Slavoj Žižek’s theory of revolution: a critique
Alan Johnson
Introduction
there is that kind [of voluntarism] which . . . celebrates itself in terms which are purely and simply a transposition of the language of the individual superman to an ensemble of “supermen” (celebration of active minorities as such, etc) . . . one has to struggle against the above-mentioned degenerations, the false heroisms and pseudo-aristocracies. (Gramsci 1971: 204)
In 2000, when I was an editor at the Marxist journal Historical Materialism, the Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek unveiled his new theory of revolution. Trotsky, he claimed, ‘went as far as proposing . . . the universal militarization of life . . .That is the good Trotsky for me’ (2000a: 196). In fact, in 1919 Trotsky called for the temporary, emergency militarization of labour. Žižek’s slip, I suspected, was a case of what Freud called ‘parapraxis’, that is the revealing irruption of an unconscious wish. He has not repressed much since: ‘[t]here are no “democratic (procedural) rules” one is a priori prohibited to violate’ because ‘revolutionary politics is not a matter of opinions but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the “opinion of the majority” and to impose the revolutionary will against it’. Revolutionary duty lies in ‘the assertion of the unconditional, “ruthless” revolutionary will, ready to “go to the end”, effectively to seize power and undermine the existing totality’ (2000b: 177).
Having apparently learnt nothing from the historical record of the use of ‘iron will’ and ‘ruthlessness’ in the pursuit of utopia – Žižek admits his leanings are ‘almost Maoist’ in this regard (2002c) – he has argued that revolutionaries must ‘act without any legitimization, engaging oneself in a kind of Pascalean wager that the Act itself will create the conditions of its retroactive “democratic” legitimization’ (2002a: 153). He has identified a clear and present danger to this project: ‘a priori norms (“human rights”, “democracy”), respect for which would prevent us from “resignifying” terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice’. He has even glimpsed where his theory was taking him: ‘[I]f this radical choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it!’ (in Butler, Laclau, Žižek 2000: 326). Welcome to the ‘New Communism’.
He need not have worried, for there has been very little decrying. Indeed, as Adam Kirsch pointed out in The New Republic, ‘the louder [Žižek] applauds violence and terror – especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin and Mao . . . the more indulgently he is received by the academic left which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult’ (2008). This chapter does not seek to explain that scandal, only to make the case that it is one.1 In Part 1, I explain the roots of Žižek’s theory of revolution and delineate its character as a Wild Blanquism. In Part 2, I try to make plain why that theory is totalitarian, drawing on two left-wing anti-totalitarians, Claude Lefort and Hal Draper.
Slavoj Žižek’s theory of revolution
Žižek’s theory of revolution is a grandchild of the disastrous nineteenth-century marriage between the philosophy of Hegelianism and the politics of Blanquism.2 That marriage was consummated in the twentieth century within the Marxist movement when Lenin substituted a dictatorial conception of the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ for Marx’s (ill-named but nonetheless) democratic original. Once unmoored from self-emancipation and democracy, Leninist ‘Marxism’ became a kind of Organized Blanquism: a party-elite seizes power by force in order to remake society and man from above, according to an Ideology, wielding the power of the modern state.
Žižek, I claim, spiritualizes and subjectivizes this already-dubious inheritance, creating a Wild Blanquism. His ‘Hegel’, like that of so many other Marxists, as Alain Finkelkraut has noted, is ‘no longer contemplative’ or ‘inspired by the glow of twilight’, but burns with ‘the light of the morning . . . unrestrained and militant’ (Finkielkraut 2001: 71). His ‘Lenin’ is an ultra-violent Schmittian decisionist (see Robinson and Tormey 2003). More: his readings of the Maoist Alain Badiou’s concept of ‘Fidelity to the Event’ and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic notion of the ‘Act’ render ‘revolution’ at once expressive (an ungrounded act of pure desire) and salvific (a form of redemption from a banal existence). (see also Žižek 2002d)
The nineteenth-century marriage of Hegelianism and Blanquism: arbitrary construction and the cult of force
The German social democrat Eduard Bernstein was one of the first to raise the alarm. A coming together of Hegelianism and Blanquism within the movement, he warned, would transform Marxism into ‘socialism from above’ – an Organized Blanquism.3 The connecting wires – both constitutive of Žižek’s own theory of revolution – were arbitrary construction and the cult of force.
Social democrats were being lured from the ‘solid ground of empirically verifiable facts’ into an ethereal world of ‘derived concepts’ and ‘arbitrary construction’ by an ‘a priori deduction dictated by the Hegelian logic of contradiction’ until ‘all moderation of judgement is lost from view’ and ‘inherently improbable deductions’ are embraced regarding ‘potential transformations’ (1993: 31).4
Although he accepted the general idea that societies developed through the resolution of antagonisms, Bernstein worried that Hegelian Marxists could not resist ‘speculative anticipation of the maturation of an economic and social development which had hardly shown its first shoots’. A speculative philosophy of development encouraged a reckless politics to close the gulf between ‘actual and postulated maturation’. Hegel’s dialectic, thought Bernstein, ‘[t]ime and again got in the way of a proper assessment of the significance of observed changes’ (1993: 34). In short, a properly strategic view of politics became impossible once reality was forced into a preconceived schema.
