Living in the End Times

barbara — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Reading Slavoj Žižek for the first time is not unlike being stuck on a bar stool next to a slightly inebriated, repentant MBA who just read a Karl Marx biography and thinks he has the world figured out. An aside about the deeper meaning of 3:10 to Yuma, a diatribe against Slovenia’s failure as a communist state, and praise of the five stages of grief seem like disconnected nonsense unless taken as a larger, comprehensive analysis of the failure of global capitalism. After a while, you’re either also drunk or so bewildered by the onslaught of information that you begin to see the reason behind this grizzled young man’s ramblings. Now just imagine that this is one of the most gifted living intellectuals.

Žižek—one of the world’s leading contemporary academic thinkers—is at once obscure and brilliant. In Living in the End Times, he pulls together themes from several smaller works and dozens of speeches and papers from the past several years to illuminate the apocalyptic zero-point for which the world is headed. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are approaching—ecological crisis, explosive social divisions and exclusions, consequences of the biogenetic revolution, and systemic imbalances (struggles over raw materials, food, and water; as well as more abstract battles over issues like intellectual property)—and our textbook-diagnosed reactions show that the end is nigh.

Using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ model, he categorizes our reactions to modern economic, social, and ecological crises as stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While many believe Kübler-Ross’ framework to be somewhat flawed, it does provide a handy way of determining one’s own stage of grieving the collapse of society. How else to make sense of our apathy in the face of the simultaneous rise of extreme religious fundamentalism, crumbling banking systems, and expansive, violent political repression? What other way to explain away the near-psychotic binaries in wealth and poverty in places like Kuwait and Dubai, oil-dependent towering desert empires built by thousands of slave-wage immigrants and ruled by a frighteningly wealthy upper class—and the ways with which we turn the other cheek?

If you believe the state of the global economy, social hierarchy, and legal affairs to be as dramatically desperate as Žižek, you’ll not be surprised that he beckons us to prepare for famine, plague, global warfare, and ultimate death. If you have little faith in humanity, you’ll find good company in the bright if troubled theorist. If you believe in our eventual recovery, you’ll also find nuggets of helpful wisdom between his dismal predictions.

You may not be able to keep up the apocalyptic philosopher, but you’d be better off for trying.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 23rd 2010

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:07:00 +0000

By Slavoj Žižek

Verso

Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek’s latest work—a call to the Left to reinvent itself in a time of international crisis—begins with a nod to Marx’s correction of Hegel in The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Indeed, when you examine the two speeches that bookend former President Bush’s term in office—the one in the aftermath of 9/11, and the one in which he addressed the global financial meltdown—you begin to notice that the first (the tragedy) sounds remarkably similar to the second (the farce).

Many people have known for years that the global banking system was on the verge of collapse. For more than a decade, police have been summoned to disperse protests around the world in which activists have called for more transparency and accountability. Last year, Naomi Klein wrote about the relationship between ideology and economics—the fact that there is no such thing as a neutral market—in The Shock Doctrine.

When the markets finally did crumble, instead of compulsively tossing billions of dollars at a problem, we would do well to reflect on how it came to be. In First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Žižek is highly critical of the Right’s shortsighted call to “Save Main Street, not Wall Street!” which fails to recognize that most obvious capitalistic principles: in a capitalist society, Main Street cannot exist without Wall Street. Period.

Žižek explores the idea that the Left should stop apologizing in the face of the Right’s moralistic blackmail. Instead of focusing on supposedly dismal or inappropriate cultural shifts, the Right should be held fully accountable for the devastating economic recession. In general, meltdowns—of economic, cultural, or nationalistic stability—should awaken us instead of being bandaged over to allow the dream to continue. That is, 9/11, much like the banking crisis, should have served as an ideological wake-up call. Asserting additional military force in the Middle East or bailing out failing banks and corporations like General Motors with taxpayer money does nothing but continue a cycle of confusing ignorance for the general public. It promotes a type of populist conservatism in which middle class people literally vote against their own self interest.

Of the many admirable qualities in his work, what I like best about Žižek is his ability to masterfully dissect U.S. policy. One might argue that Slovenia’s problems deserve such a critical eye, but I appreciate that Žižek so eloquently dismantles problematic American foreign policy and class war disguised as culture war from an outsider’s perspective. A European Chomsky of sorts, Žižek’s theory is a must-read for any scholar or layperson interested in twenty-first century capitalism, economics, and contemporary Leftist thought.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, November 3rd 2009