Slavoj Žižek urges renewed resistance

Bruno Bosteels at occupy Boston

Spontaneous rebellion and the subjective skepticisms of Slavoj Zizek

Passages à l'acte?

Confessions of a Zizek cultist
by Jay Rothermel



If Zizek is looking for the material basis for the UK's rebellion, he need look no further than the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mVxJUeN2TFk

The class reality it expresses needs to be understood as existing for - let us say - a century in every city, town and borough. The experience is as much a part of the life of oppressed nationalities, and especially the youth, in the US and UK as knowing in one's bones that the sun will rise in the morning. Yes, society knows I am its enemy, and society's cops are not taking any chances: they will go out of their way to keep reminding the youth.

These social explosions erupt every few decades because that is all the longer unorganized and un-lead [in any more than an ad hoc sense] fury and rage at powerlessness can build up steam before release. When SZ says the "protest demanded nothing" he is only correct to the extent that the rebel populace had not nailed their demands to the city hall door or run their candidate for office or printed their manifesto in their own newspaper. Capitalism today has no spatial capability to allow a constructive rehearsal and demonstration of such grievances against the foundations of an abominable social system. And today there is no leadership to shape it, and to raise up a broader consciousness of independent class or national struggle. The laughably opportunist MPs for the UK rebel zones despise their electors, and know they are there in a social worker or parole officer capacity to keep the lid on things one day longer.

I agree with SZ when he writes that rebellions such as those earlier this month in the UK emerge from a "....society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out." But this is only a surface appearance. When he writes, "Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative...." I could not disagree more. There is an articulation, and it follows a class dividing line. The UK's capitalist ruling families see the realistic alternative to rebellion in further repression: incarceration of the culprits and the enforced eviction of their families. Were the outrage of this response by the UK rulers not so outrageous, one could write it off as simply cynically Dickensian. And what of a "realistic alternative" on the other side of the class divide? Well, there's the rub. Today there are many activists ready to organize protest, many ready to try to bring the wheels of injustice to a grinding halt. But the solution to the UK rebellion does not lie in more sympathetic policing or the election of new local council members and MPs. It lies in a vanguard organizing and shaping the courageous, ambitious, and selfless energy of rebel youth in Tottenham and all over the UK to end the dictatorship of capital.

According to SZ, the "left faces the problem of 'determinate negation': what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over?" Unless a revolutionary party has won the trust and confidence of the rebel masses, any struggle will crest and subside without sustaining energy. Revolutionary parties provide leadership, education, development of cadre, and the bridge to sustain spontaneous energies over the long term. A mass movement for socialism, for workers power, under the leadership of a revolutionary party that had won the allegiance of the masses, could have radically altered the relationship of class forces in the UK over the last 24 months, and created a political climate where the depredations of cops and broader ruling class austerity drives would not be permitted.

The material basis of spontaneous rebellion, from Tunisia to Egypt, from Greece to the UK, will breed new rebellions. Building mass revolutionary socialist parties to transform these struggles must be the starting point for Marxist-Leninists today. Our irreplaceable role is not so much helping organize and publicize each individual struggle or motion of resistance, but uniting and generalizing the lessons and leadership of such struggles. And figuring out what to do next on the road to workers' power. It is only in this way that the enormous sacrifices by rebels will not be squandered, as they were thirty years ago in the UK, or in 1992 during the LA rebellion in the United States.

SZ's article on the UK rebellions is a series of subjective and skeptical footnotes to an objectively significant and heroic chapter in the spontaneous mass resistance against cop brutality and broader prerogatives of capital. He spends time shaking his head over the short-fall of spontaneous struggles that did manage to move forward dramatically in Tunisia, Egypt, and Greece, but have so far not had the organizational continuity and vanguard class consciousness to truly alter the terms under which the bourgeoisie seeks to rule today. In the end he can only hope and keep his fingers crossed: "one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness." The wish for a "strong body" smacks of putchism, and expressly underlines the gulf between a developing rebel mood among the most marginalized portions of the proletariat, creating for the first time in decades the possibility of rebuilding vanguard communist leadership, and the hand-wringing of the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, which can only hypothesize communism.









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A. B. What does that mean?

John Steele: The Political Value of Alain Badiou

John Steele wrote the following introduction to his essay for our sister site Khukuri :

“Following is the paper I gave yesterday at the Platypus convention in Chicago, as part of a panel titled “Badiou and Post-Maoism: Marxism and Communism Today.”

“Other panelists were Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Mike Ely of Kasama, and Joe Ramsey [also a participant of the Kasama Project].

“Cutrone’s paper strongly attacked Badiou, whom he characterized as a typical ’60s new leftist, deeply anti-Marxist, who would ‘reduce communism to the perennial complaint of the subaltern.’ The others of us on the panel looked far more favorably on Badiou.

“Parenthetically, what became far more clear to me at the conference is that, despite the group’s stated orientation of “self-criticism and self-education,” Platypus represents a very defined political position. In a nutshell: Marxism as the self-consciousness of the bourgeois revolution,and proletarian revolution as the fulfillment and culmination of the bourgeois revolution. I don’t raise this in order to discuss it, but simply as an observation.

“The following is not really a discussion of Badiou’s thought — certainly not a deep one — and does not attempt to assess his central philosophical positions. I’m simply, rather, attempting to address a question on a somewhat more crude level: Is Badiou, as a thinker and actor in today’s intellectual/cultural/social milieu, playing a valuable role, politically?”

___________________

Why is Badiou of political value?

by John Steele

I assume we all start out from “Marxism” (certainly I do) – but what does this mean? There have been, and will be, many Marxisms, and the way to deal with this fact is not to believe that we have somehow to excavate the “true and only” Marx or Marxism, but to recognize that the fact of many Marxisms is based not just in history but in the writings of Marx himself (as well, of course, as those of his close associate Engels). Marx did not create a completely integrated and self-consistent theoretical structure – let alone an integrated theoretical/strategic/practical edifice.

It is obvious that there are several (or many) strands and interpretations within the Marxist tradition. Most of these accept the “unitary Marx” thesis. In actuality, though, several strands of thinking co-exist in Marx and his writings, which do not necessarily form (in fact do not form) a self-consistent, integrated whole. Even within the critique of political economy, the most fully developed part of Marx’ work, there is (notoriously) more than one crisis theory.

But leaving all that aside, let’s preface the question of Badiou’s value by asking:

Why is Marx of political value?

First a point of clarification on the sort of politics I mean: the politics – to say it very broadly and for the moment without further elaboration – of human emancipation. Given that this is our politics, or our broad political aim, then what is of political value can be characterized, equally broadly, as what conduces to, or what is helpful in working toward this aim. (Obviously this will be relative to historical situation.)

So Marx is of political value if his works conduce toward this, and for quite a bit of the last hundred and fifty years he’s been thought, on a very broad scale, to be valuable in precisely this way.

Now of course a lot of the finding-Marx-of-political-value during this period was built upon an understanding of Marx as the creator of a science of society and a metaphysic of history which limned a sure course of development and eventual victory – a thesis, and an understanding of Marx, which I reject, as I’m sure do most here. That was a Marx, and it’s a Marx which has lost the political value it may once have had, but this is not the only Marx.

Turning to my subject, my thesis is that for us, at this historical moment, Badiou, in his writings and his public stance, is of political value. Or perhaps, less sweepingly: He speaks to the situation and dilemmas of this historical moment in a way that I think can help us move forward politically.

Marxism

Part of the reason for his value is the fact that he does not pose his work as a development of Marxism. Although I would claim Badiou for Marxism (and for Maoism, as I’ve written elsewhere), it’s salutary to find a thinker who defines himself politically in terms of communism, who traces a complex identity with all that communism has meant in the 20th century, including the Russian and Chinese revolutions and their ramifications, but who does not seek to derive, deduce or define a contemporary emancipatory politics simply in those terms, nor in the language (for the most part) of this tradition.

This is a good thing, part of why Badiou is of political value, because this trajectory of revolutionary politics, along with much of its language and terminology, is dead – dead in the sense of being a living force in the world socially and politically. Let me make make sure what I’m saying is clear here, and guard against misunderstandings.