Bernstein warned that this ‘almost incredible neglect of the most palpable facts’ had to be partnered by ‘a truly miraculous belief in the creative power of force’ (1993: 35).5 The chasm between the recalcitrant contingency of the world and the abstract idea of necessity could only be closed by a cult of force.6
Bernstein grasped that this was the great danger lying in wait for Marxism. He warned that commentary on Blanquism tended to stop at its externals (the absurdity of the secret societies, the tragi-comic putsches and so on). In fact, these were only the time-bound surface expressions of an underlying political theory concerning ‘the immeasurably creative power of revolutionary political force and its manifestation, revolutionary expropriation’ (1993: 38). A terrible destructive ardour was the fruit of the marriage between the Hegelian faith in ‘absolute necessity’ and the Blanquist faith in the transformational power of revolutionary violence. This marriage was ‘the treacherous element’ with Marxism fated to bend post-Marx Marxism into dictatorial shapes (1993: 46).
Ian Parker points out that Žižek’s Hegel is actually the one who reappeared in France in the 1930s as ‘a bit of an ultra-leftist’ in the lectures of (the Stalinist agent) Alexandre Kojève (2004: 39). This Hegel is a ‘figure of perpetual negativity’ who supplies Žižek with a cluster of notions that decisively shape his own theory of revolution: that the revolution can retroactively constitute the grounds on which one acts, that redemptive repetition is the proper reaction to the failure of a revolution (this is the foundational idea of the so-called New Communism) and that ‘abstract negativity’ is the ‘source and motor of revolutionary change’ (see Parker 2004: 39–45). Taken together, these ideas license a view of revolution that is pretty close to the dictionary definition of deus ex machina – the god lowered by stage machinery to resolve the plot and extricate the protagonist from a difficult situation. Revolution, Žižek thinks, ‘wipes the slate clean for the second act, the imposition of a new order’ (quoted in Parker 2004: 43–5).
The Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro thought that when Marx decided the dialectic was a body of laws with an objective existence (and not merely a way of thinking), he created a difficulty for Marxists: how to ‘establish the existence of these laws in reality through empirical means without doing violence to reality in order to make it agree with pre-established laws’ (1975: 89, emphasis added). This was an existential danger to Marxism as a tradition of emancipatory thought for the simple reason that ‘doing violence to reality’ meant abandoning the values of freedom.
But Žižek treats this danger as an opportunity. His theory of revolution is the doing of violence to reality. It is also a brutal ethics of force because, as Milovan Djilas understood, for the Communist, ‘[i]n the forefront of facts marched the a priori truths; and the struggle for their realization stifled the ethical sense and even became transformed into its own ethic, the highest ethic of all’ (1969: 72–3).
Žižek’s a priori truth is not Hegel’s, mind. Not pre-established laws but a ruthless and spiritualized will to power underpins his drive to do violence to reality. But it is all the more an arbitrary construction for that and all the more prone to turn to violence to close the gap between ideal and real. The ‘achievement’ of the mass murderer Mao was ‘tremendous’ to Žižek because Mao showed us that ‘the victorious revolutionary subject is a voluntarist agent which acts against “spontaneous economic necessity”, imposing its vision on reality through revolutionary terror’ (2007b).
The twentieth-century consummation: Lenin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’
We should stop the ridiculous game of opposing the Stalinist terror to the “authentic” Leninist legacy betrayed by Stalinism: “Leninism” is a thoroughly Stalinist notion. (Žižek 2002e: 193)
Žižek celebrates the moment when ‘Lenin violently displaces Marx’ because he believes that it is ‘only through such a violent displacement that the “original” theory can be put to work’ (2001b). Lenin consummated the marriage of Hegelianism and Blanquism when he substituted an anti-democratic concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ for Marx’s democratic original, thus ‘Marxifying’ arbitrary construction and the cult of force. Marxism was turned into an organized Blanquism, or, in Žižek’s revealing phrase, Marx was ‘put to work’.
The Marx scholar Hal Draper (1986, 1987) meticulously reconstructed the text and context of each and every use by Marx of the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to establish that the ill-starred term was invented by Marx as a way to re-educate Blanquists away from Blanquism. Marx was confronting the Blanquist notion of revolution as elite putsch with his own theory of revolution as popular self-emancipation. He did not have in mind a special dictatorial governmental form at all but was referring only to the class content of the state. Generally speaking, for Marx the ‘rule of the proletariat’ meant the working class leadership of an ‘immense majority block’, while the governmental form of that rule was the democratic republic: popular control over the sovereign body of the state, universal suffrage, representative democracy, a democratic constitution and truly mass involvement in political decision-making. Engels, in his 1895 critique of the Erfurt Programme, linked (social) form and (political) content thus: ‘the working class can come to power only under the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (cited in Draper 1986: 318).
