We Must Burn Zizek

As a pundit and public speaker, Zizek has always helped himself liberally to the alibis of stand-up comedy: it's generally understood that there's a half-feigned, hyperbolic, obscenely demonstrative dimension to his performances in these roles, and that the dividing line between the responsible and the playful (and not necessarily innocently playful) is constantly being crossed back and forth in them. There is even a rationale for this kind of instability to be found in Zizek's more ostensibly serious writings, such that it's possible to imagine that he's executing some kind of deliberate strategy in carrying on in the slightly unhinged manner with which his audiences are familiar. But it would be a mistake, I think, to suppose that he always knows exactly what he is doing; and again, his numerous glosses on Lacan supply their own account of the nature of this mistake and of the reasons why people tend to make it.

For all his professed weariness with being described as a "wild man" or "clown", Zizek is no more a fundamentally serious thinker hiding behind a mask of foolery than he is fundamentally an imbecile who just happens to have insinuated his incoherent babble into a philosophical idiom. Profanation, impurification, are the essence of his modus operandi; and this is not only a question of being "contrarian" or seeking to shock. There is in Zizek something like a drive, a compulsion, to sow confusion, to mingle the pure with the impure, and I would imagine that the reaction of an audience is at most a secondary motivation in this. The same drive is responsible for both the most exciting and the most disappointing moments in his writing: it's what makes him worth bothering with, when he is, and pathetically abject and contemptible when he isn't.

All of the above aside, there are responsibilities which any public thinker ought to honour unconditionally; and calling a pogrom by its name is one of them. Emmanuel Levinas is still held to account, decades after the fact, for failing to do justice to the Sabra and Shatila massacres in his reaction to a question about the meaning of "ethics" in the context of naked politicidal aggression. That failure is still taken as significant, as a sign that something was wrong with the way Levinas thought about the human world and what was important in it. In the same way, for Levinas and many others, Heidegger's evasions regarding the holocaust, his passing reference to the extermination as a kind of metaphysical aberration, demonstrated that his philosophical thinking was unable to separate itself from the disastrous and shameful affiliation with Nazism into which he had allowed it to be drawn.

Such "lapses" into evasion and apologetics should never be overlooked, not because they represent a lack of politeness, a stain on the purity of political correctness, but because they demonstrate a deep complicity between the arrogance of philosophy, the self-sufficiency of its conceptual means, and the brutal reality of political disasters. The philosophical imaginary has suffered a catastrophic failure, a failure of imagination, and allowed itself to be dominated by the racist imaginary which fills out its lack. Ideology speaks in philosophy's voice, lending it authority, reconnecting it to the world of "common sense" from which it had become detached. The philosopher's "plain speaking", imbued with all the prestige of his elevated idiom, is not a turn towards worldly reality but a submission to worldly power. After all is said and done - after the philosophical vocabulary has exhausted itself, and the time to attend to "pressing matters" has finally arrived - the interests of the mighty prevail.

For Zizek, a pogrom against a Roma camp in Slovenia is an occasion for reflection on the limitations of "liberal multiculturalism", which is unable to account for the real problems people with different ethnic affiliations may have in living alongside each other. The argument Zizek wants to make is that such problems require a political solution: something more concrete than the detached tolerance with which wealthy liberals regard the existence of people different from themselves for as long as they remain unthreatened by such differences. In order to make the story work, Zizek has to highlight the "problem" presented to their Slovenian neighbours by the Roma in their camp. The liberal multiculturalists do not want to know about this problem, and offer no political means with which to address it; violence breaks out, and is immediately condemned as an expression of the benighted intolerance of an illiberal (because insufficiently educated and enlightened) working class.

It's a neat story, a pithy illustration of the impotence and hypocrisy of well-meaning elites: Zizek gets to make his point and move on. But it's also a completely bogus fairytale, in which none of the protagonists - and still less the victims - is imagined or contextualised in a way that would make them or their motivations real. Violence breaks out: why? A pogrom is already a "political" solution, the politics of which is fascism: to see the "problem" and the "solution" in a way that motivates racial violence (having posited it as inevitable, not to mention desirable and cleansing) is to see both through the lens of racism.

Zizek has often made use of Lacan's scandalous argument that a man who is obsessed with the thought of his wife's infidelity is suffering from a paranoid neurosis even if his wife is in fact cheating on him: he has turned the problem of her actual infidelity into "the whole problem" of his psychic life, and is likely to seek a drastically disproportionate "solution". By analogy, racial scapegoating and exterminationist violence occur when "the whole problem" of one social group, all of the precarity and insecurity with which it is afflicted, is projected onto another (the proximity of which may well be troublesome in some respects). Why then did Zizek accept at face value the claim that the unresolved tensions between the Roma and their neighbours were sufficient in themselves to motivate a murderous attack on the former by the latter?

I would suggest that, in this instance, the thrust of Zizek's polemic required him to set up an opposition between an "unworldly" elite, depoliticised and smug in their gated communities, and the occupants of a "real world" to which Zizek himself had obtained privileged access (through the mediation of his babysitter...). To puncture the illusions of the former required some "plain speaking" on behalf of the latter: only thus could the "leftist" critique of elite pseudo-politics acquire the authority it needed to counter the cultural authority of "liberal multiculturalist" received opinion. But this supposed cultural authority is really something like a "Big Other" for Zizek, a chimerical fantasy in which liberal racism and liberal anti-racism are made to cohere: that is how he is able to sustain the counter-intuitive claim that "liberal multiculturalists" are "the real racists", whilst heedlessly regurgitating racist tropes about the anti-social criminality of the Roma. In taking this position, he resembles nothing so much as a CiF troll, enraged at the beautiful-soul platitudes of "Hampstead Liberals" and spewing reactionary bile in the hope of penetrating their supposed consensus. It is, all things considered, a bit of a let-down.