Marx is an intellectual and political resource – and Lenin, to cite just one other name, but along with many, many others – and it would be unthinkable for any contemporary emancipatory politics to attempt to do without this resource of past thinkers and actors. So I don’t mean at all that the works and example of Marx (& etc.) are dead, useless, outmoded.

As I said, we always need to beware of imposing a false unity and integration on this past, and to be alive to its contradictions, unevennesses, gaps, anomalies. But to say that Marx (etc.) is a necessary resource for rebuilding is clearly not to say that Marxism (or “Marxism-Leninism,” or —) is a living political/social force: it was – and there were many problematic aspects, but there was a living movement with a broad commonality of thinking and acting in the political realm: a subject pursuing a truth-process, in Badiou’s terms. This no longer exists as a real and living social/political force – that’s obvious. What’s often not so obvious to leftists is that the point is not to resuscitate or resurrect what has died.

Badiou: some terms

Before moving on into Badiou, let me just mention some of Badiou’s key concepts as they apply politically:

Event (this term has a specialized meaning in Badiou). A Badiouian event is a momentary break in the ruling or hegemonic structure of things, an opening out of which a new truth process may be born. To quote Badiou from his recent Communist Hypothesis, it is “a rupture in the normal order of bodies and languages as it exists for any particular situation….What is important to note here is that an event is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or that is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world. An event is the creation of new possibilities. It is located not merely at the level of objective possibilities but at the level of the possibility of possibilities.” (242-3.) Not the realization of an already existing possibility but the creation of new possibilities.

Truth process. Politics – that is, a particular political sequence – is conceived as a truth-process. Politics is an autonomous realm, which forges its own truths through truth processes. Thus political truth processes and their truths are not derivative from those of another realm (such as philosophy, ethics, economics, etc.). Emancipatory politics as truth-process: both terms are notable and important. After a certain point a particular truth process becomes saturated (Badiou’s term) – in effect it reaches an impasse. The truth-process beginning from the Russian Revolution has (long since now) become saturated.

To sum up what I’ll call the beneficially destructive aspect of Badiou:

I think this emphasis on the autonomy of politics is important and valuable. Is he correct in saying this? I’m not completely sure. But what is valuable is this emphasis – because it helps to pry us loose from a century or 150 years of making, or trying to make, politics an appendage of something else – of economics, often, or of philosophy. This illustrates a prominent way in which Badiou can be, and is valuable politically: not because he outlines a new, grand theory to which all should give assent (and this is not at all the way it is, btw, in Badiou’s stance or in the attitudes of his fans and students), but in marking a new possible approach, which will at the very least have the virtue of challenging wellworn and habitual left platitudes, which have shown themselves by this point (in fact by long ago) to be thoroughly unfruitful.

Truth

Politics as truth – why truth? Why is that valuable? Actually of course, what Badiou says is not that politics is truth, or that a real emancipatory politics represents truth, but that any real politics is constituted by a truth process. Both words should be taken in full weight.

Let’s take the second word first: politics is process – not achieved or hoped-for result, and also not a proceedure based on recipe or body of knowledge (at least not knowledge taken as knowledge, so to speak – on which see more below).

Rather, it is a process beginning not from what exists or from knowledge of what is (including its contradictions or tendencies), but from an axiom (or axioms). Now this insistence on an axiomatic beginning might seem to introduce a strong element of decisionism – as if the starting point is something arbitrarily decided upon, or some wished-for thesis taken as beginning point: a sort of utopianism. But this is not Badiou’s thinking. Rather, this axiomatic beginning is taken up as a starting point in view of an event, another key term (as we all know) in Badiou’s thinking.

An event, in Badiou’s rather technical sense, is not a grand happening. It is not even a noteworthy “thing that occurred.” It is, rather, more like a little flicker, which might easily pass unnoticed, and which will pass unnoted in the historical annals unless it becomes the beginning of a truth process. An event gives a momentary glimpse, not of possibilities inherent in what exists, or in history, but (to repeat) a glimpse of the possibility of possibilities. And the axiomatic beginning of a truth-process is the taking of a stance: it is to assume that these possibilities are real. Or even more: to explore the world, to act, as if these possibilities will have already become true.

Thus politics – actual, emancipatory politics – is a leap in the dark. It is not action based on what we know, or what can be known. It is action based on a gamble, on the making of a very serious bet, not even on a possibility (to say it again), but on what would be the case if the implications of that initial glimpse of the possibility of what might be are followed out and made true.

To take up political truth-process is to assume that axiomatic beginning in practice, to take it up fully and follow out its implications – that is, to act on the supposition of what will have become true, given the axiom’s truth. This is not a toe-in-the-water attitude, or a testing-it-out-to-see-whether stance. It’s a leap which can only be made with courage and confidence – a confidence which cannot be founded in the world which surrounds the one who leaps.

So we can clearly see the process part; and we can also start to see what’s meant by truth here. Badiou makes a strong distinction between knowledge and truth. Knowledge is achieved and relates solely to an existing state of affairs – a situation or a world, in Badiou’s terminology. Truth, on the other hand, is always processual: always in process, never achieved (else it changes to knowledge, and relates to a new and achieved world or situation). The reference of truths is in the future perfect: what will have been the case should the political practice which is the truth process come to fruition and succeed in changing the world (making a new world). Truth can only reach a state of achievment (when it then becomes knowledge) retrospectively.

If we want to say that what is true must correspond to a state of affairs, then we have to say that truths, for Badiou, correspond to a state of affairs to be brought about only through the agency of a subject and its associated truth process.

Now I just mentioned the subject associated with a truth process. Badiou’s theory of the subject is a big topic, which I will gloss over here. But let’s at least note that the subject here is not an individual person or consciousness, but something trans-individual. Badiou describes the subject as a new body, constituted by the trace of an event, and oriented around a truth process.

Political value

But leaving that thorny topic aside, let’s return to the question of political value.

The concept of event is what’s most often taken from Badiou. This is important, yes, but there’s much more to Badiou than simply the admonition to be on the lookout for what is new, or for upsurges of rebellion. There is this admonition, if it’s understood with sufficient openness: what we’re on the lookout for is the possible beginning of a new truth process, not something we’re calling on to conform to an already-existing political template.

(A good place to see how this works for Badiou is in his recent remarks on the uprisings on Tunisia and Egypt, one of which have been reprinted here, the other on Kasama.)

Communism as process and axiom – not goal

Marxism as it has existed, and to a lesser and more ambiguous extent in the writings of Marx, has built politics upon a theory of history, a progressive historical schema (obviously very much part of enlightenment thinking) which projects a sequence from pre-capitalist society through capitalism to socialism and thence to communism, within which socialism becomes the proximate revolutionary goal, and communism is over the horizon, but a state of things to be achieved in the end. In this context politics becomes an activity which is both teleological (guided by a particular goal to be achieved), and instrumental (a process serving as an instrument for the achievement of this goal).

Badiou’s conception is a challenge precisely to this:

Communism is immanent within the process of emancipatory politics: an axiom, not an objective, a process, not a program. (I owe this formulation to Don Hamerquist.)

The “communist hypothesis” informs the political truth process, not as a plan or program, nor as a goal, but as the general and over-riding defining axiom. (In fact, Badiou holds, nothing will count as a political truth-process which is not defined by this axiom: he says that it is the only real political Idea – another term used in a technical way by Badiou, which I will dodge for now.) Communism (note: not socialism – another question to discuss another time) communism as axiom and process restores real contingency to politics, and at the same time cuts against a pragmatic orientation. Politics is a process of agency, a subjective process – that is, proceeding through a subject.

This process is not a strategically mapped-out march toward a pre-established goal, but an aleatory process, following a necessarily chance-ridden path. And in fact – isn’t this how revolutionary politics has actually proceeded, even though it is not how it has conceived of itself as proceeding?