Fatefully, Marx’s democratic conception was soon replaced by a doppelganger within the Marxist movement. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ came to mean specially dictatorial governmental forms and policies (1987: 44).7 Plekhanov was the originator of this disastrous substitution, writing it into the programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 (1987: 39–41, 68–75). Lenin would later adopt Plekhanov’s conception, not as an emergency measure but in principle, as a mark of revolutionary virtue. Sounding rather like Žižek, it must be said, Lenin argued that ‘The scientific term “dictatorship” means nothing more nor less than authority untrammelled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force. The term “dictatorship” has no other meaning than this’ (1987: 90). Draper points out that this formulation was ‘a theoretical disaster, first class [with] nothing in common . . . with any conception of the workers state’ held by Marx (1987: 91).
It is upon this Leninist-dictatorial formulation that Žižek grounds his theory of revolution (2000b: 176): ‘Nothing should be accepted as inviolable . . . [not] the most sacred liberal and democratic fetishes. This is the space for repeating the Leninist gesture today’ (2007a: 95).8 He then spiritualizes Lenin’s fateful substitution; in fact he renders it almost psychotic by foregrounding ‘a double equation: divine violence = inhuman terror = dictatorship of the proletariat’ (2008: 162). There is much Robespierrist talk; we could call it the Higher Thuggery: ‘just and severe punishment of the enemies is the highest form of clemency’, ‘rigor and charity coincide in terror’ and so on (2008: 159). He rescues the idea of egalitarian terror for ‘today’s different historical constellation’ by citing Saint-Just (‘That which produces the general good is always terrible’). He adds this menacing gloss: ‘These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the temptation to violently impose the general good on a society but on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed’ (2008: 160). Little wonder that Žižek can write of ‘Stalinism’s inner greatness’ (2002e).
Wild Blanquism (1): revolution as Badiouian ‘Event’
Sigmund Freud famously criticized ‘“Wild” Psycho-Analysis’ in order to separate his creation from crude forms of analysis that had been picked up from books, short-circuited complexity and were practised by quacks (1910). Žižek’s theory of revolution is ‘wild’ not just because his crude ‘Leninism’ short-circuits Marx’s notion of working class self-emancipation, but also because he imports two theoretical resources, Badiou’s concept of the Event and Lacan’s concept of the Act, which (in Žižek’s reading, at least) reduce the notion of revolution to an arbitrary, will-governed and expressive affair, ungrounded and astrategic, albeit personally salvific for its participants, even the dead ones.
Latterly, and especially in his 500-page warrant for totalitarianism, In Defense of Lost Causes, the decisive theoretical influence on Žižek has been the philosopher Alan Badiou. A member of the ultra-left group L’Organization Politique, Badiou resurrects ‘the “eternal idea” of Communism’ which Žižek reads as being composed of ‘strict egalitarian justice, terror, voluntarism and “trust in the people”’ (2008: 461). In Badiou’s work, ‘revolution’ is less the descriptor of a substantive political overturn inaugurating a process of social transformation and more a plot point in what Terry Eagleton has astutely called a ‘born-again narrative’ (2003: 248). Casting politics in the apocalyptic mould, Badiou seeks a ‘total emancipation’ beyond both good and evil and serious political strategy. Substituting for both is unconstrained violence and pure will: ‘extreme violence [is], therefore, the reciprocal correlative of extreme enthusiasm’ (2007: 13).
The Badiouian concept of the Truth-Event – examples of which include the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the French Revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution – refers to the radically new irruption, alien to what is, which shifts history and thought onto new tracks. Žižek has adopted Badiou’s conviction that the individual can only come alive, and is only constituted as a fully human subject, through their intense, faith-like commitment – Badiou’s word is fidelity – to a particular Truth-Event (Eagleton 2009: 118).
Of course, what is being described here is fanaticism and it licenses within Žižek’s thought what John Holbo has called Žižek’s ‘towering un-thoughtfulness’ (2004: 440). After all, the enthusiastic Chinese Maoists in thrall to The Idea, who knocked the glasses off the head of an intellectual, mocked him, dragged him through a show-trial and then killed him, had fidelity to the ‘Event’ all right. Moreover, the concept of fidelity to the Event washes the blood from their hands and makes their stupid murders into ethical acts and a service to Truth.
Žižek finds in Badiou’s concept a praiseworthy combination of ‘voluntarism, an active attitude of taking risks, with a more fundamental fatalism: one acts, makes a leap and then one hopes that things will turn out all right’. Only it never has. Yet, 100 million Communist corpses later, Žižek still thinks that ‘what we need today [is] the freedom fighter with an inhuman face’ (2002a: 81–2).
