Interview with Slavoj Zizek
People who started
reading Zizek because they couldn't believe that Communist Europe could produce
such a supple thinker read him now for the simple reason that he is Zizek.
Interview by Doug Henwood, Intro by Charlie Bertsch
Issue #59, February 2002
It's hard to become a superstar in the world of scholarly
publishing. Most of the people who read its products can also write them. To
stand out in a crowd this smart requires both luck and perseverance. Slavoj
Zizek has demonstrated plenty of both. When Yugoslavia started to break up in
the aftermath of the Cold War in 1990, pristine Slovenia was the first of its
republics to declare independence. We were thrilled to be witnessing the
rebirth of "nations" that had disappeared into Germany, the Soviet
Union, or, in the case of Slovenia, first the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then
Yugoslavia. .As this little-known land's leading thinker, Zizek basked in an
aura of novelty. His work, simultaneously light-hearted and deep, invoked the
dream of a post-Cold War world in which free thinking would transcend all
borders.
A decade later, we know how quickly that hope turned to
despair. But Zizek's star hasn't dimmed. If anything, it has grown brighter.
People who started reading Zizek because they couldn't believe that Communist
Europe could produce such a supple thinker read him now for the simple reason
that he is
Zizek. For anyone who has tired of the dumbing down of mainstream
political discourse in the West, who finds it hard to believe that the bone-dry
American leftism of a Noam Chomsky represents the only possibility for
resistance, who wants to critique global capitalism without falling back on
faded Marxist slogans, Zizek's work flashes the promise of something better.
From his ground-breaking 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology to his
trenchant 1999 critique of Western governments' intervention in the former
Yugoslavia, titled NATO as the Left Hand of God?, Zizek has never failed to
stimulate thinking. And what more can we ask of an intellectual? As Zizek
himself suggests in the interview here, philosophy helps us, not by
"purifying" our thought, but by making it more complex.
What really sets Zizek apart from other major scholars is
his willingness to take risks. If you were to read all of his books in rapid
succession, you would see that they sometimes contradict one another. But you
would also see how the tension between them reflects Zizek's real purpose: to
make us see the world with fresh eyes. Unlike the vast majority of academic
thinkers, Zizek is not worried about being "careless." He roots
around in the realm of ideas looking for whatever will prove useful. It doesn't
matter if his findings come from different intellectual traditions, if they
are, in some sense, philosophically incompatible. Zizek's writing forces them
to collaborate. Marx, Freud, Hegel, Kant, Lacan...and Alfred Hitchcock, David
Lynch, and the Slovenian electronic agit-prop band Laibach all come together in
a delightful mix. This delight, finally, is what seals the deal for Zizek's
readers. It's one thing to illuminate contemporary political concerns with the
help of dense philosophical points; it's another entirely to make that insight
fun. Zizek does.Left Business Observer editor and Wall Street author Doug
Henwood talked with Zizek prior to the September 11th terrorist attack on the
Pentagon and World Trade Center, then asked a few follow-up questions in its
aftermath. In the days following the attack, Zizek's take on its significance —
an incredibly moving essay titled "Welcome to the Desert of the Real"
circulated on e-mail lists worldwide. Unlike the vast majority of commentators,
Zizek was not content to express disbelief and outrage. His words offered an
antidote to the mindless drivel on the major networks, CNN, and Fox News.
Reflecting on the many "previews" of the tragedy in American movies,
Zizek refused to blunt his critical edge: "In a way, America got what it
fantasized about."
This interview is excerpted from BS editor Joel Schalit's
anthology The Anti-Capitalism Reader, forthcoming from Akashic Books in the
summer of 2002.
BS: In general, anarchism plays a big role in American
radical politics and countercultures. Do you have any thoughts on this
influence?
Zizek: I certainly can understand where the appeal of
anarchism lies. Even though I am quite aware of the contradictory and ambiguous
nature of Marx's relationship with anarchism, Marx was right when he drew
attention to how anarchists who preach "no state no power" in order
to realize their goals usually form their own society which obeys the most
authoritarian rules. My first problem with anarchism is always, "Yeah, I
agree with your goals, but tell me how you are organized." For me, the tragedy
of anarchism is that you end up having an authoritarian secret society trying
to achieve anarchist goals. The second point is that I have problems with how
anarchism is appropriate to today's problems. I think if anything, we need more
global organization. I think that the left should disrupt this equation that
more global organization means more totalitarian control.
