Paul Bowman
[N]ote how many texts in the present volume follow a similar argumentative strategy. First, they impute to me a ridiculously caricaturized position; then, when they are forced to admit that many passages in my work directly contradict the described position, they do not read this discrepancy as what, prima facie, it is, a sign of the inadequacy of their reading, but as my own inconsistency.
(Žižek 2007: 201)
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.)
(Wittgenstein 1922/2005: 189)
Reading the romance
Slavoj Žižek’s work is theoretically dense, deft, racy, fast-paced. At the same time, he is a theorist who seems to court controversy with his writings, who seems to try to provoke, by making outrageous declarations about all manner of subjects, no matter how delicate. Nothing is off-limits, it appears, to Žižek’s analytical, diagnostic, polemical gaze. He seems to delight in breaking academic taboos. Surely this is at least part of the reason why he is so widely read (see also Belsey 2003; Bowman 2006). However, to fearlessly speak out, to heroically break taboos (academic taboos, though: so, mock-heroically) and to unashamedly make diagnoses, judgements and denunciations without worrying about offending sensibilities is one matter. The ethics and politics that one actually puts forward is quite another. It is with this problematic issue that this chapter will primarily be concerned.
More and more commentators have noted the problematic character of Žižek’s ‘targets’ – the objects of his critique and even scorn and ridicule (see for instance Bowman 2006 and the contributors to Bowman and Stamp 2007, especially Leigh Claire La Berge and Jeremy Gilbert). Others focus on the problematic character of Žižek’s politics and ethics, and especially his specific political proposals (or lack thereof). Alan Johnson’s new reading of Žižek, included in this present volume, is an example of one such extremely important response to the problem of Žižek. For what Johnson demonstrates in ‘Žižek’s theory of revolution: a critique’, is not only that the nuts and bolts of Žižek’s political theory are highly problematic in many respects. (People have been saying this for some time.) It is also that it is in a sense a scandal that anyone who places themselves on any kind of progressive political left could continue to read Žižek as if Žižek’s work could be placed on any kind of progressive political left.
Johnson concerns himself with a demonstration of the key features of Žižek’s political pronouncements over the last decade and more, in order to reveal the bare bones of the political theory that Žižek expounds. Žižek’s politics are scandalous, he argues:
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 antitotalitarianism and radical democracy but ended with Žižek embracing terror, dictatorship and linksfaschismus. (Johnson 2012: 64n1)
‘This essay does not seek to explain that scandal’, writes Johnson at the start of his essay, ‘only to make the case that it is one’. To my mind it is clear that he does so in order to demand from us an engagement with the even more scandalous fact that people seem to be reading Žižek in such a manner as to not notice his unpalatable politics. It is clearly a concern with this situation that animates Johnson’s project. For, in this case, as in all others, the issue is surely not simply that someone’s politics may or may not be scandalous. The serious issue relates rather to what is done with it, and by whom. In other words, the impetus behind Johnson’s excavation of Žižek’s political thought must involve an intention to precipitate a wider engagement with – a facing up to – the problematic fact that scholars, researchers and academics generally are continuing to read Žižek in often affiliative manners in light of the elaboration that Žižek himself has given of his own political theory over the last decade. Ultimately, that is, the problem animating Johnson’s work – which he elucidates by quoting from Adam Kirsch – is that ‘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’. What I would like to do in response to Johnson’s illuminating reading of the letter of Žižek’s political theory of revolution is to try to make some headway in an engagement with the ongoing modes of reading (or not-reading: consuming, enjoying) Žižek by an academic community that tends to conceptualize itself as more or less left and more or less radically or progressively democratic.
Blindness and insight
One possible interpretation, one way to make sense of this reading formation or this general discursive context and its uncritically hospitable reception, would be to suggest that Žižek’s readers have simply not noticed precisely how scandalous Žižek is, or that they have not identified and isolated exactly why Žižek is scandalous, and have not ‘therefore’ come ineluctably to the conclusion that perhaps Žižek should no longer be read in a straightforwardly supportive way. Of course, this would be a slightly barbed interpretation – because it would imply that Žižek’s primary readers are not really reading Žižek thoroughly, or are not being attentive or paying attention to the implications of what Žižek is actually saying, either in his many digressions, asides and virtuoso vignettes, or in the general reiterated and consistent points that he regularly makes and returns to again and again.
Now, to be clear, I do not want to suggest that Žižek’s most hospitable readers are simply uncritical fans. For, even though it is inevitable that some surely will be, I know many ‘Žižekian’ scholars to be extremely sharp, perceptive, insightful and analytical readers. Nevertheless, I still want to propose that, given the style of his writing – particularly the way it jumps around from one topic and one theorist to another topic and another theorist and then another theorist on another topic and so on, in an apparently chaotic manner – that given this, there is always going to be a degree of difficulty in stating with absolute certainty exactly what Žižek is actually saying; and perhaps not because of any ‘prima facie’ lack or failure on the reader’s part, nor because of the effects of that old chestnut called ‘textual excess’ and the play of the signifier, but perhaps because the consistency and coherence that Žižek adheres to is an effect of his investment in his own reading of the Lacanian ‘Real’, one of the effects of which will be the effect of consistent inconsistency.