The 2nd and 3rd Internationals (as well as Trotskyist variants of the latter) understood politics to be a matter of proceeding from scientific and historical analysis – and yet whatever real politics took place (and I do think it did, in particular places and times during this long period), was much more along the lines of what Badiou outlines, than the mythical self-understanding which was its ideology: real politics here too was, in practice, a leap in the dark, guided by a basic postulate, without assurance of success or where exactly what the end result would be. Look at any of whatever you may choose as great instances of revolutionary politics in the 20th century, or in your own experience, and I think this will hold true, if examined with full honesty. It certainly holds true in my own experience.

That aside, though, and whether you grant that this has been the case, I think it would be hard to deny that any emancipatory politics of the present historical moment would or must – if it’s going to take place – fit Badiou’s open but anchored process.

A personal encounter with Badiou

Badiou and the Bankruptcy of Fashionable French Philosophy

by Ralph Dumain

Badiou un-self-consciously gives the game away in this specimen of illusory self-consciousness:

Badiou, Alain. "The Adventure of French Philosophy," New Left Review, new series, no. 35, September-October 2005.

Here are some notes I wrote on this article.

I

4 Dec 2005

Just as I was about to go to bed, one of my fans enthusiastically forwarded me this article. Badiou is definitely the flavor of the month. This article is a succinct summary of a slice of intellectual history, but what blows me away is how fundamentally unconscious Badiou seems to be of the underlying dynamics I see motivating his intellectual universe. It shows how thoroughly bourgeois all French intellectuals are, esp. those of the hard left—they're the worst! To paraphrase Lenny Bruce: this is so bankrupt, it's thrilling. I'll have more to say when I've had a second go-round with this essay.

II

4 Dec 2005

First, some quotes, with comments:

BADIOU: "a French philosophical moment of the second half of the 20th century which, toute proportion gardée, bears comparison to the examples of classical Greece and enlightenment Germany."

DUMAIN: But why this moment, or the others, and with what import in the grand scheme?

BADIOU: "Sartre’s foundational work, Being and Nothingness, appeared in 1943 and the last writings of Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, date from the early 1990s. The moment of French philosophy develops between the two of them, and includes Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan as well as Sartre and Deleuze—and myself, maybe."

DUMAIN: What was the state of French philosophy before this moment? Kojeve, I've read, was the grand central station for the introduction of Hegel, which influenced all these people? What was French philosophy doing before this turn? Bachelard was a philosopher of science as well as of the poetic imagination: doesn't he go back a little further? What about the previous state of French philosophy of science? What came out of Poincaré, or of Emile Meyerson? Doesn't Barthes figure into this scenario?

BADIOU: "To think the philosophical origins of this moment we need to return to the fundamental division that occurred within French philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century, with the emergence of two contrasting currents. In 1911, Bergson gave two celebrated lectures at Oxford, which appeared in his collection La pensée et le mouvement. In 1912—simultaneously, in other words—Brunschvicg published Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique. Coming on the eve of the Great War, these interventions attest to the existence of two completely distinct orientations. In Bergson we find what might be called a philosophy of vital interiority, a thesis on the identity of being and becoming; a philosophy of life and change. This orientation will persist throughout the 20th century, up to and including Deleuze. In Brunschvicg’s work, we find a philosophy of the mathematically based concept: the possibility of a philosophical formalism of thought and of the symbolic, which likewise continues throughout the century, most specifically in Lévi-Strauss, Althusser and Lacan.

"From the start of the century, then, French philosophy presents a divided and dialectical character. On one side, a philosophy of life; on the other, a philosophy of the concept. This debate between life and concept will be absolutely central to the period that follows. At stake in any such discussion is the question of the human subject, for it is here that the two orientations coincide."

DUMAIN: This is most fascinating, and presents the essence of the problem before us. And the question is: why this dynamic? And then, Is there an unnamed dynamic underlying this ostensible dynamic? How does this compare to the duality of positivism and irrationalism one can find elsewhere in the past century and a half of western philosophy?

Badiou names a dynamic, but there's more to be said about it. (1) Badiou names a conspicuous feature of French thought: the tendency towards formalism and schematism. This is neither British, nor I think, particularly German. Here there is neither German depth nor positivist reduction, but a different twist. (2) Bergson is counterpoised to this tendency. But Bergson is not only a vitalist, but an intuitionist, a mystical reactionary of the worst sort. Bergson's incredible popularity arrives at a moment of historical rebellion against a fully schematized and mathematized world view; it is itself, paradoxically, an abstraction: pure intuition, the flow of lived experience, counterpoised against a completely reified social world? And why is this reification perfected foremost in France? This is the question Badiou doesn't pose.

BADIOU: "A first definition of the French philosophical moment would therefore be in terms of the conflict over the human subject, since the fundamental issue at stake in this conflict is that of the relationship between life and concept.

"We could, of course, take the quest for origins further back and describe the division of French philosophy as a split over the Cartesian heritage. In one sense, the postwar philosophical moment can be read as an epic discussion about the ideas and significance of Descartes, as the philosophical inventor of the category of the subject. Descartes was a theoretician both of the physical body—of the animal-machine—and of pure reflection. He was thus concerned with both the physics of phenomena and the metaphysics of the subject. All the great contemporary philosophers have written on Descartes . . ."

DUMAIN: Descartes set up, abstractly, the philosophical duality of the modern world, of the rising bourgeoisie breaking free of its feudal bonds. Also emerging is a new twist on the division of mental and manual labor. (As, e.g., CLR James et al [1950] have noted, this conception becomes embodied in the administrative-industrial organization of society to come, finally perfected in Stalinist state capitalism—bodiless planning totally organizes mindless physical labor.) A number of analysts have noted thus. The question remains, though: why this struggle over Descartes, specifically in France and specifically in the 20th century?

BADIOU: "French philosophers went seeking something in Germany, then, through the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. What was it that they sought? In a phrase: a new relation between concept and existence."

DUMAIN: This is eminently logical, but . . . Where was French philosophy at the moment when this trend began? What happened to the once fashionable Bergson?

BADIOU: "The second operation, no less important, concerns science. French philosophers sought to wrest science from the exclusive domain of the philosophy of knowledge by demonstrating that, as a mode of productive or creative activity, and not merely an object of reflection or cognition, it went far beyond the realm of knowledge. They interrogated science for models of invention and transformation that would inscribe it as a practice of creative thought, comparable to artistic activity, rather than as the organization of revealed phenomena."

DUMAIN: This immediately makes me think of Bachelard. But again, where's the why?

BADIOU: "The third operation is a political one. The philosophers of this period all sought an in-depth engagement of philosophy with the question of politics. . . . This fundamental desire to engage philosophy with the political situation transforms the relation between concept and action."

DUMAIN: Why this particular evolution, as opposed, to say, that of Lukacs, or of the Frankfurt School? Note that if the German turn was necessary, then the French lagged behind the Germans in some respect. But why this appropriation of German thought and the French twist on it? And how do the two streams compare in value? How does Sartre's Being and Nothingness—strapped in an impossible dualism ridiculed from all corners—from Marcuse to Farber and back again—compare to the German achievement?

BADIOU: "The fourth operation has to do with the modernization of philosophy, in a sense quite distinct from the cant of successive government administrations. French philosophers evinced a profound attraction to modernity. They followed contemporary artistic, cultural and social developments very closely. . . . In all this, philosophy was seeking a new relation between the concept and the production of forms—artistic, social, or forms of life. Modernization was thus the quest for a new way in which philosophy could approach the creation of forms."

DUMAIN: Again, why the particular configuration of French thought, in comparison to German, in achieving these aims? There must have been a particular blockage that had to be overcome. Later, I think, I'll be saying something about the surrealists, Sartre, and CLR James.

BADIOU: "The question of forms, and of the intimate relations of philosophy with the creation of forms, was of crucial importance. Clearly, this posed the issue of the form of philosophy itself: one could not displace the concept without inventing new philosophical forms. It was thus necessary not just to create new concepts but to transform the language of philosophy. This prompted a singular alliance between philosophy and literature which has been one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary French philosophy."