McLaren points out that when Badiou’s Maoist ontology is combined with a Žižek’s ‘Leninist’ decisionism, revolution is reduced to an act of will (2002). Certainly, the Žižekian-Badiouian Truth-Event creates its own preconditions: ‘a demand possesses, at a specific moment, a global detonating power . . . if we unconditionally insist on it, the system will explode’ (2002b: 164). Žižek then tries to ‘Leninize’ (and ‘Lacanize’) his ultra-voluntarism:
The Mensheviks relied on the all-embracing foundation of the positive logic of historical development; while the Bolsheviks (Lenin at least) were aware that “the big Other doesn’t exist” – a political intervention proper does not occur within the co-ordinates of some underlying global matrix, since what it achieves is precisely the reshuffling of this very matrix. (1999)
Actually, political interventions do occur within an underlying global matrix, or what we might call ‘circumstances not of our own choosing’ or ‘the conjuncture’, as we choose. Žižek’s wild theory of revolution rhetorically evades this brute and all-shaping fact in two ways. First, following Badiou, revolution is always thought under the political temporality of the ‘future anterieur’, or, as a brazen Žižek puts it, ‘one acts now as if the future one wants to bring about is already here’ (2008: 460). Second, revolution is spiritualized as personally salvific whatever the outcome. Win or lose, Žižek’s revolution will force the individual to ‘accept that his or her life is not just a stupid process of reproduction and pleasure-seeking but that it is in service of a Truth’ (2002a: 69–70). Win or lose, participation redeems: only when we act with ‘excessive intensity’, risking all and being willing to die for this Truth are we truly alive, anything less being only an ‘anemic spectacle of life dragging on as its own shadow’ (2003).
Wild Blanquism (2): revolution as Lacanian-Antigonian ‘Act’
Žižek’s wild Blanquism is also heavily influenced by his reading of Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of the ‘Act’. There is a moment in Lacanian psychoanalytic clinical practice when the desperate analysand makes a ruthlessly honest self-assessment, gathering up all her courage and ignoring all her fears, even despite herself and beyond her conscious control, in order to make a therapeutic breakthrough. Parker argues that Žižek’s mistake has been to turn the ‘psychotic “passage à l’acte” . . . into something that is the model of proper political action’ (Parker 2004: 80).
In consequence, Žižek’s theory of revolution floats free of institutional, ethical or strategic constraints. Ernesto Laclau noted that even when ostensibly talking politics, Žižek’s is ‘not . . . a truly political reflection’ but is rather ‘a psychoanalytic discourse which draws its examples from the politico-ideological field’ (in Butler et al. 2000: 289). Terry Eagleton has criticized Žižek for being ‘startlingly causal, almost naive in the way he moves directly from the psychoanalytic to the political’ (2003).9 Parker points out that Žižek treats psychoanalytic change ‘as the model of social transformation’ when it plainly isn’t, ‘individual self-questioning in a clinic’ being incommensurable with ‘political strategies in public collective space’ (2004: 63).
Lacan’s concept of the Act is influenced by Sophocles Antigone, and there is a sense in which Žižek’s theory of revolution is Antigonian. Antigone is deranged by the denial by the King, Creon, of a proper burial to her brother, and so sacrifices her life to secure that rite. Maybe she even longs for death (‘And if I die for it, what happiness!’). Žižek takes this as an exemplar of a properly political act: driven and excessive, pursued to the end, ignoring the consequences. He dismisses critics of such violent excess and astrategic absolutism as people who ‘effectively oppose the act as such’ (2002a: 153). His belief that a genuine ethico-political ‘Act’ must not just risk death but embrace it is then projected onto politics in the form of the claim that a ‘1794’ is an inevitable and necessary corollary of each and every ‘1789’ (2008: 393; 486–7n10).
Stavrakakis (2007) has argued that Žižek’s reading of Antigone distorts Lacan’s original notion of the Act by valorizing pure desire and parading indifference to the consequences of Antigone’s unhinged behaviour for the polity. He also claims that Žižek misreads Antigone who doesn’t actually ‘risk’ anything, as any genuine notion of risk must involve a bare minimum of calculation and strategy. She does not so much act (or even Act) as ‘act out’ desire – and this is a particularly poor model for political action.
In the end, though, Žižek’s Antigonianism is really a fraud. ‘Antigonian rage’ is only for the foot-soldiers of the revolution, not for Žižek. ‘All successful socialist revolutions [have] followed the same model’, he tells us. First, the revolutionaries exploit some local form of Antigonian ‘rage capital’ in order to climb to power. But second, the revolutionaries anticipate the moment when the rage capital will dissipate, so they ‘build . . . up repressive apparatuses’ to ensure that, whatever is the will of the people, it is ‘too late to reverse things, for the revolutionaries are now firmly entrenched’ (2009: 90).