I will return to this suggestion later. But for now, I’d merely want to suggest that an inevitable effect of the range and apparently ramshackle nature of Žižek’s texts will be conducive to the establishment of some disagreement between readers – especially, perhaps, because Žižek combines his readings of a wide range of theorists, philosophers and psychoanalysts in such a way as to suggest that they are each confirming what the others are saying. As Michael Walsh puts it:
In other words, there’s no arguing with a thoroughgoing Hegelian; this is a position that always-already anticipates (or sometimes just ‘implies’) anything of value that is subsequently voiced. So it is with characteristic relish that Žižek comments after quoting some paragraphs of Hegel: ‘Everything is in this marvellous text: from the Foucauldian motif of disciplinary micro-practice as preceding any positive instruction to the Althusserian equation of the free subject with his subjection to the Law’ . . . . Žižek’s enthusiasm is infectious, so that one feels almost churlish in saying that ‘from the Foucauldian motif’ to ‘the Althusserian equation’ can scarcely be described as ‘everything’, is in fact no great distance – Foucault was Althusser’s student, and is cited by his former teacher in the first footnote to Reading Capital. This sense of a pre-ordained inevitability is reinforced by Žižek’s other favourite formulations, the paradox . . ., the ‘nothing but’ (‘Lacan’s whole point is that the Real is nothing but this impossibility of inscription’ . . .) and the rhetorical question – ‘Is not the supreme case of a particular feature that sustains the impossible sexual relationship the curling blonde hair in Hitchcock’s Vertigo?’ . . .; ‘Do we not find the ultimate example of this impossible Thing . . . in the science-fiction theme of the . . . Id-Machine?’ . . .; ‘Is it not clear already in Kant that there is transcendental self-consciousness?’ (Walsh 2002: 391)
Žižek does and does not court consistency, in equal measure. In the face of the wide range of assertions within Žižek’s work, and consequently the wide array of responses to his work, Žižek always has one or more lines of flight open to him in defending himself or claiming to have been misread. A clear case of this occurs in the pages of a book of essays I co-edited on Žižek’s work, a book of essays which concluded with Žižek’s response – a long afterword called ‘With defenders like these, who needs attackers?’ (Žižek 2007). In response to over a dozen essays offering various criticisms of his analyses, methods and conclusions, Žižek concedes very little, almost nothing, and not one of the many substantive criticisms made of his work in the book; claiming instead that all of the contributors have misread and misrepresented him, that they have been aggressive, abusive, ‘smash and grab’, unscholarly. Similarly, the ensuing reviews and discussions of the book online often restated Žižek’s sentiments, albeit sometimes in considerably less measured terms: the contributors to our book were incompetent readers, they said, each of whom had read Žižek entirely wrong1 . . . Consequently, it strikes me that if over a dozen academics from all over the world, each working independently and with no particular anti-Žižek axe to grind, could each spend protracted periods of time researching, analysing and assessing Žižek’s work, and could each come up with critical interpretations which were then received as complete misreadings, then anyone can.
All texts are, after all, essentially open. But does that mean that finding one’s way through reasons and arguments and analyses and evidence must be an interminable process of ongoing error – all blindness and no insight? Is disentangling Žižek impossible? Perhaps. Certainly, the range of poststructuralist or ‘deconstructionist’ paradigms all propose different versions of this. Of course, Žižek himself rejects such paradigms and persistently uses a mode of address that implies that truth and insight can be directly apprehended and clearly stated by the scholar. Our own choice of title for our book – The Truth of Žižek – was, in this context, ultimately a playful jibe at Žižek’s own favourite rhetorical formulation: ‘Is this not precisely the truth of [x, y, or z]?’ – a rhetorical (non)question which more than implies that there is a ‘truth’ or, indeed, an ‘essential truth’ to this, that or the other, that can be known and stated. In the wake of our immersion in poststructuralism and the textual paradigm of deconstruction, as well as the discourse approaches of Foucault, not to mention Žižek’s own early post-Marxist and poststructuralist allies and collaborators, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, this kind of Žižekian proposition about ‘truth’ inevitably struck us as both engaging and problematic. It was one of the reasons we decided to compile a book of critical appraisals and responses to Žižek in the first place. For, given the textual ontology of deconstruction and of Laclauian discourse theory, how could one claim access to or knowledge of truth? John Mowitt’s contribution to our book, ‘Trauma Envy’ (Mowitt 2007), suggested that Žižek’s claim to be able to access the truth – a truth that would trump all others – could be understood in terms of the status he accords to the Lacanian Real, a status that allows him to regard his particular paradigm as superior to all others currently available, insofar as the (post)poststructuralist discursive formation cannot countenance the possibility of context-free ‘truth’.