DUMAIN: Literature and language. The breakout of conceptual confinement paralleled or even necessitated a breakout from linguistic confinement. How, different, then the use of language in France from Germany, which after all, was no stranger to linguistic innovation in either area. But yet the French must have felt the most straight-jacketed. That's where the surrealists came in, after the war.

BADIOU: "The surrealists also played an important role. They too were eager to shake up relations regarding the production of forms, modernity, the arts; they wanted to invent new modes of life. If theirs was largely an aesthetic programme, it paved the way for the philosophical programme of the 1950s and 60s...."

And:

"It is at this stage that we witness a spectacular change in philosophical writing. Forty years on we have, perhaps, grown accustomed to the writing of Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan; we have lost the sense of what an extraordinary rupture with earlier philosophical styles it represented."

And:

"There was, then, both a transformation of philosophical expression and an effort to shift the frontiers between philosophy and literature. We should recall—another innovation—that Sartre was also a novelist and playwright (as am I). The specificity of this moment in French philosophy is to play upon several different registers in language, displacing the borders between philosophy and literature, between philosophy and drama."

DUMAIN: Here we see an impetus to develop a new way of writing. What is not clear in many of these cases, is an intrinsic connection to the development of new abstract concepts. How do the literary and the abstract motivations necessarily mutually motivate one another, if they do? Badiou will then discuss the role of Freud, but there's already something unstated that shouldn't pass unexamined. German philosophical writing is notoriously difficult, syntactically convoluted, dense and allusive, with a record of prodigious terminological innovation, yet something different seems to be going on. The Frankfurt School was up to its eyeballs in Freud, as well as aesthetics, but . . . . ? Is the difference merely that the German philosophers did not feel the need to write novels, plays, poems? Something else is going on that needs to be teased out. It has something to do with "Cartesianism", with literary style, with a rebellion against rigidity and classicism, with a particular configuration governing the rebellion and the nature of what it rebelled against.

III

4 Dec 2005

I'm going to defer addressing the questions I posed last time, and pick up with the section "With and against Freud."

BADIOU: "At stake, finally, in this invention of a new writing, is the enunciation of the new subject; of the creation of this figure within philosophy, and the restructuring of the battlefield around it. For this can no longer be the rational, conscious subject that comes down to us from Descartes; it cannot be, to use a more technical expression, the reflexive subject. The contemporary human subject has to be something murkier, more mingled in life and the body, more extensive than the Cartesian model; more akin to a process of production, or creation, that concentrates much greater potential forces inside itself."

DUMAIN: I am singularly unimpressed with this stance—though I understand the historical statement he's making—because the Germans were just as deeply engaged with Freud and with all these issues, sans the pretentious rebellion against Cartesianism. But this is too delicious, for Badiou names a dynamic he's trapped in himself, like all these people, and thinks he's diagnosed while remaining obtuse. This is so delicious I'll have to return to it again and again.

BADIOU: "At issue, most fundamentally, has been the division of French philosophy between, on one side, what I would call an existential vitalism, originating with Bergson and running through Sartre, Foucault and Deleuze, and on the other a conceptual formalism, derived from Brunschvicg and continuing through Althusser and Lacan. Where the two paths cross is on the question of the subject, which might ultimately be defined, in terms of French philosophy, as the being that brings forth the concept."

DUMAIN: I see why Sartre is put on the one side, esp. opposite Althusser et al. But wasn't Sartre himself remarkably Cartesian and Kantian, and opposed to the surrealists as well as the spell of poetry? Sartre was deep-sixed posthumously precisely because of his affirmation of the subject, which the other side was sadomasochistically bent on smashing. And remember Barthes' assault on the concept of Man. This is a specifically petty bourgeois French preoccupation—nobody else in the world except their groupies takes this puffed-up foolishness seriously.

BADIOU: "The relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis within French philosophy is just this, one of competition and complicity, of fascination and hostility, love and hatred. No wonder the drama between them has been so violent, so complex."

DUMAIN: Badiou continues with the examples of Bachelard (but omitting Bachelard's philosophy of science) and Sartre—interesting. Deleuze—delusional.

Then, under "Paths of Greatness," Badiou outlines 6 key features of the French philosophical moment. I won't reiterate them here, but do read them.

BADIOU: "Such is the French philosophical moment, its programme, its high ambition. To identify it further, its one essential desire—for every identity is the identity of a desire—was to turn philosophy into an active form of writing that would be the medium for the new subject. And by the same token, to banish the meditative or professorial image of the philosopher; to make the philosopher something other than a sage, and so other than a rival to the priest. Rather, the philosopher aspired to become a writer-combatant, an artist of the subject, a lover of invention, a philosophical militant—these are the names for the desire that runs through this period: the desire that philosophy should act in its own name."

DUMAIN: What a load of shit! The French intellectual and cultural system is the most centralized, bureaucratic, class-confined and elitist in the entire history of humanity. Striking a pose like this is just one other route to the top. This is self-deception at its peak. This is so incredible, I'm almost speechless, but not quite . . . .

IV

9 April 2006

The star system in France also relates to its highly centralized cultural system. The concept of cultural capital now in vogue could never have originated anywhere but in France, and itself is the product of how bourgeois culture emerged out of aristocratic culture, France being the cultural capital of European feudalism. Furthermore, French philosophy, with its penchant for impersonal, schematic, and quasi-mathematical formalized theoretical schemes, reflects the conditions of the French educational and cultural system, and even the rebellion against it, with a penchant for irrationalism, linguistic play, psychoanalysis, obsessions with the body, etc., is determined and wholly encapsulated by the very same conditions. And if you take a cold hard look at all the innovations in French philosophy since the introduction of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger in the 1920s-30, you should find it all rather inferior to what the German philosophical tradition had already accomplished with the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.

V

27 July 2009

On Badiou's six points:

1. Eliminate separation of concept and existence? Pretentious drivel. "Existence" is purely academic, and in fact, the separation is greater than ever.

2. Taking philosophy out of the academy? Are you kidding? This was done far more sincerely and effectively 60 years ago.

3. Abandon opposition between knowledge and action? More pretense.

4. To make philosophy a real political intervention? Compared to what now? More pretense.

5. Question of the subject? French anti-humanism is of no importance whatever. The German tradition has said everything needed to be said on the subject.

6. New style of philosophical exposition? Heaven help us!

I find this entire program utterly worthless. . .

VI

See also the following haphazardly selected items. Not all are listed to cast aspersions on their authors or subject matter, but they do amplify some—not all!—directions in French philosophy. One finds here various contributions to various trends, for example, French Marxism and postmodernism. Omitted, for example, are French analytical philosophers. The conflict between Benda and Bergson early in the 20th century, as well as the broader contextualization by Hughes, is relevant here. Read points out Althusser's key issues concerning philosophy. Balibar and Macherey probably accomplished far more. Schrift emphasizes the institutional context of French philosophy, which he believes accounts for its peculiar traits. Badiou's perspective is not all there is.

Balibar, Étienne. "Irrationalism and Marxism," New Left Review, I/107, January-February 1978, pp. 3-18.

Balibar, Etienne. Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, translated by James Swenson. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Balibar, Etienne, The Philosophy of Marx, translated by Chris Turner. London; New York: Verso, 1995. Full text online.

Benda, Julien. The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison Des Clercs), translated by Richard Aldington, with a new introduction by Roger Kimball. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007. (Translation first published 1928; French original, 1927.) See also my amazon.com reviews of July 12, 2006:

Of Benda:

I am alarmed by Amazon.com's links to "similar" right-wing books. The conservative thrust of other customer reviewers is flat-out ignorant. To get a better appraisal of Benda's philosophical outlook, a look at his other work is in order. A good source on Benda's ouevre is Julien Benda (1956) by Robert Judson Niess.

Another good source is also a classic: Consciousness and Society by H. Stuart Hughes. To be sure, Benda was an uncompromising partisan of the Enlightenment and democracy, but his provincial, traditional, classical education made a control freak out of him. Benda lacked flexibility and could not with sufficient concreteness engage the contemporary trends he rejected—recent developments in literature as well as irrationalist philosophy. (Benda's nemesis was Henri Bergson, a point in his favor.)