BS: When you speak of a global organization, are you
thinking of some kind of global state, or do you have non-state organizations
in mind?
Zizek: I don't have any prejudices here whatever. For
example, a lot of left-wingers dismissed talk of universal human rights as just
another tool of American imperialism, to exert pressure on Third World
countries or other countries America doesn't like, so it can bomb them. But
it's not that simple. As we all know, following the same logic, Pinochet was
arrested. Even if he was set free, this provoked a tremendous psychological
change in Chile. When he left Chile, he was a universally feared, grey eminence.
He returned as an old man whom nobody was afraid of. So, instead of dismissing
the rules, it's well worth it to play the game. One should at least
strategically support the idea of some kind of international court and then try
to put it to a more progressive use.
America is already concerned about this. A few months ago,
when the Senate was still under Republican control, it adopted a measure
prohibiting any international court to have any jurisdiction over American
citizens. You know they weren't talking about some Third World anti-imperialist
court. They were talking about the Hague court, which is dominated by Western
Europeans. The same goes for many of these international agencies. I think we
should take it all. If it's outside the domain of state power, OK. But
sometimes, even if it's part of state power. I think the left should overcome
this primordial fear of state power, that because it's some form of control,
it's bad.
BS: You describe the internal structure of anarchist groups
as being authoritarian. Yet, the model popular with younger activists today is
explicitly anti-hierarchical and consensus-oriented. Do you think there's
something furtively authoritarian about such apparently freewheeling
structures?
Zizek: Absolutely. And I'm not bluffing here; I'm talking
from personal experience. Maybe my experience is too narrow, but it's not
limited to some mysterious Balkan region. I have contacts in England, France,
Germany, and more — and all the time, beneath the mask of this consensus, there
was one person accepted by some unwritten rules as the secret master. The
totalitarianism was absolute in the sense that people pretended that they were
equal, but they all obeyed him. The catch was that it was prohibited to state
clearly that he was the boss. You had to fake some kind of equality. The real
state of affairs couldn't be articulated. Which is why I'm deeply distrustful
of this "let's just coordinate this in an egalitarian fashion." I'm
more of a pessimist. In order to safeguard this equality, you have a more
sinister figure of the master, who puts pressure on the others to safeguard the
purity of the non-hierarchic principle. This is not just theory. I would be
happy to hear of groups that are not caught in this strange dialectic.
BS: We've seen over the last few years the growth of a broad
anti-capitalist — or as we say in the U.S., anti-corporate or
anti-globalization — movement, a lot of it organized according to anarchist
principles. Do you think these demonstrations are a sign of any left revival, a
new movement?
Zizek: Mixed. Not in the sense of being partly good and
partly bad but because the situation is undecided — maybe even undecidable.
What will come out of the Seattle movement is the terrain of the struggle. I
think it is PRECISELY NOW — after the attack on the World Trade Center — that
the "Seattle" task will regain its full urgency! After a period of
enthusiasm for retaliation, there will be a new (ideological) depression, and
THAT point will be our chance!!!
BS: Much of this will depend on progressives' ability to get
the word out.
Zizek: I'm well aware of the big media's censorship here.
For example, even in the European big media, which are supposed to be more
open, you will never see a detailed examination of the movement's agenda. You
get some ominous things. There is something dark about it. According to the
normal rules of the liberal game, you would expect some of these people to be
invited on some TV talk shows, confronted with their adversaries, placed in a
vigorous polemic, but no. Their agenda is ignored. Usually they're mocked as
advocating some old-fashioned left-wing politics or some particularism, like
saving local conditions against globalism. My conclusion is that the big powers
must be at least in some kind of a panic. This is a good sign.
BS: But lots of the movement has no explicit agenda to
offer. Why is the elite in such a panic?
Zizek: It's not like these are some kind of old-fashioned
left-wing idiots, or some kind of local traditionalists. I am well aware that Seattle
etc. is still a movement finding its shape, but I think it has potential. (Even
though) there is no explicit agenda, there is nonetheless an outlook
reproaching this globalization for being too exclusionary, not a true
globalization but only a capitalist globalization.
BS: At the same time this movement was growing, there was a
string of electoral victories for the right — Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia
in Italy, Jorg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria, our own Bush. What do you
make of these?