In a sense, this possibility opens a way to confer upon Žižek’s work a different kind of consistency or coherence. Nevertheless, whenever Žižek has been accorded a ‘position’ by interpreters, and particularly when this has been used as the basis for a critique of his work, this has always been something Žižek has been able to sidestep, by claiming that the position attributed to him is not in fact his (true) position and that that was not what he was actually saying. In other words, maybe, as with the Real, there is no consistent Žižekian position. This is a possibility that deserves to be taken seriously. Another possibility would be to consider that, given the sheer proliferation of his writings on equally proliferating subjects, one should not really expect to find any consistency at all: pure, regular, repetitive consistency in an author’s works through time and space would surely constitute evidence of an inflexible, sedulous non-reading of any unique thing, text, issue, problem or debate. So perhaps the inconsistencies to be found could be taken as the great strength and virtue of Žižek’s work. Perhaps Žižek is performing either the chaotic eruption of the Real or (more pragmatically) Foucault’s argument that the historical and entrenched idea of the existence of a singular consistent coherent author is a social fiction (Foucault 1977). Perhaps ‘Žižek the author’ should be regarded as a Barthesian ‘figure in the carpet’ of the texts that bear his name. Perhaps the best way to read Žižek, then, would be always to forget, anew, each time, whatever it was he may have seemed to have said the last time you read him, and to dive in and enjoy your Žižek for reasons other than overarching consistency – perhaps purely for the range of examples, anecdotes and witty and suggestive deployments of theory and philosophy, rather than for anything consistent. Perhaps Žižek is all suggestion, all provocation, all critique with no consistency . . . Perhaps.
But still, there does seem to be consistency to Žižek’s writings. The same sorts of arguments regularly recur. The same sentiments, the same connections, often even the same passages and paragraphs and pages moving from one publication to the next. And these consistencies can be enumerated, elaborated, interpreted. In light of this, I genuinely wonder how Žižek and his primary readership will respond to the challenging consistencies that Alan Johnson has revealed in the political theory Žižek has produced in the last decade. Will Johnson’s interpretation be accorded the status of a persuasively systematic reading, or will it be consigned to the category of a symptomatic misreading? (Once one is inclined to start regarding some things as symptoms, it seems to become very hard to prevent that tendency turning into regarding everything as a symptom.)
The reading of Žižek
Johnson is at pains to demonstrate that what is most scandalous about Žižek is not merely his apparent delight in breaking putative academic taboos. Nor is it even that the main targets of Žižek’s harshest judgements are invariably his own primary readership – those involved in cultural studies, film studies, cultural theory, continental philosophy, political theory (see Bowman 2006, Gilbert 2007 and Le Berge in Bowman and Stamp 2007). Rather, what makes Žižek so scandalous, in Johnson’s reading, is the fact that his political theory is based first on a deeply problematic misreading of both the spirit and the letter of certain historical events and second that his political pronouncements are explicitly anti-democratic, authoritarian, totalitarian, crypto- and not so crypto-fascist. Johnson meticulously and persuasively elaborates his evidence for arguing this. As such, I do not need to retread the same ground. So, rather than reiterating or recapitulating Johnson, I would prefer to start from the same initial observation that he makes about Žižek’s typical method, and from there to strike out on an equivalent but different tangent, into the matter that animates Johnson but that he leaves largely implicit: the problem of the reading of Žižek.
‘Žižek’s Theory of Revolution: A Critique’ begins from a clarification of Žižek’s most typical manner of proceeding: namely, the fact that Žižek so often starts from a misreading (or partial reading) and moves immediately into an amphibology, or, that is, a skewed argument, in order to arrive at conclusions that are, as such, faulty. So, typically: first Žižek misrepresents or caricatures something. He then runs with this chimera into a hyperbolical all-or-nothing argument in which straw men are set up to be struck down by the violent actions of zealous ‘free radicals’ – characters/caricatures that Žižek often represents as heroic (and violent) phallic heroes. This is a regular occurrence in his writings. Johnson begins from the example upon which Žižek bases his theory of revolutionary politics, but many equivalent examples on various topics could be provided. I will discuss one: one of the most frequent: Žižek’s reading of his favourite object of scorn, ‘cultural studies’.
Žižek almost invariably uses the term ‘cultural studies’ as a short-hand way of conjuring up everything academic that he holds in contempt. In Žižekian, ‘cultural studies’ is short-hand for the cutting edge of the entire field of social, cultural and political studies, the arts, humanities and social sciences. This is because Žižek believes cultural studies to be exemplary of the leading tendencies both of academia and (hence) of capitalist ideology. This is why he so often singles out cultural studies for particular scorn (Bowman 2006). However, the problem with Žižek’s reading of cultural studies is that he persistently fails to engage with the object of his criticism on any level at all.