Žižek ‘Marxifies’ this cynicism by talk of a ‘Leninist’ outburst followed by a ‘Stalinist obscene underside’. In Sophoclean words, an Antigonian moment is manipulated to climb to power, and a Creonian moment is embraced to retain it, the revolutionary taking ‘the heroic attitude of “Somebody has to do the dirty work, so let’s do it!”’ (2002a: 30).
Žižek’s theory of revolution, then, is marked by a politics-shaped hole. Before the putsch we can only find the Žižekian-apocalyptic (the revolutionary elite is on the prowl for ‘rage-capital’ to exploit: a decisionist ultrapolitics). After the putsch is only the Žižekian-administrative (the elite engages in repressive measures and deploys the power of organization: a non-democratic meta-politics). From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the Žižekian-political never comes.
Two sources for an anti-totalitarian critique
Two anti-totalitarian thinkers, Claude Lefort and Hal Draper, offer resources for a radical democratic critique of Žižek’s theory of revolution.
The ‘anonymous intentionality’ of the totalitarian regime of thought and language: the critique from Claude Lefort
Claude Lefort argues that the totalitarian regime of thought and language common to fascism and communism is the bearer of an anonymous intentionality that ensures not only the ‘vast efficacy’ of totalitarianism, but also its criminality, whatever the desires of the militants (1998: 2–3). Lefort identifies four bearers of this anonymous intentionality and Žižek’s theory of revolution I claim, is in thrall to each. I believe he realized this during his debate with Laclau and Butler (‘if this be linksfaschismus’) but decided to exult in that fact (so be it!’).
The dream of a society unified and transparent to itself
The first bearer of anonymous intentionality lodged within the totalitarian regime of thought is the dream of a society unified and transparent to itself. Lefort warns that ‘[w]ith the demand for . . . a concrete community freed from the reign of abstraction, is attached the endless elimination of the enemy’ (1998: 22). Despite his public image as a free spirit, largely based on his demeanour and his jokes, Žižek actually yearns for closure; he wants a world with a ‘point’. The name of his desire is not freedom but ‘final victories and ultimate demarcations’ and he wants to secure them by a ‘radical and violent simplification’. He dreams of the ‘magical moment when the infinite pondering crystallizes itself into a simple “yes” or “no”’ and he seeks a life lived in the service of a ‘Truth’ understood not as Istina (truth as adequacy to the facts) but as (Badiou’s) Pravda – ‘the absolute Truth also designating the ethically committed ideal Order of the Good’ (2002a: 70, 80). Wanting ‘definitive Solutions’ he sneers at the ‘merely pragmatic temporary solutions’ the democratic way of life relies upon (2002a: 78).
Because the vision of a society wholly unified and transparent to itself is impossible to realize, a host of crimes and pathologies flow from the attempt to impose it, staining the hands of the best-intentioned (and Žižek is not exactly well-intentioned to begin with, as we have seen). Lefort describes the dynamic at work:
the representation, which should be called phantasmal, of a society unified in all its parts, released from the opaqueness which derived from the division of interests and passions, mobilized by the task of self-realization and the aim of eliminating all those who conspire against the power of the people . . . does not this representation imply the position of someone who is detached from everyone, all-powerful, all-seeing, omniscient, thanks to whom the people calls itself One . . . the image of a man who considers obedience to legality as a simple prejudice, who is constantly proving his will of iron who presents himself as invested by Destiny, elucidates the character of the regime. (1998: 10)
The individual subject is submerged in ‘Necessity’ which is as expressed in ‘The Idea’
The second bearer of anonymous intentionality in the totalitarian regime of thought is its submergence of the individual beneath ‘The Idea’. Lefort argues that totalitarianism never offers a novel idea but rather transforms an existing doctrine into a total ideology through ‘the intensification of the belief into a comprehensive intelligibility and predictability of the processes of history’ forcing the internalization of necessity and the surrender of the individual subject (1998: 14).
The doctrine that Žižek has transformed into a total ideology is, as we have seen, a crude mish-mash of one-dimensional Leninism, spiritualist Maoism and psychoanalytic Stalinism. His recent writing is saturated with the idea that the only authentic life is one given up in self-sacrificial fidelity to the ‘Event’. Inevitably, this has led Žižek to valorize and aestheticize martyrdom. For example, Robespierre’s ‘sublime greatness’ lies in the fact that he was ‘not afraid to die’ and viewed his own death at the hands of the revolution as ‘nothing’. Žižek has plainly come to find death more interesting, authentic and meaningful than (merely bourgeois) life. Again and again his gaze falls lovingly on death. Thus, Mao’s insouciance in the face of the threat of nuclear war is lauded, as is Che Guevara’s willingness to risk nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘There is definitely something terrifying about this attitude’, Žižek admits, ‘however, this terror is nothing less than the condition of freedom’ (2008: 170).
