review of Žižek in The New Statesman

Jacques Derrida died in October 2004. Fairly rapidly thereafter, you could sense Žižek becoming the reigning star of continental philosophy among living authors. It might feel like that has always been his status, but I remember quite clearly the 1990’s, when Žižek was more an emerging special interest author than the center of attention. Even after Badiou begin to eat up more radar space, Žižek still remained the higher-profile star.

Lately I’ve been sensing a backlash again him. See the review in The New Statesman, HERE. Both the title and subtitle of the article are rather harsh: “Pseud’s corner: The star philosopher Slavoj Zizek commits intellectual suicide in his latest film.”

Two things:

1. I haven’t seen the film, but I find it hard to believe that he “commits intellectual suicide” in it. Here’s the evidence given in the review: “As the film progresses, however, Zizek does more than symbolically enact his own death; he commits intellectual suicide, all but admitting that his ‘philosophy’ is a slew of nonsense.”

Now, let’s imagine that in the film, Žižek were to state bluntly: “my ‘philosophy’ is really just a slew of nonsense.” In what sense would that constitute an “admission”? Obviously, you don’t judge someone’s level of sincerity by one self-deprecating or clowning remark. You do it by reading their books carefully and reflecting on what they have to say.

Here’s another piece of supposed evidence: “What does Slavoj Zizek believe? What does he argue for? Such obvious questions are considered vulgar among postmodernists. When you first look through the more than 50 books he has written, it is almost impossible to find an answer. It seems he seeks to splice Karl Marx with the notoriously incomprehensible French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, slathering on top an infinite number of pop-cultural references.”

But it’s not at all impossible to find an answer from reading his books. Read a few of those books and you’ll have a rather clear picture of what Žižek thinks. There is nothing a priori invalid about mixing Marx, Lacan, and pop culture references.

Nor is there anything a priori nonsensical about the “contempt for liberal democracy and preference for dictatorship” that the author finds in Žižek’s books. I happen not to be on board with Žižek’s politics, but that doesn’t make them “nonsensical.” Quite the contrary, I find him well worth taking seriously about this issue among others.

2. As for the title “Pseud’s Corner.” That’s simply unfair. Žižek is not a pseudo-intellectual. He has vices just like any of us. He undercuts his own serious arguments with sometimes grotesque dirty jokes, then complains that people should think of him as an ontologist rather than a pop culture joker. His books are often too repetitive. He is sometimes too reliant on secondary sources when dealing with figures from the history of philosophy. He treats quantum physics as though all interpreters of it univocally agree on his Hegelian-Lacanian interpretation of it. He treats realism as though it were merely a vulgar and naive reflex, never arguing against it clearly. Sometimes his recent books are a lot longer than they need to be. And so forth.

However, we can find vices in any author, and this does not make them “pseudo-intellectuals.” I agree with virtually none of Žižek’s politics or ontology, but I don’t see how you can read his books and not find him to be an intensely serious, well-read, and highly cultured person of immense intellectual gifts, one we are lucky to have in our midst. Enjoy him while you have him. We’re not going to have a philosopher this provocatively entertaining for centuries to come. (Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600, was probably the last.)

But most of all, the gift that Žižek has given us is the sense that it’s time to take clear, blunt positions on issues, after a two-decade interlude in which prose was always supposed to meander and hedge its bets and regard puns as if they were philosophical arguments. That was the 1980’s and much of the 1990’s, and Žižek was one of those who dealt that style a death-blow.

And one more thing. Any review that calls Žižek a “postmodernist” doesn’t start off on a very convincing foot.