There is also a pro-Benda tendency on the left. Recent examples are Russell Jacoby's The End of Utopia and Edward W. Said's Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (see my amazon.com review). Apart from what I call 'left Benda-ism', there is a rich history of public intellectuals as well as academics who advocate or practice free-floating intellectualism combined with political radicalism, including Richard Wright, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky, and Alvin Gouldner. In fact, Karl Marx was just this type of individual, as Gouldner pointed out.

Of Said:

This is a short popular introduction to the social role of intellectuals, taking off from the polarity of Julien Benda (free-floating) vs. Antonio Gramsci (organic) intellectuals. While Benda has always had a conservative flavor, his advocacy of independence and integrity (as opposed to his conservative notion of the intellectual's obligation to the eternal verities) is nonetheless important, so Said could be considered a left Benda-ite (as could Russell Jacoby). Said advocates the independence as well as the engagement of free-floating and academic intellectuals. He writes of the difficulties of negotiating the cosmopolitan and the national commitments of intellectuals, also of the experience of exile and marginalization. He also addresses the polarity of professionalism and amateurism, holding to the side of the "amateurs", without disavowing membership in academic institutions. He prefers the role of "speaking truth to power", which also means avoiding the twin temptations of self-submission to gods that inevitably fail and apostatic dogma-hopping.

Burwick, Frederick; Douglass, Paul; eds. The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. Cambridge [UK]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. See table of contents and publisher description.

Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930. Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1958. Latest edition, with a new introduction by Stanley Hoffman: New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002. My edition: New York: Vintage Books, 1961. See also "Consciousness and Society: A Review" by R. Dumain.

Lears, Jackson. "Keeping It Real," The Nation, June 12, 2006. Review of Martin Jay's Songs of Experience.

Lefebvre, Henri. Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings; ed. Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, Eleonore Kofman. New York; London: Continuum Books, 2003. Excerpts can be viewed on Google books; see also the Continuum Books site.

Macherey, Pierre. In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays, edited by Warren Montag; translated by Ted Stolze. London; New York: Verso, 1998.

Matthews, Eric. Review: Alan D. Schrift, Twentieth Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2007.03.25.

Read, Jason. "The Althusser Effect: Philosophy, History, and Temporality," borderlands e-journal, volume 4 number 2, 2005.

Schrift, Alan D. "Trends in French Philosophy: Fashion? ou autre chose?," paper delivered at American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 103rd Third Annual Meeting, December 29, 2006, session IV-F.

Schrift, Alan D. Twentieth Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Full text online.

Schrift, Alan D. "The Effects of the Agrégation de Philosophie on Twentieth-Century French Philosophy," Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 3, July 2008, pp. 449-473.

Wolin, Richard. "Heidegger Made Kosher," The Nation, February 20, 2006.

SZ on "climate change" - empty, with loftiness of tone

December 2, 2010

The End of Nature

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

The big ecological disasters of 2010 fit into the ancient cosmological model, in which the universe is made up of four basic elements: AIR, volcanic ash clouds from Iceland immobilizing airline traffic over Europe; EARTH, mudslides and earthquakes in China; FIRE, rendering Moscow almost unlivable; WATER, the tsunami in Indonesia, floods displacing millions in Pakistan.

Such recourse to traditional wisdom offers no true insight into the mysteries of our wild Mother Nature’s whims, however. It’s a consolation device, really, allowing us to avoid the question we all want to ask: Will more events of such magnitude turn up on nature’s agenda for 2011?

In our disenchanted, post-religious, ultra-technological era, catastrophes can no longer be rendered meaningful as part of a natural cycle or as an expression of divine wrath. Ecological catastrophes — which we can view continually and close-up, thanks to our 24/7 plugged-in world — become the meaningless intrusions of a blind, destructive rage. It’s as if we are witnessing the end of nature.

Today we look to scientific experts to know all. But they do not, and therein lies the problem. Science has transformed itself into specialized knowledge, offering an inconsistent array of conflicting explanations called “expert opinions.” But if we blame the scientific-technological civilization for many of our difficulties, we cannot do without that same science to fix the damage — only scientists, after all, can “see” the ozone hole. Or, as a line from Wagner’s “Parsifal” puts it, “The wound can only be healed by the spear that made it.” There is no way back to pre-scientific holistic wisdom, to the world of Earth, Wind, Air and Fire.

While science can help us, it can’t do the whole job. Instead of looking to science to stop our world from ending, we need to look at ourselves and learn to imagine and create a new world. At least for those of us in the West, it’s difficult to accept being passive observers who must sit and watch as our fates are revealed.

Enter the perverse pleasure of premature martyrdom: “We offended Mother Nature, so we are getting what we deserve!” It’s deceptively reassuring to be ready to assume guilt for the threats to our environment. If we are guilty, then it all depends on us; we can save ourselves simply by changing our lives. We frantically and obsessively recycle old paper, buy organic food — whatever, just so we can be sure we are doing something, making our contribution.

But like the anthropomorphic universe, magically designed for man’s comfort, the so-called balance of nature, which humankind brutally destroys with its hubris, is a myth. Catastrophes are part of natural history. The fact that ash from a modest volcanic outburst in Iceland grounded most of the planes in Europe is a much-needed reminder of how we, humans, with our tremendous power over nature, are nothing but one of the living species on Earth, depending on the delicate balance of its elements.

So what might the future hold? One thing is clear: We should accustom ourselves to a much more nomadic way of life. Gradual or sudden change in our environment, about which science can do little more than offer a warning, may force unheard-of social and cultural transformations. Suppose a new volcanic eruption makes a place uninhabitable: Where will the inhabitants find a home? In the past, large population movements were spontaneous processes, full of suffering and loss of civilizations. Today, when weapons of mass destruction are available not only to states but even to local groups, humanity simply can’t afford a spontaneous population exchange.

What this means is that new forms of global cooperation, which do not depend on the market or on diplomatic negotiations, must be invented. Is this an impossible dream?

The impossible and the possible are simultaneously bursting into excess. In the realms of personal freedom and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible. We can entertain the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities; of manipulating our biological traits via interventions into the genome; of achieving the tech-gnostic dream of immortality by encoding our distinguishing traits and feeding the composite of our identities into a computer program.

When it comes to socioeconomic relations, however, we perceive our era as one of maturity, and thus acceptance. With the collapse of Communism, we abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality — that is, capitalist socioeconomic reality — with all its impossibilities. We cannot engage in large collective acts, which necessarily end in totalitarian terror. We cannot cling to the old welfare state, which makes us noncompetitive and leads to economic crisis. We cannot isolate ourselves from the global market.

For us, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than serious social change. Witness the numerous blockbusters about global catastrophe and the conspicuous absence of films about alternate societies.

Maybe it’s time to reverse our concept of what is possible and what isn’t; maybe we should accept the impossibility of omnipotent immortality and consider the possibility of radical social change. If nature is no longer a stable order on which we can rely, then our society should also change if we want to survive in a nature that is no longer the good caring mother, but a pale and indifferent one.

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He is a scholar or visiting professor at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, the European Graduate School in Switzerland and a number of American universities.

"Fanatic mode" - Zizek as "Christian Marxist Messiah"

The Žižekian Counter-Revolution

[Slovenian Lacanian-Marxist-Hegelian philosopher and cultural theorist, Slavoj Žižek is visiting India currently and will be delivering a few lectures here. This post is prompted by his visit...

imaaN mujhe roke hai jo khiNche hai mujhe kufr
ka’aba mere peeche hai kaleesa mere aage

[Faith holds me back when infidelity beckons/
Behind me, the Kaaba; before me, the Church]

It is difficult to miss the immense subversiveness of the dilemma encapsulated in Ghalib’s couplet above. This dilemma of the believer is produced by the constant threat of corruption – the Kaaba behind the believing Muslim holds him back from indulging in, or falling prey to, the infidelities and temptations that always lie in wait.

