"Zizek is not a Radical?"

Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey

In the world of radical theory, Slavoj Zizek has
attained the status of intellectual superstar. Terry
Eagleton claims Zizek "provides the best intellectual
high since Anti-Oedipus", and with good reason. (1)
Zizek's work is passionate, exciting, funny,
frustrating, all-consuming, interdisciplinary and
paradigm-shaking. Further, he endorses immediately
"political" positions and claims that seem
uncompromisingly "radical" when compared to rivals
such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Judith
Butler. He relentlessly unmasks those he sees as
closet liberals in his enduring war on the terrorism
of political moderation, from "radical democracy" to
multiculturalism, denouncing all attempts to improve
liberal capitalism from within its own horizon. (2)

Moreover, Zizek's radicalism seems refreshingly
original and relevant whilst daring to confront the
existing socio-symbolic system. But is this
appearance of a radical break with a flawed present
sustainable?What we want to suggest in this paper is that whilst
Zizek's recent work is intellectually "radical" this
is not, despite appearances to the contrary, a
radicalism that left politics can draw sustenance or
hope from. Zizek, that is, does not offer an
alternative that is genuinely progressive or
transformative, but only the empty negativity of what
Raoul Vaneigem terms "active nihilism". (3) This
negativity "breaks" with the present but undermines,
rather than generates a meaningful politics of
resistance to the system. What Zizek delivers falls
short of its promise. Zizek's position should
therefore be exposed and opposed by those concerned
with advancing left-radical goals and anti-capitalist
resistance.

A Radical Terror?

Zizek's popularity
results largely from the apparent way out that he
provides from the cul-desac in which radical theory,
and in particular radical postmodern theory, has found
itself. Zizek is of course not the first author to
attack "postmodernists", post-structuralists and
post-Marxists on grounds of their lack of radical
ambition on the terrain of politics. To take a couple
of examples from amongst the many, Sharon Smith
asserts that "[t]he politics of identity do not offer
a way forward for those genuinely interested in
transforming society. ... The emphasis on lifestyle
... is the guarantee that such movements will remain
middle class". (4) Murray Bookchin similarly argues that
subjectivist claims about "the 'impossibility' of
formulating an 'objective criterion' of rationality or
good are 'an indulgence we can ill afford' -- the
'condition of the world is far too desperate'." (5)

These
critiques, however, are rooted in an "old" left prone
to essentialism, unfounded "objective" claims and
simplifying vulgarisations -- precisely the reasons for
the popularity of "postmodern" approaches. Objections
to spurious claims about an "objective" answer to the
present problems, to class and other reductionisms
which risk perpetuating voicelessness, and to
dogmatism and theoretical rigidity are often
well-founded,even if those who make such criticisms
appear disturbingly "liberal" in their orientations.
Thus, left activists genuinely interested in
confronting the liberal capitalist status quo find
themselves trapped between politically radical but
theoretically flawed leftist orthodoxies and
theoretically innovative but politically moderate
"post"-theories.

Enter Zizek.

Zizek
offers an alternative to traditional left radicalisms
and "postmodern" anti-essentialist approaches,
especially identity politics. For Zizek, "radical
democracy" accepts the liberal-capitalist horizon, and
so is never "radical" enough. (6) Against this alleged
pseudo-radicalism, Zizek revives traditional leftist
concepts such as "class struggle". (7) However, he
ignores the "orthodox" left meaning of such terms,
rearticulating them in a sophisticated Hegelian and
Lacanian vocabulary. His dramatic impact on radical
theory is therefore unsurprising. To take one example,
Sean Homer's praise for Zizek is based on this
supposed reinvigoration of radicalism and Marxism. (8)
Though Homer is sceptical about Zizek's "Lacanianism",
he declares that "Marxism ... has always been much
more to the fore of Zizek's work than many of his
commentators have cared to acknowledge". (9) Zizek, he
claims, is reopening the repressed issue of the
Marxian and Althusserian legacy, and calling for
"[u]topian imaginaries which allow us to think beyond
the limits of capitalism". (10) For Homer's Zizek "the
point is to be anti-capitalist, whatever form that
might take". (11) And though he attacks "the problem" of
Zizek's Lacanian categories, especially the Real,
Homer clearly sees Zizek's work as a step towards the
revitalised Marxist radicalism he advocates. (12)

Problems remain, however. Zizek's version of "class
struggle" does not map on to traditional conceptions
of an empirical working-class, and Zizek's
"proletariat" is avowedly "mythical". (13) He also
rejects newer forms of struggle such as the
anti-capitalist movement and the 1968 uprisings
thereby reproducing a problem common in radical
theory: his theory has no link to radical politics in
an immediate sense. (14)

Nevertheless, he has a theory
of how such a politics should look which he uses to
judge existing political radicalisms. So how does
Zizek see radical politics emerging? Zizek does not
offer much by way of a positive social agenda. He
does not have anything approximating to a "programme",
nor a model of the kind of society he seeks, nor a
theory of the construction of alternatives in the
present. Indeed, the more one looks at the matter,
the more difficult it becomes to pin Zizek down to any
"line" or "position". He seems at first sight to
regard social transformation, not as something
"possible" to be theorised and advanced, but as a
fundamental "impossibility" because the influence of
the dominant symbolic system is so great that it makes
alternatives unthinkable. (15) A fundamental
transformation, however, is clearly the only answer to
the vision of contemporary crisis Zizek offers. Can
he escape this contradiction?

