Žižek’s remarks on the Roma

Speaking of Žižek, I ran across this (now rather old) post by Lenin’s Tomb about some remarks by Žižek on the Roma. HERE.

LT’s post in response is powerful, and yes, I’m also leery of going anywhere near justifying maltreatment of the Roma, an extremely vulnerable group with a very unlucky track record at the hands of Hitler and many others (including even the French rail company SNCF more recently).

However, some (though not Lenin’s Tomb) have suggested that Žižek is simply trying to be a contrarian. I don’t think so at all. I think there’s a fairly sturdy common thread running through all his most controversial political statements (both this one and some of his more controversial statements at the leftmost end of the spectrum), and that is his hatred of “the beautiful soul.” What Žižek despises more than anything else (and this is to his credit) is the assumption of cost-free moral superiority, even when it comes from the Left. He is deeply attracted to those who are willing to pay the price for their views, and that’s why we find him praising Stalin’s forced collectivization and, in the remarks now at hand, apparently praising locals who “fear” the Roma over distant city dwellers making bourgeois multicultural remarks for the Roma against the locals, and so forth.

I also detect some of this in Žižek’s recent expression of boredom with anti-Americanism, which has in fact become a sort of robotic calling card among with-it intellectuals, and is the very reason that I can only take small doses of Chomsky. (In most world intellectual circles, you’ll never go wrong by telling everyone how stupid America is, especially if you’re American yourself. It’s a completely risk-free exercise, at least when you’re in those particular circles.)

In some of these cases, I would agree that Žižek goes way too far. But to say that he’s simply being contrarian in order to shock, or that his overt expression of Marxism is some sort of cover-up of his own politically suspect bourgeois liberal nationalist background (as one of the commenters at Lenin’s Tomb suggests) misses the really serious core of Žižek’s politics, which is its anti-beautifulsoulism. I hate the defense of Stalin and shudder at any opening of inquests against the Roma, but what I do always respect about Žižek’s remarks on politics is that they’re never actually clownish at all. He’s not trying to outmaneuver anyone on the moral superiority scale, but always adopting a stance while being willing to pay a price for it– a price exacted in this case by the understandably negative remarks of Lenin’s Tomb, and by other critics of his position.