The revolutionary’s role is to adopt the ‘proper attitude of a warrior towards death’ as illustrated by, of all people, the Zen Priest Yamamoto Jocho. Žižek quotes Mr Jocho approvingly: ‘Every day without fail [the warrior] should consider himself as dead . . . This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand’. Žižek even praises those Japanese soldiers who, during World War II, performed their own funerals before they left for war. It is tempting to laugh at this and assume Žižek is joking. Resist; he isn’t. He tells us this ‘pre-emptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living’ is ‘constitutive of a radical revolutionary position’ (2008: 170). Linksfaschismus indeed.10
Lefort points out that totalitarian ideology establishes the supreme law which is exalted far above law-as-such, which shrinks to mere command, indistinguishable from terror (1998: 14). Because Žižek’s revolution is a ‘magic moment of enthusiastic unity of a collective will’ then even mass murder can be justified when carried out in the name of that enthusiasm, in a spirit of fidelity to the Event. Mao’s Red Guards, for example, may have killed half a million people during the Cultural Revolution, but for Žižek all is redeemed because . . . it ‘sustained revolutionary enthusiasm’; indeed, it was ‘the last big installment in the life of this Idea’ (2008: 207). Žižek invites his readers to ‘heroically accept this “white intellectual’s burden”’, observing that Heidegger was great ‘not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement’ (2008: 107, 119) while Foucault’s support for the Iranian Islamists is to be applauded because ‘[w]hat matters is not the miserable reality that followed the upheavals . . . but the enthusiasm that the events in Iran stimulated in the external (Western) observer, confirming his hopes in the possibility of a new form of spiritualized political collective’ (2008: 108).
‘Organization’ to control and regulate behaviour in every sphere of life
The third element of the totalitarian regime of thought that bears an anonymous intentionality is the use of organization to ‘place the doctrine at the service of a plan for total domination’ and to ensure the end of the distinction between the political and the non-political (1998: 14). The ideology is grounded in a ‘single source, that of power materialized in the party’ and that party presents its unity as ‘untouchable’. Thus, in totalitarianism, ‘the power of discourse and the discourse of power become indistinguishable’ (1998: 3–4). The most shocking example of this erasure of the gap between might and right in Žižek’s own writings is this ugly piece of braggadocio.
To be clear and brutal to the end there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering’s reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a well-known Jew from deportation: “In this city, I decide who is a Jew!”. (2008: 136)
Žižek admits that he would love to mimic Goering and say ‘In this city we decide what is left’ in a future in which he can ‘simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency’ (2008: 136).
Lefort understood that unlike mass parties in democratic societies, the entire point of organization in totalitarian ideology is ‘to control and regulate behaviour in all spheres of social life . . . all situations where human relations are formed outside institutional frameworks . . . to render everything organizable, everything [a] matter for party organization’ (1998: 16). Erasing the distinction between the political and the non-political renders suspect all social ties forged by ‘a spontaneous mode of socialization’. And as spontaneity can never be fully repressed, the active minority must stand perpetual guard over the ‘maleficent adversary who is everywhere active [and] conspiratorial’ (1998: 17).
On cue, Žižek yearns for a time when ‘terms like “revisionist traitor” were not yet part of the Stalinist mantra, but expressed an authentic engaged insight’ (2000b: 177), and he is nostalgic for the days when GDR workers would have their marriage raked over by co-workers because, after all, ‘private problems themselves (from divorce to illness) are put into proper perspective by being discussed in one’s working collective’ (2001a: 133). As for Žižek’s vision of the post-revolutionary society, it is captured in his conviction that ‘Lenin was right: after the revolution, the anarchic disruptions of the disciplinary constraints of production should be replaced by an even stronger discipline’ (2000b: 177).
Embracing the totalitarian politico-aesthetic of the ‘substantialist idea’
The fourth bearer of anonymous intentionality within the totalitarian regime of thought is its aestheticized incorporation of all individuals in one social ‘body’: the ‘substantialist ideal’. The price is the constant replication and representation of the state-unified people not only functionally but also in a host of state-run front organizations, as well as a bloody aesthetics: an endless drama of the healthy social body fighting off parasites in pursuit of purity.
Badiou wishes the revolutionary to view the world as ‘an ancient world full of corruption and treachery. One has to constantly start again with purification’ (2007: 14) and he looks forward to ‘the advent or commencement of man: the new man . . . a real creation, something that has not come into existence because it arises out of the destruction of historical antagonisms’ (2007: 14, 16). Man is to be drilled – Žižek himself is attracted by the aesthetic of ‘the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial Machine’ – and when out of step, forced to be free. Little wonder that Žižek flirts with talk of the individual being ‘crushed, stamped on, mercilessly worked over, in order to produce a new man’ (2002f).