Substitute Marxism for Kaaba and ‘postmodernism’ for Church, and you have the perfect Žižekian incarnation of this classic Ghalibian dilemma: Not quite at home in the Faith (Lacan, jouissance, surplus-enjoyment, the Real…) and yet, not able to leave it either, for the fear of what might befall one deserting the Order. Faith is the anchor that holds one back from committing all kinds of blasphemies. Nevertheless, the seductions of infidelity force our philosopher to turn for sustenance precisely to the philosophers and ideas he mistrusts: unlike most members of the Marxist faith, he repeatedly returns to Nietzsche, Heidegger, to Derrida, Foucault, Laclau and Deleuze. He takes over their language and makes himself at home in it. Is there a hidden jouissance in thus frequenting this forbidden territory?

Thus he can in one breath defend the entire heritage of Marxism (from the 1917 October revolution to ‘revolutionary terror’), and at the same time claim that the attempts to trace the moment of the Fall (the Late Engels, Lenin’s deviation from the classical path, Stalin’s perversities and so on) must be rejected: ‘the Fall is to be inscribed in the very origins’ (Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes Verso 2008: 175).

Some years ago, Slavoj Zizek wrote a series of essays advocating a passionate ‘return to Lenin’ and a ‘reassertion of the politics of Truth’ [Slavoj Zizek (2001), ‘Repeating Lenin’ and Zizek (2002) ‘Can Lenin Tell Us About Freedom Today?’]. He set up his argument in opposition to those who ‘dismiss the politics of Truth’ as ‘totalitarian’ and argued for the need to ‘break out of the deadlock’ created by the post-Marxist and postmodernist endeavour to ‘relegate politics to the domain of doxa.’ The breaking out of this deadlock, he argued, must involve the reassertion of the ‘politics of Truth’ and must take the form of a return to Lenin (2001:1). He has since then, continued his journey along this path with ever-growing zeal, defending ‘totalitarianism’ or what is just another name for it, ‘revolutionary terror’, often with its proper name – the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. In more recent work (Zizek 2008) he moves his defense of these themes into the sublime:

‘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 that is not only reactionary but also reactive in Nietzsche’s sense of the term.’ (2008: 4).

And in case anyone misses the ‘true meaning’ of this claim, let me underline that the reference to ‘lowest opportunist fears’ and reactive politics is a direct reference to so-called ‘identity politics’ – race, caste religion and so on. Thus he says:

‘In contrast to this approach, Badiou and others insist [and Zizek wholeheartedly endorses] on the fidelity to the One which emerges and is constituted through the very political struggle of/for naming and, as such, cannot be grounded in any particular determinate content (such as ethnic or religious roots)’ (Ibid: 5).

Any careful reader of Zizek’s can see that the insistence on ‘fidelity to the One’ is an insistence on the Universal – One that emerges from a global, overdetermining struggle that subsumes every other struggle, namely the struggle against Capital. Thus he claims that

‘This book [2008] is unashamedly committed to the “Messianic” standpoint of universal emancipation. No wonder then, that to the partisans of the “postmodern” doxa the list of lost Causes defended here must appear as a horror show of their worst nightmares…’ among which he includes ‘the revolutionary terror from Robespierre to Mao; Stalinism; the dictatorship of the proletariat…’ (Ibid: 6)

Before our very own partisans of the Universal start rejoicing at the emergence of this new Messiah who has descended to destroy all the pagan worshipers of particularity, it is worth pointing out that Zizek openly gives specific content to this ‘One’ – the Christian ideal [The Fragile Absolute - or, why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For? Verso 2000] on the one hand and Eurocentrism['A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism'] on the other. Thus he claims:

‘Yes, there is a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism; yes, Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onsalught of new spiritualisms – the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks’ (2000: 2).

What is left in this Marxism then, for those pagans who populate large parts of the Afro-Asian world, or for those in the Muslim world is not a matter of concern to our philosopher. Slavoj Zizek thus emerges before us as the new Messiah calling for a new Crusade against infidels.

So for instance, the Christian Marxist Messiah expresses his profound discomfort with what he calls Mao Tsetung’s ‘pagan’ insistence on struggles, splits and divisions. This is how he reads Mao:

‘One should be very precise in diagnosing, at the very abstract level of theory, where Mao was right and where he was wrong. Mao was right in rejecting the standard notion of “dialectical synthesis” as the “reconciliation” of the opposites, as a higher unity which encompasses their struggle; he was wrong in formulating this rejection, this insistence on the priority of struggle, of division, over every synthesis or unity, in terms of general cosmology – the ontology of the “eternal struggle of opposites” - this is why he got caught up in the simplistic, properly non-dialectical, notion of the “bad infinity” of struggle. Mao clearly regresses here to primitive pagan “wisdoms” on how every creature, every determinate form of life, sooner or later meets its end…’(2008: 185)

To Zizek, the significance of Lenin lies in his ‘unconditional will to intervene in the situation’, not – as he puts it – in the pragmatic sense of ‘adjusting theory’ to reality but by ‘adopting the unequivocal radical position’ [note the definite article] from which alone, he argues, it is ‘possible to intervene in a way that it changes the coordinates of the situation’ itself (2001:2). Zizek in fact claims that ‘freedom is “actual” precisely and only as the capacity to “transcend” the coordinates of a given situation…that is, to redefine the very situation within which one is active’ (2001:3).

Zizek’s insistence on the ‘revolutionary’ will to intervene and the will to change the coordinates of a given situation may seem to provide a much needed corrective in today’s world, where radical politics has been gripped by a fatalistic frame of mind, always having to choose the ‘lesser evil’ in any given situation, or simply acting in a pragmatic way. This is a frame of mind that is evident on the Old Left, practically all across the world – and India is no exception. The Old Left’s responses to globalization, for example, or its relationship to the social struggles of the last two decades amply illustrate this frame of mind. The need to recover the radical impulse of Leninist practice therefore cannot be overstated in such a situation. I have on earlier occasions critiqued certain aspects of Lenin’s politics, namely his vanguardism and the totalitarian implications of his interventions but that should not detract from an appreciation of some other aspects of his life-work. Lenin’s sense of politics as deeply contingent and conjunctural, his emphasis therefore, on what he called the ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ – all these are aspects that have much to tell us about ‘the political’ as such.

However, there are two problems in the way Zizek proceeds to recuperate this impulse. First, as a reading of Zizek’s essays and subsequent writings will show, his entire argument is predicated upon the absolutization of a certain reading of Lenin in revolutionary times, torn from all historical-political context. In saying this, I am not suggesting that Lenin should always and only be read in his context. Rather, my point is that Zizek abstracts Lenin from all historico-political context and from politics as such. Moments of apocalyptic revolutionary ruptures that take shape around specific constellations of global and national forces, we know, are extremely rare in history. For the most part, there are dispersed logics at play, rarely fusing into that explosive, countrywide – or worldwide – unity that becomes the occasion for a revolutionary intervention of the kind that Zizek talks of. In such contexts, this ‘Zizekian-Leninist’ imagination simply does not work.

As a matter of fact, Zizek really misses the whole point of the Leninist ‘will to intervene’ itself: Lenin repeatedly points out that revolutionaries cannot simply call a revolutionary situation into existence or create it out of nothing; they must always act upon a given situation. We need only recall Lenin’s assertion in the context of the collapse of the Second International that ‘to the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation’ and that not every revolutionary situation need lead to a revolution (‘The Collapse of the Second International’, Collected Works, Vol. 21, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, p. 213). One of the critical conditions for a revolutionary situation to arise, in Lenin’s view, is that of a ‘considerable increase in the activity of the masses’ as a consequence of which they are drawn into ‘independent historical action’ (Ibid: 214). Lenin implicitly makes a distinction here, between a revolutionary situation and a non-revolutionary situation. And we know that a Leninist intervention is predicated upon a certain specific kind of configuration of forces and antagonisms, called ‘overdetermination’ by Althusser, where different conflicts coalesce into an explosive unity. We also know that Lenin’s own response after the defeat of the 1905 revolution and especially after 1908, was to wait for the ‘new revolutionary upsurge’.

