljana

By Assaf Sagiv

The totalitarian dreams of Slavoj Žižek.

V

From Žižek’s insistence on his commitment to the project of modernity (in both its idealistic and Marxist versions) and from his assertion that there is a real need for “global social transformation,”⁶⁹ we might conclude that like other progressive intellectuals, he seeks to free the human race from its chains, to smash oppressive regimes, and to build a freer world. Sadly, this is far from the case. Žižek may well extol the ideal of freedom, but at the same time he insists that winning this supreme prize demands the establishment of a totalitarian despotism, which imposes on its citizens a reign of fear and a blind obedience to authority.

Capitalism, which Žižek critiques as the hegemonic order of our time, embodies the complete opposite. Interestingly, some of the arguments Žižek puts forward to discredit capitalism make him sound like an arch-conservative: He points to the demise of all the centers of authority we once obeyed, the ingrained traditions, the old and venerated institutions, the written and unwritten codes, the rules of good taste—all these, he laments, are fading and evaporating under the weight of global market pressures. Capitalism encourages unbridled permissiveness, exhorts us to pure hedonism, tempts us to give free rein to our passions; any missed opportunity leaves us with pangs of guilt.⁷⁰ The symbolic order, the “big Other” itself, threatens to disintegrate, leaving in its wake confusion, terror, and helplessness.⁷¹

To deal with this crisis, post-modern subjects adopt different and often outlandish strategies that reflect the pathology of the times. To compensate for the erosion of “official” authority, for example, they explore relationships of power and domination in their private lives (hence the growing popularity of sado-masochistic practices);⁷² desperately seeking meaning and rules to live by, they turn to spiritual gurus and self-help books; they develop paranoid beliefs in the existence of the “Other of the Other,” omnipotent forces secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes;⁷³ and their passion for the Real itself is often expressed by indulgence in self-ruination and an appetite for destruction.⁷⁴ “The ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth century,” writes Žižek, “was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality—the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality.”⁷⁵ Paradoxically, the yearning to penetrate the Real through the cobweb of mere semblances of reality culminates in an “effect” of impressive aesthetic vision. Žižek finds a hair-raising example of this kind of effect in the September 11 terror attacks:

And was not the attack on the World Trade Center with regard to Hollywood catastrophe movies like snuff pornography versus ordinary sado-masochistic porno movies? This is the element of truth in Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s provocative statement that the planes hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work of art: We can perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of twentieth-century art’s “passion for the Real”—the “terrorists” themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it. When, days after September 11, 2001, our gaze was transfixed by the images of the plane hitting one of the WTC towers… we wanted to see it again and again; the same shots were repeated ad nauseam, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest.⁷⁶

All these phenomena, Žižek claims, indicate the loss of “symbolic efficiency” in post-modern capitalist society, in which individuals suffer from narcissistic, hysterical, and paranoid syndromes, and are drawn towards the obscene underside of the Real. At the same time, however, thanks to the ingenious ideological apparatus of “cynical reason,” they continue to conform to the capitalist order. Civilization is thus poised on the edge of the abyss. Indeed, Žižek does not balk at apocalyptic terminology: “In some sense, we can in fact argue that, today, we are approaching a kind of “end of time”: The self-propelling explosive spiral of global capitalism does seem to point toward a moment of (social, ecological, even subjective) collapse, in which total dynamism, frantic activity, will coincide with a deeper immobility.”⁷⁷

The fear of social, cultural, and moral collapse is common to elements on both the Left and the Right, but Žižek dismisses both sides’ agendas as inadequate or fraudulent: Rightist nationalism, in his view, is not a genuine alternative to post-modern capitalism, but rather its rotten fruit;⁷⁸ liberals are cowards who collaborate with the status quo; and social democrats, cast in a similar mold, propose mere cosmetic changes to it.⁷⁹ Žižek also writes disparagingly of leftist circles engaged in the “politics of identity,” multi-culturalism, and “radical democracy,” who ruffle feathers with their demands for minority rights, but ultimately make no real difference:

All the talk about new forms of politics bursting out all over, focused on particular issues (gay rights, ecology, ethnic minorities…), all this incessant activity of fluid, shifting identities, of building multiple ad hoc coalitions, and so on, has something inauthentic about it, and ultimately resembles the obsessional neurotic who talks all the time and is otherwise frantically active precisely in order to ensure that something—what really matters—will not be disturbed.⁸⁰