Some of the stakes and drama of this are played out most clearly in an essay by Jeremy Gilbert, again in The Truth of Žižek.2 In his essay ‘All the right questions, all the wrong answers’ – a title which encapsulates the overarching consensus about Žižek that emerged within the pages of The Truth of Žižek – Gilbert takes issue with Žižek’s frequent declarations and assertions about cultural studies. Gilbert takes Žižek to task on a factual level – pointing out various ways in which most, if not all, of the claims that Žižek makes about cultural studies are demonstrably false, caricatural, mendacious, ill-informed, smacking of all the biases associated with the most right-wing of conservative reactionaries (Gilbert 2007: 61–80), and, I would add, palpably imbued with the stench of a resentment and hostility that – should any of the things that Žižek claims about this ‘cultural studies’ object that he represents as weak, soft, feminized, deluded and impotent have any basis in fact whatsoever – would put Žižek firmly in the position of a kind of school bully, of the sort who singles out the most naïve and gentle boy for attack, precisely because he is the one least likely to fight back. (I am supplementing my paraphrase of Gilbert’s argument with some of my own imagery here.)
It is worth looking at one aspect of the Gilbert-Žižek exchange, at some length, not least because it also connects Žižek’s criticisms of cultural studies with his interest in totalitarianism (the object of Johnson’s attention), as well as relating directly to the question of reading (Žižek’s reading and reading Žižek). So, allow me to quote Gilbert at length:
Let us take as one exemplary text, Žižek’s Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?. For a start, this book opens by promising to address the ‘problem’ of the fact that accusations of ‘totalitarianism’ have become unanswerable and automatically condemnatory charges in the context of a certain post-structuralist intellectual climate. It proceeds to do nothing of the kind, instead offering a more or less stream of consciousness set of reflections on certain uses of psychoanalytic theory to address a disparate and frequently disconnected set of intellectual issues. At no point does the book make any attempt to engage with the complex intellectual history which leads to the blanket condemnation of ‘totalitarianism’ – the disillusion with party communism after 1968, the rigorous scholarship of Lyotard and Lefort, the influence of anarchism on the ‘new social movements’, etc. In place of any such thing, we get remarks such as this one: ‘If at a Cultural Studies colloquium in the 1970s, one was asked innocently “Is your line of argumentation not similar to that of Arendt?” this was a sure sign that one was in deep trouble’ (Žižek 2001: 2).
On the one hand, this is a remark intended to illustrate a general point about the changing fashionability of Arendt’s work during recent decades, to be read quickly and passed over. On the other, it sets up Žižek’s entire case that there is something ‘wrong’ with ‘cultural studies’ that can be registered in terms of its changing attitude to Arendt. As such, if Žižek’s initial assertion about this change is not substantiable then it raises severe questions as to the whole premise of this argument – never mind the substance of the argument itself. So wait. Read the remark again. Pause and reflect. Only one of two responses is really possible here: either silent acquiescence from someone who assumes that the remark must be reasonable (because it is made in a book by a famous authority on cultural theory published by a renowned publisher of esteem and quality), or a protesting query from anyone who knows anything at all about Cultural Studies and its history. Locating myself in the latter category I have to ask: what the hell is Žižek talking about? How on earth would Žižek know what ‘would have happened’ (with enough certainty to know that anything would have been a ‘sure sign’ of anything else) at a ‘Cultural Studies colloquium in the 1970s’. There was only one place in the world where one might have attended a ‘Cultural Studies colloquium in the 1970s’: at the University of Birmingham – and to the best of anyone’s recollection (I have asked a number of people who were there), Slavoj Žižek never made it along to one.
Žižek may be right and he may be wrong about his substantive point. That isn’t the immediate issue, although we will come back to it. The important point for now is that Žižek is making an authoritative comment on something – Cultural Studies colloquia in the 1970s – without offering the slightest reason for the reader to put aside their justifiable scepticism as to Žižek’s authority so to comment. Let’s be clear about the implicit assumption here: the reader is assumed (or hoped, at least) to know even less about the subject than Žižek, and to take his word for it. Such a reader is being misled for the sake of a polemical point on Žižek’s part. (Gilbert 2007: 63–4)
Žižek responds to Gilbert at some length in his afterword to The Truth of Žižek, ‘With defenders like these, who needs attackers?’ (Žižek 2007). In response to Gilbert’s key point about cultural studies ‘as such’, all Žižek says is this:
Well, Birmingham definitely was not the only place ‘in the world’ – being born in 1949, I am old enough to have followed the scene around Europe from the early 70s, where, in the aftermath of the 1968 events, a Leftist critical analysis of cultural products was flourishing, especially in Germany and France, but also in Latin America. And, unfortunately, from that time, I remember clearly incidents where stating similarity to Arendt functioned as an act of ominous accusation.
With this, Žižek confirms the first half of Gilbert’s reading (‘On the one hand, this is a remark intended to illustrate a general point about the changing fashionability of Arendt’s work during recent decades, to be read quickly and passed over’). But it does so as if Gilbert had not already said this, and at exactly the same time as it misses everything else that Gilbert goes on to say – all of the important points, all of the essential critique that Gilbert is making. Žižek’s response to Gilbert’s taking of him to task about his incessant polemicizing against cultural studies (specifically: cultural studies specifically, and not some vague intellectual ‘scene’), takes the form of ignoring the essential point of the criticism that Gilbert is clearly, insistently, deliberately and unequivocally making.