Zizek: They're not to be underestimated. I'll put it in my
old-fashioned Stalinist terms: there are two deviations to be avoided here,
left and right. The right-wing deviation is to fully endorse their liberal
opponents, to say, "OK, we have our problems with Gore or Blair but
they're basically our guys, and we should support them against the true
right." We should also avoid the opposite mistake, which is that they're
all the same. It doesn't really matter if it's Gore or Bush. From this position
it's only one step to the position that says, "so it's even better we have
Bush, because then we see the true enemy."We should steer the right middle
course: while maintaining our critical distance towards the moderate left, one
shouldn't be afraid when certain issues are at stake, to support them. What is
at stake is the following: it looked in the 1990s that after the disintegration
of socialism, the Third Way left represents the universal interests of capital
as such, to put it in the old Marxist way, and the right-wing parties represent
only particular interests. In the U.S., the Republicans target certain types of
rich people, and even certain parts of the lower classes — flirting with the
Moral Majority, for example. The problem is that right-wing politicians such as
Haider are playing the global game. Not only do we have a Third Way left; we
now have a Third Way right too, which tries to combine unrestrained global
capitalism with a more conservative cultural politics.Here is where I see the
long-term danger of these right wingers. I think that sooner or later the
existing power structure will be forced more and more to directly violate its
own formal democratic rules. For example, in Europe, the tendency behind all
these movements like Holocaust revisionism and so on, is an attempt to
dismantle the post-World War II ideological consensus around anti-fascism, with
a social solidarity built around the welfare state. It's an open question as to
what will replace it.
[*Ed Note: Such as the new emergency powers granted the U.S.
government for domestic surveillance purposes following the WTC/Pentagon
attacks, which suspend habeas corpus rights for immigrants, allow security
services to monitor your telecommunications activities, and review your student
and bank records without permission from a judge]
BS: What about the transition from Clinton to Bush? What's
significant about this from your point of view?
Zizek: The sad thing is that Clinton left behind him a
devastated, disoriented Democratic Party. There are people who say that his
departure leaves some room for a resurgence of the party's left wing, but that
will be difficult. The true problem of Clinton is his legacy; there is none. He
didn't survive as a movement, in the sense that he left a long-term imprint. He
was just an opportunist and now he's simply out. He didn't emerge as a figure
like Thatcher or Reagan who left a certain legacy. OK, you can say that he left
a legacy of compromise or triangulation, but the big failure is at this
ideological level. He didn't leave behind a platform with which the moderate
liberals could identify.
BS: A lot of readers of American underground publications
read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and the stuff coming out of small anarchist
presses. What would they get from reading your work that they might be missing?
Zizek: Martin Heidegger said that philosophy doesn't make
things easier, it makes them harder and more complicated. What they can learn
is the ambiguity of so many situations, in the sense that whenever we are
presented by the big media with a simple opposition, like multicultural
tolerance vs. ethnic fundamentalism, the opposition is never so clear-cut. The
idea is that things are always more complex. For example, multiculturalist
tolerance, or at least a certain type of it, generates or involves a much
deeper racism. As a rule, this type of tolerance relies on the distinction
between us multiculturalists, and intolerant ethnic others, with the
paradoxical result that anti-racism itself is used to dismiss IN A RACIST WAY
the other as a racist. Not to mention the fact that this kind of
"tolerance" is as a rule patronizing. Its respect for the other
cannot but remind us of the respect for naive children's beliefs: we leave them
in their blessed ignorance so as not to hurt them...
Or take Chomsky. There are two problematic features in his
work — though it goes without saying that I admire him very much. One is his
anti-theorism. A friend who had lunch with him recently told me that Chomsky
announced that he'd concluded that social theory and economic theory are of no
use — that things are simply evident, like American state terror, and that all
we need to know are the facts. I disagree with this. And the second point is
that with all his criticism of the U.S., Chomsky retains a certain commitment
to what is the most elemental ingredient of American ideology, individualism, a
fundamental belief that America is the land of free individuals, and so on. So
in that way he is deeply and problematically American.You can see some of these
problems in the famous Faurisson scandal in France. As many readers may know,
Chomsky wrote the preface for a book by Robert Faurisson, which was threatened
with being banned because it denied the reality of the Holocaust. Chomsky
claimed that though he opposes the book's content, the book should still be
published for free speech reasons. I can see the argument, but I can't support
him here. The argument is that freedom of the press is freedom for all, even
for those whom we find disgusting and totally unacceptable; otherwise, today it
is them, tomorrow it is us. It sounds logical, but I think that it avoids the
true paradox of freedom: that some limitations have to guarantee it.So to
understand what goes on today — to understand how we experience ourselves, to
understand the structures of social authority, to understand whether we really
live in a "permissive" society, and how prohibitions function today —
for these we need social theory. That's the difference between me and the names
you mentioned.