Žižekian hatred for the Enemy, expressed in his thuggish Goering-talk for example, saturates his writings. In ‘The Leninist Freedom’ he reports gleefully on Lenin’s response to the Menshevik defenders of democracy in 1920: ‘Of course, gentlemen, you have the right to publish this critique – but, then, gentlemen, be so kind as to allow us to line you up against the wall and shoot you!’ (2001b).11 (Actually, Lenin said ‘Do your job, gentlemen – we too will do our job’, but Žižek captures his meaning well enough.)
The adoption of the tone of the commissar and the aestheticizing of murder are two signs that the anonymous intentionality of the totalitarian regime of thought is eating its way through a thinker. Since his break with Laclau in 2000, Žižek has often sung in this leather-booted register, abusing anti-totalitarians as ‘conformist liberal scoundrels’ who denounce ‘every attempt to change things’ (2001a: 4) and traducing anti-totalitarian thought as ‘a worthless sophistic exercise, a pseudo-theorization of the lowest opportunist survivalist fears and instincts, a way of thinking that is . . . reactionary’ (2008: 4).
No socialism without democracy: the critique from Hal Draper
Žižek’s call for a ‘left alternative to democracy’ has not given his many admirers pause, and nor has his praise for those philosophers, from Plato to Heidegger, who have been ‘mistrustful of democracy, if not directly anti-democratic’ (2008: 102). On the first page of In Defense of Lost Causes Žižek announced that there is no difference between three statements: ‘the Church synod has decided’, ‘the Central Committee has passed a resolution’ and ‘the people have made clear its choice at the ballot box’ (2008: 1). Praising Alain Badiou’s view that ‘Today, the enemy is . . . called Democracy’ (in Žižek 2008: 183) Žižek argues that democracy is ‘in its very notion a passivization of the popular Will’ (2009c: 135), a form of ‘corruption’ (2009c: 136), and – an echo of Plato, the original totalitarian – a political system that is unable to provide a ‘place for Virtue’. He scorns liberal-democratic politics as a void and its partisans as ‘the party of the non-Event’ (2002a: 151) and cracks a tendentious joke hints at his alternative. ‘You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it – time to get serious once again!’ (2009: 157).
While democracy is wholly external to Slavoj Žižek’s theory of revolution, Hal Draper established that it was wholly internal to Karl Marx’s. Marx was a democratic extremist – ‘the first socialist figure to come to an acceptance of the socialist idea through the battle for the consistent expression of democratic control from below’. Uniquely, he ‘came through the bourgeois-democratic movement: through it to its farthest bounds, and then out by its farthest end. In this sense, he was the first to fuse the struggle for consistent political democracy with the struggle for a socialist transformation’. Seen through this optic, Marx’s true revolution in thought was not Capital, but the idea that only on the social ground of self-emancipation could the integration of political democracy and the ‘social question’ be worked out:
Marx’s theory moved in the direction of defining consistent democracy in socialist terms and consistent socialism in democratic terms. The task of theory . . . is not to adjudicate a clash between the two considerations . . . but rather to grasp the social dynamics of the situation under which the apparent contradiction between the two is resolved. (1977: 283)
Draper argues that democracy is the sine qua non of self-emancipatory socialism. Not ‘merely of sentimental or moral value . . . nor is it merely a preference’, democracy is ‘the only way in which the rule of the working class can exist in political actuality’ (1962). While Marx thought in terms of the maturation of the working class through reform-fights (‘We say to the workers: “You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years . . . to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power”’.),12 Žižek offers sound bites: ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’ (2009: 154). While Marx believed the first step was ‘winning the battle of democracy’ because the encroachment of a new social logic is impossible without untrammelled democracy; civil liberties, a culture of pluralism, with maximum space for initiative from below and for enforcing the accountability of the government representatives. Žižek prefers to ‘resignify terror’.
The other lesson of the Stalinist experience ignored by Žižek and Badiou is that without democracy, statification equals totalitarianism. They both desire to give a fresh existence to the communist hypothesis but only in the form of a redemptive repetition. They seek new conditions for its existence, but the hypothesis itself is placed beyond criticism as the Eternal Event to which one must have fidelity.
Žižek’s ‘Wild Blanquism’ functions to protect the project of a redemptive repetition of the communist hypothesis by shielding it from a confrontation with its historical nemesis: real people (who are never to be confused with Badiou’s totalitarian category ‘The People’). The true purpose of ‘resignifying terror’, mocking as ‘liberal scoundrels’ all who warn of the totalitarian temptation, rehabilitating the educational dictatorship and grounding politics in a Truth that must be imposed against the people in the name of ‘The People’, is precisely to wall-off the Communist hypothesis from that very ‘independent movement of the immense majority’ in which Marx placed every hope.