The manner in which Žižek misses the point is very precise. Let us take note of its features. First, note that Gilbert is obviously not claiming that Birmingham was the ‘only place in the world’ in the 1970s. He is stating the institutional–historical fact that there was ‘only one place in the world where one might have attended a “Cultural Studies colloquium in the 1970s”’. For cultural studies as a named institutional disciplinary entity – that is, cultural studies as such – the thing called ‘cultural studies’ was baptized in the 1960s at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom. It was not until the 1980s that it spread widely, through the institution of degree programmes, departments, centres, schools, conferences, associations, publishers’ categories and so on; and it was not until the 1990s that a quick evocation of ‘cultural studies’ could be taken as shorthand for the general tendencies of the intellectual scenes of the arts and humanities – that is, not until after the institutional transformation of the arts and humanities precipitated in large part by the institutional proliferation of centres and sites of cultural studies.
In other words, the question is this: before cultural studies as such, was there cultural studies ‘as such’? In a very general sense, one might say, yes, perhaps, sort of. But should one wish to answer this kind of question with any kind of precision or rigour, one would have to say, no, not really, not as such, and surely it could only look like there was ‘cultural studies before cultural studies’ from an un-self-reflexive post-cultural studies position. Alternatively put, before the paradigms, approaches, questions, orientations and discourses of cultural studies hegemonized the intellectual scene, had the paradigms, approaches, questions, orientations and discourses of cultural studies hegemonized the intellectual scene?
I have argued before – indeed, in the same book containing the Gilber–Žižek exchange – that this tendency in Žižek to quickly introduce something (whether a debate, issue, entity or complex problematic) by using sweeping statements and short-hand is both a strength and a weakness of his work (Bowman 2007). For, on the one hand, it allows him to conjure up, quickly and dramatically, any entrenched and ongoing debate. That is, rather than re-inventing the wheel, Žižek assumes that we know what he is talking about. But on the other hand, this wreaks all the conceptual and representational violence of any other reductive representation or account. So, on the one hand, this accounts for some of the appeal of Žižek’s work; it quickly maps out historical polemics, disciplinary disagreements and ways to read philosophers and theorists against each other. But on the other hand, it often proceeds, as in the case Jeremy Gilbert points out here, according to an entirely problematic manner of not reading, not engaging, not reflecting and not seeking or digging to find out whether things are actually as Žižek says they are, in a quick synopsis.
In this case, then, Gilbert’s specific point is that, in the 1970s, there really was a cultural studies scene, but that it is not what or where Žižek says it was. On the one hand, again, this merely reconfirms the fact that Žižek uses the term ‘cultural studies’ to refer to the general tendencies or discursive formations of left discourse in and around the arts and humanities disciplines – which takes us directly back to the point Gilbert concedes from the outset, that ‘this is a remark intended to illustrate a general point . . . to be read quickly and passed over’. But, on the other hand, it still leaves entirely unaddressed Gilbert’s actual challenge to Žižek – his questioning of his (persistent mis)reading and representation of ‘cultural studies’, specifically his ad hominem and ad nauseum insistence ‘that there is something “wrong” with “cultural studies”’. In other words, if Žižek is never actually referring to ‘actually-existing’ cultural studies, then why does he always refer to cultural studies?3
Over and above the specific issue of Žižek’s long-running misreading and compulsive defamation of cultural studies, my main reason for drawing attention to this matter again here is to add further fuel to the fire that Alan Johnson is surely lighting in his critique of Žižek’s theory of revolution. For, as we see in these and other equivalent cases, Žižek has a tendency to take only a fraction of the salient information about an issue or entity, to miss the essential issue and to run with what amounts to a reduced or reductive stereotype into an all-or-nothing argument. In this, we may say, Žižek’s manner of reading amounts to a formalizable or formulaic mode of misreading. And I would suggest that it happens on all scales: from the scale of the phrase to the scale of the book, at least. On the level of the phrase, we see this in Žižek’s reduction of the essential thrust of Gilbert’s sentence about cultural studies in the 1970s (‘There was only one place in the world where one might have attended a ‘Cultural Studies colloquium in the 1970s’: at the University of Birmingham . . .’ – This is not the entire sentence, but it is the essential thrust of it). Žižek reduces this to ‘Birmingham definitely was not the only place “in the world”’. On a larger level, on the scale of a whole book, we see it in the following: Simon Critchley wrote a brief Preface to The Truth of Žižek, entitled ‘Why Žižek must be defended’. With this title Critchley stakes out his own generous position vis-à-vis Žižek’s efforts (which, as I mentioned above, takes its best expression in the proposition of Gilbert’s title: namely, that Žižek asks all the right questions but comes up with all the wrong answers). However, no one else in the book purported to operate under Critchley’s title. It was Critchley’s own. Everyone else had different titles. Yet what Žižek picks up and runs with throughout his entire response to the book is the sentiment announced in Critchley’s title. Hence Žižek’s own title, ‘With defenders like these, who needs attackers?’ Hence also the problem residing here: no one except Critchley even suggested that they were bent on defending Žižek. Yet, Žižek proceeds as if this were everyone’s brief. Hence, Žižek’s contribution keeps returning to and playing with this presupposition, as if his critics were failing in their stated mission of defending him. For instance:
Gilbert ‘defends’ me by way of raising against me two main reproaches: my books ‘display a level of scholarship which would be considered pitiable in the work of an undergraduate student’; and, I am ‘a writer whose main stock-in-trade is demonstrably ill-informed and frequently inaccurate diatribes against the legacies of the New Lefts’. (Žižek 2007: 216–17)
It may be needless to say by now that these reproaches were not actually Gilbert’s defences of Žižek at all. There were some points on which Gilbert sought to defend Žižek. But these are quite different to the ones Žižek refers to here.