Second, more fundamentally, the legacy of Lenin itself needs to be considered afresh today – both in terms of its relevance for the present and in relation to the fate of ‘actually existing socialist’ societies. Zizek confronts neither. Surely the political practice of the communist movement has revealed suffcient reason for the understanding that the ‘politics of Truth’ that he identifies with Lenin, leads to totalitarianism. The ontological and epistemological privilege – in relation to access to the Truth – granted to the ‘working class’ in the Marxist tradition, and its transference to the ‘vanguard’ in the Leninist schema, has been discussed often enough. It has been convincingly shown to lead to an authoritarian, if not totalitarian mind-set. (We have seen it happen repeatedly in practice, even in India, even within a largely democratic set-up). Within the history of Marxism, there is clearly a larger body of work – and other political currents – that make a strong critique of the vanguardism of the Leninist framework. These range from Rosa Luxembourg to council communism. Lenin and Leninism constituted only one tendency within the history of marxism and the radical Left. It was a tendency that was responsible, eventually, for destroying all heresies and heterodox voices critical of the ‘Church’. And all these tendencies existed long before anybody had even dreamt of some demon called ‘postmodernism’. To attribute all internal critical, heterodox tendencies within marxism to postmodernism is to refuse to face the fact that the defeat of 20th century marxism was not the outcome of any conspiracy; it is to refuse to face up to the fact that it was its own infirmities that led to its collapse.

In the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet socialism, one of the important things that happened, if haltingly and hesitatingly, was an attempt to cast a fresh look at the entire history of marxism and communism. Even within the most hidebound sections of the Left, there was an attempt to acknowledge the immense diversity of marxist theory and practice with a relatively greater degree of openness – though not always to the degree one would have liked to see. The sum and substance of Zizek’s intervention has been to institute a counter-revolution in Marxist thinking that was in the process of a renewal of the radical emancipatory project.

The Zizekian intervention seeks to put an end to all questioning and doubts and institute in their place a Messianism that directs all its critque outwards.

And why not? After all, his declared model is the Church and St Paul. This is a point that Zizek makes repeatedly: his understanding of Marxism’s history is modelled on his reading of the history of Christianity where Lenin is to Marx what St Paul was to Christ, for it was they who gave institutional form to their ideas. His open and unabashed ‘defense of the Christian ideal’ and Eurocentrism, goes hand in hand with his defense of Lenin. Lenin, in Zizek’s hands, is truly the banner of a counter-revolution that seeks to put a stop to all attempts to re-examine the history of marxism on the one hand and to clamp down on whatever postcolonial theory since Edward Said has managed to achieve, by way of disturbing/ challenging the hegemony of Western/ European thought. Indeed, he has also lately been working overtime to rid the white European Left of all ‘guilt’ by vigorously arguing that s/he should ‘unashamedly’ swear by Marx’s early writings on India ['British Rule in India' and 'Future Results of British Rule in India' (1853)] where Marx notoriously described colonialism as the ‘unconscious tool of history’. This he does by completely disregarding that other episode in Marx’s engagement with the East – his study of the peasant communes in Russia and his Ethnological Notebooks. In other words, even in relation to Marx’s own intellectual development, Zizek intervenes in a counter-revolutionary fashion, restoring to Marx his earlier Eurocentric self, ironing out all the ambiguities, doubts, confusions and quests and replacing them by one single, self-serving narrative that is meant to salvage the European Leftist of from his/her bad conscience.

For the time being let us bracket the larger philosophical question of the vantage point from where Truth becomes available – if there is one at all, that is. Zizek fails to even ask the necessary political questions about the totalitarianism of the former socialist states. One can certainly pick out phrases and statements by him condemning Stalinism and its perversities but neither he, nor his friend-philosopher Alain Badiou, care to tell us how their own advocacy of ‘revolutionary terror’ is any different from Stalinism.

In relation to the relevance of Lenin’s legacy to the present, the point that Zizek completely ignores (he is certainly not unaware of it), is that many of the responses within the Left that he criticizes are not merely born in academies; they are responses in real politics, to very real situations, and point to very fundamental antinomies of radical or Left politics in the contemporary world. There are two sets of practical questions involved here. One, that relates to the metamorphosis of revolutionary movements into reformist parties. This is a very real problem and one cannot but sympathize with Zizek when he rails against the proponents of the so-called ‘third way’ in contemporary Britain and Europe. But is it enough, today, to simply bemoan the fading away of the revolutionary dream? Isn’t it necessary to ask why all revolutionary/radical currents are continuously haunted by the inevitable threat of ‘reformism’? Witness the pathos of contemporary communist and marxist parties which are arduously engaged in ‘building capitalism’ – from People’s Republic of China and Vietnam to West Bengal in India. Must revolutionary/radical movements always choose between the option of becoming reformist bourgeois institutions on the one hand, and remaining marginal revolutionary sects akin to the Anabaptists awaiting their millennium, on the other?

The other set of questions of course, are those that relate to the explosion of what is disparagingly called ‘identity politics’ by marxists and by Zizek – feminism, anti-racism, Dalit politics, movements of sexual minorities.

It is mere self-delusion to believe that either so-called identity politics or the ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ is a fiction invented in the academy by a Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida or a Laclau. Postmodernism, at best, names a critical symptom of our times and to credit it with inventing it is to really ‘miss the point’ (to use a Zizekism). The exhaustion of the great narratives of emancipation of modernity and the emergence of anxieties around identity are very real issues in the contemporary world. The collapse of socialism too, we might do well to remember, was not orchestrated in the French academy but has its roots in the real practice of politics. The question that needs to be asked, therefore, is whether all this has any relationship to the very theory and politics of the Marxist Left. How can we then return to Lenin without asking any questions about the actual fate of that ‘politics of Truth’ and its totalitarian implications? There is of course, another question lurking here: was the break with bourgeois politics inaugurated by Leninism, really a break in any fundamental sense? Was there any serious attempt either to rethink the entire question of new socialist institutions, or was there eventually, a surrender to the fundamental premises of bourgeois society, as seen for instance in the institution of one-‘man’ management in industry, in the primacy of the productivist imagination, and so on? Did the ‘utopian spark of Lenin’ that Zizek talks of manage to hold out against his cold realist sense? In retrospect, was not Lenin’s failure to think through new forms, a consequence of the fact that his and his comrades’ minds were set solely on the capture and retention of state power?

Zizek does not leave room for any doubt that despite his protestations to the contrary, he is resurrecting some old Leninist themes, though in a peculiarly metaphysical fashion. This is not in itself surprising given his fascination with Hegel. Even though he claims that ‘to repeat Lenin does not mean a return to Lenin’ but ‘to accept that Lenin is dead, that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it that is worth saving’ – it is precisely what he does not do. Lenin today, says Zizek, seems like a figure from another time, that his notions belong to an epoch to which we can no longer relate. Having said this, his poser to us is remarkable: ‘What if our impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with our epoch? What if the fact that we experience Lenin as irrelevant, ‘out of sync’ with our postmodern times, imparts the much more unsettling message that our time itself is ‘out of sync’…?” Who can miss the clear attempt to deify Lenin here and assign to him a relevance beyond all times? The recourse to ‘Hegelian dialectics’ of course comes in handy for Zizek on such occasions as it makes it possible to claim ‘X’ and cancel it at the same time, and so, all through his arguments, Zizek makes excessive performative use of such ‘dialectical’ flourishes. I am not sure, however, that this rhetorical flourish offers anything more than a false sense of certainty and relevance to many sectors of the Left who have lost their moorings. In terms of its knowledge function, there seems to be nothing here, or in the footnote that he appends to this astonishing passage. In this note too, he simply states, with equal rhetorical flourish that ‘at a more general methodological level, one should also turn around the standard pseudo-Nietzschean view according to which the past we construct…is a symptom, an articulation of our present problems…what if, on the contrary, we ourselves – our present – is a symptom of the unresolved deadlocks of the past?’