His attempt to do so
revolves around a reclassification of "impossibility"
as an active element in generating action. Asserting
or pursuing the impossible becomes in Zizek's account
not only possible but desirable. So how then can the
left advance its "impossible" politics? How is a now
"impossible" model of class struggle be transformed
into a politics relevant to the present period? As
becomes evident "class struggle" is not for Zizek an
empirical referent and even less a category of
Marxisant sociological analysis, but a synonym for the
Lacanian Real. A progressive endorsement of "class
struggle" means positing the lack of a common horizon
and assuming or asserting the insolubility of
political conflict. (16) It therefore involves a
glorification of conflict, antagonism, terror and a
militaristic logic of carving the field into good and
bad sides, as a good in itself. (17) Zizek celebrates
war because it "undermines the complacency of our
daily routine" by introducing "meaningless sacrifice
and destruction". (18) He fears being trapped by a
suffocating social peace or Good and so calls on
people to take a "militant, divisive position" of
"assertion of the Truth that enthuses them". (19) The
content of this Truth is a secondary issue.

For
Zizek, Truth has nothing to do with truth-claims and
the field of "knowledge". Truth is an event which
"just happens", in which "the thing itself" is
"disclosed to us as what it is". (20) Truth is therefore
the exaggeration which distorts any balanced system. (21)
A "truth-effect" occurs whenever a work produces a
strong emotional reaction, and it need not be
identified with empirical accuracy: lies and
distortions can have a truth-effect, and factual truth
can cover the disavowal of desire and the Real. (22)

In
this sense, therefore, Lenin and de Gaulle, St Paul
and Lacan are all carriers of the truth and therefore
are progressive, "radical" figures, despite the
incompatibility of their doctrines. Such individuals
(and it is always individuals) violently carve the
field and produce a truth-effect. That de Gaulle and
the Church are political rightists is of no importance
to Zizek, since he redefines "right" and "left" to
avoid such problems. He also writes off the human
suffering caused by carving the field as justified or
even beneficial: it has a "transcendental genesis" in
the subject, and its victims endure it because they
obtain jouissance from it. (23) The structural
occurrence of a truth-event is what matters to him --
not what kind of world results from it. This is a
secondary issue -- and anyway one that he thinks is
impossible to discuss, since the logic of liberal
capitalism is so total that it makes alternatives
unthinkable. (24) One should keep the utopian
possibility of alternatives open, but it should remain
empty, awaiting a content. (25) How can one overcome
capitalism without imagining an alternative? Zizek's
answer relies on his extension of Lacanian clinical
principles into social analysis. For Zizek, every
social system contains a Symbolic (social
institutions, law, etc.), an Imaginary (the
ideologies, fantasies and "pseudo-concrete images"
which sustain this system), and a Real, a group which
is "extimate" to (intimately present in, but
necessarily external to) the system, a "part of no
part" which must be repressed or disavowed for the
system to function. Zizek identifies this group with
the symptom in psychoanalysis, terming it the "social
symptom". Just as a patient in psychoanalysis should
identify with his or her symptom to cure neuroses, so
political radicals should identify with the social
symptom to achieve radical change. This involves a
"statement of solidarity" which takes the form "We are
all them", the excluded non-part -- for instance, "we
are all Sarajevans" or "we are all illegal
immigrants". (26) By identifying with the symptom, one
becomes for Zizek a "proletarian", and therefore
"touched by Grace". (27) Thus even academics like Zizek
can perform an authentic Act while retaining their
accustomed lifestyles simply by identifying with
anathemas thrown at them by others. (28) Since the
social symptom is the embodiment of the "inherent
impossibility" of society, identification with it
allows one, paradoxically, to recover a radical
politics which is rendered unthinkable and impossible
by the present socio-symbolic system. (29) Identification
with the symptom is not an external act of solidarity.

Zizek does not accept a division between individual
and social psychology, so he believes identifying with
the social symptom also disrupts one's own
psychological structure. This identification involves
neither the self-emancipation of this group nor a
struggle in support of its specific demands, but
rather, a personal act from the standpoint of this
group, which substitutes for it and even goes against
its particular demands in pursuit of its ascribed
Truth. (30) Thus Zizek mercilessly rejects the present
state of the world. On the one hand, he is very aware
of problems of great significance for the left: the
privatisation of everything from telecommunications to
genes, the invisible exploitation of workers in
sweatshops, the growing ecological crisis, and the
weight of the forces lined up to make these attacks,
and the crisis they generate, seem "normal". (31) And
yet on the other, he launches conservative attacks on
liberalism and reflexivity, (32) bemoaning the lack of a
Master, (33) denouncing campaigns against sexual
violence, (34) railing against "permissiveness" and
"decadence" and calling for a conformist "normal
mature subject" prepared to submit to authority on
trust and to identify authentically with social
roles. (35)

Though it is not clear that the changes he
demands are unproblematically progressive, he clearly
wants a comprehensive transformation. Indeed, he
dismisses others? concerns for human rights,
moderation and toleration as "humanist hysterical
shirking of the act" and announces that he doesn't
care if "bleeding-heart liberals" accuse him of
"linksfaschismus". (36) Zizek's theory thus sacrifices
everything to a core orientation. Yet the question
remains, how can he reconcile such a stance with the
impossibility of imagining a radical alternative?

[A longer, whole article may be downloaded from here.]