In following the structure that they so regularly do, Žižek’s arguments could be said to be rather like jokes. Indeed, maybe this is another reason why people enjoy Žižek so much. For, rather than being as concerned as the likes of myself, Jeremy Gilbert or Alan Johnson with the characteristics that Žižek imputes to such matters as ‘cultural studies’, ‘politics’, ‘revolution’ and so on, presumably some readers may be more casual (disinterested?) and may simply enjoy or laugh along with Žižek’s ridiculing of such huge social problems as naïve ‘liberal tolerant multiculturalists’, wishy-washy ‘postmodernist deconstructionists’, hapless ‘cognitivists and positivists’, the credulous ‘new social movements’, spoilt-brat consumerist feminists, narcissistic gays and blacks or indeed any of the bugbears Žižek so frequently singles out for scorn – bugbears, it deserves to be noted, that are typically the bugbears of choice of reactionary right wing and conservative thought, rather than those of any left other than the most tyrannical. So surely some people simply laugh. And surely Žižek’s lampooning of things like minority groups and positions may inevitably come as a breath of fresh air, or release a certain pressure, built up inside leftist readers, caused by their always having to maintain a serious and sober respect for so many ‘worthy’ things so much of the time. . . Presumably also there will be some readers who hold some version of the platitude ‘it’s funny ’cos it’s true’. While there will be others who believe that Žižek is simply telling it like it is.
Before we get to the question of taking Žižek seriously, perhaps we need to ask the question: if we’re laughing along or nodding along with something, what does this signify or portend? In Freud’s theory, ‘getting’ a joke is evidence of what Freud calls a ‘far reaching psychic conformity’. In other words, if we laugh at the racist joke, it is because we are racist, or at least have been made to become so momentarily insofar as we become involved in the setting up and elaboration of the joke. For, in Freud’s characterization of ‘tendentious jokes’ – namely, sexist, racist or otherwise hostile and aggressive jokes – the listener is recruited (interpellated) as a co-conspirator in the fantasy belittlement or victory over the object of the joke – an object that Freud argues is actually an object of desire, resentment, fear or preoccupation (Freud 1976).
In other words, any enjoyment of the ‘tendentious’ joke derives from a normally unspoken desire to ‘get’ something that we can’t otherwise ‘have’. Hence, blondes are rendered stupid and thereby beaten symbolically because they cannot be ‘had’ in reality, blacks are punished symbolically because they won’t go away and so on. Any laughter that bursts out from us signals the release of our pent-up ‘inhibitions’ (to use Freud’s word). These ‘inhibitions’ arise within us (if they are going to arise at all) as soon as someone leans closer to you and says ‘Did you hear the one about the blonde who went to see the ventriloquist’s show?’, or suchlike. On hearing this, if the listener has indeed been successfully interpellated or recruited to the drama, certain ‘inhibitions’ and an accompanying sense of excitement, anticipation, nervousness and even appetite all arise – because we recognize that this is going to be a bit ‘naughty’, a little bit ‘taboo’ – and we become primed, like a coiled spring, to release all of this in a burst of laughter. As Adorno and Horkheimer famously put it: laugher always occurs when some fear passes. There are lots of reasons why fear arises in the build up of jokes: jokes are conspiratorial, disrespectful, naughty. We are fearful in the face of talk about blondes or blacks because we worry that we might be reprimanded or, more fundamentally, that our enjoyment of socially unacceptable desires and wishes may become the target of reprimand. So, the punch-line comes both as a release and a relief.
What, then, are we signing up to when we laugh along, or smile, or nod, with Žižek’s ‘insights’ into the ‘truth’ of this or that aspect of, say, ‘tolerant liberal multiculturalism’, when this topic or group is rendered by Žižek as a symptom of some kind of evil ideology? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps puncturing the perceived prohibitions of ‘political correctness’ by pointing out that exponents of political correctness themselves are not free from the contaminations of their own prejudices (tolerance cannot tolerate intolerance, for instance); and perhaps pointing out the ‘ideological’ uses and dimensions of the ostensibly worthy world of ‘political correctness’ (its use in the macropolitical repression of ‘true’ otherness, for example; as when the norms of ‘tolerant’ societies are used to criminalize the norms and practices of ‘intolerant’ cultures and societies); perhaps enjoying this and other sorts of Žižekian ‘ideology critique’ will not necessarily make one into an opponent of political correctness as such. Surely, we can all laugh at ourselves from time to time, and this does not mean that we are somehow opposed to or hostile to ourselves or our own activities through and through. So perhaps enjoying Žižek’s critique of the left, the liberal, the postmodern, the tolerant, the multicultural and the like does not mean that we are opposed to any of these things. But, is Žižek?