Conclusion: why we must keep saying totalitarianism
Today, the project of the Left desperately needs theoretical resources that help it to do two things: deepen and extend the democratic revolution begun in the eighteenth century while completing what the French anti-totalitarian writer Pierre Rosanvallon calls the ‘reconceptualization of the political in the light of the totalitarian experience’ (2006). Slavoj Žižek’s theory of revolution sunders the political project of the left from both. It reprises as an academic farce in this century what was a genuine tragedy in the last, when, in the plangent words of Albert Camus, ‘The great event of the twentieth century was the forsaking of the values of freedom by the revolutionary movements. Since that moment, a certain hope has disappeared from the world and a solitude has begun for each and every man’ (quoted in Howe 1982: 132–3). Žižek may make us laugh. But he does not restore that hope, nor lift that solitude.
Notes
1 Žižek’s diagnosis of the crisis of late modernity – whatever criticisms one may make of it – is not a scandal, of course. He is a penetrating critic of a range of maladies that have swept the globe since the Thatcher–Reagan revolution, and by treating those maladies as indicators of ‘what is wrong in the very structure of the system’ (2007a: 81) Žižek has held open the question of a global alternative to capitalism. And he can be brilliant in forcing us to adopt strange angles of vision on a vast array of familiar cultural objects, high and low, making us see them afresh as forms of meaning in the service of this ‘system’-in-crisis. No, the scandal does not lie in his insistence that a global alternative be held open, but in how he proposes to realize it. In 2000 – somewhere in the middle of his debate with Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler – he decided to give up on democracy, ‘radical’ or otherwise. That exchange began with a declaration of their shared anti-totalitarianism and radical democracy but ended with Žižek embracing terror, dictatorship and linksfaschismus (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000).
2 The French conspirator and revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–81) opposed universal suffrage and believed that the revolution would be made by a ruthless elite band organizing a putsch. After the seizure of power the Blanquist believed that ‘[t]he revolutionary band of idealistic dictators alone would exercise the transitional dictatorship’ (Draper 1987: 13). In a meticulous account of the Marx-Blanqui relationship, Draper concluded that ‘Marx did vigorously reject Blanquist (Jacobin-Communist) putschism . . . from his earliest known writings to his last, with unusual consistency’ (1986: 145). Blanquism, thought Draper, has always been ‘the “left” way to reject self-emancipation’ (1986: 162).
3 ‘Marxism and the Hegelian dialectic’, the second chapter of Bernstein’s 1899 book The Preconditions of Socialism, was not translated by Edith C. Harvey in Evolutionary Socialism (1961), but was included in Henry Tudor’s 1993 translation, which also restored the original title.
4 Bernstein thought Hegelianism a ‘treacherous element in Marxist doctrine’ (1993: 36). In Germany, after 1848, Marx and Engels, as a result of ‘working on the basis of the radical Hegelian dialectic, arrived at a doctrine very similar to Blanquism’ (1993: 37). By thinking the proletariat as the ‘antithesis’ they expected a proletarian revolution in Germany in 1848 and ‘[t]his position led directly to Blanquism’ (1993: 38). It has not only been the devil Bernstein who has raised this alarm. Sebastiano Timpanaro thought that ‘the intrinsically idealist character of the dialectic was not clearly recognized by either [Marx or Engels]’ and that ‘Hegel has had certain negative effects on the thought of Marx and Engels which cannot be brushed aside’ (1975: 89, 129n82).
5 In a very different language, Laclau and Mouffe repeat Bernstein: ‘“dialectics” exerts an effect of closure in those cases where more weight is attached to the necessary character of an a priori transition, than to the discontinuous moment of an open articulation’ (1985: 95).
6 Sidney Hook argued that over the course of the twentieth century the Marxist ideal of revolution degenerated into ‘the cult of revolution’. The cultist ‘rejects the processes of democratic social change as hopelessly ineffective or deceptive or both’ and gives up on the working class as hopelessly corrupted. Bizarrely, in societies that have welfare states and mass reformist social democratic parties and elected governments, the cultist fastens on notions of violence, revolutionary myth, ‘emancipatory terror’ and dictatorship (2002: 204–7). Hook might have been describing Žižek.
7 The idea that Marx’s concept of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was systematically misunderstood by his followers can also be found in Hook (1934) and Laurat (1940).
8 Parker argues that Žižek is not really a Marxist, but only ‘uses Marxism tactically against other political and theoretical systems’ (2004: 96). Laclau has criticized Žižek’s ‘insufficiently deconstructed traditional Marxism’ (in Butler et al., 2000: 204–6). See also Homer (2001).
10 See Johnson (forthcoming).
11 Listening to the giggling of tenured faculty and their affluent students as Žižek jokes about the murder of the party of Julius Martov is enough to make one reconsider the virtues of terror.
12 Norman Geras makes the case for thinking of self-emancipation as ‘central, not incidental, to historical materialism’ (1986: 134).
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