Žižek rejects all conventional political alternatives for their failure to provide genuine emancipation from the clutches of the dominant ideology. How, then, are we to change “what really matters”? According to Žižek, the answer lies in what he calls “the ethics of the Real.” These ethics—which may also be described as “radical politicization”—are bound up in the recognition that “the big Other” does not exist, and it is therefore pointless to look for it.⁸¹ In other words, instead of taking refuge in phony symbolic security, one must embrace the arbitrariness and instability of the Real, which is also the authentic state of the subject. The practical application of these ethics is the “act,” a concept central to Žižek’s doctrine and a key clause in his political manifesto. According to Žižek, the act is the ultimate challenge to the existing order: An extreme and shocking action, devoid of any tangible cause or identifiable rationale, involving the ruthless rejection of symbolic injunctions. It is a savage blow to all that is considered “proper” and “normal.” Žižek is quite explicit on this point:

Every act worthy of this name is “mad” in the sense of radical unaccountability: By means of it, I put at stake everything, including myself, my symbolic identity; the act is therefore always a “crime,” a “transgression,” namely of the limit of the symbolic community to which I belong. The act is defined by this irreducible risk: in its most fundamental dimension, it is always negative, i.e., an act of annihilation, of wiping out—we not only don’t know what will come out of, its final outcome is ultimately even insignificant, strictly secondary in relation to the NO! of the pure act.⁸²

The “annihilation” entailed in the act is also—and perhaps mainly—self-annihilation of the subject. For by this act, the perpetrator is fundamentally altered, undergoing an irreversible mental metamorphosis. “In it,” writes Žižek, “the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not).”⁸³ In other words, by his act, the subject detaches himself from his symbolic identity and returns to “the night of the world;” that is, he experiences himself anew as pure and primordial negativity. In Žižek’s view, this extreme detachment endows the act with universal meaning: It returns the subject to its basic position in the “empty place,” where it is not governed by the symbolic “big Other.”⁸⁴

Žižek cites several famous cases to demonstrate what he means when writing about the act. Some of his examples are discomfiting, to say the least: He recalls, for example, the scandal of the American teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, who had an affair with a thirteen-year-old student, became pregnant by him, and was subsequently prosecuted and jailed. Žižek is fascinated by Letourneau’s willful devotion to her juvenile lover, a devotion that caused her to suspend those powers of rational judgment that enable us to distinguish between good and evil. “Is not such a suspension, however, one of the constituents of the notion of the authentic act of being truly in love?” he asks. “Crucial here was Mary Kay’s unconditional compulsion to accomplish something she knew very well was against her own Good: Her passion was simply too strong; she was fully aware that, beyond all social obligations, the very core of her being was at stake in it.”⁸⁵

Žižek takes a no less disturbing example from the film The Usual Suspects. In one of the thriller’s best-known scenes, the arch-criminal Keyser Soze returns home to find his wife and young children held hostage by a rival gang. His reaction defies all expectation: He shoots dead his own family. Then he turns to his enemies and announces that now, since they no longer have any hold over him, he is free to kill them and their families, as well. Soze’s willingness to take the lives of his loved ones so as to be “free” to exact bloody vengeance is presented by Žižek as a near-heroic act: “Something like this is always at work in an authentic act,” he says. “You always have this dimension of sacrificing the most precious part of yourself.”⁸⁶

In both examples, the act is an extreme action undertaken by individuals willing to take a stand against the conventions of the society in which they live. Žižek stresses, however, that the act may also be a collective initiative, whose most obvious political form is revolution. He attacks idealists who are seduced into referring to revolution as an exalted notion, not to be translated into the language of reality lest it fail; so, too, does he mock those who eulogize the auspicious starts of the great revolutions in France and Russia, but lament their tragic descent into violence. Against all these temptations, he argues, “one should insist on the unconditional need to endorse the act fully in all its consequences,” because “the act always and by definition appears as a change ‘from Bad to Worse’ (the usual criticism of conservatives against revolutionaries: Yes, the situation is bad, but your solution is even worse…). The proper heroism of the act is fully to assume this worse.”⁸⁷ Accordingly, we should rid ourselves of the pragmatic wisdom typical of the liberal outlook, and dare to do what must be done: Overthrow today’s status quo through resolute action. He writes:

The democratic political order is of its very nature susceptible to corruption. The ultimate choice is: Do we accept and endorse this corruption in a spirit of realistic resigned wisdom, or can we summon up the courage to formulate a leftist alternative to democracy in order to break the vicious cycle of democratic corruption and the rightist campaigns to get rid of it?⁸⁸