To echo Johnson, the short answer would seem to be yes. There does seem to be a plethora of evidence within Žižek’s texts to demonstrate this – especially in the form of quips, jokes, anecdotes, diagnoses (as ‘ideological’) and so on; even if there is also evidence of Žižek occasionally dropping the smile and offering straight-faced reassurances to the effect of, ‘obviously, folks, I am not against these others that I may seem to have spent so much time apparently attacking here’ – in a manner reminiscent of the two white students in the Hollywood comedy Soul Man who have a habit of exchanging racist jokes in earshot of blacks before quickly turning to them and saying ‘Hey! Joke! No offence! Right?’
The asymptotic sinthome of ideology
Alan Johnson follows one strand in Žižek’s thinking: his theory of revolution, as it has developed since it was first explicitly announced over a decade ago. Johnson reads Žižek’s statements about political revolution in such a way as to argue that what Žižek is championing is ethically and politically aligned with totalitarianism. What I am adding here is that, given this, the fact that a certain readership regards Žižek as ‘one of us’ suggests that Žižek’s readers are, in effect, not reading Žižek. The fact that what Johnson represents as the scandal of Žižek’s politics has not been received as a scandal by his primary readership is the problem that animates Johnson’s work.
The existence or dominance of such a non-reading is scandalous to Johnson because Žižek remains so widely ‘read’ in academic and intellectual circles by people who are overwhelmingly avowedly democratic, left-leaning, liberal, progressive, tolerant and theoretically informed. For, Žižek is widely read by cultural critics, researchers, scholars and students of film, culture, society, race, gender, class, ethnicity, subjectivity and so on – by academics working within the traditions of leftist cultural, political and identity studies. Yet, Žižek makes no bones of his contempt for this leftist position – what he often denounces as a pathetic and contemptible ‘resigned and cynical’ liberal tolerant deconstructionist, multiculturalist stance. Indeed, Žižek often openly pours scorn on actually-existing struggles and movements of the democratic left, and particularly on the entire formation and orientation of cultural and political thinking and theory associated with it. So, just as Johnson elaborates the extent to which, for over a decade now, Žižek has openly embraced an anti-democratic position of hard authoritarian voluntarism, one could easily construct an even longer list of his denunciations of everything associated with progressive left theory and politics. And yet many associated with precisely such a left seem to love him. His lecture tours sell out. His books go like hot cakes – bought by the very people who one would expect to be repelled by his declarations and denunciations. Us. Why does this happen?
In forensic mode, Johnson deftly lays bare the key coordinates of Žižek’s politics. Stripping away the many digressions, anecdotes, ‘jokes’, asides and scattershot diagnoses, declarations and denunciations that constitute the core of Žižek’s texts (and which surely help fuel his popularity), Johnson reveals the structure of Žižek’s politics: it is ‘wild Blanquism’, he argues, and it is totalitarian. It is, in other words, contrary to the overwhelming impetus and orientation of contemporary cultural, political, humanistic and social thinking in general and of cultural studies in particular.
I have already gestured to the peculiarity of the ongoing situation in which on the one hand you have the massive popularity of Žižek within cultural studies while on the other hand you have Žižek’s manifest and enduring contempt for cultural studies (Bowman 2006). Another peculiar feature of this situation is that, alongside the fact that Žižek almost invariably singles out cultural studies for the strongest criticism in the opening pages and paragraphs of his books and articles (and that these books and articles are consumed by people working in and around cultural studies), there is a contrary movement in which Žižek frequently writes endorsements for the back of books claiming, time and again, that ‘finally’ we have a book which ‘redeems cultural studies’. But the question remains one of why Žižek remains so frequently read in the disciplinary field he holds in such contempt.
Žižek vis-à-vis cultural studies is equivalent – perhaps even structurally identical – to the situation Johnson lays out regarding Žižek vis-à-vis political theory. His method is to start from a misreading, to move into a caricature, to construct an all-or-nothing binary and then to slay the chimerical straw bogeyman he has invented. And yet he remains read. My speculation is that this is because Žižek deals with all the ‘big’ subjects in a lively and fast-paced manner. Everything from the Holocaust to cybertechnology to politics to the most arcane aspects of theology and continental philosophy are engaged by Žižek, and often by way of contemporary popular cultural and often filmic examples. So, to a readership used to much more measured and meticulous scholarship, this is quite exhilarating. As such, Žižek’s actual animosity to cultural studies or democratic politics either becomes secondary to the liveliness of his texts or becomes something that can be forgiven because he offers so much more besides.