BS: Chomsky and people like him seem to think that if we
just got the facts out there, things would almost
take care of themselves. Why
is this wrong? Why aren't "the facts" enough?
Zizek: Let me give you a very naive answer. I think that
basically the facts are already known. Let's take Chomsky's analyses of how the
CIA intervened in Nicaragua. OK, (he provides) a lot of details, yes, but did I
learn anything fundamentally new? It's exactly what I'd expected: the CIA was
playing a very dirty game. Of course it's more convincing if you learn the
dirty details. But I don't think that we really learned anything dramatically
new there. I don't think that merely "knowing the facts" can really
change people's perceptions.To put it another way: Chomsky's own position on
Kosovo, on the Yugoslav war, shows some of his limitations, because of a lack
of a proper historical context. With all his facts, he got the picture wrong.
As far as I can judge, Chomsky bought a certain narrative — that we shouldn't
put all the blame on Milosevic, that all parties were more or less to blame,
and the West supported or incited this explosion because of its own
geopolitical goals. All are not the same. I'm not saying that the Serbs are
guilty. I just repeat my old point that Yugoslavia was not over with the
secession of Slovenia. It was over the moment Milosevic took over Serbia. This
triggered a totally different dynamic. It is also not true that the
disintegration of Yugoslavia was supported by the West. On the contrary, the
West exerted enormous pressure, at least until 1991, for ethnic groups to
remain in Yugoslavia. I saw [former Secretary of State] James Baker on Yugoslav
TV supporting the Yugoslav army's attempts to prevent Slovenia's secession.The
ultimate paradox for me is that because he lacks a theoretical framework,
Chomsky even gets the facts wrong sometimes.
BS: Years ago, you were involved with the band Laibach and
its proto-state, NSK (Neue Slovenische Kunst). Why did you get involved with
them?
Zizek: The reason I liked them at a certain moment (which
was during the last years of "really existing socialism") was that
they were a third voice, a disturbing voice, not fitting into the opposition
between the old Communists and the new liberal democrats. For me, their message
was that there were fundamental mechanisms of power which we couldn't get rid
of with the simple passage to democracy. This was a disturbing message, which
was why they got on everyone's nerves. This was no abstract theoretical
construct. In the late 1980s, people got this message instinctively — which is
why Laibach were more strongly repressed by the new democratic, nationalist
powers in Slovenia than previously by the Communists. In the early 1980s, they
had some trouble with the Communists, but from the mid-1980s onward, they
didn't have any trouble. But they did again with the transition of power. With
their mocking rituals of totalitarian power, they transmitted a certain message
about the functioning of power that didn't fit the naive belief in liberal democracy.
The miracle was that they did it through certain stage rituals. Later, they
tried to change their image (to put it in marketing terms) and they failed.
BS: You talk and write a lot about popular culture,
particularly movies. How does your thinking about pop culture relate to your
thinking about politics?
Zizek: We can no longer, as we did in the good old times,
(if they were really good) oppose the economy and culture. They are so
intertwined not only through the commercialization of culture but also the
culturalization of the economy. Political analysis today cannot bypass mass
culture. For me, the basic ideological attitudes are not found in big picture
philosophical statements, but instead in lifeworld practices — how do you
behave, how do you react — which aren't only reflected in mass culture, but
which are, up to a point, even generated in mass culture. Mass culture is the
central ideological battlefield today.
BS: You have recently been speaking about reviving Lenin. To
a lot of politically active young people, Lenin is a devil figure. What do you
find valuable in Lenin, or the Leninist tradition?
Zizek: I am careful to speak about not repeating Lenin. I am
not an idiot. It wouldn't mean anything to return to the Leninist working class
party today. What interests me about Lenin is precisely that after World War I
broke out in 1914, he found himself in a total deadlock. Everything went wrong.