Tantalizing though this question of the relationship of ‘the past’ with our present is, we cannot go into it here. However, it is necessary to underline that if we are dealing with a certain failure of the Leninist/Marxist project, any attempt at a renewal of that egalitarian project that wishes to make it speak to our times, must squarely adopt an approach that:

(a) tries to understand actual practices on the ground, rather than lament that these practices and the times they inhabit, cannot ‘comprehend’ the greatness of Lenin (or any other prophet, for that matter)

(b) avoids assigning at all costs, a metaphysical priority to some a priori Truth and its supposed Subject, over the present ‘times’ and the different kinds of practices that mark them.

Zizek in fact, minces no words when he claims that ‘in a concrete situation, its universal truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly partisan position.’ Notice the reference to ‘a concrete situation’: If Lenin has to have a relevance beyond all context and if all ‘times’ are to be judged with reference to their ‘penetrability of Lenin’, what is the meaning of this reference to any ‘concrete situation’? What is the meaning of its ‘universality’ in that case? Of course, we can see lurking behind this reference an invocation of an old Hegelianism. We know that in Hegel, the ‘concrete universal’ is critical to the very idea of the Universal – it is the particular that is precisely not particular but announces the presence of the Universal (the Universal being self-particularizing). In other words, in Hegel, the ‘concrete universal’ is a moment in the self-development of the Absolute Idea. Interestingly, in another essay (‘The Ongoing “Soft Revolution”‘, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2004) this metaphysic is extended to the very idea of Capital itself: ‘More than ever, capital is the concrete universal of our historical epoch. That is, while it remains a particular formation, it overdetermines all alternative formations, as well as all noneconomic strata of social life’ (2004: 294). With this formulation, despite references to ‘our historical epoch’, Zizek now institutes capital virtually as an ontological category. Everything that seeks to challenge it and transform it, is eventually defeated by it. Thus Zizek:

Modern technological domination is inextricably intertwined with the social form of capital, it can only occur within this form, and, insofar as the alternative social formations display the same ontological attitude, this merely confirms that they are, in their innermost core, mediated by capital as their concrete universality…’ (2004: 295, emphasis added).

With this we have a perfect pseudo-explanation of the defeat of marxism – and a highly metaphysical one at that. It also happens to be a profound regression from Marx himself, for Marx relentlessly located the explanation of such questions in the domain of the socio-historical, displacing them from the realm of speculative philosophy. Zizek takes us back to good old Hegel, as if the Marxist episode never happened.

The second part of Zizek’s breathtaking sentence above is that this universal truth of the concrete situation can only be articulated from a thoroughly partisan position. What might be that partisan position? Witness the following:

‘Yes, assuming the proletarian standpoint is exactly like making a leap of faith and assuming a full subjective engagement with its Cause; yes the ‘truth’ of Marxism is perceptible only to those who accomplish this leap, not to neutral observers.’

I have argued elsewhere that this is an argument that can be made for any religious/theological position – that its ‘universal truth’ is only available to believers! The Truth of Islam or the Truth of Hinduism can only be understood by ‘making a leap of faith and assuming a full subjective engagement with its Cause’! The banality of this claim should thus be evident. Clearly, there is no argument here but a series of assertions and it would, once again, be impossible to find in Marx himself, a support for such metaphysical nonsense. However, the moves are clear and unambiguous. For my part, I do think it is important to read and re-read Lenin today – not as a prophet, as Zizek does but as a revolutionary, thrown into a specific conjuncture, trying to navigate his or her way through an uncertain situation. It is there that Lenin excels, leaving behind all those who preferred to stick to text-book notions of socialist revolution.

It is difficult to engage here with Zizek’s prophetic and might one say, almost fanatical mode. What I do wish to question is the straightforward connection that he seeks to draw between ‘Truth’ and ‘Action’: the will to intervene, it seems, is solely predicated upon the having access to the Truth, which becomes available only on the condition that one assumes the proletarian standpoint. What that undefined proletarian standpoint is, Zizek of course, does not explain. Is it the standpoint of the actually, empirically existing ‘proletariat’ – ‘empirical class consciousness’ as Luakcs would say? Is this proletariat really governed by an undivided and unified collective will? Can he demonstrate how one is to understand the actual fragmentation of the working class, in the face of that posited unified will? Zizek, the great Hegelian, will have none of this empirical nonsense: The ‘Rational Will’ is not tainted by the ‘actually existing’ individual wills. It simply is, in and of itself. From this emerges Zizek’s metaphysical conception of the ‘proletarian standpoint’ and this can only be cognitively available to the revolutionary intelligentsia, armed with the magic wand of Leninist Marxism? Recall a similar move made by Lukacs in his celebrated work History and Class Consciousness, from an equally avowedly Hegelian position, where he continuously counterposed ‘facts’ to ‘tendency of the total development’, that is the logic of the totality. The difference between ‘fact’ and ‘tendency’ with an absolute priority to the logic of the totality [the ‘tendency’] became crucial for Lukacs, in order to extricate Marxism from its first major crisis. The Zizekian gesture merely repeats that old logic.

But let us return, however briefly, to the relationship between Truth and political action. How and why do people act? Let us stay with the Marxist legacy that Zizek cherishes and just sample a few of Lenin’s own statements:
1. In What is to be Done?, Lenin talks of the importance of organizing ‘nation-wide’ exposures, for only that, he claims, will make the party a vanguard of the revolutionary forces. The ‘overwhelming majority’ of non-working class exposers [agitators]…are sober politicians and level-headed businessmen’ who will come to the proletarian party with their complaints ‘only when they see that these complaints can really have effect, and that we represent a political force.’
2. In the same text, while discussing the question of ‘amateurishness’, he recalls that the ‘entire student youth of the period (1894-1901) was absorbed in Marxism.’ And he then goes on to add that, they ‘were not only, or not even so much absorbed in Marxism as a theory, but as an answer to the question: “what is to be done?”; as a call to take the field against the enemy.’
3. In a text written in the interregnum between the two revolutions, he writes: ‘At the present moment we cannot say for certain whether a mighty agrarian revolution will develop in the Russian countryside in the near future. We cannot say exactly how profound the class cleavage is among the peasantry…’
4. In an appeal, in the same period, to the soldiers of all belligerent countries: ‘No, brother soldiers, it is time we opened our eyes, it is time we took our fate into our own hands. In all countries, popular wrath against the capitalist class, which has drawn our people into the war, is growing, spreading and gaining strength.’

We could actually go on multiplying the quotes but this small sample will do. What exactly is Lenin saying?

In (1) above, it is the eventuality that the Social-Democratic party manages to emerge as a political force, that Lenin expects, will make other strata come towards it; when they are convinced, in other words, of its political efficacy, its capacity to provide them with some security from Czarist repression. More importantly, we could add, it is not enough for the revolutionary forces to be politically efficacious; it is equally necessary for the other strata to perceive that they will protect their interests.

In (2), he recalls how the students came to Marxism in an earlier era, not because of the Truth that it represented but as a call to take the field against the enemy. We can produce instance upon instance of revolutionaries in India and many other countries, joining communist parties out of this kind of a similar call ‘to take the field’. To them, Marxism was not the repository of some absolute truth. Most of them had not even read Marxist texts when they ‘became marxists’. It was the revolution in Russia and the stories that filtered in about a new kind of movement that had transformed the old power structures of oppression that brought them to Marxism. As Mao once put it in a memorable phrase, ‘it was the salvoes of the October revolution that brought Marxism to China.’

In (3), it is the sharpening of the ‘class cleavage’ that will motivate the peasantry. Here again, it is worth noticing that this ‘sharpening of class cleavages’ is not a purely ‘objective’ fact. It is only when the peasants are able to see that there is an irreconcilability of interests with the landlords, that the antagonism assumes a revolutionary form. In our own time, closer home, we have seen hundreds of poverty stricken cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra commit suicide rather than move into political action against the government.

In (4) it is upon popular anger against the war, not any objective datum of oppression, that Lenin’s expectations of the new revolutionary upsurge hinge.

Where is ‘Truth’ in all this? Zizek’s obsession with the Truth, one might venture to add, is a characteristic of the speculative philosopher and the ‘revolutionary vanguard’ alone.