In other words, the fundamental consistencies which subtend Žižek’s work are either overlooked or forgiven because of the assortment of stimulating examples and vignettes he produces. But surely the fundamental orientation, or the overwhelming tendency of someone’s discourse, matters. Surely, it makes a difference – that is, if anything about academic reading and writing makes any difference. Surely, at least, such forgiveness or forgetting, on the part of the generous reader, amounts to a species of misreading, non-reading, or under-reading. Holding such a view is what moves Johnson to elaborate Žižek’s frequently reiterated contentions about political action: because surely it matters that this stuff is passing into academic and intellectual circulation without being clearly marked as what it is: problematically voluntarist, violent, anti-democratic and totalitarian.
In offering us this reading, I think that Johnson adds weight to a growing response to Žižek, of which I like to think The Truth of Žižek was an important early instalment. There are now numerous types of increasingly critical response to Žižek. Some of these include the following. First, that Žižek can be shown to be predominantly concerned with the ongoing ‘multicultural’ transformation of the sociopolitical world. As a white male academic, it seems to be primarily the deconstruction of this traditional seat of power that bothers him – hence his spleen against LGB, non-white, non-traditional intellectuals (see Leigh Claire la Berge’s contribution). Another is that Žižek’s political position is unable to distinguish or disentangle itself from one which may justify terrorism. Another, as we have seen, is that despite the fact that Žižek asks ‘all the right questions’, the problem is that he invariably comes up with ‘all the wrong answers’. This is because, as Johnson similarly observes (as have others, including Critchley, Laclau and Chow), Žižek reads sociopolitical reality as if a ‘body politic’ simply exists, and as if psychoanalytic insights into (or dogmas about) subjectivity and behaviour can be directly mapped onto the macropolitical world. It is certainly the case that Žižek anthropomorphizes and Lacanianizes everything, including processes without a subject. But even though he does this, it is not the case that he interprets the world through a consistent psychoanalytic paradigm. Rather, Žižek uses inconsistent, mutually incoherent and incompatible terms and concepts, which do not map smoothly or consistently and produce clear and compelling insights in the way he tries to persuade us they do. Specifically, for instance, Žižek piles Lacan on top of Marx who he puts on top of Hegel, as if these all click together smoothly and with no remainder or contradictions in order to produce an analytical machine that produces truth-insights that the righteous cultural critic can point out in order to speak truth to power. Moreover, in seeing his task as speaking truth to power Žižek arguably identifies too closely with the power that is his object and perhaps seeks to occupy, become or possess, himself. Whether or not this is literally true, it certainly seems to be the case that, with his investments in the primacy of the Lacanian Real, Žižek stakes a claim to a register of truth that he believes trumps all others: the chaotic Real.
It certainly seems to be the consistencies in Žižek which cause so much difficulty. Readers who try to find consistencies in Žižek, whether by way of identifying the tendencies, reiterations and repetitions that populate Žižek’s otherwise ramshackle works, or by attempting to follow the letter of Žižek’s argumentative constructions and scenarios (see Valentine 2007, for an excellent example), either ‘reveal’ a Žižekian position that is so simple as to appear caricatural, or to tie themselves up in knots. I place my own work and Johnson’s work in the former category. And I know that this leaves me – if not Johnson – wide open to the accusation of another type of misreading.
Žižek himself has long forwarded the idea that the very idea that there should be consistency is a kind of structuring fantasy, or Lacanian sinthome. So, given this, to accuse Žižek of inconsistency might be no real criticism. Conversely, perhaps identifying consistencies may amount to a real problem. It is certainly the case that readings which attempt to establish a consistent or coherent reading of Žižek encounter problems. But not attempting to do this – even if any attempt to read Žižek for coherence or consistency always ends up proving to be wide open to the accusation that it is not a complete, coherent or consistent reading, but rather something that can at best be asymptotic to a reading of Žižek – may be a much more serious issue.
1 Initial reactions on the blogosphere in 2007–8 suggested that people had not only read Žižek’s Afterword first, but that their readings of the book had stopped there. At the time of writing this draft of this present paper (19th May 2011), I have again become embroiled, all over again, in a strangely familiar and entirely predictable (symptomatic?) argument with members of a facebook group called Žižek Studies, who argue that they are ‘with Žižek’ and against the rest of the contributors to The Truth of Žižek because not only do the contributors attack Žižek on a ‘personal’ level, but these contributors are also ‘fetishists’. I have tried to point out the irony/self-contradiction of their replaying of the accusation they make, and also that therefore they must be against Žižek because in his Afterword Žižek himself rejects any and all ‘characteriological’ analysis. But to no avail, it seems.
2 I am making so much use of ‘my own’ book not in order to boost sales – the entire book is now online for free – but because it is something of a one-stop-shop to find a range of key criticisms of Žižek and to see Žižek’s response to them.
3 I have answered this question at length on a few occasions (Bowman 2006, 2007, 2008). As does Jeremy Gilbert in the essay we are discussing here (Gilbert 2007).
References
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