All of the social democratic parties outside Russia supported the war, and
there was a mass outbreak of patriotism. After this, Lenin had to think about
how to reinvent a radical, revolutionary politics in this situation of total
breakdown. This is the Lenin I like. Lenin is usually presented as a great
follower of Marx, but it is impressive how often you read in Lenin the ironic
line that "about this there isn't anything in Marx." It's this purely
negative parallel. Just as Lenin was forced to reformulate the entire socialist
project, we are in a similar situation. What Lenin did, we should do today, at
an even more radical level.For example, at the most elementary level, Marx's
concept of exploitation presupposes a certain labor theory of value. If you
take this away from Marx, the whole edifice of his model disintegrates. What do
we do with this today, given the importance of intellectual labor? Both
standard solutions are too easy — to claim that there is still real physical
production going on in the Third World, or that today's programmers are a new
proletariat? Like Lenin, we're deadlocked. What I like in Lenin is precisely
what scares people about him — the ruthless will to discard all prejudices. Why
not violence? Horrible as it may sound, I think it's a useful antidote to all
the aseptic, frustrating, politically correct pacifism.Let's take the campaign
against smoking in the U.S. I think this is a much more suspicious phenomenon
than it appears to be. First, deeply inscribed into it is an idea of absolute
narcissism, that whenever you are in contact with another person, somehow he or
she can infect you. Second, there is an envy of the intense enjoyment of
smoking. There is a certain vision of subjectivity, a certain falseness in
liberalism, that comes down to "I want to be left alone by others; I don't
want to get too close to the others." Also, in this fight against the
tobacco companies, you have a certain kind of politically correct yuppie who is
doing very well financially, but who wants to retain a certain anti-capitalist
aura. What better way to focus on the obvious bad guy, Big Tobacco? It functions
as an ersatz enemy. You can still claim your stock market gains, but you can
say, "I'm against tobacco companies." Now I should make it clear that
I don't smoke. And I don't like tobacco companies. But this obsession with the
danger of smoking isn't as simple as it might appear.
BS: You've also left some of your readers scratching their
heads over the positive things you've been writing about Christianity lately.
What is it in Christianity you find worthy?
Zizek: I'm tempted to say, "The Leninist part." I
am a fighting atheist. My leanings are almost Maoist ones. Churches should be
turned into grain silos or palaces of culture. What Christianity did, in a
religiously mystified version, is give us the idea of rebirth. Against the
pagan notion of destiny, Christianity offered the possibility of a radical
opening, that we can find a zero point and clear the table. It introduced a new
kind of ethics: not that each of us should do our duty according to our place
in society — a good King should be a good King, a good servant a good servant —
but instead that
irrespective of who I am, I have direct access to
universality. This is explosive. What interests me is only this dimension. Of
course it was later taken over by secular philosophers and progressive
thinkers. I am not in any way defending the Church as an institution, not even
in a minimal way.For an example, let's take Judith Butler, and her thesis that
our sexual identity isn't part of our nature but is socially constructed. Such
a statement, such a feminist position, could only occur against a background of
a Christian space.
BS: Several times you've used the word
"universalism." For trafficking in such concepts, people you'd
identify as forces of political correctness have indicted you for Eurocentrism.
You've even written a radical leftist plea for Eurocentrism. How do you respond
to the PC camp's charges against you?
Zizek: I think that we should accept that universalism is a
Eurocentrist notion. This may sound racist, but I don't think it is. Even when
Third World countries appeal to freedom and democracy, when they formulate
their struggle against European imperialism, they are at a more radical level
endorsing the European premise of universalism. You may remember that in the
struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the ANC always appealed to
universal Enlightenment values, and it was Buthelezi, the regime's black
supporter in the pay of the CIA, who appealed to special African values.My
opponent here is the widely accepted position that we should leave behind the
quest for universal truth — that what we have instead are just different
narratives about who we are, the stories we tell about ourselves. So, in that
view, the highest ethical injunction is to respect the other story. All the
stories should be told, each ethnic, political, or sexual group should be given
the right to tell its story, as if this kind of tolerance towards the plurality
of stories with no universal truth value is the ultimate ethical horizon.I
oppose this radically. This ethics of storytelling is usually accompanied by a
right to narrate, as if the highest act you can do today is to narrate your own
story, as if only a black lesbian mother can know what it's like to be a black
lesbian mother, and so on. Now this may sound very emancipatory. But the moment
we accept this logic, we enter a kind of apartheid. In a situation of social
domination, all narratives are not the same. For example, in Germany in the
1930s, the narrative of the Jews wasn't just one among many. This was the narrative
that explained the truth about the entire situation. Or today, take the gay
struggle. It's not enough for gays to say, "we want our story to be
heard." No, the gay narrative must contain a universal dimension, in the
sense that their implicit claim must be that what happens to us is not
something that concerns only us. What is happening to us is a symptom or signal
that tells us something about what's wrong with the entirety of society today.
We have to insist on this universal dimension.